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The secret way to
war
By Mark Danner
Note
In its June 9
issue, the New York Review of Books will be the
first American print publication to publish the
full British "smoking gun" document, the secret
memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of British
Prime Minister Tony Blair's top advisers in July
2002, eight months before the Iraq war commenced.
Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first
published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable
proof of the way in which the George W Bush
administration made its decision to invade Iraq -
without significant consultation, reasonable
intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore
ways to avoid war - and well before seeking a
congressional or United Nations mandate of any
sort.
It was October 16, 2002, and the
United States Congress had just voted to authorize
the president to go to war against Iraq. When Bush
came before members of his cabinet and Congress
gathered in the East Room of the White House and
addressed the American people, he was in a somber
mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free
citizens about the gravest decision their country
could make.
The 107th Congress, the
president said, had just become "one of the few
called by history to authorize military action to
defend our country and the cause of peace". But,
he hastened to add, no one should assume that war
was inevitable. Though "Congress has now
authorized the use of force", the president said
emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of
force. I hope the use of force will not become
necessary."
President Bush went on: "Our
goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat
to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can
be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this
without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to
avoid military action by the international
community, it has the obligation to prove
compliance with all the world's demands. It's the
obligation of Iraq."
Iraq, Bush said,
still had the power to prevent war by "declaring
and destroying all its weapons of mass
destruction" - but if Iraq did not declare and
destroy those weapons, the president warned, the
United States would "go into battle, as a last
resort".
It is safe to say that, at the
time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis
answered Bush's demand by repeating their claim
that in fact there were no weapons of mass
destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in
fact destroyed these weapons, probably years
before Bush's ultimatum: "the Iraqis" - in the
words of chief US weapons inspector David Kaye -
"were telling the truth".
As Americans
watch their young men and women fighting in the
third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in
Iraq - a war that has now killed more than 1,600
Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis - they
are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of
what would have happened if the United Nations
weapons inspectors had been allowed - as all the
major powers except the United Kingdom had urged
they should be - to complete their work. What
would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors
had been allowed to prove, before the US went
"into battle", what David Kaye and his colleagues
finally proved afterward?
Thanks to a
formerly secret memorandum published by the London
Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the
British elections, we now have a partial answer to
that question. The memo, which records the minutes
of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior
foreign policy and security officials, shows that
even as President Bush told Americans in October
2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not
become necessary" - that such a decision depended
on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his
demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass
destruction - the president had in fact already
definitively decided, at least three months
before, to choose this "last resort" of going
"into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose
to do or not do, the president's decision to go to
war had long since been made.
On July 23,
2002, eight months before American and British
forces invaded, senior British officials met with
Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The
gathering, similar to an American "principals
meeting", brought together Geoffrey Hoon, defense
secretary; Jack Straw, foreign secretary; Lord
Goldsmith, attorney general; John Scarlett, head
of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises
the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also
known as "C", head of MI6 (the British equivalent
of the US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA); David
Manning, the equivalent of the national security
adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the
Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff); Jonathan Powell,
Blair's chief of staff; Alastair Campbell,
director of strategy (Blair's communications and
political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of
government relations.
After John Scarlett
began the meeting with a summary of intelligence
on Iraq - notably, that "the regime was tough and
based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way
to overthrow it was likely to be by massive
military action", "C" offered a report on his
visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks
with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and
other high officials. This passage is worth
quoting in full:
"C reported on his recent
talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift
in attitude. Military action was now seen as
inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam
[Hussein], through military action, justified by
the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of
mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts
were being fixed around the policy. The NSC
[National Security Council] had no patience with
the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing
material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was
little discussion in Washington of the aftermath
after military action."
Seen from today's
perspective, this short paragraph is a strikingly
clear template for the future, establishing these
points:
1) By mid-July 2002, eight months
before the war began, President Bush had decided
to invade and occupy Iraq.
