I’m still interested in the origins of the invasion of Iraq, the why and the when. At one level this is banal. We know, originally from CBS reporter David Martin, that within hours of the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeldt was ‘telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks’.(1)We know that the various neo-con and/or Israeli-supporting think tanks and action groups, notably the PNAC, had been pushing for more military action against Iraq; and the bits of the military-intelligence network in Washington under their control, such as the Defence Policy Board, within a week of 9/11 began planning how to use 9/11 as the pretext to attack Iraq.(2) But when precisely was the decision taken?
One fixed point we have is the memorandum written by Matthew Rycroft, dated 23 July 2002, after a meeting at Downing Street to discuss Iraq. In that Rycroft reports ‘C’, head of MI6, as saying, ‘There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable.’ A CIA analyst at the time, Paul Pillar, dates the decision to ‘the beginning of 2002’;(3) and in late February the Australian Ambassador to the UN, John Dauth, told the chairman of the Australian Wheat Board that US military action against Iraq was inevitable.(4)In written evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons former British diplomat, Carne Ross, stated: ‘When I served in Kabul immediately after the Taliban fell, I was told then by British officers that forces were being held back for Iraq – this was in April 2002.’
Justifying the invasion
How the invasion would be justified was unclear at that stage. ‘C’ is reported by Rycroft as saying in July 2002 that ‘Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD’. But other pretexts were being considered. In November 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, met with Bruce Jackson. Jackson had founded the Project for Transitional Democracies, was president of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO and had served as executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). His formal day job, as it were, was director of strategic planning for the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s biggest arms company. Hadley told him that ‘they were going to war and were struggling with a rationale’ to justify it and asked that Jackson, ‘set up something like the Committee on NATO’ to come up with one. Jackson created the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq whose mission statement was ‘to promote regional peace, political freedom and international security by replacing the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases to threaten the community of nations.’ Despite signing up a whole raft of Washington bigwigs, the leaders of a group of former Soviet bloc satellites trying to curry favour with America, Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic, Natan Sharansky of Israel and Carl Bildt, the prime minister of Sweden, the committee was closed down in 2003 because its human rights rationale for the war had been abandoned in favour of WMDs.
‘We were cut out,’ Jackson explains, ‘after the whole thing went to Rumsfeld. The Department of Defense didn’t want anyone looking over their shoulder. Rumsfeld took it all away from State.’
As to the ‘Why Iraq?’ question, Security and Intelligence Co-ordinator in the cabinet from 2002-2005, Sir David Omand, offered this gloss:
‘The Iraq story is a simple one: post 9/11 Washington and London started to wake up. The biggest danger would be a terrorist with a nuclear weapon and something had to be done about it. The Americans resolved that Iraq was the place to start to deal with the threat because it was a persistent offender against UN resolutions and because it was believed to be a serial WMD offender’.(6)
This was done, we are told, against the advice of the American and British intelligence agencies. In ‘UK warned against invasion’(7)Dan Glaister cited the testimony of three CIA officers that Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, and David Manning, then Blair’s foreign policy adviser and now the UK ambassador to Washington, arrived in Washington on the day after 9/11 and told then CIA head George Tenet that ‘his [Blair’s] government stood by [the US]……..and that we could count on it for any and all support.’ But they also added: ‘I hope we can all agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq.’ According to one of the CIA officers, Mr Tenet replied, ‘Absolutely, we all agree on that.’
But that was then; and a year later, despite dissent from the CIA’s analysts, the agency’s leaders were finding ways to go along with the neo-cons driving the policy. Senior CIA officer at the time, Paul R. Pillar, has described this process:(8)
‘Well before March 2003, intelligence analysts and their managers knew that the United States was heading for war with Iraq. It was clear that the Bush administration would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. Intelligence analysts……felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious.’
Does that ‘natural and strong’ desire to go along to get along get them off the hook?
Notes
- <www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0716-10.htm>
- See, for example, the account at <www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0716-10.htm>. I write ‘more’ because, lest we forget, there had been a decade of military action – ‘no fly zones’, bombings and support of covert operations – as well as economic blockades. The invasion of 2003 was merely another action in the continuous US-UK assault on Iraq.
- ‘Ex-CIA Analyst Condemns Bush “Manipulation Campaign”on Iraq’, Agence France Presse, 4 May 2006.
- An event recorded in AWB minutes. <http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20061123&articleId=3959>
- <www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmfaff/uc1720-i/1720m02.htm>
- Glees, Davies and Morrison, The Open Side of Secrecy (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006) p. 109.
- The Guardian 23 October 2006
- In ‘Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq’ in Foreign Affairs March/April 2006 <www.foreignaffairs.org/20060301faessay85202/paul-r-pillar/intelligence-policy-and-the-war-in-iraq.html>