INTRODUCTION
ON VALENTINE’S DAY in 1998, Robin Cook – then Britain’s Foreign Secretary – came out with a new position on Iraq. “Doing nothing, he said, “is not an option.” It was, nonetheless, an option which both Britain and the US proceeded to take.
February 1998 was the turning point in US-Iraq relations. In Washington, the US House of Representatives decided that the policy of containing Saddam Hussein through United Nations sanctions is not working, and started preparing for unilateral military action. This started the path to a second Gulf War.
In 1998, UN sanctions were still working reasonably effectively. But as sympathy grows for Iraq in the Arab world, and antagonism towards the US grew, its former enemies are reopening embassies and clandestine trade links. Iraq is now estimated to be making $2.2 billion a year in illicit trade. After years in financial shackles, imposed by the UN, Iraq is now beginning to break free.
Opponents of a second Gulf War have throughout argued there is not enough evidence to justify an attack. Although the withdrawal of UN weapons inspectors in December 1998 removed the main source of information, both London and Washington have been regularly updating their intelligence with testimonies from informants and information from spy satellites.
Much of this intelligence is in the public domain. The Scotsman’s dossier collates what is known and lays down the evidence which may soon be used to justify an attack on Iraq. It has drawn from United Nations reports, statements from defectors, the defence industry trade press, military US think-tanks, summary reports from Australia (which formerly led the UN weapons inspectors team), and the biannual CIA statement to US Congress and evidence given to Capitol Hill committees. It also includes the reports from the Washington Post and the New York Times, regarded as CIA leaks, which have made the most impact in the US.
The result paints picture of a dictator who has been bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction and has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal his plans. All the evidence points towards Saddam developing chemical weapons and that he already may have enough, as the Australian government’s dossier suggests, “to theoretically obliterate the entire global population.”
But it stops short of a smoking gun. No one, in either London or Washington, is understood to have incontrovertible proof that Saddam is developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. The evidence simply proves that he has the means and the inclination.
Whether this is enough to justify an attack on Iraq is the question which Britain must now answer. |
