The rush to war

The latest attempts by the United States and the United Kingdom to make out a case for a war against Iraq fail to convince a sceptical world, including their allies.

SADDAM HUSSEIN for Adolf Hitler, George Bush for Winston Churchill: if nothing else, then the United States' ongoing war of terror has had the salutary effect of tutoring the uninitiated in history, though the tortured analogies that have been dredged up serve more to obfuscate than to illumine.

A decidedly more modest man than his President, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's ambitions did not touch quite the same rarefied heights in historical analogy. His objective was to persuade a sceptical world and recruit allies for the U.S.' final war of destruction on Iraq, if necessary by re-enacting a key moment in the `Cuban missile crisis' of 1961. For the U.S. and the world, the moment in 1961 when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson held up aerial photographs of Soviet missile deployment in Cuba was decisive. It set the stage for the confrontation that for a few fraught days had the world teetering on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. And it was the substantive justification for the U.S. strategy of military and diplomatic coercion that the Soviets finally had to yield to.

February 5, when the U.S. Secretary of State made his long-awaited presentation to the United Nations Security Council, reportedly after working frenetically over the preceding week to declassify and access the most sensitive intelligence inputs received by the U.S. administration, it was no "Adlai Stevenson moment". Shortly after Powell's 75-minute speech, the United Kingdom summoned up the expected words of approbation. France, Germany and China, the other three permanent members, insisted that the evidence marshalled by the U.S. only meant that the weapons inspections in Iraq needed to continue, if necessary with a greater input of expertise and resources. Germany, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council for the month of February, strongly underlined this finding. And Pakistan, just into the second month of its two-year term as Council member, pointedly drew attention to the suffering of the Iraqi people under sanctions, which had gone on long enough.

The reasons for Powell's failure to carry conviction are not hard to identify. He began with an assertion that every statement of his was "backed up by sources, solid sources", but every effort to underline the solidity of his sources only had the opposite effect. "What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," he said, as lurking doubts within the Security Council membership became more explicit with every avowal that the U.S. was giving them irrefutable evidence.

Security Council Resolution 1441, which imposes virtually impossible compliance requirements on Iraq, also entails an obligation on all member-states to provide all relevant information to the weapons inspectors tasked with enforcing Iraq's disarmament. Powell showed an uneasy awareness of this when he asserted at the very beginning of his speech, that the U.S. was "providing all relevant information... to the inspection teams for them to do their work".

The subsequent details made this a rather implausible claim. For instance, Powell presented satellite imagery from an alleged munitions site, al-Taji, where the Iraqis recently discovered four chemical artillery shells that had not been mentioned in their weapons declaration of December 7. Adding on his own colour coding to the images, Powell virtually asked the Security Council to take it on faith that they bore the "signature" of lethal material storage. And a series of images over time indicated the subsequent removal of the material, followed by the decontamination of the site.

The obvious question that arose was why the U.S. did not alert the weapons inspection teams in Iraq to the suspect site. The images were shot between an unspecified date in November and December 22. Weapons inspectors returned to Iraq on November 27. Using the sweeping powers granted under Resolution 1441, they could have declared a virtual moratorium on the movement of personnel, material and equipment in and around the sites and carried out comprehensive inspections at a later stage.

In all, Powell claimed, U.S. intelligence had picked up such "house-cleaning" activities at 30 suspect sites in Iraq since November. These sites covered the entire range of proscribed weaponry, from ballistic missiles to biological and chemical agents.

Curiously, the empowered inspection teams were not told of any suspicious activity at these sites by U.S. intelligence, though this is obligatory under Resolution 1441. Far from establishing a "material breach" by Iraq, Powell's presentation only suggested that the boot was on the other foot - the U.S. was in peril of being held in violation of a resolution it sponsored and drafted virtually in its entirety. For the membership of the Security Council, which had watched the rush to war with a growing sense of alarm, Powell's presentation only confirmed that the U.S. was intent on bending and twisting its intelligence resources for a unilateral agenda in Iraq, rather than for the shared purpose of disarmament.

