I wasn’t one of the people, the very few people even on the left, who from the start insisted on the immorality of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. I’m ashamed to say I never thought much about it until much later, when Bush’s the younger’s war on the country became imminent. It just never appeared on my radar as an issue, nor made much of an impact in the newspapers here. Only when the sanctions were argued as an alternative to war back in 2003 I formed an opinion about them and for a moment I bought into the idea that it might be a good compromise alternative to the war, before coming to my senses. Now Andrew Cockburn’s review of Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions by Joy Gordon makes it clear I should have been much more skeptical much earlier:
Most of the time, those overseeing the blockade were able to go about their task without public reproach. Every so often a press report from Baghdad would highlight the immense slow-motion disaster in Iraq, but for the most part the conscience of the world, and especially that of the American public, remained untroubled. Administration officials reassured themselves that any hardship was entirely the fault of Saddam, and that in any case reports of civilian suffering were deliberately exaggerated by the Iraqi regime. As one US official with a key role in the Unscom weapons inspections said to me in all sincerity at the time: ‘Those people who report all those dying babies are very carefully steered to certain hospitals by the government.’ In spite of reams of child mortality statistics collected by various reputable outside parties, such as the World Health Organisation, it was impossible to convince him otherwise.
Very occasionally, a ray of truth would shine through. In 1996, the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the UN. Albright maintained that sanctions had proved their value because Saddam had made some admissions about his weapons programmes and had recognised the independence of Kuwait (he did this in 1991, right after the war). Asked whether this was worth the death of half a million children, Albright replied: ‘We think the price is worth it.’ Years later, as Gordon observes, Albright was still ‘trying to explain her way out of her failure to respond more effectively to what she described as “our public relations problem”’. Her attempts to justify the policy were echoed by other sanctioneers, such as the State Department official quoted by Gordon who maintained that ‘the US is conducting a public good which it has done a poor job of selling to other countries.’
[...]
Gordon puts all this in context. ‘Under the Oil for Food programme, the Iraqi government skimmed about 10 per cent from import contracts and for a brief time received illicit payments from oil sales. The two combined amounted to about $2 billion … By contrast, in 14 months of occupation, the US-led occupation authority depleted $18 billion in funds’ – money earned from the sale of oil, most of which disappeared with little or no accounting and no discernible return to the Iraqi people. Saddam may have lavished millions on marble palaces (largely jerry-built, as their subsequent US military occupants discovered) but his greed paled in comparison to that of his successors.
The economic strangulation of Iraq was justified on the basis of Saddam’s supposed possession of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Year after year, UN inspectors combed Iraq in search of evidence that these WMD existed. But after 1991, the first year of inspections, when the infrastructure of Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme was detected and destroyed, along with missiles and an extensive arsenal of chemical weapons, nothing more was ever found. Given Saddam’s record of denying the existence of his nuclear project (his chemical arsenal was well known; he had used it extensively in the Iran-Iraq war, with US approval) the inspectors had strong grounds for suspicion, at least until August 1995. That was when Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and the former overseer of his weapons programmes, suddenly defected to Jordan, where he was debriefed by the CIA, MI6 and Unscom. In those interviews he made it perfectly clear that the entire stock of WMD had been destroyed in 1991, a confession that his interlocutors, including the UN inspectors, took great pains to conceal from the outside world.
On a more theoretical note, the fact that sanctions could continue for so long under three presidents without real reason other than the fact that they existed is a good example of how real world “conspiracies” work. Most, if not all the facts about the futility of the sanctions were known almost from the start, as was the fact that the stated reasons why they should continue were never the real reasons. Yet criticism and awareness of these issues throughout their existence has been confined to the socalled loony left, with the official storyline being swallowed uncritically by everybody else. Including by me.
He won’t appear before the International Criminal Court (conveniently located in Den Haag not too far from parliament) anytime soon, but the conclusions from the Dutch Iraq inquiry (PDF, in English) do show that the Dutch political support for the war was neither as easily decoupled from the actual war as the then government made it out to be nor justified by international law. Finally it has been officially confirmed what we all knew or at least suspected back then, that the existing UN resolutions on Iraq were never sufficient legal justification for the war. Not that anything will come from it, but at least we saw our beloved prime minister embarassed and humiliated.
I’m still reading the report as a whole, but the conclusions reached by the inquiry don’t contain any real surprises. That the war was illegal as well as immoral I knew anyway, that the decision to support the war was reached long before it was discussed in parliament, for entirely different reasons than officially stated, wasn’t news either. It was clear from the start that the CDA-led government was led by its traditional policy of “Atlantic solidarity”, a desire to engage with the US and be seen as a dependable ally of it, a lesser form of the British delusions of a special relationship. The war was never assessed on its merits, the possible outcomes were not taken into account.
Though the material support of the Netherlands for the war was small, the political effect of its support was to lend a veneer of respectability to what was essentially an unilateral US war. The distinction between “political but no military support” was completely unclear and largely elided outside the Dutch political debate, presented by the US as if it meant we had given our full support. Again, not a surprise.
Some common themes emerge from the inquiry’s conclusions, which are also coming to light in the British Chilcott inquiry. There’s the dodginess of the legal reasoning for the war, as well as the exagerration of the available evidence for WMDs — turns out the Dutch intelligence services were much more skeptical about this than the government told us at the time, shock horror. More important is the utter disdain for the democratic process shown by both governments. In the Dutch case, the inquiry concludes that the decision was rammed through parliament and went entirely against the wishes of a majority of the voters.