2) Bush had decided
to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of
terrorism and WMD".
3) Already "the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the
policy".
4) Many at the top of the
administration did not want to seek approval from
the United Nations (going "the UN route").
5)
Few in Washington seemed much interested in the
aftermath of the war.
We have long known,
thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military
planning for the Iraq war began as early as
November 21, 2001, after Bush ordered Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would
take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein
if we have to", and that Secretary Rumsfeld and
General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command,
were briefing American senior officials on the
progress of military planning during the late
spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days
after the meeting in London leaks about specific
plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the
front pages of the New York Times and the
Washington Post.
What the Downing Street
memo confirms for the first time is that President
Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to
"remove Saddam, through military action", that war
with Iraq was "inevitable" - and that what
remained was simply to establish and develop the
modalities of justification; that is, to come up
with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing"
the "intelligence and facts ... around the
policy". The great value of the discussion
recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the
governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy
of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest,
war had been decided on; the question at issue
then was how to justify it - how to "fix", as it
were, what Blair will later call "the political
context". Specifically, though by this point in
July the president had decided to go to war, he
had not yet decided to go to the United Nations
and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out,
those on the National Security Council - the
senior security officials of the US government -
"had no patience with the UN route, and no
enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi
regime's record". This would later change, largely
as a result of the political concerns of these
very people gathered together at 10 Downing
Street.
After Admiral Boyce offered a
brief discussion of the war plans then on the
table and the defense secretary said a word or two
about timing - "the most likely timing in US minds
for military action to begin was January, with the
timeline beginning 30 days before the US
congressional elections" - Foreign Secretary Jack
Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether
or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an
invasion.
"The Foreign Secretary said he
would discuss [the timing of the war] with [US
secretary of state] Colin Powell this week. It
seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to
take military action, even if the timing was not
yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not
threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability
was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Given that Saddam was not threatening to
attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass
destruction program was less extensive than those
of a number of other countries, how does one
justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an
idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum
to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons
inspectors. This would also help with the legal
justification for the use of force."
The
British realized they needed "help with the legal
justification for the use of force" because, as
the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly,
"The desire for regime change was not a legal base
for military action." Which is to say, the simple
desire to overthrow the leadership of a given
sovereign country does not make it legal to invade
that country; on the contrary. And, said the
attorney general, of the "three possible legal
bases: self-defense, humanitarian intervention, or
[United Nations Security Council] authorization",
the first two "could not be the base in this
case". In other words, Iraq was not attacking the
United States or the United Kingdom, so the
leaders could not claim to be acting in
self-defense; nor was Iraq's leadership in the
process of committing genocide, so the United
States and the United Kingdom could not claim to
be invading for humanitarian reasons. [1] This
left Security Council authorization as the only
conceivable legal justification for war. But how
to get it?
At this point in the meeting
Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard
his foreign minister's suggestion about drafting
an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the
United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could
be politically critical, said Blair - but only if
the Iraqi leader turned it down.
"The
prime minister said that it would make a big
difference politically and legally if Saddam
refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime
change and WMD were linked in the sense that it
was the regime that was producing the WMD ... If
the political context were right, people would
support regime change. The two key issues were
whether the military plan worked and whether we
had the political strategy to give the military
plan the space to work."
Here the
inspectors were introduced, but as a means to
create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be
made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept
inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept
them, the Americans and the British would be well
on their way to having a legal justification to go
to war (the attorney general's third alternative
of UN Security Council authorization).
Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was
introduced not as a means to avoid war, as
President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but
as a means to make war possible. War had been
decided on; the problem under discussion here was
how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the
political context ...right". The "political
strategy" - at the center of which, as with the
Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for
"it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -
must be strong enough to give "the military plan
the space to work". Which is to say, once the
allies were victorious the war would justify
itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors,
especially if refused, could form the political
bridge by which the allies could reach their goal:
"regime change" through "military action".
