Wrong War, Wrong Time

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National security editor Patrick Walters talks to a former SAS officer who believes the Howard Government failed to provide moral leadership over the war in Iraq and misled the Australian people
(snip)
Tinley served as principal planner and executive officer for the SAS task group responsible for liaison and co-ordination with the key coalition headquarters. In February 2002, he went back to Kuwait. There he discovered his old US coalition partners hard at work on a very different, top secret plan: the invasion of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein.

"It was very clear to everybody that Iraq was going to happen. It had gone beyond just speculation about contingency planning and what-ifs. If we look at the undue haste in which they the US extracted from Afghanistan, it was clear that, at a professional military level, there was a bigger game afoot on the other side of Iran."

(snip)
The Australian team began detailed planning for the assault on western Iraq, which would include searching for Scud missiles that could be equipped with weapons of mass destruction. Not only would the search prove elusive but the only hard intelligence given to Tinley on possible Scud missile targets turned out to be six years old.

"I couldn't find any direct actionable intelligence linking any of the areas we were looking at in the west with WMD," he tells Inquirer. "We were looking from just west of Baghdad all the way through to the Jordanian border and between the Syrian and Saudi borders. When I pressed them (US intelligence) for more specific imagery or information regarding locations or likely locations of WMD, they confessed, off the record, that there had not been any tangible siting of any WMD or WMD-enabling equipment for some years. It was all shadows and inferenced conversations between Iraqis.




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http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20815881-601,00.html