Posted on 01/29/2004 8:23:32 AM PST by Solson
Protagonists on both sides of the war debate have been exposed, writes Tony Parkinson.
Hands up those who overestimated the capacity of Saddam Hussein's Iraq to produce and deploy weapons of mass destruction.
I, for one, plead guilty.
It is only of limited comfort that I can cite as co-defendants the combined intelligence agencies of the Western world, along with the "strong presumptions" of former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. For reasons still unknown, widely held expectations have not been borne out by the facts.
Now, hands up those who accused the US, British and Australian governments of lying their way to war, by manufacturing or manipulating evidence of Iraq's weapons stocks.
The Hutton report, published in London yesterday, has delivered a severe rebuke to the British Broadcasting Corporation over unfounded accusations of deception at the highest levels of the Blair Government. Many in Australia have also run with this obscene conspiracy theory. Anyone ready to confess they got that one wrong?
In short, this has not been a good week for either side of the war debate. US weapons inspector David Kay and Britain's Lord Hutton have each delivered sobering reality checks.
Protagonists on both sides have been exposed for filling information gaps with guesswork. In both cases, the tendency has been to suspect the worst, and say so. Now comes the time for reckoning.
One result is that governments in Washington, London and Canberra will face continuing awkward questions over why their pre-war intelligence assessments of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons capabilities were so dramatically askew.
Kay says nothing more substantial is likely to emerge from the search for weapons in Iraq. This places grave question marks over the reliability, at least in the case of Iraq, of the threat assessments provided to governments. It is anything but a reassuring precedent, and it has important implications for the continuing war on terror.
Nobody realistically expects governments and their intelligence agencies to know everything about a suspected danger to their societies before taking action. But, if the radical strategic choices involved in the Bush Administration's doctrine of pre-emption are to be in any way supportable, governments must know with far greater certainty much more than they appeared to know about what was going on inside Iraq.
That said, opponents of the war should pause carefully before claiming any sense of vindication. For they, too, face an array of awkward questions arising from what we have learned since the fall of Saddam.
The Hutton report reminds us of the corrosive dangers of excessive public cynicism about political processes in the Western democracies. Prime Minister Tony Blair has been all but hounded from office on the strength of the BBC reports that Downing Street had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons in September 2002 with claims the Government probably knew to be false.
Hutton's exoneration of Blair provides a salutary lesson for the media. As of today, it is the BBC's integrity, not that of Blair, that has become the issue.
Hutton's findings could not be more punishing. The punchline, in essence, was this: the BBC could not be believed when it said the Government could not be believed.
The ramifications extend far beyond Britain. The false accusations against Blair triggered a widespread campaign to discredit the arguments for military intervention in Iraq. If Blair had lied, the argument went, the other core partners in the so-called coalition of the willing, namely George Bush and John Howard, were similarly tainted.
Hutton's findings should prompt contrition among those too eager to subscribe to this dark and dismal proposition. More positively, it might help remove one of the blinding distractions preventing a cogent and clear-headed analysis of whether the war was necessary.
Much has been said already about the changing patterns of behaviour in Iraq's neighbourhood, and the tentative emergence of more moderate voices in the Arab world. One clear plus: Gaddafi's Libya has renounced a nuclear weapons project more advanced than anyone could have imagined.
Big deal, some will say, as they seek to co-opt David Kay's revelations on the failure to find weapons stockpiles in Iraq as confirmation of their belief that the invasion was unjustified.
This is certainly not Kay's view. In fact, the most salient of all the weapons inspector's recent remarks are these: "I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war."
Why so? The Iraqi Survey Group has not solved the riddle of the missing weapons, but its investigations have established the certainty that Iraq would not have complied willingly with the UN as long as Saddam ruled.
The inspectors uncovered a vast infrastructure - scientists, databases and procurement networks - that gave Iraq the "breakout capability" to get back into the gas-and-germ warfare business as soon as the UN was off the case.
And reports are now emerging of how the Baathist regime was working systematically to achieve precisely this purpose, using oil money to bribe individuals and organisations inside and outside Iraq to galvanise opposition to sanctions.
Moreover, Saddam's Iraq had indeed become a viper's nest for terrorists, including al-Qaeda operatives. The capture of these extremists continues in Iraq, and links to the former regime are slowly but surely emerging. An imminent threat? Maybe not. A profound threat? Inevitably.
Finally, there is the harrowing evidence of the regime's monstrosity, with the uncovering of 300,000 corpses. Saddam was not just another tinpot dictator. This was slaughter on a historic scale.
On the basis of what we have learned since the fall of Saddam, the choices for liberal consciences must surely be clearer.
Western society can either confront a vicious and aggressive totalitarian impulse in the Middle East, for which Saddam's Iraq had become a crucible. Or we can run the risk of inventing excuses for doing nothing.
Tony Parkinson is international editor of The Age.
tparkinson@theage.com.au
Kay may have been questioned on specifics during the closed intelligence session. However, his appearance in front of the Armed Services committee wasn't intended to go into that type of detail, IMO.
It's not just our credibility. Every major intelligence agency in the world was convinced Saddam still possessed WMD.
And let's not let the U.N. off the hook. After all, it was the U.N. who, for the twelve years following the end of the first Gulf War, told the world Saddam had WMD -- the Security Council passed no fewer than 17 resolutions regarding Saddam's WMD, and imposed economic sanctions because of Saddam's lack of compliance.
We should demand an accounting from Coffee-Cup Annan as to why the U.N. "lied" to us all those years about Iraq's WMD.
Awesome statement! Do you mind if I quote it?
Dont mind at all ... in fact, it's an obvious point to me, but one the 'pundits' havent quite figured out. Here we have Libya acknowledging being part of an international black market in nuclear weapons technology that WE NEVER HEARD OF. He only told us because of what we did to Saddam and he wants to come clean now. The CIA was asleep at the switch on this, as they were when India did bomb test in 1998.
Not a 'peep' about how this reflects on our intelligence.
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