But there was a problem: as the foreign
secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy,
there could be US/UK differences". While the
British considered legal justification for going
to war critical - they, unlike the Americans, are
members of the International Criminal Court - the
Americans did not. Foreign Secretary Straw
suggested that given "US resistance, we should
explore discreetly the ultimatum". The defense
secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing
"that if the prime minister wanted UK military
involvement, he would need to decide this early.
He cautioned that many in the US did not think it
worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be
important for the prime minister to set out the
political context to Bush." The key negotiation in
view at this point, in other words, was not with
Saddam over letting in the United Nations
inspectors - both parties hoped he would refuse to
admit them, and thus provide the justification for
invading. The key negotiation would be between the
Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea
of involving the United Nations at all, and the
British, who were more concerned than their
American cousins about having some kind of legal
fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later,
Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to
"discreetly explore the ultimatum" with
then-secretary of state Powell, perhaps the only
senior American official who shared some of the
British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in
Bob Woodward's account, "If you are really
thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a
player, we cannot be unless you go to the United
Nations." [2]
Britain's strong support for
the "UN route" that most American officials so
distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the
bureaucratic battle over going to the United
Nations. As late as August 26, 2002, Vice
President Dick Cheney had appeared before a
convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and
publicly denounced "the UN route". Asserting that
"simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and]
there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use
against our friends, against our allies, and
against us", Cheney advanced the view that going
to the United Nations would itself be dangerous:
"A return of inspectors would provide no
assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN
resolutions. On the contrary, there is great
danger that it would provide false comfort that
Saddam was somehow 'back in the box'."
Cheney, like other administration
"hard-liners", feared "the UN route" not because
it might fail but because it might succeed and
thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had
to be fought. As Woodward recounts, it would
finally take a personal visit by Blair on
September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to
the United Nations:
"For Blair the
immediate question was, would the United Nations
be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the
question was, does Blair believe in the UN? It was
critical domestically for the prime minister to
show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at
heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had
gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK
favored trying to make international institutions
work before resorting to force. Going through the
UN would be a large and much-needed plus." [3]
Bush then told Blair that he had decided
"to go to the UN" and the prime minister,
according to Woodward, "was relieved". After the
session with Blair, Bush later recounted to
Woodward, he walked into a conference room and
told the British officials gathered there, "your
man has got cojones". ("And of course these Brits
don't know what cojones are," Bush told Woodward.)
Henceforth this particular conference with Blair
would be known, Bush declared, as "the cojones
meeting".
That September the attempt to
sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House
Chief of Staff Andrew Card told the New York Times
in an unusually candid moment, "You don't roll out
a new product in August." At the heart of the
sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in
substantial part to Blair's prodding, George W
Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on
September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi
regime, announce, "We will work with the UN
Security Council for the necessary resolutions."
The main phase of public diplomacy - giving the
war a "political context", in Blair's phrase - had
begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an
attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing
Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make
the war possible, partly by making it politically
palatable.
As it turned out, however - and
as Cheney and others had feared - the "UN route"
to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though
Powell managed the considerable feat of securing
unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution
1441, winning even Syria's support, the allies
differed on the key question of whether or not the
resolution gave United Nations approval for the
use of force against Saddam, as the Americans
contended, or whether a second resolution would be
required, as the majority of the council, and even
the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy
Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put
this position bluntly on November 8, the day
Resolution 1441 was passed:
"We heard loud
and clear during the negotiations about
'automaticity' and 'hidden triggers' - the
concerns that on a decision so crucial we should
not rush into military action ... Let me be
equally clear ... There is no 'automaticity' in
this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi
breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter
will return to the Council for discussion as
required ... We would expect the Security Council
then to meet its responsibilities."
Vice
President Cheney could have expected no worse.
Having decided to travel down "the UN route", the
Americans and the British would now need a second
resolution to gain the necessary approval to
attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and
American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the
July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to
admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies
an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of
inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and
found ... nothing. January, which Defense
Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely
timing in US minds for military action to begin",
came and went, and the inspectors went on
searching.