It did not help the U.S.' cause that Iraq was swift to arrange visits by international media teams to two of the suspect sites mentioned by Powell. At al-Mutasim, 60 km south of Baghdad, the manager of the facility displayed log books recording numerous visits by U.N. weapons inspectors. A joint press release by two groups of weapons inspectors, records on December 12, that "experienced" missile specialists had examined the facility and found all activity there to be compliant with U.N. stipulations. The site was later visited by inspection teams on December 15, 2002; and January 14, 19 and 21. The last inspections took place on February 5, just hours before Powell addressed the Security Council.

The scenario at Fallujah, another suspect site in Powell's presentation, was similar. Clearly, Powell's gamble on the credulity of the U.N. had gone disastrously askew. It took a monitory and characteristically menacing warning by President Bush - that the "game was up" for Iraq - to restore U.S. policy to the familiar pitch of unilateral arrogance.

Meanwhile, the U.S.' only ally in its new crusade was having a rough time. In his ardour to embrace the U.S. war plans, British Prime Minister Tony Blair had already set himself at odds with much of his party and virtually all of public opinion in his country. Vigorously pursuing his role as under-study to the U.S., Blair on February 4 issued under the imprimatur of his office, a supposedly authoritative intelligence estimate entitled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation". Acknowledging the valuable sustenance received from across the Atlantic, Powell cited this document during his address to the U.N., terming it a "fine paper" that set out Iraq's deception "in exquisite (sic) detail".

It did not take long for Glen Rangwala, a political scientist at Cambridge University, to see through the sham. Having followed the debate on Iraqi disarmament for years and exhaustively rehearsed all the arguments advanced by rival sides, Rangwala detected the plagiarism virtually on sight. No fewer than six pages of the 19-page report were a virtual copy of two articles published in Jane's Intelligence Review - one in November 2002, and one as far back as 1997. Another 10 pages, Rangwala pointed out, were borrowed without attribution, though with motivated and highly tendentious changes, from a paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a researcher on weapons proliferation based at Monterey, California. Al-Marashi later confirmed that the evidence on which his study was based pertained to the period prior to the 1991 Gulf war. He did, rather implausibly, hold out a face-saving offering to the British government, insisting that his inferences remained accurate and current. It was as if the devastation of the Gulf war, the punishing economic sanctions and eight years of intrusive inspections had just not happened.

Informed observers see Blair's embarrassment as symptomatic of a fundamental debility in the war propaganda effort. Since the U.S. government began cranking up its propaganda machinery, the political momentum for war has tended to far outpace the intelligence inputs. The intelligence agencies of the U.S. and U.K, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and MI6, have not quite been able to produce the evidence that could bolster the claims about Iraq, made with metronomic monotony by Bush and Blair. The September 2002 dossier, published by the U.K. and prepared just ahead of Bush's address to the U.N. General Assembly, was comprehensively rubbished by most experts. Under pressure to produce a more convincing sequel and lacking reliable intelligence inputs, Blair has now put the seal of his authority on a pathetic piece of plagiarism.

THE timing of Powell's intervention in the U.N. was crucial. On January 27, the Security Council had heard two detailed briefings by the officials overseeing Iraqi disarmament: Hans Blix, executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic) and Mohammad El-Baradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). These were authoritative briefings, which covered a range of disarmament issues and dealt with qualitative matters where subjective judgment seemed important.

Blix's summation was a mixed bag. Iraq was given credit for "cooperation in process" with the weapons inspectors, in regard to the "procedures, mechanisms, infrastructure and practical arrangements to pursue inspections and seek verifiable disarmament". But Blix was reluctant to award the accolade of "cooperation in substance", since his assessment was that Iraq had not arrived at a "genuine acceptance... of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace".

El-Baradei had a rather more positive assessment: "In support of the IAEA inspections to date, the Iraqi authorities have provided access to all facilities visited - including presidential compounds and private residences - without conditions and without delay. The Iraqi authorities also have been cooperative in making available additional original documentation, in response to requests by IAEA inspectors." The IAEA chief, however, did emphasise that Iraq needed to "shift from passive support" to a "proactive" mode, from "responding as needed to inspectors' requests" to "voluntarily assisting inspectors by providing documentation, people and other evidence".

But with all these subjective judgments delivered, El-Baradei was categorical in his conclusion that "no prohibited nuclear activities (had) been identified during (IAEA) inspections". The work of inspections was "steadily progressing and should be allowed to run its course". With the monitoring and verification system now in place, the IAEA would be in a position, "barring exceptional circumstances", to provide "within the next few months... credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programme".

