BOOK REVIEW
The whitewash thickens The WMD Mirage: Iraq's Decade of Deception and America's False Premise for War,
edited and with an introduction by Craig R Whitney
Buy this book
Reviewed by Piyush Mathur, with Eihab M Abdel-Rahman
As New York Times reporter Judith Miller cools her heels in prison for refusing
to disclose her sources to special prosecutor Patrick J Fitzgerald (in a case
ultimately related to America's erstwhile quest
for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - WMDs), it is ironical to review The WMD
Mirage, a volume edited and introduced by another Times journalist,
Craig R Whitney, who is on precisely that quest.
While Whitney does not deserve to be compared with Miller (what with the
latter's notoriously unethical reporting of the Iraq war), assiduous news
readers and political analysts may find his present journalistic outreach to
have little intention of contracting the circle of misinformation and
propaganda of which Miller has been not an insignificant source. On the
surface, Whitney's volume - most of whose contents are disparately available on
the Internet - is a mature (though meandering and lifeless) exercise at
straightening out a complex bureaucratic
maze for the common reader; in effect, it is a marketable re-packaging of US
political establishment's position on the hunt for Iraq's WMDs (and on
Operation Iraqi Freedom).
A collection of excerpts (sometimes whole texts) from key UN documents,
US-government reports and speeches by US President George W Bush and then
secretary of state Colin Powell (all originally published between 2002 and
2004), the volume reproduces the US government's narrative on the WMD business.
Central to this narrative is the belated and supremely staged acknowledgement
of errors ultimately blamed on US intelligence community - and a concomitant
exoneration of the Bush administration, portrayed largely as a victim of faulty
intelligence.
That Iraq illegally possessed chemical, biological and nuclear WMDs - or had
ongoing programs for developing the same - was a key claim of the Bush
administration. Iraq's WMD capabilities, coupled with its government's presumed
links to al-Qaeda, were cited as the prime reason by the US why it considered
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein a threat - and why it was expedient to get rid
of him. Both the claims were falsified by field investigations past the
invasion of Iraq - and Whitney traces the unfolding of this entire WMD drama by
including a variety of texts.
In the volume, Whitney divides the above information into five different
sections, each of which follows his introductions to the sections and
associated histories. At their best, Whitney's introductions summarize the
above texts with insufficient independent audit; at their worst, they
participate in the American government's propaganda by sticking to a patently
selective history of the US' relationship with Iraq (and with Saddam Hussein).
As such, Whitney adheres to the politically corrected official line in arguing
- in his introduction to Part V - that Saddam "was far from an innocent victim
of flawed American policy". (p 330) To the contrary, Saddam was, to some
extent, a by-product of a flawed American foreign policy - and his connections
with the US go at least as far back as 1963, when Iraqi Prime Minister General
Abd al-Karim Qasim was assassinated in a Ba'athist coup. Richard Sale of the
United Press International has reported that in the wake of the coup, "the CIA
provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of
suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated and summarily gunned
down." Sale has also reported that - according to Adel Darwish, co-author of Unholy
Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War(199) - the mass killings
were presided over by Hussein.
That Saddam was accommodated, and sometimes used by the US until the 1991 Gulf
War, is well documented and known to conscientious literati and
politicians worldwide. The highlights of this relationship are as follows:
US sustenance of Hussein's 1975 Algiers agreement with the Shah of Iran, under
which the Shah stopped supporting the anti-Ba'athist Kurds and gutted their
back bases in Iran in return for Iraq's acceptance of Iranian sovereignty over
Shatt al-Arab and, by implication, of Iranian supremacy in the Gulf;
US support of Saddam Hussein through his aggressive war against Iran
(1980-1988), whereas Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq (in 1983 and 1984) as
president Ronald Reagan's envoy and extended diplomatic, financial and military
assistance to him;
US observance of key Iraqi requests at the UN as the Security Council was held
to issue, on March 30, 1984, a presidential statement (rather than allowed to
bring a resolution to a vote) - which condemned the use of chemical weapons
without naming Iraq as the offending party (against Iran and the Kurds).
None of the above details occur either in Whitney's commentaries or the parts
of the texts he includes in this volume. Also missing from the volume are
scrutiny of the role of neo-con politicos and senior members of the Bush
administration in producing and selecting Iraq-related intelligence as well as
accounting of the unprecedented number of significant intelligence leaks
critical of the Bush administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. That
the above two factors complement each other in the overall narrative of
America's failed quest for Iraq's WMDs appears to be lost on Whitney.
