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Real war, virtual
weapons
By Ian Williams
(Republished with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
The Persian emperors used to have courtiers
whose job was to whisper regularly in the rulers' ears
the message that they were only mortal. Looking at the
Persian Gulf today and the respective pitfalls of US
President George W Bush, British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, and former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the
Iraq war, it appears the courtiers' profession needs
reviving.
Someone should be telling modern heads
of state to avoid decisions based on weak evidence,
unsubstantiated statements, and false hope. Contemporary
leaders, like those of yore, ought to heed warnings to
discount heady advice brought by people with their own
agendas, be they the likes of neo-conservative
counselors to Bush and Blair or Saddam's Ba'athist
advisers.
Saddam's advisers' remote dreams of
developing an Iraqi nuclear arsenal of chemical and
biological weaponry inspired his refusal for years to
allow UN inspections of the non-existent weapons cache,
eventually leading to his political suicide. Meanwhile,
basing the invasion of Iraq on spurious claims about the
arsenal and Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda, then trying to
justify the post-invasion occupation on equally dubious
allegations of Iraq's trade in uranium with Niger, have
played directly into the hands of the political
opposition to Blair and Bush.
Results of the
investigation showing the absence of the weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in Iraq have damaged Blair's
credibility, perhaps fatally, since his whole case to
the British for the war was grounded in pursuance of UN
resolutions on Iraqi disarmament.
At first, Bush
seemed to have escaped the contumely that Blair received
from his constituents, since the White House cast the
war as a payback for the September 11, 2001, terror
attacks. The general equation that Saddam and Osama bin
Laden are both evil (and both Arabs), and therefore in
essence the same, held up with much of the
television-watching public. But this rationale for
invasion eventually was recognized as an even bigger
untruth than the WMD allegations. While Iraq certainly
had once had weapons programs that Saddam had lied
about, no one outside the fever-ridden neo-conservative
think-tanks could maintain seeing any connection
whatsoever between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Now, the
continuing embarrassment of the absence of any credible
signs of missing weapons or imaginary links with
al-Qaeda is exacerbated by the question of who knew, and
when, that the documents about Iraq seeking uranium from
Niger were fakes. The shame is going to mount, not least
because visions of a quick victory in Iraq have turned
into a nightmarish occupation with a visible daily toll
on both occupiers and occupied. The outcome is that
Democratic contenders for the US presidency who may have
been loath to cast aspersions on a successful war, have
since come to consider it fair game to denounce an
increasingly unpopular and unsuccessful occupation based
upon an untruth.
Variations on untruths
The question of whether Bush and Blair knew they
were lying is difficult. They certainly voiced untruths,
but did they believe what they said when they said it?
Like Saddam, they have surrounded themselves with people
who either filter out the truths that they think their
masters would find unpalatable, or who are deliberately
trying to shape their bosses' attitudes and decisions.
UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, while they tried
to be totally objective and fair in their assessments,
nonetheless tended to assume that there must be some
weapons program, no matter how minimal. Even so, they
totally discounted any nuclear program. This had left
those in the US and UK administrations who wanted a war
with Iraq scrambling for legal and political cover.
Enter the phantom uranium shipments argument: The
public's biggest fear was a nuclear weapon in the hands
of terrorists, so the White House had a political need
for Iraq to have one - and any scrap of evidence has
been seized upon to vindicate that political need.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell wisely upheld
his reputation as part of the sane wing of the Bush
administration by skipping the uranium charges while
presenting evidence to the UN Security Council. But even
his Niger-free case on the broader issues of weaponry
could not stand up, either to the scrutiny of the UN
inspectors then or to the highly motivated US search
teams now looking under every sand dune in occupied
Iraq.
The one element of his argument that
almost rang true was that if the Iraqis genuinely had
nothing to hide, then their scientists ought to be
lining up for interviews on the weapons program. But the
argument failed to take into consideration the brutal
reality created by the paranoia in the Ba'athist regime,
which would hang unaccompanied interviewees from
meat-hooks rather than allow them to let something slip
to the foreigners.
In any case, the prospective
interviewees would have little new to reveal if the
numerous depositions that the weapons had been destroyed
are to be taken at face value, which they presumably
must be in the absence of any functioning weapons
systems, let alone any sizzling test tubes. It seems
highly likely that Saddam's son-in-law, who briefly
defected to Amman, Jordan, and divulged the details of
previous programs, was telling the truth when he said
that the weapons and production lines were all
destroyed.
Lure of WMDs
If Saddam
did not have any weapons, then why didn't he cooperate
completely with the UN inspectors and allow them
interviews? Indeed, even earlier, why did he choose a
course of action that would enhance suspicions already
raised by previous misconduct and that guaranteed
continuing sanctions upon sanctions?
Increasingly, it seems likely that the WMDs were
as much a figment of Washington's imagination as a
twinkle in Saddam's eye - or rather a virtual program in
the minds of Iraqi scientists. The recent discovery of
nuclear centrifuge equipment, long buried and possibly
even forgotten in nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi's
Baghdad backyard, gives a clue to the nature of the
program, and at the same time it may also explain the
reluctance to allow the scientists to be interviewed and
certainly the refusal to allow them abroad. The program
was little more than a wish to keep expertise and
know-how intact until such time as the sanctions were
over, the spotlight moved on, and the labs could be
reopened.
It is difficult to see how the UN, the
US, or the UK administrations could counter such a
program, which may have evaded the spirit of disarmament
resolutions, but probably is close to compliance with
their wording. A Ba'athist regime could conceivably just
execute all Iraqi biological or nuclear scientists to
meet foreign demands for avoiding war. But not even the
war-favoring US public, not even Texans who support
their state's death penalty, would applaud mass
executions of every Iraqi with a bachelor's degree in
biology or physics. In the end, you cannot outlaw
knowledge, no matter how pernicious. Besides, so many of
the techniques used in weapons production are common to
industrial processes that it would be impossible to ban
them and still run a functional, modern economy.
The Iraqi refusal to allow in the inspectors all
those years was in retrospect a fatal mistake of the
kind that dictatorships often make. Among Hussein's
motives for spending so many years under sanctions for
refusing access to UN inspectors there is the sense of
upholding honor and national sovereignty, as irrational
as that held by the likes of US Undersecretary of State
John Bolton and others in the US administration - and
probably as genuine for many Iraqi officials.
The Ba'athists also had a problem when
second-guessing US intentions. Most of what Saddam has
done is unforgivable, but anyone trying to determine a
clear US foreign policy in Iraq over the past decade
would have to forgive him his failure to determine
exactly what that policy was, and instead fear the
worst. Washington had used UN inspections before as a
cover for spying, which certainly enhanced the Iraqi
regime's strong predisposition to paranoia. At no point
did a US administration unequivocally declare that a
successful inspection and a clean bill of disarmament
health would end sanctions. And by the time a clear line
did emerge from the fog in Washington, it was the
neo-conservatives' Catonian invocation: Iraq must be
destroyed.
The uncertainty about US intentions
and the virtual weapons program certainly explain the
Iraqi regime's hypersensitivity about the interviews.
Unfortunately, they do not meet Bush and Blair's
political need for more tangible evidence to justify
their invasion, so they will keep on looking for
rationale. But they might well be a tad more circumspect
about accepting what their minions tell them for the
duration of whatever political future they have.
Ian Williams
contributes frequently to Foreign Policy in Focus on UN and international
affairs.
(Copyright 2003 Foreign Policy in
Focus)
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