Iraq: War of Mass Deception

Iraq: War of Mass Deception

Mislead into War
Will America Demand Accountability or Remain Complicit in the War of Mass Deception?
Adam Hodges

It’s June 2005, over two years after the invasion of Iraq. The war continues under different monikers—e.g. “security operations”, “building democracy”—but it is war all the same. No Orwellian double-speak can erase the lived reality of those on the ground in Iraq. And the costs continue to mount on many fronts.

Front #1: Human suffering. As of June 2005, over 1,700 US soldiers are dead, over 12,000 wounded, and more than 22,000 Iraqi civilians have died as directly reported by the media. In addition, an October 2004 study published in the medical journal Lancet projected a conservative estimate of an excess of 100,000 Iraqi deaths between the March 2003 invasion and the release of the study.

Front #2: Starving domestic needs to feed the war. Since the start of the war, the US Congress has allocated $207.5 billion in funding. These costs are above and beyond the over $400 billion annual military budget, which has also continued to rise during the Bush administration. The additional money allocated for the war in Iraq has come in the form of supplemental requests by the administration: approximately $54.4 billion for the war enacted in April 2003, $70.6 billion enacted in November 2003, $21.5 billion passed with regular Defense Department appropriations for 2005, and a request made by the administration in February 2005 for an $81.9 billion package with $61 billion of that marked for the war. The annual US military budget—which accounts for about half of the world’s military expenditures—is staggering in itself, let alone the extra $207.5 billion allocated through September 30, 2005 for the war in Iraq. The National Priorities Project provides a telling comparison of these war costs in terms of what the same money could do for pre-school, children’s health, public education, college scholarships, public housing, world hunger, the global AIDS epidemic, and world immunization. (See also, “The ‘Warfare’ State and Military Keynesianism”, Oct 11, 2004.)

Yet the costs of war don’t end here. The tally continues to mount on American democracy and international law.

Wars are costly, devastating and unwanted. No democratic nation desires war. International law and the ethos of democracy in the modern world condemn any unprovoked act of aggression by one nation-state against another. In short, war is something only to be waged with just cause, in self-defense, by proportional means, and as a last resort.

Modern democracies are marked by transparency and important checks that hold government accountable to the rule of law and the ethos of the international community. In theory, democracies don’t wage illegal wars; which is to say, if a democracy engages in war, it must be for defensive reasons—or, as in the case of the war against Iraq, attempt to appear that way.

And this brings us to the thorn in the Achilles’ heel of the Bush administration that won’t go away. Why was war waged against Iraq?

Yes, we know the administration’s reasoning and rationale. In a post-9/11 world, Saddam Hussein, who supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction, could not be trusted for fear he would slip a nuclear bomb to al Qaeda terrorists. And the administration wove a beautiful narrative that positioned a war against Iraq as part of its broader ‘war on terror.’

It didn’t matter that Osama bin Laden detested the secular regime of the ‘infidel’ Saddam. Nor did it matter that the two never engaged in any collaborative relationship prior to or after 9/11—facts verified by the 9/11 Commission (see Staff Statement No. 15 as well as the commission’s final report); the administration narrative created an image of an Iraq/al Qaeda alliance in the minds of many Americans so powerful that as recently as March 2005, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 61% of respondents still erroneously believed that Iraq provided direct support to al Qaeda before the war—numbers that are similar to previous studies by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in April 2004 and October 2003, as well as a Pew Research Center poll in October 2002.

The administration narrative also convinced many, evidently including a majority of Congress, that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMDs, an assertion that has become so thoroughly discredited that even the administration had to explain why it was wrong. The official party line, of course, put the blame on ‘faulty intelligence.’

Yet myriad contradictory pieces of evidence were available to dispute administration claims in the lead up to war. Outside the borders of the United States, foreign governments weren’t so convinced, and media outside the United States and independent media within provided a much more open discussion about the (lack of) evidence and underlying motives for waging war against Iraq.

Yet within the administration, counter-evidence was ignored and supportive evidence highlighted. The (seemingly selective) intelligence gathering was helped along by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.

According to a Pentagon official cited in a May 2003 article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, “Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.”

Former ambassador Joseph Wilson, among others including arms inspectors, provided further counter-evidence. His trip to Niger had discredited information that nevertheless ended up in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union—information that claimed Iraq had purportedly purchased uranium from Niger.

