The Bush administration has been accused of building their case for war against Iraq on false pretenses; a substantive charge that requires a heavy burden of proof. It must be shown that they manipulated information to push the country towards war. Their defense has been that the intelligence was wrong and they acted on the best information available at the time. There is much evidence that undermines their interpretation of events. Under the doctrinal approach the evidence does not matter and is ignored. The empirical approach requires an examination of the evidence in order to support or discard the hypothesis that the intelligence wrongly manipulated the Bush Administration into an unnecessary war. Recently several British memos, transcripts and minutes, which offer important insights into the mindsets of the war planners, have leaked to the British press but have been mostly ignored or misrepresented by the American Press. They are the “Iraq Legal Background” (ILB) memo, “Iraq Options Paper” (IOP), “Manning Memo” (MM), “Meyer Memo” (MYM), “Ricketts Memo” (RM), “Straw Memo" (SM), “Cabinet Office Paper” (COP), and the “Downing Street Minutes” (DSM). These leaks offer a chance to compare what the British and U.S. leaders told each other in private. Indeed, there are several damning revelations; the US was determined to go to war even while President Bush claimed otherwise; the British considered the U.S. outlaws in the international community and were very concerned with manufacturing a legal justification to cover the illegal goal of regime change, without which they would be indictable as war criminals under the standards established at Nuremburg; they were willing to risk provoking a nuclear or WMD war between Israel and Iraq to achieve regime change. Iraq's WMD programs were "frozen" and containment had worked to neutralize any threat he posed to the international community; he had no credible ties to terrorism; the demand for the return of the inspectors was a gambit to provide legal justification for war, not as a means to avert one as was claimed.
If you dare draw obvious conclusions from the new evidence then you have “a paranoid theory” and are participating in “a vast conspiracy.” If you persist then you are perhaps a “citizen with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them.” These are the words of Michael Kinsley, a mainstream liberal and editor of the Los Angelos Times editorial page. He is about as an extreme leftist as is allowed to appear in the mainstream press. His paper is frequently maligned by the right for its excesses in ‘liberalism.’ Kinsley wrote an editorial after hundreds of angry inquiries from citizens about the lack of coverage on the Downing Street Minutes. Michael Kinsley relented to their pressure and read the document for himself although one would expect a highly placed member of the “watchdog” press to do so without prodding. To Kinsley, more important than the documentary record is “the center of politics, where the media try to be and where compromises end up.” If the evidence leads you away from the “center”, wherever that is, then you are subscribing to “a paranoid theory.” This is cynicism at its highest form; a functioning media should ignore the “center” of politics and find the truth regardless of political climate. Kinsley’s perspective seems to be the prevalent in the media judging by the lack of coverage on the British memos. What little coverage there has been is shameful, tardy and blatantly misleading.
The documentary evidence do lead one to extreme conclusions; one of which is that U.S. and British war planners are indictable for war crimes of aggression and were aware of this. This "extremist" interpretation is avoided by the press regardless of how well supported it is by the evidence. The conclusion violates doctrinal truth and is therefore discarded. Kinsley’s take on the “Downing Street Minutes” demonstrates why we may be better off with no coverage than any at all. Kinsley’s words are worth quoting at length. (Emphasis mine)
[The Downing Street Minutes is] a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002. The key passage summarizes "recent talks in Washington" by the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John Le Carre-style, simply as "C"). C reported that "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. . . . There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." C's focus on the dog that didn't bark -- the lack of discussion about the aftermath of war -- was smart and prescient. But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It says that war is "now seen as inevitable" by "Washington." That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if "Washington" meant actual administration decision makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C is saying only that these people believe that war is how events will play out… C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision makers had told him they were fixing the facts. Although the prose is not exactly crystalline, it seems to be saying only that "Washington" had reached that conclusion.Kinsley went on to quote several press reports from the period to demonstrate his point about what the “freelance chatterboxes” at Time, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angelos Times were chattering about. Kinsley’s suggestion that the head of British intelligence met with top Bush officials to discuss Iraq and reported back to the British Prime Minister the current views of the American press rather than the officials he met with is absurd on its face; anyone with internet access in Britain could have told Tony Blair what the “freelance chatterboxes” thought about Bush’s intentions. The memo makes reference to military actions that were already in progress; “the Defense Secretary (Rumsfeld) said that the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” These ‘spikes of activity’ are a reference to the US and British decision to covertly double the rate of bombing in 2002 months before the war to “destroy Iraq’s ability to resist” and perhaps provoke Saddam Hussein into a response that could be used as a pretext for war. [1] This is a significant piece of evidence that the Bush Administration misled the American people and the world for months, paying lip service to the idea that the war was a last resort, that there would be an open dialogue on the matter and that the fix was not yet in. Even now President Bush insists that war was not decided upon until the last minute.
