Jack A. Smith, New York
US President George Bush's administration is now frantically attempting to defuse three crises at once resulting from its invasion of Iraq.
These are the persistent guerrilla campaign against the occupation; deepening difficulties with the Shia majority which suspects Washington is manipulating "democratisation" to continue its domination of the "liberated" country; and now the mystery of the elusive weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been solved with the discovery that such weapons do not exist except as a figment of Bush's propaganda apparatus.
The definitive exposure of the Bush administration's mendacity was delivered by David Kay, a hawkish conservative who resigned on January 23 as the head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the body responsible for hunting for the WMD that Bush repeatedly assured the world were hidden in Iraq.
After a half-year scouring Iraq with a team of 1400 scientists, weapons experts and Pentagon personnel, Kay concluded that no WMD existed in Iraq, that none were produced since the first Iraq war in 1991, and that remaining pre-war stockpiles were destroyed in the 1990s, voluntarily or by UN weapons inspectors. This same conclusion would have reached, but without the horror and extraordinary expense of this war, had Washington permitted UN inspection teams to fulfill their mission last year.
"We didn't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on", Kay disclosed on January 25. He also revealed that Iraq did not send WMD to Syria to escape detection, as the White House has speculated; that stores of military clothing to protect the Iraqi army against chemical warfare were for defence, not offense; and that the mobile trailers the White House claimed were for production of biological warfare agents were actually producing hydrogen for weather balloons.
One of the most significant of Kay's exposures was that for many years the CIA obtained information about Iraq from spies within UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission), which was in charge of weapons inspections in Iraq until US President Clinton ordered the inspectors to withdraw in December 1998 as a prelude to the Operation Desert Fox massive pre-emptive bombing campaign.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would not allow the inspectors to return the next month when he uncovered evidence of the spying — a major breach of UN ethics — which the US denied, subsequently declaring Baghdad "kicked out" the inspectors, which the corporate media always repeated as truth.
"During the 1980s", the January 26 New York Times reported on the basis of an interview with Kay, the CIA "became spoiled by on-the-ground intelligence that it obtained from United Nations weapons inspectors. But the quality of the information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998."
The newspaper then quoted Kay directly: "UNSCOM was like crack cocaine for the CIA." And without the UN inspectors, Kay told the NYT, "the agency lacked its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information".
'Intelligence failure'
Long an advocate of "regime change" in Iraq, Kay said in a TV interview last July 17 that he had "seen enough" to be convinced that Iraq had been producing WMD in recent years and that "in six months from now, we'll be starting to reveal that evidence". Exactly six months later he resigned for lack of any evidence at all. "We were almost all wrong", he said on January 28. He had no alternative but to come clean. There was no WMD and any attempt to plant fake evidence risked political suicide.
But Kay did his best to limit damage to President Bush. As the Center for American Progress (CAP) reported on January 28, "Kay has spent the last three days pummeling the intelligence community instead of the Bush administration".
The CAP pointed out that before the invasion the CIA told the White House that there was no recent evidence Baghdad engaged in terrorist operations against the US, and that it had not provided chemical or biological weapons to al Qaeda or related terrorist groups. Also, the CIA sent two memos to the White House questioning Bush's assertion, later put forward in a major speech, that Iraq was seeking nuclear materials from Africa. And a month before the invasion the CIA warned the White House, "We do not have any direct evidence Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs".
In addition, the Defense Intelligence Agency warned Bush in September 2002 that there was "no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons".
The same month the energy department's responsible unit informed the White House that its allegation was incorrect that Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes to reconstitute its long-abandoned nuclear program.
In October 2002, the State Department intelligence division informed the administration that its claim that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons was incorrect.
The Bush administration began to beat the WMD war drums in the summer of 2002 after it became evident that the US call for a violent "regime change" in Baghdad was sharply opposed by the UN and the great majority of the world's nations.
Pre-war critics
The allegations were immediately challenged by the likes of former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark, who long contended that Iraq disposed of its WMD, and former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter, a tireless critic — though a political conservative himself — of Bush's use of lies to justify a new war, among others. Ritter maintained that 95% of Iraq's WMD was verifirf as destroyed before he resigned in 1998.
The world anti-war movement likewise disputed Washington's claims from the beginning.
Iraq, of course, insisted that its WMD stocks were eliminated years ago, but Washington and its mass media minions just scoffed.
Even as the argument in favour of WMD was reduced to tatters by January, Bush continued to put it forward, although on an even more deceptive basis, in his State of the Union speech on January 20. "Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq", he said, as though "liberation" was a consideration in the decision to go to war.
"[L]et us be candid about the consequences of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. We're seeking all the facts. Already the Kay Report [submitted in October, and already dated] identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations. Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day."
The key to comprehending this intentionally misleading paragraph is the phrase "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment". It conveys the impression that Kay found or is about to find the "hidden" WMD, but what he actually discovered was some information "related" to WMD "program activities", i.e., paperwork about earlier projects.
Note also that the "equipment" Iraq allegedly "concealed" was not identified as chemical, biological or nuclear weaponry.
Three days later Kay resigned, acknowledging he found nothing of importance.
Perhaps the most telling evidence that Washington was deceiving the American people about Iraq's alleged WMD was exposed the moment it became clear in the [northern] autumn of 2002 that the US intended to invade Iraq.
Clearly, Washington — which in recent decades has only attacked countries far weaker than itself — would hardly mount an invasion against a government that actually possessed and would use chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons to defend itself, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of GIs. Such a war would be illogical and a political disaster, which is why many people in the peace movement immediately began referring to WMD as "weapons of mass distraction".
Another indication that the White House scare stories about WMD were strictly for public consumption was the decision last year to reassign several hundred members of Kay's ISG to counterinsurgency work rather than the search for weapons. If the US was convinced large amounts of WMD were hidden somewhere in Iraq — and thus available to resistance forces — it would have intensified, not reduced, the hunt for weapons.
Bush's options
Bush is entertaining several options to discourage the voters from holding him responsible for contriving a false pretext to engage in a highly expensive war that is turning into a dangerous fiasco. One is to have the intelligence agencies take the fall to the extent possible. Another is to divert public attention with a show trial of Hussein this summer and autumn, depicting him as the reincarnation of Hitler, and/or better yet, finally capturing Osama bin Laden.
Lastly, the administration will mercilessly exploit the ignorance and fears of the American people, who have been exposed to continual lies about Hussein's "evil intentions" toward the US since 1990 and frightening scare stories about imminent terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001.
Several days after Kay resigned Bush was still insisting that regardless of all else the war was justified because Hussein posed "a grave and gathering threat to America and the world". It is absurd to suggest that Iraq, a country crippled by the 1991 war and 12 years of killer sanctions, was a threat to anyone, but most Americans do not know this.
The failure to discover WMD plus the beginning of a national debate on the war will impact many millions of Americans who passively supported the invasion and occupation but who now question the entire enterprise. The movement's job is to introduce the real issues into the election and to win these people to the anti-war side.
If last year's mass demonstrations and other actions can be duplicated in this election year they will have a much bigger impact, particularly if the broad movement maintains its conscientious demand for an immediate end to the war and occupation and to bring the troops home now.
[Abridged from the February 1, 2004, issue of the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, published in New Paltz, New York.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 11, 2004.
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