Learning from Alice
The US government's disinformation campaign about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is rapidly unravelling, writes Faiza Rady
Some members of American President George W Bush's National Security team must surely be avid readers of Alice in Wonderland. A classic for children and adults alike, Lewis Carroll's masterpiece provides significant guidance for those politicos willing to learn the ABC's of preemptive war and other fares. "For in Alice, like all kids know," said former United States Attorney General, writer and political activist Ramsey Clark, "the execution precedes the trial."
So it was with Iraq: bomb first, find evidence of the proverbial weapons of mass destruction (WMD) later.
Former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a high-powered insider who fell out of grace and was sacked in December 2002, recently exposed the Bush administration's preemptive war scenario, Alice-style. In a CBS interview on Sunday, O'Neil said Bush had decided to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on day one of his presidency. Charges would be concocted later, while evidence remained elusive and irrelevant to political discourse.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction Saddam Hussein was a bad person and he needed to go," said O'Neill, adding that he never saw the US government provide proof for their thunderous claims. "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," said the former National Security team member.
With no evidence of "imminent" or other menacing threats to US national security, the Bush administration simply waged war as it saw fit, using the concept of "preemptive war" as a pretext to aggression. "For me, the notion of pre- emption -- that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do -- is a really huge leap," O'Neill told CBS.
O'Neill's claims were confirmed by the publication of the most comprehensive study to date examining the Bush administration's allegations concerning Iraq's possession of WMD vis-à-vis material evidence in the real world.
In WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, four experts on weapon proliferation at the respected US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sifted through thousands of pages documenting the case for and against Iraq's WMD. This includes: the unclassified records of pre-war intelligence, the administration's statements about Iraq's capabilities to produce nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and long-range missiles, and the evidence found to date in Iraq. The report concludes that the Bush administration "systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD", and began sometime in 2002 to exert undue pressure on US intelligence agencies to adapt their findings to the administration's warfare scenario.
Concerning Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons arsenal, WMD in Iraq says that inspectors had dismantled the country's nuclear programme after the 1991 war. Bulky, expensive and largely dependent on imports, nuclear installations are not exactly unobtrusive -- even when under the cover of your local shopping mall, the report proceeds to explain. This was especially true at the time when the country was crawling with inspectors ever on the lookout for nuclear warheads, "imminently" threatening US coastlines.
"The 731 inspections conducted by the UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), between 27 November 2002 and 18 March 2003, did not reveal any evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction, or significant quantities of proscribed items," says the report.
Regarding the administration's "imminent" nuclear threat mantra, the report cites the conclusions of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the Department of State, finding that the evidence was "inadequate to support a judgement that the nuclear programme had been restarted".
As for the notorious chemical weapons stockpile, the report quoted Rolf Ekeus, Executive Chairman of the UN Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) from 1991 to 1997, who reiterated the conclusion of a number of experts, saying that "the large quantities of nerve agents discovered in storage in Iraq had lost most of their lethal property and were not suitable for warfare as early as 1991."
The case of biological weapons (BW) or "weapon agents" is particularly symptomatic of the US government's well-oiled disinformation campaign, unperturbed by material evidence, or anything else.
While President Bush reiterated the tale that Iraq had "a massive stockpile of biological weapons that had never been accounted for, and [was] capable of killing millions", the biological team supervised by UNMOVIC supervised and verified the destruction of 244.6 kilogrammes of declared but expired growth media and 40 vials of expired toxins.
Dismissing the evidence as yet another Iraqi ploy to cover their BW production trail, the Bush administration came up with a second plan. Far from the madding crowd, hiding from the inspectors, Iraqi scientists were allegedly manufacturing BW in mobile units. Meanwhile, UN inspectors failed to put their hands on any mobile units.
However, despite the UN inspectors' repeated dismissals of Bush administration assertions, the record shows that persistence does sometimes pay off. Although intelligence reports maintained until the end of March 2003 that the mobile BW productions units were nowhere in sight, US troops discovered in May two vehicles in the field that a joint CIA-Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report called "the strongest evidence to date of Iraq's BW capabilities", though the US army reported that the vehicles did not test positive for BW agents.
Regardless, the American president exulted: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," he said. The US media gobbled up Bush's words like manna from the skies and the "news" made international headlines.
Unfortunately for the Bush administration the evidence proved too flimsy. Following a thorough investigation of the vehicles, DIA engineers themselves reported in June that the vehicles were most likely used to chemically produce hydrogen for military weather balloons, as the Iraqis had claimed in the first place.
Further celebrated evidence of a "clandestine network of laboratories and concealed equipment and materials" was the discovery of a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. The administration once again cried victory and President Bush declared that the "live strain of deadly agent botulinum proved that Saddam Hussein was a danger to the world".
The deadly vial had in fact been concealed in an Iraqi scientist's kitchen since 1993, after having been purchased from the US sometime in the 1980s. By 2003 it had long lost its potency, like all other WMD in Iraq, concluded the report.
