The inspection process was rigged to create uncertainty
over WMD to bolster the US and UK's case for war
10 October 2004 The Independant UK
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=570477
It appears that the last vestiges of perceived
legitimacy regarding the decision of President George
Bush and Tony Blair to invade Iraq have been eliminated
with the release this week of the Iraq Survey Group's
final report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The
report's author, Charles Duelfer, underscored the
finality of what the world had come to accept in the 18
months since the invasion of Iraq - that there were no
stockpiles of WMD, or programmes to produce WMD.
Despite public statements made before the war by Bush,
Blair and officials and pundits on both sides of the
Atlantic to the contrary, the ISG report concludes that
all of Iraq's WMD stockpiles had been destroyed in
1991, and WMD programmes and facilities dismantled by
1996.
Duelfer's report does speak of Saddam Hussein's
intent to acquire WMD once economic sanctions were
lifted and UN inspections ended (although this
conclusion is acknowledged to be derived from
fragmentary and speculative sources). This judgement
has been seized by Bush and Blair as they scramble to
re-justify their respective decisions to wage war. The
Duelfer report showed that Saddam was systematically
gaming the system, using the UN oil-for-food programme
to try to influence countries and companies in an
effort to undermine sanctions, Bush said. He was
doing so with the intent of restarting his weapons
programme once the world looked away. Blair, for his
part, has apologised for relying on faulty
intelligence, but not for his decision to go to war.
The mantra from both camps remains that the world is a
safer place with Saddam behind bars.
But is it? When one examines the reality of the
situation on the ground in Iraq today, it seems hard to
draw any conclusion that postulates a scenario built
around the notion of an improved environment of
stability and security. Indeed, many Iraqis hold that
life under Saddam was a better option than the life
they are facing under an increasingly violent and
destabilising US-led occupation. The ultimate
condemnation of the failure and futility of the US-UK
effort in Iraq is that if Saddam were released from his
prison cell and participated in the elections scheduled
for next January, there is a good chance he would
emerge as the popular choice. But while democratic
freedom of expression was a desired outcome of the
decision to remove Saddam from power, the crux of the
pre-war arguments and the ones being reconfigured by
those in favour of the invasion centre on the need to
improve international peace and security. Has Saddam's
removal accomplished this?
To answer this question, you have to postulate a world
today that includes an Iraq led by Saddam. How this
world would deal with him would be determined by
decisions made by the US, Britain and the international
community in the months leading up to the March 2003
invasion of Iraq. One of the key historical questions
being asked is what if Hans Blix (who gives his own
view, right) had been given the three additional months
he had requested in order to complete his programme of
inspection? Two issues arise from this scenario: would
Blix have been able to assemble enough data to
ascertain conclusively, in as definitive a fashion as
the Duelfer ISG report, a finding that Saddam's Iraq
was free of WMD, and thus posed no immediate threat;
and would the main supporters of military engagement
with Iraq, the US and Britain, have been willing to
accept such a finding?
The answer to the first point is that Blix and his team
of inspectors were saddled with a complicated list of
cluster issues, ironically assembled by Duelfer
during his tenure as head of the UN weapons inspectors,
that would have needed to be rectified for any finding
of compliance to be made. These clusters postulated
the need for Iraq to prove the negative, something that
is virtually impossible to do. We now know that Iraq's
WMD were destroyed in 1991. The problem wasn't the
weapons, but verification of Iraq's declarations. The
standards of verification set by Duelfer-Blix were
impossible for Iraq to meet, thus making closure on the
cluster issues also an unattainable goal. This
situation answers the second point as well. Since the
inspection process was pre-programmed to fail, there
would be no way the US or the UK would accept any
finding of compliance from the UN weapons inspectors.
The inspection process was rigged to create uncertainty
regarding Iraq's WMD, which was used by the US and the
UK to bolster their case for war.
It appears that there was no way short of war to create
an environment where a finding of Iraq's compliance
with its obligation to disarm could be embraced by the
US and British governments. The main reason for this
was that the issue wasn't WMD per se, but Saddam. The
true goal wasn't
