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Misled into war (21 March 2003) Dr Glen Rangwala explains how Bush and Blair deliberately avoided a peaceful solution to Iraqi disarmament. When the first bombs fell on Baghdad, the very reason provided by the US and UK for attacking Iraq had already fallen away. On 18 March, Tony Blair and Jack Straw told the House of Commons at great length about French perfidy, largely on the basis of an inaccurate translation of a comment by Jacques Chirac. They only provided occasional reminders of why they were about to endorse and participate in an attack upon Iraq, not France. Those reminders are worth examining. Blair was widely praised in the mass media for the "passion" with which he spoke in the Commons on the day that a majority of Labour MPs voted for war, but the actual substance of what he said appeared trifling at first, and unfounded or misleading if scrutinised more carefully. As their sole evidence, Blair and Straw claimed to present the findings of the UN weapons inspectors of Unmovic, in particular their "working paper" of 6 March 2003. Blair's first quote in his speech from the report - his first allegation about Iraq - was that Iraq "had had far reaching plans to weaponise VX". Note the verb's tense in that quote. That quotation, about the deadly nerve agent VX, was from a "background" section of the Unmovic report, on Iraq's policy before 1991. Blair presented that quote without any context, leading many MPs no doubt to think that this was a statement about current Iraqi policy. In the key new section of the report on VX, Unmovic reported that "route B", the method Iraq used to produce the 1.5 tonnes of VX before 1990 that have been repeatedly mentioned by US and UK leaders, did not lead to a stable chemical that Iraq could still possess. According to the weapons inspectors, "VX produced through route B must be used relatively quickly after production (about 1 to 8 weeks)". In other words, Blair's first piece of "evidence" was about a substance that the weapons inspectors consider to have been no threat since early 1991. Tony Blair didn't tell the MPs that. Blair also quoted from a section of the Unmovic report about anthrax. He didn't mention that the inspectors had already refuted the central US and UK claim about Iraq's production of anthrax. In the past, Bush and Blair have repeatedly mentioned how Iraq could have produced three times as much anthrax in 1990 than Iraq has admitted, and the inspectors accounted for. Unmovic rejected that claim: Iraq presented documents to inspectors in 1995 to verify that it had produced as much anthrax as it said it had, and Unmovic now accepted these documents as "credible". What Unmovic hadn't been able to account for was any anthrax produced in the two weeks at the start of January 1991 before the first Gulf War was scheduled to begin. Maybe Iraq massively stepped up production of anthrax across the country in those two weeks, Unmovic says. Yes, but maybe not. Worst case assumptions are worth having if you are a weapons inspector, but a political decision on war has to be taken on the basis of likelihoods not far-fetched possibilities. On the basis of such an unlikely scenario, for which Unmovic do not claim that there is any evidence, Blair blew his trumpet for war. The final substantive claim was that Iraq had played "the same old games" with inspectors. Contrast that to the statement of Unmovic's chief, Hans Blix, to the Security Council on 7 March that Iraq was taking "numerous initiatives .. with a view to resolving long-standing open disarmament issues", and this "can be seen as 'active', or even 'proactive'" cooperation. Since the start of March, the Iraqis had destroyed 72 of its 120 medium range missiles on the request of the inspectors, and was ahead of the timetable to destroy the entire stock. The regime had passed a law prohibiting the production or retention of any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, as the inspectors had asked. They had verified that they had destroyed bombs containing anthrax in 1991 by excavating the destruction site. They had allowed inspectors to visit unhindered over 350 sites across Iraq, in almost 600 inspections, and the inspectors had not found a single piece of evidence that Iraq had retained any prohibited weapons. If the concern had been about the potential threat from Iraq, one would expect the UK and US administrations to be pleased with the results of the inspections. Instead, they pulled the inspectors out of the country. It can be little surprise then that Hans Blix said on the morning the bombing started - a few days too late, one might think - that he considered that the US had always been "dubious" about the inspections process, and had "lost patience" with the inspectors very quickly, especially as "the Iraqis did cooperate with us". In other words, working inspections were getting in the way, as the decision for war had already been taken. In Iraq in 1990-91, Serbia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001, the US and UK were presented with many opportunities to achieve their stated aims without war. Iraq and Serbia had offered to withdraw from Kuwait and Kosova respectively, and Afghanistan had offered to hand over Usama Bin Laden. None of those opportunities were taken up. Instead, just as realistic possibilities for peaceful solutions arise, the US has demanded total surrender, with self-humiliation as an added demand. The same approach was apparent again in Iraq, to be found in the British demand that Saddam Hussein appear on Iraqi television to apologise for his lies. With the existing inspections system, peaceful disarmament seemed to be achievable. Under the terms of Security Council Resolution 1284, the time period that would have led to the suspension of economic sanctions by the summer was about to begin. With this prospect imminent, the well-tested US-UK strategy of making impossible demands, coupled with an almost immediate military onslaught, went into action.
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Author: Glen Rangwala Back to the Index of Writings |
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