BY ROHAN PEARCE
"We made it clear to the dictator of Iraq that he must disarm. We asked other nations to join us in seeing to it that he would disarm, and he chose not to do so, so we disarmed him. And I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain. He is no longer a threat to the free world, and the people of Iraq are free" US President George Bush declared on June 17.
"It is somewhat puzzling that you could have 100% certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence and zero certainty about where they are" Hans Blix, the retiring head of the UN team which carried out weapons inspections in Iraq, told the US Council on Foreign Relations on June 24.
The evidence is growing that the governments of the "coalition of the willing" the US, Britain and Australia deliberately deceived the populations of their countries to build support for a war. Their lies were used to justify a bloody war, and what is shaping up to be an even bloodier occupation. It is intolerable that these lying warmongers are allowed to remain in power.
The evidence that Iraq possessed no stockpile of WMD will come as little surprise to the war planners in Canberra, Washington or London. After all, Los Angeles Times journalist William Arkin revealed on March 9 that sources in the US Air Force who were part of planning for the invasion told him that there wasn't a single confirmed biological or chemical target on their lists. Arkin wrote: "Incredible as it may seem, given all the talk by the administration including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's discourse last week [on March 5 at the UN Security Council] about continuing Iraqi deception there is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons."
This was confirmed at a Washington press conference on June 6, where Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, head of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), acknowledged: "We could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the weapons of mass destruction program, specifically the chemical warfare portion."
But the pre-invasion pronouncements on WMD by Canberra, London and Washington added no such caveats. This was not "exaggeration" about Iraqi WMD, nor is it "faulty intelligence" it was deliberate deceit to justify an immoral and illegal war.
Why else would the invading forces not even bother to secure the Tuwaitha nuclear facility, associated with Iraq's past nuclear weapons program? As a result, the site was looted and the uranium stored at the site has disappeared. Greenpeace spokesperson Mike Townsley told the June 25 British Guardian he thinks that "at best", it was "callous disregard". He pointedly added: "They managed to secure the oil industry."
In the lead up to the invasion, intelligence was used selectively by the warmongers. According to a May 30 Reuters article, Patrick Lang, the former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the DIA, said that a four-person Pentagon team (dubbed "the cabal"), "cherry-picked the intelligence stream" to come up with evidence that Iraq was a "threat".
The deliberate campaign of deceit was made necessary by massive worldwide opposition, including in Australia and Britain, to an invasion of Iraq. An extensive war propaganda campaign was waged, which, while giving an overall impression that Iraq had banned weapons, provided no evidence whatsoever to support this claim.
The warmongers' lie campaign was remarkably successful in some respects a June 24 Washington Post-ABC News poll found almost a quarter of Americans believe that Iraq actually employed chemical or biological weapons against the invading armies during the war.
However, Bush's approval rating, the Post's poll revealed, has dropped from a high of 92% in November 2001 to 68%. As uneasiness among the US population about Iraqis' resistance to their "liberation" grows, and the purported justification for the invasion rings increasingly hollow, Washington could face dire political consequences.
Or at least they should. The abject failure of the occupying forces to discover any WMD arsenal in Iraq should mean that the governments of Howard, Bush and Blair are thrown out of office.
The chances of such an outcome, however, have been limited by the complicity of their parliamentary opponents. The US Democrats, like the Tories in Britain and the Labor Party in Australia, never seriously (if at all) challenged either the war drive or the manner in which it was presented a mission to "disarm" Iraq.
Some Democrats, such as Congress member Henry Waxman, have begun to push the Bush administration on some aspects of the justifications used to go to war. Waxman has publicly questioned the use of falsified documents purporting to show Iraq tried to import uranium. But the Democrats have found themselves unable to seriously challenge Bush's WMD argument in a way that doesn't attack the rampantly racist patriotism that has swept the US since 9/11.
On June 18, the intelligence committees of the US House of Representatives and Senate began closed-door hearings on the "intelligence" on Iraqi WMD programs. The hearings will provide a "safe" way for the US rulers to back away from some of Washington's more outrageous pre-invasion statements, by blaming "intelligence failures", without questioning the "justness" of Iraq's "liberation".
Of the three leaders of the "coalition of the willing", it is Blair who is under the most pressure for evidence of WMD to emerge. Prior to the invasion, London's drive to war was not just the subject of mass opposition by the country's population, but was also opposed by a section of Britain's ruling class. This was reflected in the division within the Labour Party and the strongly anti-war stand (until the invasion began) of the mainstream Daily Mirror newspaper.
