A mission in Iraq built on a lie

June 16 2003

When Bush wondered what to do about September 11 an ultra-right 
lobby group was there to tell him, writes Robert Manne.  

It is gradually becoming transparent that the endlessly repeated claim 
used to justify the invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein possessed a 
vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - was false.  

The 200 most plausible sites for the storage of such weapons have been 
inspected. Many of the most senior military, intelligence and scientific 
figures in the regime have been captured and interrogated. Yet not one 
weapon of mass destruction has so far been found.  

The spurious justification constitutes, in my opinion, one of the greatest 
foreign policy scandals involving Western governments since 1945.  

It is surely imperative for all those who care about democracy - whether 
or not they supported the war - to try to discover an explanation for the 
deception and the true causes of what has occurred.  

One important moment on the road that led to the invasion of Iraq can 
be found in the formation in 1997 of the Project for the New American 
Century. This lobby group represented almost all the most powerful 
figures associated with the defence and foreign policy wing of American 
neo-conservatism: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul 
Wolfowitz and William Kristol.  

The PNAC neocons were all former hardline Cold Warriors and muscular 
internationalists, who supported the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan 
with enthusiasm. All were equally contemptuous of the naive liberalism 
of Jimmy Carter and the status quo realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. All, 
moreover, regarded the arrival of the era of US global hegemony at the 
end of the Cold War as providing a splendid opportunity for spreading 
American ideals of liberal democracy and free trade, if necessary by 
military means. All supported a serious increase in US defence 
spending. All were suspicious about the rise of China in the long term. 
All advocated a policy of preventing the emergence of any superpower 
rival to the US.  

The PNAC neocons were also unconditional supporters of Israel, with 
close links to the most hawkish elements of Likud. Some advocated 
pre-emptive strikes of the kind Israel had used in 1981 to take out 
Iraq's nuclear plant at Osirak. All were extremely hostile to Israel's 
enemies in the Middle East - Syria, Iran and Iraq. Indeed, one of the 
first initiatives of the PNAC was the publication of an open letter 
to president Bill Clinton advocating the armed overthrow of Saddam's 
regime.  

Although some members of the PNAC supported John McCain and not 
George Bush for the Republican presidential candidacy in 2000, it 
was the selection of Cheney as Bush's running mate which provided the 
neocons with what turned out to be their historic opportunity. With 
Cheney's support, 10 of the 18 signatories of the PNAC letter to Clinton 
on regime change in Iraq moved into key positions in the new Bush 
Administration. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were appointed 
to the three most senior positions in the Department of Defence.  

The neocons made little serious policy headway in the first months of 
the Bush presidency, but then September 11 occurred. In an article in 
Commentary in February last year, the neo-conservative godfather 
Norman Podhoretz captured the new situation rather well: "One hears 
that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what 
he wanted to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his 
election all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes 
he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world."  

It did not require the presence of the neocons in the administration to 
convince Bush to go to war with Afghanistan to destroy the al-Qaeda 
bases there. Their presence, however, was crucial to the next decision: 
to move from war against Afghanistan to war against Iraq.  

After September 11 Bush was a President in search of a missionary 
grand strategy for fighting global terrorism and radical Islam. The 
neocons were the only group inside his administration with a ready 
blueprint which answered to his mood.  

The first significant neocon victory was Bush's announcement, early last 
year, concerning the existence of an axis of evil, comprising Iraq, Iran 
and North Korea. Their even more substantial achievement, however, 
was as the architects of the new revolutionary US strategic doctrine of 
September last year. It announced that, as a consequence of the 
danger of "rogue states" launching surprise attacks on the US or 
secretly passing weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups, in the 
future pre-emptive, unilateral US military action against such states 
might be required.  

With this new strategic doctrine the victory of the neocons seemed 
complete.  

It was not quite so. The neocons hoped for a US war against Iraq 
without sanction from the United Nations. After a short political 
struggle for the mind of the President, the combined alliance of 
Tony Blair, Colin Powell at the Department of State and old Republican 
hawks like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft prevailed. Bush agreed to 
take his case for war on Iraq to the UN.  

Although the true purpose of the neocons' planned war against Iraq was 
not to disarm Saddam but to bring about "regime change", the case for 
war had to be argued exclusively in terms of the threat to peace posed 
by Saddam's illegal possession of weapons of mass destruction. 
Fighting wars to bring about regime change is in breach of international 
law. Such an argument could not be mounted at the UN.  

In order to put the case for war, unambiguous evidence of Iraq's 
possession of such weapons had to be produced. As is becoming clear, 
the traditional gatherers of such intelligence - the CIA and the 
Pentagon's DIA - had reservations. To achieve greater certainty 
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz created, inside the Pentagon, a new body 
called the Office of Special Plans, under the leadership of a neocon 
ex-Cold Warrior, Abram Shulsky. As Seymour Hersh has argued in a 
recent article in The New Yorker, it was through uncritical acceptance 
or even manipulation of intelligence supplied by Iraqi defectors that 
the Office of Special Plans was able to deliver the concrete evidence 
concerning Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that the case for war 
required.  

If Hersh is right, it was on the basis of this kind of highly politicised 
intelligence that Bush, Blair and Howard claimed to know for certain that 
Saddam had amassed a vast arsenal of chemical and biological 
weapons which were ready for use; that the production of such weapons 
was increasing in tempo; that it was almost certain that within a short 
few years Saddam would be in possession of nuclear weapons as well.  

It now appears that every part of this assessment was false. If so, 
the conclusion seems inescapable. The Anglophone democracies invaded 
Iraq on the basis of a lie.  

Robert Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University.

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Source: Sydney Morning Herald ...
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615673779.html


Cheers, Steve..

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