Kinsley goes through tortured acrobatics to reach his conclusion that the head of British intelligence traveled to Washington to discuss Iraq with the highest of American officials and reported back on the American press’s impression of Bush. But Kinsley offers a second line of defense for the clever readers who see how absurd his first is. Even if the head of British intelligence were not reporting back on his impressions of the American press, but instead was reporting on his discussions with US officials he “offered no specifics”, “nor does the memo assert that actual decision makers had told him they were fixing facts.” This second line of defense is a bit trickier, but no less bizarre. The context of the minutes is an important consideration. The minutes are a discussion between internal policy planners; not an effort to provide an airtight case for reporters or historians. David Manning was not trying to prove the “facts were being fixed around the policy” as that was not the point of his discussion. Certain assumptions had already been accepted. And if one goes back and examines much of the ‘intelligence’ it is very hard not to conclude that the facts were fixed around the policy. [2] Several examples include: The Bush administration insisted that the aluminum tubes that the IAEA investigated and declared unsuitable for nuclear production were for nuclear production based on the already discredited analysis of a junior CIA analyst. They used an obviously fraudulent document from Niger to make a claim that Saddam had purchased yellowcake. The British dossier was almost completely based on a graduate student’s thesis that was about Iraq as it was before the Gulf War. They used an assessment of Iraq’s nuclear capabilities before the Gulf War as if it were current. The unmanned aerial vehicles that Bush claimed could reach the US had been discredited by the US Air Force before he used it publicly. Or numerous other examples of discredited or fraudulent information presented to the public by Bush as fact. The details have been delineated extensively elsewhere.
The New York Times along with the rest of the American media tried to bury the Downing Street Minutes along with the other leaked memos. After some agitation from citizens they finally took a look. And their coverage is no less awful than Michael Kinsley’s. In a front page Times story titled “Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn’t Made” David Sanger reports, “A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made ‘no political decisions’ to invade Iraq.” The crucial matter is the interpretation of the phrase “no political decisions.” Sanger interprets this to mean that the “political” decision to invade Iraq was undecided. This is a rebuttal to the interpretation of the Downing Street Minutes, which plainly suggests the opposite: “There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action is now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam” and “had made up his mind to take military action” (DSM) However, Sanger distorts the phrase “no political decisions” as the few who bother to read the transcript will discover. The cabinet transcript says, (emphasis mine)
Ministers are invited to: … Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action… The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.The “political decisions” are not as Sanger suggests, about whether to invade Iraq or not; indeed “military planning for action… [was] proceeding apace” and the US “had already begun ‘spikes of activity.’” What had not yet taken shape was “a realistic political strategy… necessary to justify government military action.” The concern was that the plan “lacks a political framework” for “creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath.” The “political conditions” are specified in part as “the preparation of domestic opinion.” The phrase ‘Political decisions’ refers not to the decision for military action already in progress, but to the political strategy necessary for selling the war to the public and a skeptical international community. This is a topic discussed endlessly in the leaked documents.
