Don't
Let The Warmonger
Off The Hook
By Scott Ritter
04 April 2005
The
Independent
Former
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has secured his place in history,
not as a great American military leader, national security advisor,
or diplomatic representative of his country, but rather the dupe who
peddled false intelligence data to the Security Council of the United
Nations on that fateful day on 5 February 2003, sealing the US case
for war with Iraq. Powell, once revered as an American hero, will be
remembered as Bush's shill for a sham case for war, waxing eloquently:
"What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid
intelligence" for ever fixed in the minds of the more than 150
million people who watched him that day.
Powell repeated
his role this past week when, in an interview with the German magazine
Stern, he reflected on his historical moment before the council: "The
CIA believed there were weapons of mass destruction," Powell said.
"The president believed it. I believed it. Still, it was wrong.
I did not know this at the time." Ever the good soldier, Powell
this past week performed another service in defence of this charade:
pre-empting a damning report on the CIA's intelligence about Iraqi WMD
which was released a day after Powell's interview. This report, a product
of the Presidential Commission on Intelligence and WMD, is critical
of what it calls the CIA's failure to accurately assess the true status
of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities in the lead-up to
the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.
The Presidential
Commission's report speaks of the "worthless or misleading"
assessments produced by the CIA. Building on the foundation established
by Colin Powell, the commission placed blame for this failure on the
CIA, quashing any notion of political pressure influencing the assessments
by emphasising that: "The analysts who worked on Iraqi weapons
issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure
cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgements".
This is a curious statement, given the fact that the CIA's October 2002
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, used to justify the decision
to go to war against Iraq, was published almost two months after President
Bush made his decision to invade Iraq. The commission, in an understatement,
did note: "It is hard to deny the conclusion that intelligence
analysts worked in an environment that did not encourage scepticism
about the conventional wisdom."
As the commission's
own report shows, when it came to Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction
programmes, the CIA had ceased to function as a professional intelligence
agency, tasked with discerning fact, and instead had transformed itself
into a clearing house of rumour and speculation. In this diseased environment,
defector reports that under any other circumstance would have been discarded
as fictitious were certified as viable and then used to germinate numerous
other corroborating intelligence reports that were treated as separate
accounts, and yet had as their genesis the same errant report. In the
same way, intellectual "traps" were manufactured where a hypothesis
which postulated Iraqi guilt were constructed, together with the notion
that any information that was uncovered which contradicted this hypothesis
was to be dismissed as being part of an elaborate Iraqi "cover
story".
The Presidential
Commission's report smooths over the role played by the British government
in promulgating falsehoods about Iraq's WMD programmes. The September
2002 "dossier" on Iraqi WMD capabilities has already gone
down in history as a totally discredited work. Like the just-released
US WMD report, the British carried out their own charade of an investigation
into its intelligence failures, known as the Butler Commission. The
commission was averse to any notion that it was pressure from policy
makers that produced the inaccurate analysis of Iraqi WMD, and as such
its report cannot be seen as anything more that yet another whitewash,
designed to shift blame for the Iraq WMD intelligence analysis debacle
away from Prime Minister Blair and on to the shoulders of the British
intelligence community.
In the end, it is
the policymakers - British and American alike - who must shoulder the
responsibility for the Iraqi WMD fiasco. This was very much an elective
war, not a conflict of necessity. In their headlong rush to get rid
of Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Tony Blair violated not only international
law and the moral character of their own respective democratic constituencies,
but also the intellectual integrity of the very intelligence services
the citizens they are responsible for depend on to help guide them through
a dangerous world.
The Presidential
Commission says that the CIA was "dead wrong" when it came
to assessing Iraqi WMD capabilities, but the fact of the matter is that
it is George Bush and Tony Blair who were dead wrong, to the tune of
over 1,500 American, nearly 90 British, and tens of thousands of Iraqi
lives lost, in pursuing a war on such blatantly false premises.
The American people
have already shown themselves to be culpable in legitimising this tragedy
by re-electing George Bush, the chief architect of this disaster, as
president of the United States. In the weeks to come, the citizens of
Great Britain will have a chance to carve their names in the annals
of history, either slavishly repeating the same mistake of their American
cousins by re-electing a man who is responsible for a massive violation
of international law, or establishing the viability of British democracy
as a lasting bastion of the rule of law by voting out Tony Blair. This
will send a clear and lasting signal to those on the Presidential Commission
and the Butler Commission that illegal wars of aggression are the responsibility
of the politicians who order them, not the intelligence officials who
justify them.
Scott Ritter was
UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and is author of
'Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy',
which is to be published in the summer by IB Tauris & Co
Copyright: The Independent