Missing WMDS: the Perfect Storm?

John Mason

Paris

June 3rd, 2003

Last week, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia gave a speech from the Senate floor that should have marked the moment when Bush’s Iraq policy began to unravel. “ The truth, “ he said” has a way of asserting itself despite all attempts to obscure it. Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing international law, under false premises. We just fought a war that didn’t need to be fought.”

The false premise in question was the claim that Saddam possessed an arsenal of chemical and biological terror weapons that was both operational in March and an immediate threat to the security of the United States. This is no small matter. This was the central charge made by Colin Powell and Jack Straw at the UN Security Council in order to justify the use of military force against the Iraqi regime. This was the claim that justified the charges of betrayal and disloyalty that put Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroder and Hans Blix on trial in the American and the British media for three long months. And this was the claim that - along with the baseless assertion that Saddam was a full partner with Bin Laden’s terrorists - persuaded a reluctant and divided American public to finally rally behind their President during the Second Iraq War.

Since last week these claims have been very much in doubt. Both on the ground in Iraq where American weapons inspectors were being withdrawn after a fruitless search for the missing arsenal that dragged on for weeks, and in London and Washington where this “intelligence failure” has become a major embarrassment, if not yet a political scandal. Subject to an internal review within the CIA since April, this “policy and intelligence fiasco” has now become the subject of closed hearings of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It has also triggered a flood of leaks, as the battle between Rumsfeld’s Neo-Con warriors in the Pentagon and the “realists” in Powell’s State Department has erupted in the public arena.

For some time now, retired intelligence officers from the CIA and senior diplomats from the State department have been voicing their complaints about how Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was feeding “hot garbage” from Iraqi defectors directly to the White house, and “grossly manipulating” intelligence data to shape public opinion. Last year our Secretary of Defence set up his own in-house intelligence service, nicknamed the “Cabal,” to compete with both the CIA and the DIA who were stood accused of showing excessive caution in their estimates of Saddam’s weapon programs and his ties to Al Queda’s terrorist network. In the view of groups like “Veteran Intelligence Agents for Sanity,” Rumsfeld’s decision to create his own service with a back channel to the White House set the stage for “hyping” to the national media whatever reports supported Rumsfeld line on Iraq and eventually to passing off forged documents like the infamous Niger uranium memo to the highest levels of the Administration and the US Congress.

Charges that US Intelligence had been politically compromised were only reinforced by two admissions last week by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. First, Secretary Rumsfeld admitted in response to questions from members of the Council of Foreign Relations in New York that the Iraqis “didn’t have time to use their weapons. They may have had time to destroy them. I don’t know…” Second Under-secretary Wolfowitz attempted to downplay the importance of WMDs by telling Vanity Fair that the issue of Iraqi WMDs had been emphasised in the run-up to the war only “for bureaucratic reasons. It was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

These efforts at political damage control backfired and in a matter of days, the issue of the missing WMDs went from being a story told by a stringer with the US military inspection team and buried in the back pages of the Washington Post, to the lead article for Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report, written by their top investigative reporters. Newsweek gave the story to the same Michael Isikoff who dogged the Clintons for years throughout the Whitewater and Monicagate investigations. Clearly blood is in the water and hungry media sharks are circling Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

And there we have it, the perfect media storm in the making. But this one may never take off because of the reluctance of the Democratic leadership to revisit whether the war was justified or constitutional procedures short-circuited by cooked intelligence. Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority leader, captured the mainstream position when she declared: “We don’t have to be in disagreement with the President on National Security. People have lost their lives. I would not want to leave the impression that because we have not found weapons of mass destruction, it was not a worthy sacrifice.” Once again, the Bush Administration has proven lucky in its choice of enemies. Only time and public pressure, will tell whether the same is true for the Blair Government.