But the Times was not finished obfuscating the truth. The day after Sanger’s misleading report the Times published another report that contradicted Sanger’s interpretation and conceded that the memos reveal the “not quite so shocking” revelation that Bush had already decided to go to war and was lying to the public about whether the decision was already made. But this was a non-story for the paper of record because the “near-unanimous conventional wisdom in Washington held that Mr. Bush was determined to topple Saddam Hussein by any means necessary.” The Times’ position is that the president lied about a matter of grave importance, making a mockery of democratic function - but it is a non-story since everyone knew so at the time. The Times was in on the game then, so why make a fuss over it now? It took a couple of tries to find the right shovel needed to bury the story; first ignore it, then deny it and finally distort it. Another journalistic triumph of the liberal New York Times, leader of the free press. [3]
The Washington Post got into the act with an editorial on June 15, 2005, more than a month after the initial story broke. According to them the memos are diverting “discussion… to the wrong subject” and did not “add a single fact to what was previously known about the Administration’s prewar deliberation.” The Post assembles a nice straw man, asserting that the memos do not “alter the conclusions of multiple independent investigations … that US and British intelligence agencies genuinely believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.” Of course, this is a non-issue. What is in question is not whether or not there was bad intelligence on Iraqi WMDs. The question is whether or not Bush and Blair exaggerated and manipulated the threat of Saddam Hussein to scare the public into supporting a war. The memos along with previous instances of obvious manipulation provide overwhelming evidence that the threat was inflated beyond recognition. The internal assessments of the Iraqi threat were far more subdued than public assessments. (More below) [4]
The Times, the Washington Post, and liberals like Michael Kinsley cannot be trusted to use an empirical approach. The memos are available to anyone who cares to look they are both concise and accessible. The British were concerned with the political needs for the success of the war, defined in the Cabinet Office Paper as the “justification/legal base; an international coalition; a quiescent Israel/Palestine; a positive risk/benefit assessment; and the preparation of domestic opinion.” Much thought and concern centered on the question of legality. They needed to engineer a legal basis for the war. The Cabinet Office Paper says, (emphasis mine) “It is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support“ without facing legal prosecution for crimes of aggression. The tacit admission of illegality and the subsequent need to engineer legality are hard to miss outside of the offices of the New York Times and Washington Post. There are also several frank assessments that the U.S. is a rogue state that ignores international law. The “U.S. views of international law vary from that of the UK and the international community.” In another leak titled Iraq Legal Background, the author discusses possible legal pretexts for the invasion and U.S. ambivalence for the rule of law. “It is for the Council to assess whether any such break of those obligations (NSC resolutions) has occurred. The US have a rather different view: they maintain that the assessment of breach is for individual member States. We are not aware of any other State which supports this view.” And from the Iraq Options Paper, “In contrast to general legal opinion, the US asserts the right of individual Member States to determine” whether another State has breached UN Security Council Resolutions, thereby rendering moot international law and the Security Council. All acknowledged that the American goal of “regime change has no basis in international law.” Critics of American power have frequently charged that the U.S. ignores international law while condemning others (such as Saddam Hussein) for doing likewise. It is chilling and disheartening to see our closest allies so frankly share this assessment.
The real pretext for invasion was “regime change by military means” in the hopes of bringing Iraqi oil “back into the international community.” But the British knew that regime change “has no basis in international law” so this plan would require constructing “a legal justification.” (IOP) It is important to stress that the illegality of regime change as a basis for the use of force was never in question. “Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law. But regime change could result from action that is otherwise lawful.” (COP) If they could devise a strategy to give the proper pretexts for war then the goal of “regime change,” while “not a legal base for military action” could be achieved if they could “work up a plan for an ultimatum” that would “help with the legal justification for the use of force.” (DSM). Jack Straw wrote to Tony Blair, “Regime change per se is no justification for military action.” Tony Blair told Bush in Crawford “that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change,” provided that the US Government placed “its military planning within a political framework.” (CBP) The British Ambassador Christopher Meyer wrote to Tony Blair, “We backed regime change, but the plan had to be clever.” In the Iraq Options Paper, the author discussed the “options for achieving regime change” which included a ground campaign, but a technicality had to be dealt with first; the “legal justification for invasion” where according to “Law Officers advice, none currently exists” which makes “moving quickly to invade legally very difficult”, but not impossible if they could substitute the precondition of legality with a very carefully managed public relations campaign. The challenge was “to create the conditions necessary to justify government military action.” The British outlined the only three internationally acceptable reasons for the use of force; 1) Violations of Security Council Resolutions; 2) Self–Defense as defined under UN Article 51; and 3) Humanitarian Intervention. (COP)
Pretext 2 was discarded for obvious reasons; the case that Iraq seriously threatened the United States or Iraq’s neighbors was too implausible. “The case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.” (DSM) Even worse, containment had worked. “Since 1991, the policy of containment has been partially successful: sanctions have effectively frozen Iraq’s nuclear program. Iraq has been prevented from rebuilding its conventional arsenal to pre-Gulf War levels; ballistic missile programs have been severely restricted; biological weapons and chemical weapons programs have been hindered… [and] Saddam has not succeeded in seriously threatening his neighbors.” But the U.S. was no longer satisfied with containing the threat no matter how effective the policy was at neutralizing the threat; buoyed by “success in Operation Enduring Freedom” and a desire to settle some “unfinished business from 1991” the U.S. demanded regime change. The ‘intelligence misleading the politician’ hypothesis loses more credibility. Saddam Hussein’s conventional military was weakened as well. The invasion would go smoothly “because Iraqi forces are now considerably weaker” than during the Gulf War. (IOP) Peter Rickets wrote about the threat posed by Iraq, “the truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs”, which were “frozen” and “severely restricted”, but that the desire for regime change had increased. Peter Rickets asked for more time to “ensure that the figures” in the British Dossier were “consistent with those of the US” because “even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts” The worrisome programs “have not, as far as we know, been stepped up,” but they needed to deal with the “problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from Iraq.” Links to terrorism were also not an option; “U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda is so far frankly unconvincing.” (RM) Moreover, “there is no recent evidence of Iraq complicity with international terrorism. There is therefore no justification for action against Iraq based” in self-defense. (IOP) “There has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL and Al Qaida.” (SM) Jack Straw wrote to Tony Blair that it would be extremely difficult to convince the world that “the threat from Iraq” has worsened recently or that there was any “justification for any military action in terms of international law” based on self defense. He continued, “The Iraqi regime plainly poses a most serious threat” but did not “justify military action.” The doctrine of self-defense was therefore unusable.
