So much intelligence, so many lies.
February 7, 2004
The WMD fiasco has all the makings of a US-led conspiracy, writes Richard Glover.
For a long time, Scott Ritter, the UN's chief weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, was virtually alone in expressing doubts about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. For his trouble, he got called everything from a hothead to a traitor.
I rang him this week, on the day John Howard finally conceded that the intelligence on Iraq was faulty. Ritter still sounds like the US marine officer he once was, the voice parade-ground adamant. He doesn't accept the theory that intelligence services simply stuffed up. For him, it's a story of people bending to pressure from above,putting career ahead of country in order to tell the politicians what they wanted to hear.
In his role as a weapons inspector, he told me, he liaised with intelligence officials from Israel from 1994 to 1998. By the end of that period, Israel had reassessed the threat from Iraq, believing it had been fundamentally disarmed. In the same period, he says, the CIA came to the same conclusion. So, he asks, what happened to change that view, if not the arrival in the White House of George Bush.
Ritter still speaks the military language of patriotism and service, which he now uses to condemn both the leaders who demanded faulty intelligence, and the spineless agencies which went out to find it. "An intelligence officer's job," he said, "is never to tell the boss what they want to hear, but what the facts are. It's a job that's centred on service to country."
He lamented that not a single US intelligence officer spoke out for the truth, saying they suffered from "moral and intellectual cowardice".
I reminded him of Andrew Wilkie. Ritter responded, "I would hope the people of Australia would applaud him as a true hero and a patriot who did what was right in the face of tremendous political pressure to the contrary."
Of course, some people see Ritter as a conspiracy theorist; they prefer the Stuff-Up Theory of History. Under this version, we should stop imagining this well-oiled conspiracy, with Bush and Blair calling the shots, and instead allow for simple incompetence.
It's true the Stuff-Up-ologists have a fair bit of human history on their side. Some this week have quoted one of America's other recent invasions - that of Grenada in 1983. The prime reason for the invasion, they remind us, was to rescue a group of American medical students who were being held hostage on the Caribbean island.
Well, they were apparently being held hostage. An internal military coup was under way on the island, and the students had phoned home with news of the fighting in the streets. Their worried parents called the State Department, and one well-connected family even phoned the Secretary of State, George Schultz. As journalist Matthew Wall notes in a piece in Slate, the information then passed through the hands of Oliver North, John Poindexter and the national security adviser, Robert MacFarlane, before eventually reaching President Reagan.
By that time, the students' apprehensive calls home had transmogrified into a full-on Tehran-style hostage crisis. Send in the troops!
As Wall notes, the phone lines to the island continued to operate during the three-day invasion, but no one thought to phone the students to discover if they were in fact being held hostage. Before you laugh, I should mention that 23 US soldiers died, along with hundreds of Cubans and Grenadians.
So score that one to the stuff-up-ologists. What's different about Iraq is the amount of intelligence. In Grenada, there wasn't a single CIA agent; even the maps were old. For Iraq, there was a mountain of intelligence, aerial surveillance and weapon inspectors' reports.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that Ritter is right: this time it wasn't a stuff-up. The people of the West were fed some deliberate spin, on the basis of which they were then asked to make decisions. No wonder people are angry.
smh.com.au |
