CAIRO, 20 July 2004 — The four British inquiries into Iraq war intelligence — two parliamentary, Hutton and Butler — along with the findings of the Senate Committee, make it patently clear that Iraq under Saddam had no significant usable stocks of WMD prior to the invasion and no credible links with terrorist groups.
Yet, in the face of those findings both the American president and the British prime minister believe that the invasion was right, saying with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, Iraq is a free and better place on the verge of enjoying true democracy.
For those of us who were vehemently against the war from the get-go it is difficult to move on from Britain’s two “dodgy dossiers” — one discredited by Lord Butler as being misleading and the other partly lifted typos and all from a 12-year-old student’s thesis published on the Internet. It is even harder to set aside the lurid pre-war warnings of Bush and Blair, which gave the impression Saddam was an imminent threat to his neighbors as well as American and British interests.
It is hard to dismiss former Cabinet minister Robin Cook’s March 5, 2003 diary entry recording that he had told Blair that same day: “It is clear from the private briefing I have had that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction, in a sense of weapons that could strike at strategic cities. But he probably does have several thousand battlefield chemical munitions”. When he asked Blair whether he worried these might be used against British troops, the prime minister answered, “Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use.”
So much for the “45 minute” claim, which Blair unashamedly touted in his personal introduction to the September dossier sent out to the media highlighted with a yellow marker pen. I still recall with a shake of the head the case made by Colin Powell with such vigor before the UN Security Council and his “rock solid” allegations concerning Iraq’s import of aluminum tubes, which he said were for nuclear centrifuges, and turned out to be for rockets. I cannot forget Powell’s enthusiastic lauding of forged documentation indicating Iraq was actively seeking uranium yellowcake from Niger and his assertions concerning mobile chemical weapons laboratories, which were, in fact, related to weather balloons.
Although the establishment insists that such false allegations were made in good faith and based on the intelligence then at hand, we must surely wonder how state-of-the-art and highly sophisticated Western intelligence agencies got it so wrong and why the US and UK governments possible misuse or embellishment of intelligence to suit the Bush administration’s long-held Iraq agenda hasn’t come under serious scrutiny. Instead, America’s fall guy was former head of the CIA George Tenet, while Britain’s Lord Butler ensured that individuals should not be blamed for collective errors effectively leaving the British prime minister, his Cabinet, former spinmaster Alastair Campbell and John Scarlett, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, off the hook.
So let’s suppose we agree to adopt some form of collective amnesia concerning Iraq’s WMD and forget Tony Blair’s claims last year of having found 400,000 bodies in Iraqi mass graves when only 5,000 have actually been unearthed. Let’s suppose we can forgive MI6 for deliberately omitting to inform the Hutton Inquiry that it had earlier withdrawn its intelligence in the September 2002 dossier as being unsafe and close our eyes to the stubborn refusal of the British government to publish Attorney General Lord Goldsmith’s opinion as to the legality of the war given during the run-up.
Let’s suppose we are willing to give Bush and Blair as well as Uncle Tom Cobbly and all the benefit of the doubt can we now expect the war aficionados to fulfill their promises concerning Iraq’s future? In other words, now that so much dirty water has gone under the bridge, is Iraq truly sovereign and can its people start afresh with a clean government?
I would love to be able to give an optimistic opinion on this one because nobody needs peace, security and freedom more than the Iraqis, who have suffered decades of oppression, war and the effects of US-UK-led sanctions, which devastated their health, education and economy. Unfortunately, though, former Baathist, CIA employee and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi is looking more like Saddam Mark II than the leader of a fledgling democracy if we are to believe a recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald. The paper’s highly respected and award-winning Iraq correspondent Paul McGeough broke the story, supported by two independent witnesses, that Allawi cold bloodedly shot six suspected insurgents in the head at close range, telling as many as 30 onlookers that the detainees “deserved worse than death”.
Whereas the British government has repeatedly embellished and repeated Saddam’s crimes, the Foreign Office dismissed the Herald’s allegation against Allawi, saying “there are thousands of rumors sweeping the city and this is just one of them”.
In concert, a spokesman for the US Embassy in Baghdad said: “If we attempted to refute each rumor, we would have no time for other business. As far as this press office is concerned, this case is closed.”
So that’s it then. No time to investigate a damning story which involves America’s new buddy Iraq’s prime minister who, like Saddam before him when he was the Pentagon’s blue-eyed boy, can apparently do no wrong. There is no doubt Allawi is a tough nut prepared to crack down hard on anyone who doesn’t toe the line in the new Iraq and to join hands with America’s 140,000 troops still on the ground to do so. Iraqis currently crave personal security more than anything and some may believe Allawi is their man.
Those who do should watch out. Besides being strong, a leader should be compassionate, loyal, wise and just. If the Herald story turns out to be true, Allawi, said to be responsible for the 45-minute claim in the first place, and who purportedly used terrorist methods to foment unrest in Iraq against his former boss Saddam, doesn’t appear to fit the Iraqi people’s bill. On the other hand, as a cooperative secular Shiite strong man, he may suit the Bush administration’s profile of a suitable regional ally more than it would care to admit.
(Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer on Mideast affairs. She welcomes feedback at [email protected])