On the Security Council, a
majority - led by France, Germany, and Russia -
would push for the inspections to run their
course. President Jacques Chirac of France later
put this argument succinctly in an interview with
CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin:
"France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American
either. We are not just going to use our veto to
nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there
is another option, another way, another more
normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that
we have to go through that path. And we should
pursue it until we've come [to] a dead end, but
that isn't the case." [4]
Where would this
"dead end" be found, however, and who would
determine that it had been found? Would it be the
French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that
threatened the administration's policy now began
to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons,
or had they been presented with them by Saddam
Hussein, many who had supported the resolution
would argue that the inspections regime it
established had indeed begun to work - that by
multilateral action the world was succeeding,
peacefully, in "disarming Iraq". As long as the
inspectors found no weapons, however, many would
argue that the inspectors "must be given time to
do their work" - until, in Chirac's words, they
"came to a dead end". However that point might be
determined, it is likely that, long before it was
reached, the failure to find weapons would have
undermined the administration's central argument
for going to war - "the conjunction". as "C" had
put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and
WMD". And as we now know, the inspectors would
never have found weapons of mass destruction.
Vice President Cheney had anticipated this
problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix,
the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October
30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according
to Blix, "stated the position that inspections, if
they do not give results, cannot go on forever,
and said the US was 'ready to discredit
inspections in favor of disarmament'. A pretty
straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did
not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that
the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they
did not know where), the US would be ready to say
that the inspectors were useless and embark on
disarmament by other means." [5]
Indeed,
the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of
weapons came in the wake of a very large effort
launched by the administration to put before the
world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort
spearheaded by Bush's speech in Cincinnati, Ohio,
on October 7, 2002, and followed by a series of
increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that
reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia
presentation to the UN Security Council on
February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter,
the administration had "rolled out the product",
in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of
television, radio, and all the print press to get
its message out about the imminent threat of
Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised
Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the
government can play.")
As the gap between
administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -
"We know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld
- and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that
gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in
many quarters of undermining the credibility of
the United Nations process itself. The inspectors'
failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to
discredit the worth of the inspections, rather
than to cast doubt on the administration's
contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles
of weapons of mass destruction.
Oddly
enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to
prevent war at this point might have been to
reveal and yield up some weapons, thus
demonstrating to the world that the inspections
were working. As we now know, however, he had no
weapons to yield up. As Blix remarked, "It
occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would
be in greater difficulty if ... there truly were
no weapons of which they could 'yield
possession'." The fact that, in Blix's words, "the
UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq
without knowing it" - that the UN process had been
successful - meant, in effect, that the inspectors
would be discredited and the United States would
go to war.
President Bush would do so, of
course, having failed to get the "second
resolution" so desired by his friend and ally,
Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning
on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were
whether the military plan worked and whether we
had the political strategy to give the military
plan the space to work". He seems to have been
proved right in this. In the end, his political
strategy only half worked: the Security Council's
refusal to vote a second resolution approving the
use of force left "the UN route" discussed that
day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to
follow the United States without the protection of
international approval. Had the military plan
"worked" - had the war been short and decisive
rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive - Blair
would perhaps have escaped the political damage
the war has caused him. A week after the Downing
Street memo was published in the Sunday Times,
Tony Blair was re-elected, but his majority in
parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq
war, and the damage it had done to his reputation
for probity, is widely believed to have been a
principal cause.
