Since issue 45, last June, there has been so much information produced on the events preceding the assault on Iraq it is impossible to keep track of it all. Here is my selection. For the powers-that-be, the war has been traumatic, not least because their various cover stories and deceptions have been exposed so rapidly, thanks, mostly, to the the Internet.
Off-message
A story I missed at the time was the replacement of Admiral Sir Michael Boyce as Chief of the Defence Staff. In July 2002 his departure was announced. In ‘Defence chief replaced for being “off message” over Iraq invasion’ in The Independent 24 July 2002, Kim Sengupta wrote:
‘The move follows reports of disagreements between Sir Michael and the Government on a number of issues, especially proposals for a war in Iraq. Sir Michael is among a number of senior British commanders who are said to question Britain’s backing for a US invasion of Iraq, and are sceptical of Pentagon claims about Saddam Hussein’s links with the al-Qa’ida terror organisation and his stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction.’ (1)
Even more off-message
On 25 January 2004 The Glasgow Herald reported what were claimed to be the views of senior British intelligence figures in a ‘pre-emptive strike against Tony Blair ahead of the publication of the Hutton report’ (2) The Herald said this of MI6:
‘The key points it wants on the record are:
Many had been openly sceptical about the presence of WMD in Iraq for years.
The intelligence community was under pressure to provide the government with what it wanted, namely that Iraq possessed WMD and was a danger.
Intelligence was “cherry-picked”, with damning intelligence against Iraq being selectively chosen, while intelligence assessments, which might have worked against the build-up to war, were sidelined. Intelligence work had become politicised under Labour, and spies were taking orders from politicians. They provided worst-case scenarios which were use by politicians to make factual claims.'(3)
There were no names and no hints of names in the story and no surprises in it. We have to take this on trust. But the author was Neil Mackay, who now has a long and distinguished track record as an investigative journalist.
Hutton-wise
The best single piece to appear in response to the report by Lord Hutton, was by Lieutenant Colonel Crispin Black in The Guardian 12 February 2004. It contained these devastating lines.
‘I left the [intelligence] assessment staff just six months before the dreaded dossier was published. From what came out at the Hutton inquiry I could hardly recognise the organisation I had so recently worked for. Meetings with no minutes, an intelligence analytical group on a highly specialised subject which included unqualified officials in Downing Street but excluded the DIS’s lifetime experts (like Dr Brian Jones), vague and unexplained bits of intelligence appearing in the dossier as gospel (notably the 45-minute claim), sloppy use of language, that weird “last call” for intelligence like Henry II raving about Thomas à Becket – with “who will furnish me with the intelligence I need” substituted for “who will rid me of that turbulent priest”…..When the report came I was puzzled at first – serious people seemed to be taking it so seriously. And then everyone started to laugh. Some of the passages – particularly “the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the prime minister….may have subconsciously influenced ……members of the JIC…..consistent with the intelligence available to the JIC” are masterpieces of comic writing‘ (emphasis added).
Why did the US attack Iraq?
What do the foreign policy experts think? Take Timothy Garton-Ash, for example, who writes a regular column in The Guardian. Garton-Ash is one of those figures who bridge the gap between academia and the Foreign Office/MI6. A governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Britain’s mini version of America’s National Endowment for Democracy, his main role is as director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, MI6’s academic annex. In ‘We were duped’, in The Guardian, 4 March 2004, he offered as reasons: ‘unfinished business from the first Gulf War, concern for Middle East oil supplies, a desire to go on “rolling up” the possible threats after 9/11’. Or take Stephen Holmes, a regular contributor to The London Review of Books and research director at the Center for Law and Security at New York University School of Law, who wrote:
‘….we can safely say that the following jumble of motives, seizing different actors at different times, contributed to the decision ….to frighten any group or state that might feel emboldened to replicate 11 September; to offer solace to American voters traumatized by 11 September by letting them see US military supremacy in action; to show that the US was still responding aggressively to 11 September even after “running out of targets in Afghanistan”; to finish a job that George H.W. Bush had left undone; to avenge Saddam’s 1993 attempt to assassinate the first President Bush; to field-test Rumsfeld’s proposals for military reform; to reduce US dependency on the Saudis by securing some leverage over Iraqi oil supplies; to allow the US to evacuate its troops from Saudi Arabia, thereby removing a point of anti-American rage; to destroy an important regional threat to Israel; to make sure that Saddam could not acquire the capacity for nuclear blackmail after, France, Germany and other countries dismantled the UN embargo; to express America’s self-love by offering to replicate American political institutions abroad; to counter “moral relativism” by revealing that the world really is divided between good and evil.’ (4)
‘…there were three reasons why they [the neo-conservatives] felt the U.S. needed to topple Saddam, put in a friendly government and occupy Iraq. One of those reasons is that sanctions and containment were working and everybody pretty much knew it. Many companies around the world were preparing to do business with Iraq in anticipation of a lifting of sanctions. But the U.S. and the U.K. had been bombing northern and southern Iraq since 1991. So it was very unlikely that we would be in any kind of position to gain significant contracts in any post-sanctions Iraq. And those sanctions were going to be lifted soon, Saddam would still be in place, and we would get no financial benefit.
