Weapon threat not the motive for war, ex-spy says

By Tom Allard, Foreign Affairs Writer in Canberra and agencies
June 10 2003

Australia's premier intelligence analysis agency told the Federal 
Government that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threat was not the 
prime motive for the United States going to war against Iraq, a former 
intelligence officer said yesterday.  

It was regarded as a "secondary issue", less important than regime 
change and reshaping the Middle East by putting in place a pro-US 
government in an oil-rich country and introducing democracy to the 
region.  

Domestic political considerations were also considered an important 
factor by Australia's Office of National Assessments, according the 
former ONA officer, Andrew Wilkie.  

Before the war, the ONA, which is answerable to the Prime Minister and 
cabinet, gave the Government reports on the US, as well as intelligence 
assessments on Iraq.  

"In the assessments on the US, it was being made very clear to 
government all the things which were driving the US on Iraq. WMD 
wasn't the most important issue. In fact, it was seen as a secondary 
issue," Mr Wilkie said yesterday.  

"It was also about the credibility of the US military. The US sees its 
military and threat of force as one of its most important foreign policy 
tools. They had threatened to use force and would lose credibility if they 
didn't," Mr Wilkie said.  

"The sum of all of these things was bigger than the impact of WMD."  

The Australian Government cited the destruction of Iraq's WMD and the 
possibility Saddam Hussein's lethal arms could be given to terrorists as 
the casus belli.  

It never mentioned re-fashioning the geopolitical landscape of the Middle 
East as an objective of the war until after the war was won.  

A spokesman for the Prime Minister noted that the ONA director-
general, Kim Jones, had said Mr Wilkie had been involved only in 
providing reports on humanitarian aspects of the war.  

Mr Wilkie left ONA in protest on the eve of the war in March.  

The opposition parties are pushing for an independent inquiry into any 
intelligence failure in the lead-up to the war.  

Mr Wilkie's revelations came as a British newspaper reported that the 
mobile laboratories found in Iraq and said to be built to make chemical 
and biological weapons had been supplied by Britain in the late 1980s 
to produce hydrogen for military balloons.  

Also in Britain, the Prime Minister Tony Blair's spin doctor, Alistair 
Campbell, wrote to the head of MI6 and promised to take more care in 
presenting intelligence material to the public after a damaging row over a 
dossier on Iraq's weapons.  

The document - dubbed the "dodgy dossier" by British media - failed to 
make clear the source of some information used to back the 
Government's case for war.  

Chunks of the report came from a student's thesis, which leaned heavily 
on documents more than 10 years old.  

The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, on Sunday became the most 
senior minister to admit publicly it was wrong to publish the "dodgy 
dossier".  

In the US, the White House launched a co-ordinated effort to quell 
accusations that it had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam  
Hussein.

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Source: Sydney Morning Herald ...
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/10/1055010936009.html

Cheers, Steve..

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