In the United States, on
the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has
attracted little attention. As I write, no
American newspaper has published it and few
writers have bothered to comment on it. The war
continues, and Americans have grown weary of it;
few seem much interested now in discussing how it
began, and why their country came to fight a war
in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out
not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush
administration has followed a simple and
heretofore largely successful policy: blame the
intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy" as early
as July 2002 (as "C", the head of British
intelligence, reported upon his return from
Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable
hubris, even for this administration, that its
officials now explain their misjudgments in going
to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures"
- that is, on the intelligence that they
themselves politicized. Still, for the most part,
Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate
Intelligence Committee investigated the failures
of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a
promised second report that was to take up the
administration's political use of intelligence -
which is, after all, the critical issue - was
postponed until after the 2004 elections, then
quietly abandoned.
In the end, the Downing
Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in
what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude
about facts, or rather about where the line should
be drawn between facts and political opinion. It
calls to mind an interesting observation that an
unnamed "senior adviser" to President Bush made to
a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:
"The aide said that guys like me [ie,
reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call
the reality-based community', which he defined as
people who 'believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality'. I
nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's
not the way the world really works anymore,' he
continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act,
we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality - judiciously, as you will -
we'll act again, creating other new realities,
which you can study too, and that's how things
will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we
do.'"
Though this seems on its face to be
a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of
course an argument about power, and its influence
on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape
truth: power, in the end, can determine reality,
or at least the reality that most people accept -
a critical point, for the administration has been
singularly effective in its recognition that what
is most politically important is not what readers
of the New York Times believe but what most
Americans are willing to believe. The last
century's most innovative authority on power and
truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but
rather more directly.
"There was no point
in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For
intellectuals would never be converted and would
anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will
always be 'the man in the street'. Arguments must
therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal
to emotions and instincts, not the intellect.
Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to
tactics and psychology."
I thought of this
quotation when I first read the Downing Street
memorandum; but I had first looked it up several
months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had
seen the images of the newly re-elected President
George W Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the
highest civilian honor the United States can
bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of
central intelligence; L Paul Bremer, the former
head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in
Iraq; and General (ret) Tommy Franks, the
commander who had led American forces during the
first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course,
would be known to history as the intelligence
director who had failed to detect and prevent the
attacks of September 11, 2001, and the man who had
assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's
possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a
slam dunk". Franks had allowed the looting of
Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare
for what would come after the taking of Baghdad.
("There was little discussion in Washington," as
"C" told Prime Minister Blair on July 23, "of the
aftermath after military action".) Bremer had
dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and
thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits
for the insurgency. One might debate their
ultimate responsibility for these grave errors,
but it is difficult to argue that these officials
merited the highest recognition the country could
offer.
Of course truth, as the master
propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely
subordinate to tactics and psychology". He, of
course, would have instantly grasped the
psychological tactic embodied in that White House
ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure
Americans that the war the administration launched
against Iraq has been a success and was worth
fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are
still willing to believe this suggests that as
time goes on and the gap grows between what
Americans see and what they are told, membership
in the "reality-based community" may grow along
with it. We will see.
Still, for those
interested in the question of how our leaders
persuaded the country to become embroiled in a
counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street
memorandum offers one more confirmation of the
truth. For those, that is, who want to hear it.
Notes
[1] The latter charge
might have been given as a reason for intervention
in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was
carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds;
at that time, though, the Ronald Reagan
administration - comprising many of the same
officials who would later lead the invasion of
Iraq - was supporting Saddam in his war against
Iran and kept largely silent. The second major
killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in
1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shi'ites in the
south who had rebelled against the regime in the
wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first
Bush administration, despite president George H W
Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the
dictator, Saddam Hussein", and despite the
presence of hundreds of thousands of American
troops within miles of the killing, stood by and
did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a
Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch,
January 2004).
[2] See Bob Woodward, Plan
of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p 162.
[3] See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp
177–178.
[4] See "Chirac Makes His Case on
Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS
News; March 16, 2003.
[5] See Hans Blix,
Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p 86.
Mark Danner, a longtime New
Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at
the University of California at Berkeley and Henry
R Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent
book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu
Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces
on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New
York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com
(Copyright
2005 Mark Danner)
Published with
permission of TomDispatch. |
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