However I’m still convinced that the massive protests against the war in the Netherlands helped convince the government from active participation in the war, against their own instincs, as they realised they could not overcome the combination of active voter hostility and parliamentary resistance to this, including from their own MPs, at a time when the domestic political situation was far from stable. This is not directly supported by the inquiry’s conclusions, but reading between the lines the formula of “political support, but no military support” looks like a typical Dutch compromise position taken by an internally divided government unwilling to turn this disagreement into an open conflict. Interestingly during part of the runup to the war the government coalition included the LPF, the party of Pim Fortuyn, which was largely against the war, not something you’d expect considering its background…
(All of the above analysis is a bit late in the day I admit, but I’ve been busy…)
Silvio Berlusconi is a man who always enjoyed playing the pantomine villain, revelling in the loathing and hatred of his opponents, viscerally enjoying his thriumphs over them. He must have thought he was untouchable, with every attempt to bring him to account for his shady business dealings and politics having failed so far and the Italian electorate once again having made him prime minister. And then that happened. If you watch the video you can see the shock and horror creep in his face, not just from the physical shock of the assault, but also from the dawning realisation that he isn’t invulnerable, that people do hate him enough to want to hurt or kill him and might just succeed in doing so.
Asked if the anger of parents like Mr Brierley was “the cross you will always have to bear”, Mr Blair said: “Let’s be clear, it’s worse for them. They have lost their child and it’s very sad. If you have lost your loved one but you think you have lost them in a cause that’s not worth it, that makes it worse.”
Being held responsible for soldiers’ deaths is “the responsibility you carry” as Prime Minister. “But you have got to carry it, I’m afraid, because there is no point in going into a situation of conflict and not understanding there is going to be a price paid.
“Now, it’s also important to understand that many of those who are in the Armed Forces, including those who have lost their loved ones in Afghanistan or in Iraq, also are very often proud of what their child has done and proud of the cause they fought in…. You know, there are parents who feel very, very deeply angry and resentful and believe that the war was not worth it, but there are also those others who don’t want to feel that their view is ignored.”
You do wonder what would puncture this smug certainty of his; whether even what happened to Berlusconi would be enough.
But what strikes me as interesting is that it corresponds well with the PR-driven schedule for the famous dossiers and the run-up to war in general. Recall the “Downing Street Memo”, written in late July. The facts and intelligence were being fixed around the policy. This culminated in the first coordinated spin drive in the autumn. At the same time as Abu Zubeydah was being lashed to the board, the White House Iraq Group and the Iraq Communications Group were being established to coordinate transatlantic PR operations. The first dossier would be launched in September. Interestingly, I’m seeing a spike in search requests for both organisations.
A second wave of propaganda activity was then launched in the spring as the key UN and parliamentary votes approached and the military time-table counted down. And, sure enough, there was a second bout of torture; on this occasion, extra torture was approved by Donald Rumsfeld before the authorisation was taken back.
Start with the outcome you want, structure your process to get these answers, then repackage and sell the polished turds to suckers while omitting the gruesome details ; it’s amazing how much the selling of the War on Iraq resembles what was happening in American finance in the same period. The moral of both is to never assume shit is shinola just because some well respected source tells you so. On a more serious note, this is more evidence that torture does work, just not in the way 24 wants us to believe. The Bush thugs wanted links between Al-Quida and Iraq and they got them. That these links were made up by people desperate to avoid more “simulated drowning” was one of those details omitted in the breathless NYT writeups about meeting Mohammed Atta in Praque.
Gordon Brown will announce by the autumn a “long” inquiry into the Iraq war, indicating that the potentially embarrassing report will be delayed until well after the general election expected next year.
Ministers have decided that the inquiry should be wide-ranging, possibly dating back to Margaret Thatcher’s tacit support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Its main focus will be on the conduct of the 2003 war and the breakdown of law and order afterwards.
David Lidington, the shadow foreign minister, said: “I think the government are determined to avoid the report being published before the general election. But they do not have even a figleaf of an excuse for a further delay.”
Brown has agreed that an inquiry will be held after the withdrawal of all British combat troops from Iraq, which must take place by 31 July. Government sources insist that no final decisions have been made on the format and timing of the inquiry, though it is expected to meet in private and to be given a lengthy timetable.
Which is depressing enough, but the most depressing bit comes at the end of the article:
Tony Blair would probably welcome any delay in publishing the report. The former prime minister is making active plans to assume the new role of president of the European Council if Irish voters pass the Lisbon treaty in a referendum this autumn.
That this is even a realistic prospect is enough to make you want to slit your wrists (down, not across).
The activities of al-Qaeda in two of Iraq’s most troubled cities could keep US combat troops engaged beyond the June 30 deadline for their withdrawal, the top US commander in the country has warned.
US troop numbers in Mosul and Baqubah, in the north of the country, could rise rather than fall over the next year if necessary, General Ray Odierno told The Times in his first interview with a British newspaper since taking over from General David Petraeus in September.
He said that a joint assessment would be conducted with the Iraqi authorities in the coming weeks before a decision is made.
Combat troops are due to leave all Iraqi cities by the end of June. Any delay would be a potential setback for President Obama, who has pledged to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by August 2010 as he switches his focus to Afghanistan.
