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SPEAKING
FREELY
Making the case vs fixing it
By Peter Bollington
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
Accompanying Tom
Engelhardt's Smoking signposts June
20, Mark Danner's "Why the Memo Matters" (NY
Review of Books, July 14) pinpoints the difficulty
in demonstrating that the war in Iraq was decided
months or years in advance of March 2003. In a
peculiar irony, while it is clear that President
George W Bush was marching to war with Iraq rather
than hoping to avoid it, the "proof" of this
intent is somehow elusive.
Mark Danner's
comment:
"It was an exceedingly clever
pretext, for every action preparing for war
could by definition be construed to be an action
intended to avert it - as necessary to convince
Saddam [Hussein] that a war was imminent.
According to this rhetorical stratagem, the
actions, whether preparing to wage war or
seeking to avert it, merge, become
indistinguishable. Failing the emergence of a
time-stamped recording of President Bush
declaring, "I have today decided to go to war
with Saddam and all this inspection stuff is
rubbish", we are unlikely to recover the kind of
"smoking gun" that Kinsley and others seem to
demand." Yet a reprise of the
evidence, including books on the shelf for several
years, such as Richard Clarke's Against All
Enemies and Craig Unger's House of Bush,
House of Saud, as well as the stream of newly
released and reviewed documents unleashed by the
leaked Downing Street Memos, indicates the march
to war was well underway even before the illegal
"spikes" or air attacks on Iraq started in the
summer of 2002.
Summarizing all this
evidence would require a book-sized presentation,
beyond the scope of articles for the daily news.
But attempts to dismiss the recently leaked
Downing Street memos as "nothing new" are futile,
as shown by Engelhardt, Danner, Michael Smith, and
others. In fact, saying the memos are "old news"
tends to confirm the case for war as already
fixed.
The Downing Street memos have
sprung a cascade of both new information and
review of old, such as plans to invade Iraq as
distantly as 1992 with Wolfowitz's position paper,
"Defense Planning Guidance", then in 1998 with the
first Project for the New American Century version
of "Rebuilding America's Defenses", and again in
1999 in Bush interviews with his biographer Mickey
Herskowitz (who was subsequently replaced) in
which he shows enthusiasm for finishing what his
dad started in Iraq and for using the political
gains thus acquired to push through programs for a
magnificent presidency.
The now
often-repeated and potent phrasing, "the
intelligence and the facts were being fixed around
the policy" is one of the most significant and
extraordinary pieces of evidence available. Why
would Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 (the
British equivalent of the US Central Intelligence
Agency), use such language in an official memo of
the Downing Street meeting on July 23, 2002, in
which British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other
top officials had been discussing American plans
for war?
Are we to believe that politics
is by and large such a game of lying that
everything under consideration in secret meetings
is by its nature being "fixed around a policy"?
Having just returned from America and meetings
with Bush officials, was Dearlove quoting one of
them directly, or simply offering his impression?
Or via Dearlove as messenger, were British
parliamentarians, including Blair, being duped by
an American government wishing to suggest it was
going to war when it had no intention of doing so
unless absolutely necessary?
The problem
with Dearlove's language is its deviation from a
straightforward use of words. In contrast, words
such as the following would have left no sinister
impression: "The policy was a result of
intelligence and facts"; "Facts and intelligence
were dictating the policy."
But these were
not the words, and additional, similarly phrased
comments from the Downing Street memos betray
nervous ministers secretly brainstorming ways to
fool the public: the US and Britain would need "to
create the conditions" to make invasion legal;
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military
action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]"; "It seemed
clear that Bush had made up his mind to take
military action, even if the timing was not
decided. But the case was thin."
Additional support that Bush intended to
make war versus wishing to avert it are the
failure to find WMDs, the absence of a connection
to al-Qaeda (a problem also mentioned in the
Downing Street memos), Saddam's cooperation with
UN inspections, the cutting short of those
inspections, the absence of plans for the
aftermath of the war, and US resistance to world
opinion.
Also, if Bush was sincere in his
wish to avert war and the UN inspections were
supported in that spirit, what action by Saddam
precipitated the attacks in March 2003? Here the
melding of intent to war and acting to avert war
comes to its weakest link. Saddam was cooperating,
and had even destroyed missiles uncovered by the
inspectors. Since no WMD had been discovered and
no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda
established, what happened to unleash the "shock
and awe" campaign? What was the triggering event?
If we are to wait until a world leader
emerges to say, "I was lying, because that's the
nature of how you get things done in politics," we
may as well light candles on Richard Nixon's tomb
and sing "Hail to the chief." A "smoking gun" may
be needed in a court or impeachment proceedings,
but for millions of disillusioned Britons and
Americans, including those who have lost loved
ones in Iraq, the case is absolutely clear.
On gaining office, the Bush presidency had
immediately placed pre-emptive attack on Iraq on
its agenda and moved deliberately to accomplish
it. It did so in violation of international law,
riding the pretext allowed it by September 11.
This understanding is now spreading in the world's
last bastion of illusion, the American Congress.
Meanwhile, more and more citizens are having no
problems seeing through the deceit.
Peter Bollington is a retired
senior citizen in the US writing occasionally to
the local and Internet press.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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