Although central to understanding how "America's false premise" for Operation
Iraqi Freedom came about, many details are not comfortably discussible in an
unclassified format by the polite (and often conniving) members of mainstream
American political establishment (and not just by the right wing). With the
journalistic class generally playing along, American politicians testify to the
presence of imperial tendencies in American political subconscious and culture
by refusing to confront the above issues objectively and from the perspective
of global ethics - fearing that they would end up on the wrong side of their
electorate. It thus stands to reason why the Senate Select Committee would
blame the intelligence community's "collective presumption that Iraq had an
active and growing weapons of mass destruction program" without even mentioning
that the same presumption was entrenched in the thinking of top White House
officials of the Bush administration well before Bush came to power (p 207).
Prior administrative prejudice
Indeed, as signatories to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC, est
1997), Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, I Lewis Libby, Elliott
Abrams, Paula Dobriansky, Peter Rodman, Robert Zoellick, R James Woolsey, John
Bolton, William Schneider, Jr, Richard Armitage and Zalmay Khalizad were
responsible for a January 26, 1998 letter outlining the "only acceptable
policy" on Iraq to president Bill Clinton. The letter, accessible on the
website of The Indy Voice, deemed such a policy to be "one that eliminates the
possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass
destruction". The letter further argued: "In the near term, this means a
willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In
the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That
now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."
In yet another public letter to Bush, released on September 20, 2001 - nine
days after the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York - the PNAC
argued: "It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form
to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link
Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of
terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam
Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute
an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."
The PNAC probably didn't need to write the second letter. According to Paul
O'Neill, who served as Bush's treasury secretary (before being fired in early
2003) - and who was a permanent member of US National Security Council's (NSC)
- Bush began plotting to invade Iraq as soon as he took office.
In The Price of Loyalty(2004), a book written by former Wall Street
Journal reporter Ron Suskind (based on his extensive interviews with O'Neill
and several other officials who attended NSC meetings), there are references to
several memos containing information regarding early plans for the invasion and
occupation of Iraq. One Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001 and titled
"Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts", even includes a map of
potential areas for oil exploration in Iraq, and - according to Suskind -
"talks about contractors around the world from 30-40 countries and which ones
have intentions on oil in Iraq.
What else Whitney neglects to mention and reason Whitney also does not tell us
about:
The role of the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a subproject of the Department
of Defense's Near East and South Asia Bureau (NESA). At the instruction of
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld , the OSP was created - initially as an
informal group within the Pentagon - by Wolfowitz (then deputy secretary of
defense) and Douglas Feith (under secretary of defense for policy). Under the
direction of Abram Shulsky, the OSP was tasked, in the words of Rumsfeld, to
"search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists".
Numerous reports and intelligence leaks, however, suggest that the group was
formed to bypass the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the State
Department - none of which would supply the kind of alarmist intelligence on
Iraq that the White House wished to have in order to make its case for invading
Iraq. (After much criticism - of both its secrecy and illicit interference with
intelligence - the OSP was technically repurposed and renamed to the Office of
Northern Gulf Affairs in July 2003.)
The OSP's reliance on Iraqi exiles, especially the Iraqi National Congress
(INC) and its key leader Ahmed Chalabi, for intelligence on Iraq. Many
journalistic reports and intelligence leaks suggest that as intelligence
sources - but also as effective rebels against Saddam Hussein - neither Chalabi
nor the INC was trusted by the CIA after 1996 (when it had become clear that
the INC had no real intelligence to give and was inconsequential against
Saddam).
The CIA's mistrust was so great that Judith Miller, in an underhanded critique
of the CIA, wrote the following in a January 24, 2003 story in Times, "Until
recently, CIA officials were so hostile to defectors brought out of Iraq by the
Iraqi National Congress that they refused to interview them and even tried to
discredit their information." Miller then quoted Richard Perle, then a senior
Pentagon policy adviser, "But ultimately, the flow of information was so vital
and so overwhelming that [the CIA] could no longer ignore it." Useful to note
here is that, despite that resistance from the CIA, the INC's Information
Collection Program had begun receiving $340,000 per month - first from the
State Department, then from the Pentagon - as Bush came to power, and continued
to receive that amount until May 2004.
The White House Iraq Group (WHIG), formed by Andrew Card Jr in August 2002, "to
set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad" - according to
an August 10, 2003 report by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington
Post. The WHIG set up a "strategic communications" task force that planned
"speeches and white papers" that, as the Post's analysis shows, vastly
exaggerated and distorted intelligence concerning Iraq's WMDs.
