The most interesting development of the last twenty-four hours — among many, including a report in this morning’s New York Times that the ruling house of Saudi Arabia will soon call for the withdrawal of all American forces from that land and embark on a program of “democratization” — was first noted yesterday by Bob Fertik, who runs the always interesting www.democrats.com website. He wrote in part: “The entire US media is running a single story line written by Bush propaganda minister Karl Rove: that a US invasion of Iraq is inevitable… But suddenly this story line is about to change. Germany and France – dismissed only days ago by Donald Rumsfeld as ‘Old Europe’ – have come up with a comprehensive plan to avoid war by sending thousands of UN troops to take effective control of Iraq.” To read Fertik click here
Briefly to pat myself on the back, I wrote long ago that the UN inspection teams constituted a potential stumbling block to war, utterly overlooked by our media. It’s hard (though not inconceivable) to imagine a war being started with them in place. So the UN has to agree to withdraw them. Now we know that the Germans and French have been quietly planning the opposite — to triple the size of the teams and possibly insert large numbers of UN peacekeeping troops in Iraq as well, effectively turning the country into a semi-United Nations protectorate. This is the sort of inventive policy-making that we so desperately need right now.
Fertik reports Karl Rove is “livid” and Thom Shankar in a front-page piece in the New York Times this morning reports more vaguely, in a passage buried deep in the article, “Livid American officials denounced the fact that they first heard of the possible plan from reporters. ‘That’s not the way to have a winning hand with the United States,’ said a senior American official.” No wonder they’re livid, only a day ago, our president announced that the “game” was “over,” and now it turns out that the French and Germans are evidently ready to sit down at the table to deal out another hand of high-stakes poker.
In the meantime, Colin Powell’s proof of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and of its Al Qaeda ties is turning out to be — big surprise — an intelligence house of cards. First, there was that “intelligence” dossier from the British, which was cribbed from published articles, some years old, whose authors have now denounced the use made of them. (See yesterday’s dispatch and click here to read the latest); then, in today’s British Observer, the reliable Luke Harding visited the camp in the Kurdish areas of Iraq named by Powell as an Al-Qaeda site for making weapons of mass destruction and found nothing that faintly fit the description. His piece, “Revealed: truth behind US ‘poison factory’ claim,” begins:
“If Colin Powell were to visit the shabby military compound at the foot of a large snow-covered mountain, he might be in for an unpleasant surprise. The US Secretary of State last week confidently described the compound in north-eastern Iraq – run by an Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam – as a ‘terrorist chemicals and poisons factory.’
“Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind – more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere – only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.”
To read more Harding click here
The rest of the mix of released material which, polls show, effectively increased American public support for a unilateral war in Iraq, turns out to be weak at best. Below, Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun columnist, veteran Middle East reporter, and hardly a fan of Saddam Hussein, takes apart the evidence offered; while LA Times military analyst William Arkin points out the obvious — that such intelligence “data” is not self-evident but must be interpreted, as it has been in this case by those whose only goal is to take Iraq. Finally, I’ve added a piece by Chalmers Johnson, also in today’s LA Times, on the Saddam Hussein(s) the Americans might find at the end of a war to destroy his regime. (Hint: there are four of them.)
“Yesterday, however, it emerged that the terrorist factory was nothing of the kind – more a dilapidated collection of concrete outbuildings at the foot of a grassy sloping hill. Behind the barbed wire, and a courtyard strewn with broken rocket parts, are a few empty concrete houses. There is a bakery. There is no sign of chemical weapons anywhere – only the smell of paraffin and vegetable ghee used for cooking.”
To read more Harding click here
The rest of the mix of released material which, polls show, effectively increased American public support for a unilateral war in Iraq, turns out to be weak at best. Below, Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun columnist, veteran Middle East reporter, and hardly a fan of Saddam Hussein, takes apart the evidence offered; while LA Times military analyst William Arkin points out the obvious — that such intelligence “data” is not self-evident but must be interpreted, as it has been in this case by those whose only goal is to take Iraq. Finally, I’ve added a piece by Chalmers Johnson, also in today’s LA Times, on the Saddam Hussein(s) the Americans might find at the end of a war to destroy his regime. (Hint: there are four of them.)
As I’ve said many times before, I won’t be surprised if Saddam Hussein’s regime tried to retain weapons of mass destruction. The point here is that what can be felt behind this administration’s mustering of “evidence” is the urge to take out Saddam and his regime by war, to launch the Big One, and to remake the whole Middle East in their image. Tom
Powell’s “proof” is all smoke and mirrors
By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
February 9, 2003American Secretary of State Colin Powell used the UN Security Council last Wednesday to make Washington’s case for war against Iraq. The widely respected Powell delivered a weighty indictment based on a mosaic of circumstantial evidence obtained by U.S. intelligence.
Powell’s philipic encouraged those favouring war. Skeptics dismissed it as a farrago of dubious claims.
A good defence attorney would have had most of Powell’s charges thrown out of court. France, Germany, Russia and China concluded Powell’s indictment showed the need for stronger, continued inspections rather than war.
Powell’s charges (and some plausible explanations):
Recorded conversations – Iraqi officers discussing removal of a “modified vehicle” and deleting references to nerve gas from documents. If genuine, and not spliced, these radio intercepts suggest Iraq may have been hiding some biowarfare arms, or was racing to eliminate any residues or evidence of its 1980s weapons program in advance of UN inspections.
To read more Margolis click here
Raw Data Rarely Produce Certainty
By William M. Arkin
The Los Angeles Times
February 9 2003SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — Three weeks ago, I arrived home to a message on my answering machine from an official in the Bush administration. Shortly after the Gulf War in 1991, I had photographed an elaborately camouflaged building in Iraq. Now the White House wanted permission to use it in a publication it was putting out on Saddam Hussein’s regime called “Apparatus of Lies.”
On Wednesday, as I watched Secretary of State Colin L. Powell present an unprecedented cache of intelligence material to the United Nations, I thought of that telephone message. Among the pieces of evidence Powell used to buttress his case that Iraq was flouting U.N. resolution was a photograph he said showed a “poison and explosives factory” at Khurmal in northeastern Iraq. I’ve had too much experience with U.S. intelligence to believe that Powell’s photo was fabricated or doctored. Neither was the secretary deliberately misrepresenting evidence.
Deadly Game of Finding Hussein
Turning up the shadow warrior could be difficult.
By Chalmers Johnson
The Los Angeles Times
February 9 2003It is widely reported that when the war on Iraq is launched, the United States will bomb into smithereens every one of Saddam Hussein’s beautiful, extravagant palaces, with the aim of killing Iraq’s leader no matter where he may be hiding.
These are the supposedly humane tactics of a civilized nation anxious to conduct a short war that will bring about a swift “regime change.” But what if the military planners have misjudged the opposition? After all, the bombs that rained on Afghanistan did not succeed in the death or capture of either Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden or the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar. (“Where is Omar?” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to ask cheerfully at press conferences, as if he were referring to the children’s picturebook “Where’s Waldo?”)
Chalmers Johnson is the author of “Blowback” (Owl Books, 2001) and the forthcoming book “The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country.”