Humanitarian intervention fared no better; the British reasoned that this justification is an “exceptional” case, only applicable for “clear and well documented” catastrophes. The action taken “must be proportionate” and “there must be no other means short of the use of force which could prevent it.” This option is given the least amount of consideration in the documents, presumably because a full-scale war would obviously fail “the tests of immediacy and proportionality.” (COP) This analysis has been borne out by the aftermath. People are dieing at a greater rate than under Saddam’s regime, medical conditions already poor have severely worsened, unemployment has skyrocketed, access to basic necessities like electricity and potable water have declined, child malnutrition and a protein deficiency known as “wasting” have nearly doubled, and a self perpetuating war is roiling along every day in the major cities of Iraq which consume the lives of more civilians than soldiers or insurgents. As a humanitarian intervention, the war is a gross failure.
They were then left with option 1; violations of Security Council resolutions. Only “if Iraq is held to be in breach of” security resolutions could “offensive military action… be justified.”(IOP) The key was to insist on the reinsertion of weapons inspectors in Iraq, but they had to take care that the issue of the inspectors “be handled in a way that would persuade European and wider opinion that the US was” acting upon “a legal base.” (MM) Tony Blair “said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors.” (DSM) They therefore “needed to wrongfoot Saddam” (MYM) on the resolutions by “toughening existing containment policy” which would “put real pressure on Saddam either to submit to meaningful inspections or lash out.” (IOP) The provocation needed to come from the presence of inspectors. “It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject… However failing that we would be most unlikely to achieve a legal base for military action.” (COP) If the inspectors found “significant evidence of WMD, were expelled or … not re-admitted” then “this could provide the legal justification for large-scale military action.” With “stricter implementation of sanctions and a military build-up” to “frighten his regime” he may refuse to admit UN inspectors and force the Security Council to “provide the justification for military action.” Inspectors were not a means to avoid war, they were something the US and UK felt they could manipulate into provoking war. There remained a problem however, if Saddam allowed the inspectors in “then such concessions would prevent the US from acting,” (IOP) although in the event of total failure to manufacture a legal justification “much of the international community would find it difficult to stand in the way of the determined course of the US hegemon.” (COP) The inspectors were admitted and did not find anything. The plan failed to provide the legal justification they needed, although in the end “US hegemon” sufficed.