A so-called "Strategic Support Branch" that, according to a January 23
report by Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, "arose from Rumsfeld's written
order to end his 'near total dependence on CIA' for what is known as human
intelligence". Essentially another way to bypass the CIA, this unit had been
"operating in secret for two years - in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places" by
the time the Post filed this report. The Post report also notes that "two
longtime members of the House Intelligence Committee, a Democrat and a
Republican, said they knew no details [about this unit] before being
interviewed for this article."
Outrage from the intelligence community
O'Neill's incriminating assertion - that Bush began plotting to invade Iraq as
soon as he assumed office - was in line with a range of unrelated high-profile
intelligence leaks and dissident comments (many of which provided concrete
details about how the Bush White House influenced the selection, interpretation
and trafficking of intelligence on Iraq).
Faulty intelligence to blame?
Details clearly show that the intelligence community was far from comfortable,
or in consort, with the Bush administration's course of action relating to the
"war on terrorism" and Iraq. Whitney has the gall to tell us that the "story of
the failure of American intelligence in Iraq is fully summarized in the report
of an investigative body named by the president himself: the Commission on the
Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass
Destruction" (p xi). In effect, by neglecting key details, Whitney unwisely
obliges us to unquestioningly accept the following two spurious assertions made
in the report by the Senate Select Committee:
"The Committee did not find any evidence that administration officials
attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments
related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities."(p 239).
"The Committee found no evidence that the vice president's visits to the [CIA]
were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure
analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq's [WMD] programs,
or did pressure analysts to change their assessments." (p 239)
As Whitney stops far short of acknowledging the presence of, let alone
perforating, any governmental fabrication, he stops even further short of
discussing issues in political ethics, sovereignty, imperialism, the history of
American foreign relations, relationship between media and intelligence. All
these issues are extremely important for any serious and meaningful analysis of
the United States' role in world as well as domestic politics, especially in
the face of terrorism.
Here, it needs to be mentioned that while the Bush administration is to blame
for the specific issue of America's false premise for the war in Iraq - a
premise that the administration itself has since consistently and openly
downplayed (replacing it with the equally false premise of the desire to spread
democracy) - the prior (and continuing) propagandist and violent history of the
CIA makes it an easier target in the eyes of the public.
Conclusion
So, all in all, the American political establishment, with the comfortable
solidarity of much of its media, has yet again brought the nation to a point
where it appears to be lost in the haze of its own propaganda, and it is
incredibly difficult -for even the educated of the US - to distinguish between
truth and falsity. The key issue for the imperially inclined United States,
then, should not be how to run other nations - and how to educate them - but
how to inform its own citizenry, even bureaucracy, truthfully and honestly. The
elusive search for WMDs is, in this sense, a morality tale about how the United
States eluded itself - and seems so resolved to do so in the years to come.
The irony of reviewing a volume such as this is not, therefore, bound to a
particular point of encounter, interface, or given moment - as in the
expression, a moment of irony. Instead, the irony is interwoven into layers
upon layers of incestuous political fabrications that continue to be tailored
and retailored, even to date, by a range of closely related establishment
figures in the US (and sometimes in the UK).
For all that, Whitney's highly conformist inclusions in this volume add yet
another layer to the same fabrication; his commentary accepts the intramural
criticisms that the Bush White House has so successfully cultivated, and in so
many different forms. Given that Whitney, formerly a reporter (currently a
subeditor) - for a powerful newspaper such as the New York Times - had to have
access to a wide range of sources of information and viewpoints, his
unwillingness to look beyond this establishment critique of the establishment
makes him only a willing participant of the establishment. There was, and
continues to be, too much out there for Whitney to allow us to view this
volume's weaknesses as coincidence.
The WMD Mirage: Iraq's Decade of Deception and America's False Premise for War,
edited and with an Introduction by Craig R Whitney, PublicAffairs: New York,
April, 2005. ISBN: 1586483617. Price US$16.95, 671 pages.
Piyush Mathur (Ph D), an alumnus of JNU, New Delhi, and Virginia Tech,
USA, is currently Adjunct Scholar, Institute on Globalization and the Human
Condition, McMaster University, Canada.
Eihab M Abdel-Rahman, PhD, is Research Associate, Engineering Science
and Mechanics, Virginia Tech.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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quest
for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction - WMDs), it is ironical to review The WMD
Mirage, a volume edited and introduced by another Times journalist,
Craig R Whitney, who is on precisely that quest.