At issue, then, is whether the intelligence was ‘faulty’, as the official administration interpretation claims, or whether it was selectively manipulated to justify a preordained policy—a policy dead set on regime change in Iraq by war.

The administration’s long-standing desire for regime change in Iraq has been no secret; and by all accounts, it was part of Bush administration foreign policy prior to taking office, let alone before the events of 9/11. Documents produced by neo-conservative strategists that detail this objective stretch back to a 1992 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance supervised by then-under secretary of defense for policy Paul Wolfowitz, who became Deputy Secretary of Defense after Bush was elected in 2000. Additional documents written by those associated with Wolfowitz and the current Bush administration include a 1996 memo to then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that advocates removing Saddam Hussein, a 1998 letter to President Clinton on Iraq policy, and a 2000 report by the Project for the New American Century think tank whose co-authors include six officials who came to serve in the Bush administration. (See also, “Origins of Regime Change in Iraq” by Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 19, 2003, for further discussion of these issues.)

In addition, we have the accounts of former administration officials, such as terrorism czar Richard Clarke and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil that testify to this policy; and the 9/11 Commission Report cites Secretary of State Colin Powell as having “recalled that Wolfowitz…argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked. Powell said that Wolfowitz was not able to justify his belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. ‘Paul was always of the view that Iraq was a problem that had to be dealt with,’ Powell told us. ‘And he saw this as one way of using this event [9/11] as a way to deal with the Iraq problem’” (p. 335). (See also, reportage by Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service.)

In short, 9/11 provided an opportune platform for justifying the neo-conservatives’ policy toward Iraq. A convincing enough case simply needed to be made.

"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," explained White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. to New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller in a September 7, 2002 article, “Traces of Terror: The Strategy; Bush Aides Set Strategy to Sell Policy on Iraq.”

In her piece, Bumiller details the White House’s choice of Ellis Island in New York as the site for President Bush’s speech on the first anniversary of 9/11. “A centerpiece of the strategy, White House officials said, is to use Mr. Bush's speech on Sept. 11 to help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq, which could come early next year.”

Of course, that action officially started on March 20, 2003, after what Bush termed the “final days of decision” in his ultimatum to Iraq. Yet recent evidence in the Times of London—“RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war,” by Michael Smith, May 29, 2005—reports that the “RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war.”

The article goes on to state, “The attacks were intensified from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids had become a full air offensive.” (See also, “The Other Bomb Drops,” by Jeremey Scahill in The Nation, June 1, 2005.)

The unofficial war was well underway before the marketing campaign barely got rolling, and long before the official war was launched.

While the ‘marketing campaign’ worked to gain approval from the US Congress and gain consent from a large portion of the American population, the campaign for legal justification failed on all accounts. As Kofi Annan stated explicitly upon being pressed in a September 2004 interview, the war was illegal; and current debates in the UK keep running up against this fact.

Bush administration expostulations that it did everything it could to avoid war against Iraq are disingenuous at best and outright lies at worst. In either case, it is time for the American public to wake up from the bad nightmare it has experienced over the past several years. Perhaps the recent publicity over the Downing Street minutes will be a needed splash of cold water to wake mainstream America from its slumber.

Yesterday, Representative John Connors held hearings to examine the legal implications of the minutes for potential impeachment proceedings against President Bush and other administration officials responsible for misleading America into war.

While it is true that nothing new has been revealed in the memo insofar as much of the world saw through the Bush administration’s bogus rationale for war from the beginning, the memo provides prima facie evidence in the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of senior ministers and advisors in the Blair government that "Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided."

The minutes state that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The thrust of the meeting focused on how best to legally justify the already determined war. It noted, "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

War should be a last resort effort justified by truly genuine rationale based on self-defense. A government that decides on war and then attempts to justify its acts of aggression to satisfy public opinion can hardly be called democratic. It is up to the people in that country to maintain democracy and hold those government officials accountable for their actions.

The recent publicity over the Downing Street minutes provides new hope in attempts to bring these issues to light in mainstream America. The efforts, if they gain enough steam, may eventually lead to that sine qua non of democracy: accountability.

Links:

• www.AfterDowningStreet.org
• www.DowningStreetMemo.com