The second reason has to do with our military-basing posture in the region. We had been very dissatisfied with our relations with Saudi Arabia ….so we were looking for alternate strategic locations beyond Kuwait, beyond Qatar….to secure the energy lines of communication in the region.
The last reason is the conversion, the switch Saddam Hussein made in the Food for Oil program, from the dollar to the euro. He did this, by the way, long before 9/11, in November 2000 – selling his oil for euros. The oil sales permitted in that program aren’t very much. But when the sanctions would be lifted, the sales from the country with the second largest oil reserves on the planet would have been moving to the euro. The U.S. dollar is in a sensitive period because we are a debtor nation now. Our currency is still popular, but it’s not backed up like it used to be. If oil, a very solid commodity, is traded on the euro, that could cause massive, almost glacial, shifts in confidence in trading on the dollar. So one of the first executive orders that Bush signed in May [2003] switched trading on Iraq’s oil back to the dollar’ (emphasises added).
So: for the neo-cons driving the policy the war was about commercial contracts, energy supplies and the dollar. The business of America is still business.
In his article Garton-Ash let the reader know that he is an insider – ‘I remember officials in No 10 Downing Street at that time, people of great integrity who I’ve known and respected for years’ – and gave this as the ultimate reason for the willingness of the group round Blair to let themselves be ‘duped’:
‘If they could not find a case for war that would win a majority in the House of Commons, and be (just about) acceptable in international law, Britain would face the unimaginable: leaving America in the lurch.'(7)
This shows the level of delusion still operating among some of our foreign policy intellectuals: they think the US cares about HMG’s views. You might have thought the US invading Grenada, a member of the Commonwealth, against the wishes of HMG, would have been enough of a lesson. Apparently not. The reality is that Britain could leave the US ‘in the lurch’ the way a flea might leave an elephant in the lurch. And why is it ‘unimaginable’ not to support the US? It used not to be ‘unimaginable’. Edward Heath declined to support the US in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Harold Wilson refused to send troops to fight with the US in Vietnam.
The US was going to war and fabricated a pretext, as it has done many times in its history, starting with the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, to justify the war with Spain. The price of joining the ‘coalition of the willing’ was to swallow the pretext, eat shit and swear it was ice-cream. Intelligence professionals in Australia and the UK(8) – and the US to some extent – baulked; but the politicians and the intelligence administrators, those who had the contact with the political system, managed to force it down.
Notes
1 <http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=317840>
2 <http://www.sundayherald.com/39548> Similar points were made, apparently by MI6, also anonymously, in Patrick Wintour, ‘MI6 anger over war intelligence’ in The Guardian 7 April 2004. Or was Wintour recycling the Herald piece?
3 The same sorts of things have been occurring in Australia. See, for example,<www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2003/s1018566.htm>
4 ‘No grand strategy and no ultimate aim’, The London Review of Books, 6 May 2004.
5 I use ‘neo-conservatives’, Tom Easton uses ‘Neoconservatives’. There is no generally agreed use.
6 <www.laweekly.com/ink/04/13/news-cooper.php> See also her five part article in Salon in March at <http://archive.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/>
7 One of the Australian analysts said of his period, before 9-11: ‘We had strong reservations about the evidence that was being provided to us, but that was never carried forward because the deputy director at the time thought that the intelligence relationship [with the US] was more important.‘ (emphasis added) <www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2004/s1046367.htm> Our intelligence bureaucrats would say the same; and they always will.
8 And perhaps Spain. About the view of Spanish intelligence on this I know nothing.