By Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden | 15 May 2024 (IDN) — President Barack Obama once observed, “ISIS [Islamic State] is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion—which is an example of unintended consequences—which is why we should generally aim before we shoot”.
Many of us, looking back at the horror of the Iraq war, waged by the US and the UK against the regime of Saddam Hussein when 200,000 civilians died and a total of 800 billion US dollars was spent on the campaign, need little to be persuaded that there was a Machiavellian plot to find an excuse to make war.
Yet there are many in the circles of power in Washington who believe the US should shoot on sight and kill whenever danger is thought to have appeared—in Iraq, Syria, Libya and, before that, in Vietnam. Today we see this visceral reaction, begetting Israel’s receipt of massive political and military support from the US in Israel’s lopsided war against Hamas in Gaza.
The US government itself has published the most damming evidence against the Iraq war. It was based on a 93-page classified CIA document that allegedly contained “specific information” on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs and his close links with Al Qaeda.
Declassified document
The document has now been declassified thanks to the work of the investigative journalist, John Greenewald. His findings were published in the online magazine, VICE. The document is available for everyone to read in its entirety. It reveals that there was zero justification for the war. It reveals that there was “no operational tie between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda” and no weapons of mass destruction programs.
President George W. Bush’s secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that the US had “bulletproof evidence” linking Saddam Hussein to the terrorist group. “We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members. We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical and biological-agent training”.
RAND Corporation report
A report issued by the high-powered RAND Corporation which employs some of the best analysts in the US, entitled “Blinders, Blunders and Wars”, said the CIA report “contained several qualifiers that were dropped. As the draft went up the intelligence chain of command the conclusions were treated increasingly definitively”.
One example is that the CIA report concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a vaccine production plant to manufacture biological weapons, but we are unable to determine whether biological weapons research has resumed”. The report also said that Hussein did not have ´“sufficient material” to manufacture nuclear weapons. But on October 7th, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, President Bush simply said, Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program”.
Another example is Rumsfeld’s claim to have “bulletproof evidence” on Al Qaeda’s link with Saddam Hussein. “We have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members.”
But the CIA report’s information about Iraq’s supposed working relationship with Al Qaeda and Iraq concluded that it was not at all clear that Saddam Hussein had even been aware of the relationship, if in fact there were one. Congress’s later investigation concluded that the intelligence community based its claims on a single source.
Bio-weapons claims were based on unreliable reporting
Paul Pillar, now a visiting professor at Georgetown University and before that in charge of coordinating the intelligence community’s assessments on Iraq, told VICE that the bio-weapons claims were based on unreliable reporting by sources such as Ahmad Chalabi, the former head of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group.
“There was an insufficient scepticism about some of the source material”, Pillar said. “I think there should have been agnosticism expressed in the main judgments.” Pillar went on to say Bush and Rumsfeld “had already made the decision to go to war in Iraq, so the CIA report didn’t influence their decision”.
However they used their misleading interpretations of it to convince public opinion that war was necessary. (The British ambassador to Washington at the time wrote in his book that he told British prime minister, Tony Blair, this. Yet Blair went on telling the public that evidence of malfeasance was still being gathered.)
The RAND study also concluded that the report was wrong on mobile biological labs, uranium ore purchases from Niger and Iraq building rocket delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction. The Israel/Hamas conflict is of a different kind. But it has some of the same ingredients.
Misrepresentation of the “enemy” over many decades, the US and European support (there were some exceptions) for particularly cruel bombing and rocket campaigns, the total disregard for civilian life and, not least, the disproportionate killings of young children. Yes, aim before you shoot. And don’t tell such terrible lies.
Note: For 17 years, Jonathan Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright Jonathan Power
Visit: www.jonathanpowerjournalist.com
Photo: Collage of the pictures of former Vice President Mike Pence (left) and President Joe Biden (right). Sources: Official portraits of the two leaders.