Criminals
The Lot Of Us
By Scott Ritter
28 January, 2005
The Guardian
The
White House's acknowledgement last month that the United States has
formally ended its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq brought
to a close the most calamitous international deception of modern times.
This decision was taken a month after a contentious presidential election
in which the issue of WMD and the war in Iraq played a central role.
In the lead-up to the invasion, and throughout its aftermath, President
Bush was unwavering in his conviction that Iraq had WMD, and that this
posed a threat to the US and the world. The failure to find WMD should
have been his Achilles heel, but the Democratic contender, John Kerry,
floundered, changing his position on WMD and Iraq many times.
Ironically, it was
Kerry who forced the Bush administration to acknowledge that it was
WMD that solely justified any military action against Iraq. Before the
US Senate in 2002, secretary of state Colin Powell responded to a question
posed by Kerry about what would happen if Iraq allowed UN weapons inspectors
to return and they found the country had in fact disarmed.
"If Iraq was
disarmed as a result of an inspection regime that gave us and the security
council confidence that it had been disarmed, I think it unlikely that
we would find a casus belli."
When one looks at
the situation in Iraq today, the only way that it would be possible
to justify the current state of affairs - a once secular society now
the centre of a global anti-American Islamist jihad, tens of thousands
of civilians killed, an unending war that costs almost £3.2bn
a month, and the basic principles of democracy mocked through an election
process that has generated extensive violence - is if the invasion of
Iraq was for a cause worthy of the price.
The threat to international
peace and security represented by Iraqi WMD seemed to be such a cause.
We now know there were no WMD, and thus no justification for the war.
And yet there are no repercussions.
The culpability
for the war can be traced to those same Senate hearings in 2002, when
Colin Powell said:"We can have debates about the size of the stockpile
... but no one can doubt two things. One, they [Iraq] are in violation
of these resolutions ... And second, they have not lost the intent to
develop these weapons of mass destruction."
Politicians, the
mainstream media and the public alike accepted this line of argument,
without debate, thus setting the stage for an illegal war.
UN weapons inspections
were never given a chance. Ever since the Clinton administration ordered
them out of Iraq in 1998, the US has denigrated the efficacy of the
inspection process. This was a policy begun by Clinton, but perfected
by Bush in the build-up to war. In October 2002, a month after Saddam
Hussein agreed to the unfettered return of weapons inspectors, the US
defence department postulated the existence of secret production facilities,
protected by a "concealment mechanism" designed to defeat
inspectors. Thus, even if they returned, a finding of no WMD was meaningless.
Inspectors did return,
and they found nothing. Iraq submitted a complete declaration of its
WMD holdings, which was dismissed as lies by the Bush administration.
Everyone seemed to accept this rejection of fact. "Intelligence
information" wasassumed to be infallible. And yet it was all just
hype.
There was never
any serious effort undertaken by the Bush administration to find Iraqi
WMD. Prior to the invasion, the US military re-designated an artillery
brigade as an "exploitation task force" designed to search
for WMD as the coalition advanced into Iraq.
It did little more
than serve as a vehicle for its embedded reporter, Judith Miller of
the New York Times, to recycle fabricated information provided by Ahmed
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, creating dramatic headlines
that had no substance. Once Iraq was occupied, Miller was sent home,
and the taskforce disbanded.
A new organisation
was created, the CIA-led Iraq survey group (ISG), led by David Kay.
His job was not to find WMD but to spin the data for the political benefit
of the White House. He hinted at dramatic findings, only to suddenly
reverse course once Saddam Hussein was captured. Kay told us that everyone
had got it wrong on WMD, that it was no one's fault. He was replaced
by Charles Duelfer, whose task was to extend the WMD cover-up for as
long as possible. Duelfer was very adept at this, having done similar
work while serving as the deputy executive chairman of the UN weapons
inspection effort.
I witnessed him
manipulate reports to the security council, rejecting all that didn't
sustain his (and the US government's) foregone conclusion that Iraq
had WMD.
As the head of the
ISG, he was called upon to again manipulate the data. As it was virtually
impossible to conjure up WMD stockpiles where none existed, he did the
next best thing - he re-certified Colin Powell's pre-war assertion that
Saddam Hussein had the "intent" to re-acquire WMD. Duelfer
provided no evidence to support this supposition. In fact, the available
data seems to reject the notion of "intent". But once again,
politicians, the mainstream media and the public at large failed to
let facts get in the way of assertions. The ISG had accomplished its
mission - not the search for WMD, but the establishment of a viable
alibi. Its job done, the ISG slipped quietly away, its passing barely
noticed by politicians, media and a public all too willing to pretend
that no crime has been committed.
But, through the
invasion of Iraq, a crime of gigantic proportions has been perpetrated.
If history has taught us anything, it is that it will condemn both the
individuals and respective societies who not only perpetrated the crime,
but also remained blind and mute while it was being committed.
· Scott Ritter
was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998 and
is the author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the
Bushwhacking of America
Email [email protected]