Blair Could Have Stopped Iraq War: Kofi Annan
By Countercurrents.org
30 September, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general says: Tony Blair could ultimately have stopped Iraq war. Annan has made news headlines as his memoir is lunched. On the occasion, in interviews, and in the memoirs, Interventions A Life in War and Peace , he made a number of interesting observations that reveal inner-face of world power players.
Jo Adetunji reported in the guardian.co.uk on September 29, 2012 :
Former UN secretary general says in memoirs he admired ex-British PM until he failed to stand up to US over invasion. Tony Blair could have stopped the Iraq war had he decided to walk away from a partnership with the US , claimed Annan.
In an interview to launch his memoirs, Annan said he had reflected on what would have happened if, without a second UN resolution over Iraq , Blair had refused to go to war with Iraq in 2003.
"I will forever wonder what would have happened if, without a second [UN] resolution ... Blair had said 'George [Bush], this is where we part company. You're on your own'," he told the Times. "I really think it could have stopped the war ... It would have given the Americans a pause. It would have given them a very serious pause to think it through ... All this would have raised a question: 'Do we go this alone?'"
While Annan argued that neither his resignation as UN secretary general nor that of then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, would have changed the course of military action, Blair could have made a difference had he spoken out. "Because of the special relationship and also the fact that ... when you think of the big countries, Britain was the only one that teamed up with [Bush]," Annan said.
Annan said he had done everything in his power to stop the war, which was justified heavily on the case that Iraq 's ruler Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. No evidence of these were later found and Blair came under fire for relying on a "sexed-up" dossier, which claimed that Hussein had the capacity to activate biological and chemical weapons in 45 minutes. The US-led invasion led to a war that lasted for eight years and is believed to have cost more than 100,000 lives.
Anann's disappointment in Blair is also reflected in his memoirs, co-written with Nader Mousavizadeh, Annan's former special assistant at the UN.
Annan recounts a meeting with Blair in 2006 over a bloody conflict between Israel and the Shia Islamic militant group Hezbollah, which he said the former British prime minister saw simplistically like Iraq "a meta-conflict between modernity and the medieval, between tolerant secularism and radical Islam".
"This was not the Blair with whom I had agreed so passionately about the moral necessity of a humanitarian intervention to halt the Serbian attacks on the Kosovar Albanians in 1999 ... Something had changed in Blair, and with it, I felt, his ability to act as a credible mediator," he said.
However, Annan said he did not agree with fellow Nobel peace prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, over his suggestion that Bush and Blair should face proceedings in the international criminal court. Annan said they were democratically elected leaders acting in what they believed were their national interests.
Writing on Syria, and his recent experience as UN and Arab League envoy, he said the country's sectarian rifts were "as deep and bitter as those of Lebanon and on a scale that threatens a clash of sectarian animosities that could dwarf even those that shook Iraq after 2003" and estimated that thousands would die as a result of the conflict.
The memoir made news in many newspapers including The New York Times , The Washington Post also.
Annan says Colin Powell, the former US secretary of state, was always skeptical of the evidence on his own WMD (weapons of mass destruction) claims he used to justify the war in Iraq .
Powell has called the run-up to the Iraq invasion "a blot" on his distinguished career.
In Interventions: A Life in War and Peace Annan says that Powell had greater doubts than previously believed about the Bush administration's evidence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had WMD.
There is question: How does Annan know what Powell was thinking? He says Powell told him, according to The New York Times .
Annan, who considers Powell a friend, says that the then-secretary of State dropped by Annan's office at UN headquarters six weeks into the war. He says Powell was ebullient after learning that US forces had found what they thought were the mobile laboratories the Bush administration had claimed Hussein was using to make weapons of mass destruction. Powell, who had made an impassioned case to the U.N. Security Council that Iraq 's chemical and biological weapons program justified the invasion, was excited. "Kofi, they've made an honest man of me," Annan quotes Powell as saying.
He says that as he sat with Powell, "the relief and the exhaustion was palpable." Annan wasn't convinced that Iraq really had all of the weapons the Bush administration Powell included had claimed. Still, Annan writes , "I could not help but smile along with my friend" and "could only be impressed by the resilience of this man, who had endured so much to argue for a war he clearly did not believe in."
In the months after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Annan's relations with the US worsened as he issued a series of increasingly critical statements, telling the BBC that he considered the US move illegal. He also became an outspoken critic of America 's excesses in the war on terror.
In his own memoir, Powell says his February 2003 speech at the U.N. justifying the invasion on the basis of what turned out to be bogus evidence was "a blot, a failure [that] will always be attached to me." He doesn't say he knew the intelligence was false, but he does say, "I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me." Powell has said he was misled , and demanded that the CIA and Pentagon explain why they didn't tell him that they knew that a key informant Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, also known as "Curveball" had lied when he said Saddam had mobile bio-weapons labs.
In the memoir Annan jokes that SG, the abbreviation for his title as UN secretary general, carried a second meaning around the organization's headquarters that more aptly described the role of the world's top diplomat: scapegoat.
Annan shouldered his share of blame for some of the world's worst human rights calamities. As the undersecretary general for peacekeeping in the 1990s, Annan bore responsibility for UN missions in Bosnia and Rwanda , where peacekeeping forces failed to stem the slaughter of civilians under their watch.
The book provides an opportunity to remind that the greatest blame belonged to the globe's biggest powers, mainly the US , for failing to provide the UN with the troops, the firepower and the will to confront evildoers.
Annan is justified in shining a light on the US including the Clinton administration, which blocked action in the UN Security Council on Rwanda , and the Bush administration, which went to war in Iraq on the back of flimsy evidence and with a post-invasion plan that left the country in chaos.
Rwanda is illustrative. On the eve of that country's 1994 genocide, the UN's force commander, Canadian Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, fired off a cable to Annan saying that he'd uncovered a plan to exterminate the country's Tutsi and that he intended to mount an armed raid on a weapons cache that would be used to arm the mass murderers. Annan ordered him to abort the mission, a decision Dallaire saw as disastrous.
In Annan's telling, there was no other logical response, given the UN's under-equipped peacekeeping force in Rwanda and the reluctance of the Clinton administration to support a tough reaction in the wake of a debacle in Somalia , where 19 US Army Rangers and members of the elite Delta Force were killed by supporters of a Somali warlord.
One always imagines that those responsible for great evil should exude it from their very pores. But as with Saddam Hussein - whom I met with on a special visit to Iraq in 1998 in order to attempt to broker a deal that would stop a war - this was a man who seemed cool, polite, and friendly.
Annan has been a lifelong admirer of the US . When the Clinton administration sought a replacement for the United Nations' Egyptian leader, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, it settled on Annan, who had shared Washington 's belief that the use of firepower in Bosnia could help turn the tide. He had also supported, however belatedly, then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright's case for the use of military force against the Serbs in Kosovo.
A major corruption scandal over the UN' management of the multibillion-dollar oil-for-food program in Iraq, which implicated the top UN official managing the program and disclosed that Annan's son profited from it, weakened the Annan politically and brought calls from Republican lawmakers for his resignation.
However, he survived in the top UN post.
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