Blix was less inclined to deliver anything remotely approaching a final certification. Unmovic, he said, was in the process of preparing its own list of "unresolved disarmament issues". In the interim, he said, the body had examined the final report of its predecessor body, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (Unscom) and a subsequent compilation by a special commission appointed by the U.N. Secretary-General (the Amorim report). The questions posed in these two reports were "professionally justified" and needed to be answered by Iraq, rather than dismissed as "evil machinations of Unscom".

This was a pointed reference to the tainted record of Unscom, which became, in over eight years of active inspections in Iraq, the vehicle for an espionage agenda, ever willing to tailor its findings to the convenience of the U.S. The record of Unscom's second executive chairman, Richard Butler, was especially sordid. After conniving in the U.S. effort to pronounce an end to weapons inspections in December 1998 and move operations in Iraq to more active military engagement, Butler was denounced by other members of the Security Council and virtually barred from any further participation in deliberations on Iraq. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan later found that allegations of espionage that had been levelled against Unscom under Butler to be prima facie valid.

Despite Butler's ignominious departure from the disarmament programme, Iraq is still being held to account for the standards that he set. That this is a virtually impossible situation is evident from the continuing difficulties over accounting for all the anthrax agent that has been produced in Iraq. As Blix informed the Security Council: "Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 litres of this biological warfare agent, which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991. Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction... There are strong indications that Iraq produced more anthrax than it declared, and that at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date."

Powell dramatically highlighted this finding in the U.N. by holding up a small vial which allegedly had been the magnitude of the anthrax mailing that paralysed U.S. government offices in September 2001 and claimed the lives of two postal workers. He omitted to mention what the preponderance of evidence about the origins of the anthrax spores indicated. It has been credibly reported that the anthrax spores were dispatched by mail to two U.S. Democratic Senators by a former researcher in a U.S. biowarfare project, who subsequently became a charter member of the far-Right militias that have flourished under the Bush administration's benign gaze. It raises serious queries about the stewardship of hazardous material in the U.S., rather than in Iraq.

As Rangwala has pointed out, the "strong evidence" of higher-than-declared anthrax production by Iraq is little else than a hypothetical "possibility": specifically that the biological fermentors Iraq had in its possession could have been run at a higher capacity than declared. Contrary to Blix's assertion that there is no evidence of any anthrax agent being destroyed, Unscom had recorded some evidence of such disposal: "Laboratory analysis of samples obtained at Al-Hakam (one of many suspect sites in Iraq) has demonstrated the presence of viable bacillus anthracis spores at an alleged bulk agent disposal site."

The requirement now placed on Iraq is virtually impossible. It is expected to prove that long destroyed fermentors did not, 12 years ago, work at a higher capacity than stated. Blix seemed to concede as much when he spoke of a number of circumstantial details that Iraq could bring to the material audit to establish that it was free of anthrax and other suspect materials.

As he prepared to return to Iraq for another review of the inspections programme, Blix seemed positively inclined towards improved signals of cooperation. Interviews with scientists connected to the weapons programmes were being permitted without government or military minders being present. And the Iraqi government had decided to permit the overflight of U2 reconnassaince aircraft. Blix well knew that neither of these constraints had been imposed by the Iraqi government.

Rather, individual scientists were reluctant to be interviewed in isolation for the same reason that a witness in any criminal case would decline giving testimony without, at the minimum, an attorney being present. And the restrictions on U2 overflights arose from Iraq's inability to guarantee their safety. Iraqi air defence artillery has been routinely engaging U.S. and British warplanes that fly hostile patrols over the country. Devoid of a mandate from the U.N., these patrols often bomb without provocation. The onus for guaranteeing the safety of U2 overflights was on the U.S. and the U.K., rather than Iraq.

The crude belligerence of the U.S. and the U.K. has to an extent corrected the sharp asymmetries in global perceptions of the Iraq problem. If the increasingly isolated "allies" are now able to push a second resolution through the U.N., authorising the use of force, it would only be the outcome of extreme coercion and blackmail or bribery of a high order. Far from facing irrelevance if it fails to authorise war, the U.N. would, in the event of its succumbing to U.S. pressure, be firmly embarked upon the path to extinction.