Blair's case for going to war is being strongly challenged by an official parliamentary enquiry, undertaken by the House of Commons' foreign affairs committee. Two former members of Blair's cabinet, Clare Short and Robin Cook, have already appeared before the committee attacking Blair's credibility.
The main items of "evidence" provided by the British government the Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government dossier, released in September, and the Iraq Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation dossier, released in January have been slammed.
While it is the January document which is known almost universally as the "dodgy dossier", both are a prime example of the campaign of deceit, misinformation and innuendo waged by the "coalition of the willing" in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
On February 5, Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, revealed that the "dodgy dossier" was plagiarised from work by Ibrahim al Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and from articles in Jane's Intelligence Review.
Rangwala revealed that Marashi's work was based on the activities of Iraq's intelligence agencies in the period from August 1990 to January 1991 but the dossier presents his study as a contemporary assessment! Moreover, Rangwala's study revealed that the original work had been changed to make Iraq seem more threatening hardly an "intelligence failure". One example, cited by Rangwala, is "aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes" was changed in the dossier to "supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes".
Marashi, an Iraqi living in the US, appeared before the committee on June 19, where he testified: "I was quite shocked to see it [his article] end up in this dossier. That was not my intent, to have it support such an argument ... to go to war."
Even Blair's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, admitted that the February dossier was an "embarrassment", reported the BBC on June 24. Straw said: "We did say there was a 'current and serious' threat and I stand by that completely." In his foreword to the September dossier, Blair had claimed that Iraq's "military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them"!
What is astonishing, however, is that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has not yet faced anything like the pressure that Blair has.
Howard is no less guilty of lying about Iraq's alleged WMD arsenal. On February 4, he told the federal parliament his government "knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons" (emphasis added).
Andrew Wilkie, a defence analyst for the Office of National Assessment (ONA), resigned on March 11, accusing the Howard government of exaggerating the "threat" posed by Iraq. While Wilkie is unlikely to testify before an Australian inquiry, he appeared before the British inquiry on June 19.
Wilkie told the committee that, while he believes Iraq "had some sort of WMD program": "I think the problem was the way that the British and Australian governments took those reasonably measured assessments and exaggerated them for their own purposes. Words used, such as 'massive program, imminent threat', I do not believe were words ever offered to governments by their intelligence agencies."
Asked on SBS television's June 4 Dateline program about his stated view that the ONA was receiving "garbage grade intelligence", Wilkie replied that the "ONA was offering a much more moderate assessment than anything that was being said publicly in Canberra or in London or in Washington for that matter". He added: "Politicians in all three capitals are now manoeuvring to shift blame to their intelligence agencies. I recall clearly, PM Howard describing Iraq's WMD program on a number of occasions as 'massive' a word never offered to the government by organisations such as the [ONA]."
Wilkie told Dateline that US officials were "using WMD shamelessly to mask their real reasons for the war", and that his concern was that the Australian government was using the WMD "story to mask its real reasons for going to war, which was a preparedness to support the US at any cost".
But the scandal is not just Howard's lies it's that the "opposition" ALP has not taken advantage of the government's deception and kicked up a stink. It was only in February this year that half-a-million Australians mobilised against Howard's war drive, and opinion polls showed up to 70% of the population opposed going to war. While support for the war grew during the invasion, the potential for a political crisis for the Coalition government remains.
The ALP has been content with a handful of queries during question time in parliament and a nobbled Senate inquiry. Why won't Simon Crean, the leader of the Labor "opposition", come out and say that the public was lied to by Howard? That, along with Blair and Bush, Howard led his country into a war which had nothing to do with WMD or, for that matter, "liberation". Of course, Crean would have to explain why he told parliament on February 4 that he agreed with Howard that "Saddam Hussein" had to be "disarmed".
It is not as if evidence that the "coalition of the willing" lied was hidden away the reports by Blix to the UN Security Council provided ample evidence this was the case.
The problem for the ALP leaders is that they fundamentally support the same framework as the Coalition support for the US-Australia military alliance and for the continued "right" of the imperialist, First World nations to pull "rogue" Third World nations into line, by political, economic or military means.
The main problem Crean raised prior to the invasion was merely a question process "multilateralism" versus Washington's "unilateralism". The death of more than 5000 Iraqi civilians (so far) and an occupation depriving Iraqis of any form of self-determination wasn't an issue for him.
Millions mobilised against the invasion of Iraq, but were unable to prevent it. The task for those who refused to let their rulers' imperial ambitions go unchallenged is to fight for the independence of Iraqis from their new Western overlords and to make those who led their countries to war pay the price for their lies.
From Green Left Weekly, July 2, 2003.
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