Rohan Pearce
The January 13 publication of Ron Suskind's book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, has once again stoked the controversy surrounding the pre-war justification given by President Bush for the invasion of Iraq.
Suskind's book recounts former Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill's time as Bush's treasury secretary, from January 2001 until December 2002.
It offers more evidence that the US invasion of Iraq was not motivated by concerns over non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In an interview in the January 19 edition of Time magazine, O'Neill said that in the 23 months he spent as part of Bush's cabinet, he "never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction".
He added: "There were allegations and assertions by people. But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions. To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterise as real evidence."
In addition to access to O'Neill and 19,000 internal government documents provided by the former official, Suskind interviewed hundreds of people, including current members of the Bush cabinet.
Suskind explained on the January 11 edition of the CBS television program 60 Minutes that Iraq had been a target of the US government since Bush came into office in early 2001.
At the first meeting of Bush's National Security Council (NSC) — a mere 10 days after the presidential inauguration — the question of "regime change" in Iraq was on the agenda. "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed", he told 60 Minutes.
According to O'Neill, the meeting was "all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this'."
The cover sheet of briefing material for the second NSC meeting, held two days later, is marked "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq".
The pre-release media coverage of the O'Neill book coincided with the release of a report, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), a liberal US think tank. The report was launched on January 8.
Like O'Neill, the CEIP is a thoroughly establishment source which accuses the Bush administration of systematically misrepresenting the WMD situation in order to make the case for war.
The report points out: "It is unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden, or sent out of the country the hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, dozens of Scud missiles and facilities engaged in the ongoing production of chemical and biological weapons that officials claimed were present without the United States detecting some sign of this activity before, during, or after the major combat period of the war."
It concludes that the "dramatic shift between prior intelligence assessments and the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate... together with the creation of an independent intelligence entity at the Pentagon and other steps, suggest that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002".
US officials, the report concludes, "systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs".
One year and one day after the 9/11 attacks, Bush addressed the UN General Assembly to make the case for war against Iraq. He told the General Assembly that "Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons", that it "likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons... Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon."
If Iraq obtained fissile material, Bush said, "it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year". To avoid war Iraq would have to "immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material".
However, even Washington's Iraq Survey Group, the White House-created "weapons inspections" team, has been unable to provide any evidence of Iraqi WMD. The interim report delivered by ISG head David Kay to Congress on October 2 admitted, for example, that: "Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new [chemical weapons] munitions was reduced — if not entirely destroyed — during Operations Desert Storm [the 1991 Gulf War] and Desert Fox [the 1998 US-British bombing of Iraq], 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections."
Of the 1400 members of the ISG, less than 40 remained in Iraq at the end of 2003.
The substance of WMD accusations now being leveled against the deposed Iraqi regime by Washington (and its British and Australian allies) has been almost entirely reduced to accusations of malicious intentions by Saddam Hussein.
The Kay team's primary method seems to have been to coerce "confessions" out of Iraqi scientists and researchers in order to build a case that Hussein would have "eventually" resumed WMD production. For example, a January 7 Washington Post article reported that Ali Zaag, dean of Baghdad University's Institute for Biotechnology, had been twice visited by ISG members. On the second occasion they told him, "We'll give you a few more days to reveal something, and then we'll have to take you".
The CEIP report also discredits the other major pre-war claim of the US government — that, as Bush put it in a March 17, 2003, address to the nation, "[Iraq] has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda".
According to the report, there "was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and al Qaeda", and there "was no evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD to al Qaeda and much evidence to counter it".
At a January 8 press conference, Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that he had "not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, "but I think the possibility of such connections did exist and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did".
In a February 5, 2003, presentation to the UN Security Council, Powell claimed that the White House's accusations that Hussein's regime possessed WMD and was linked to al Qaeda were not assertions: "These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries."
The White House's continuing denials that it lied about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq are undermined by the past, semi-public, position taken by members of the current administration in favour of "regime change" in Baghdad. Members of the Project for a New American Century, the right-wing think-tank whose members have been some of the key architects of the Bush regime's foreign policy, sent a letter to then-president Bill Clinton on January 26, 1999. The letter (available at ) forcefully argues for regime change in Iraq. The majority of its signatories are now Bush administration officials, including defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
The letter argued that the US should be willing "to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing". It added: "In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
"We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts."
The letter also pre-empted the current US administration's disingenuous claim that the invasion was "legal" and its willingness to defy its imperialist rivals on the UN Security Council: "We believe the US has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council."
The crisis of credibility faced by the "coalition of the willing" warmongers was epitomised by British PM Tony Blair's Christmas message to British troops in Iraq. He stated that the ISG had discovered "massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories" and evidence that Hussein's regime had tried to "conceal weapons".
When the US civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, was asked about these claims without being told the source, he replied: "I don't know where those words come from but that is not what David Kay has said... I have read his reports so I don't know who said that. It sounds like a bit of a red herring to me. It sounds like someone who doesn't agree with the policy sets up a red herring then knocks it down."
No matter how much Washington denies it, destroying the threat of WMD was never the reason for the Iraq invasion. One of the NSC documents obtained by Suskind from O'Neill is titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts". The document showed plans for the post-invasion dispersal of Iraq's oil assets among the world's great powers, starting with the major oil companies.
The document was dated March 5, 2001 — six months before 9/11, and one-and-a-half years before Bush demanded Iraq "immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material".
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, January 21, 2004.
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