The planners were somewhat concerned with domestic constituencies, but only in so much as they could be manipulated with a well managed “public relations strategy.” (MM) “Time will be required to prepare public opinion” with “an information campaign which has to be closely related to an overseas information campaign.” They needed time for “sensitizing the public” with “a media campaign to … prepare public opinion both in the UK and abroad.” (IOP) This “sensitizing” would need to “give full coverage to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, including his WMD” even though “the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.” (COP, DSM) From the documents “presented it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action.” (SM) As noted above the self-defense justification had no plausibility, Saddam’s weapons programs had been contained; but something had to be done about the “problem of bringing public opinion to accept the imminence of a threat from Iraq.” It was an issue “the Prime Minister and President” needed “to have a frank discussion about.” The war ran the risk of looking “like a grudge between Bush and Saddam” if they did not inflate the risk Saddam posed to the world. (RM)
What were the expected outcomes of the war? If we are to judge the war planners actions based on the range of expected outcomes, they fare rather poorly. The British predictions sound remarkably similar to dissidents who opposed the war. Jack Straw noted, “There seems to be a larger hole in this [the aftermath] than on anything.” Saddam was only likely to use WMD “if his regime were threatened.” “There is no greater threat now that he will use WMD than there has been in recent years, so continuing containment [was] an option.” (IOP) The war threatened stability in the Middle East. “With his regime in danger, Saddam could use WMD, either before or during an invasion. Saddam could also target Israel as he did during the Gulf War. Restraining Israel will be difficult. It could try to pre-empt a WMD attack and has certainly made clear that it would retaliate.” (IOP) In other words, the war could likely trigger a WMD war between nuclear-armed Israel and Iraq. It would also be the most likely scenario for Saddam to use his WMDs. Furthermore toppling Saddam would not prevent his WMD stockpiles from falling to terrorists as looting and lawlessness were expected outcomes of the war. It was possible that “another Sunni General still in charge of an active Iraqi WMD program” would assume power, or “military coup could succeed coup until an autocratic, Sunni dictator emerged” or “a pro-Western regime would be installed.” There was some concern that “there is no guarantee that another Sunni autocrat would be better” because it would be unlikely to prevent Iraq from seeking “to acquire WMD … so long as Iran and Israel retain their WMD and conventional armouries.” (IOP)
There are many empirical conclusions to be derived from the leaked papers. The free press’s obedience to doctrinal truth is not something that should go unnoticed. The theme that recurs over and over is the concern for manufacturing legal pretexts for invasion; all of the papers discuss this matter. They all agreed that regime change was their reason for war and it had no legality. Thusly they tacitly admit that the entire war is illegal, fraudulently based on a contrived legal scenario that failed after Saddam allowed inspectors into the country and could not find WMDs. The planners do not discuss why ‘regime change’ is not a legal pretext for the use of force or if they should try to have it added as a justification in the international legal framework alongside self-defense, humanitarian intervention, and Security Council authorization. The issue is not whether Saddam’s regime was “noxious”, demonstrating the case for that is trivial. The issue is whether any government has the right to topple another government because they do not like them and subject millions of people to the horrors of war. The British accept that the right does not exist. The pretext for regime change undermines legal frameworks and in its place inserts the doctrine of “might makes right,” which holds as a fundamental tenet that if you are powerful enough to interpret the laws as you see fit then you can remake them to fit your agenda. This is a dangerous precedent to set, and we should give more thought to the type of world we wish to live in.
Notes:
[1] Scahill, Jeremy. “The Other Bomb Drops.” The Nation, 1 June 2005
He reports:
It was a huge air assault: Approximately 100 US and British planes flew from Kuwait into Iraqi airspace. At least seven types of aircraft were part of this massive operation, including US F-15 Strike Eagles and Royal Air Force Tornado ground-attack planes. They dropped precision-guided munitions on Saddam Hussein's major western air-defense facility, clearing the path for Special Forces helicopters that lay in wait in Jordan. Earlier attacks had been carried out against Iraqi command and control centers, radar detection systems, Revolutionary Guard units, communication centers and mobile air-defense systems. The Pentagon's goal was clear: Destroy Iraq's ability to resist. This was war.
But there was a catch: The war hadn't started yet, at least not officially. This was September 2002 - a month before Congress had voted to give President Bush the authority he used to invade Iraq, two months before the United Nations brought the matter to a vote and more than six months before "shock and awe" officially began.
At the time, the Bush Administration publicly played down the extent of the air strikes, claiming the United States was just defending the so-called no-fly zones. But new information that has come out in response to the Downing Street memo reveals that, by this time, the war was already a foregone conclusion and attacks were no less than the undeclared beginning of the invasion of Iraq.The Sunday Times of London recently reported on new evidence showing 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 paper cites newly released statistics from the British Defense Ministry showing that "the Allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001" and that "a full air offensive" was under way months before the invasion had officially begun.
[2] Kinsley, Michael. “No Smoking Gun.” The Washington Post, 12 June 2005. B09
[3] Sanger, David. “Prewar Decision Says War Decision Wasn’t Made.” New York Times, 13 June 2005. A1
Purdom, Todd. “A Peephole to the War Room: British Documents Shed Light on Bush Team’s State of Mind.” New York Times, 14 June 2005. Online Edition
[4] Editorial. “Iraq, Then and Now.” Washington Post, 15 June 2005. A24
1 comments:
I gotta say, this must be your longest writing in a awhile, took most of my lunch to read/reread it. Good stuff. I had not clue there were this many memos. I had heard about Downing Street and others, but not to this level.
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