[R-G] Poking holes in the case for war

[DavidMcR at aol.com]

             L A WEEKLY 31 January -6 Feb 2003
             Missing Evidence
             Poking holes in the case for war
             by Ian Williams
 
 
 
             As convoys of TV trucks descended Monday on the United Nations 
in New York to witness the report of the Iraq inspection team, it was clear 
that most of the media have adopted the White House way of seeing events: as 
a series of ultimatums and triggers to start war on Baghdad. The inspectors 
themselves had promised no such event, nor had the U.N. Security Council. It 
was the hawks in Washington who had whipped up the press, yet again, to build 
the war fever with a roll of drums and the sound of administration-leaked 
punditry dripping away at common sense.
 
             After a year of total immersion in American TV, it's difficult 
to remember that as the New Year of 2002 dawned, Iraq and Saddam Hussein were 
not in the headlines. They weren't even on the horizon. Still reeling from 
the shock of September 11, the world had united behind the United States as 
it fought the forces of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the mountains of 
Afghanistan.
 
             Then President George W. Bush stood up and used a speechwriter's 
catch phrase - "the Axis of Evil" - in his State of the Union address on 
January 27, 2002. He lumped together Iraq and Iran, two bitter enemies, and 
North Korea, which did not have much to do with anyone else, but at least was 
still avowedly communist and so had to substitute for the former Evil Empire 
(RIP). The world laughed at his geopolitical naiveté. As it faces a war that 
could destabilize the region, and whose threat is already rocking the wobbly 
world economy, no one is laughing anymore.
 
             Iraq did not change on January 27. It was every bit as evil 
before as it was after the president's road-to-Baghdad revelation and 
conversion. Since then, however, Bush has successfully made a previous 
back-burner issue the one with the fat in the fire, regardless of the near 
unanimous opinion of the rest of the world that, while Iraq may be "a" 
problem, it is just one of several.
 
             In fact, the Bush administration has reversed von Clausewitz's 
dictum about war being diplomacy continued by other means. For the last year, 
the U.S. has regarded diplomacy as war in waiting. Luckily for the world, the 
White House's diplomacy has been as inept as its approach to winning the 
hearts and minds of the world's public.
 
             It has not helped the White House's crusade against Iraq that 
its stated reasons keep changing. About the only one that has stayed 
consistent is Bush's claim that Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my dad."
 
             Not only do the war aims change weekly, but almost every other 
stated reason fails the test of American practice. Defiance of U.N. 
resolutions? All year the administration has either vetoed resolutions about 
Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories or ensured that they were not 
implemented.
 
             Was it about Saddam Hussein's tyrannical and bloodthirsty rule 
at home? If the president is so concerned, where were the tears for the 
Chechens, the Western Saharans, the Tibetans and the other contemporary 
victims listed in the State Department's own human-rights reports?
 
             Was it about threats to other countries? But none of Iraq's 
neighbors felt in the slightest bit threatened by Iraq, with its crumbling 
economy, obsolete conventional weaponry and inspected-into-the-sand-dunes 
weapons of mass destruction. Even Israel did not really feel threatened. 
Ariel Sharon is just a person who harbors monstrous and long-lasting grudges, 
as he demonstrated at Sabra and Shatila.
 
             Is it about democratization? Then why is the administration 
publicly discussing a Ba'athist regime without Saddam as an option. And what 
to do about Syria, or Saudi Arabia?
 
             Was it about the oil? Well, the U.S. has been buying oil from 
Iraq to make up for the shortfall from Venezuela and, if the war breaks out, 
risks losing not only that but the Saudi and Gulf oil, either through 
military action or fundamentalist insurrection if their regimes help the U.S.
 
             So it must be about disarmament and control of weapons of mass 
destruction, then? Well, perhaps that would be a little more convincing if 
the administration were not considering the use of nuclear weapons against 
Iraq. Most damningly, Richard Butler, the former head of the U.N. inspection 
teams, and much reviled by Saddam and his supporters for being a tool of 
Washington, said this week that the U.S. was displaying a "shocking double 
standard."
 
             Butler needs no convincing that Iraq possesses forbidden weapons 
and is cheating, but he points out, "The spectacle of the U.S., armed with 
its weapons of mass destruction, acting without Security Council authority to 
invade a country in the heartland of Arabia and, if necessary, use its 
weapons to win that battle, is something that would so deeply violate any 
notion of fairness in this world that I strongly suspect it would set loose 
forces we would deeply live to regret."
 
             Butler churlishly pointed out that Israel, Pakistan and India do 
actually have nuclear weapons now and that the United States and other 
permanent Security Council members are themselves the possessors of the 
world's largest quantities of nuclear weapons.
 
             It seems he did not mention North Korea, which has been the 
severest test for the consistency of White House policy at home and abroad. 
Why is this other charter member of the Axis of Evil, with a tyrannical and 
murderous regime and an actual nuclear weapons program, a state that can be 
cajoled and negotiated with, while the world must go to war immediately with 
Iraq, which has no currently working nukes, and little opportunity to build 
them?
 
             It is no wonder that the desks of the world's chancelleries are 
covered in drifts of dandruff as they scratch their heads wondering just what 
the Bush administration is on about. Even so, there are indeed double 
standards, and being the world's biggest military and economic power does 
have its privileges. So, for a time, despite other countries' awareness of 
the inconsistencies in the American position, or rather positions, it looked 
like Bush had succeeded in putting Iraq on top of the world's agenda.
 
             In September, when he told the United Nations that he was going 
to go the multilateral route, most of the world was deeply relieved that the 
U.S. was not going to rip up the U.N. Charter and mount a unilateral attack 
on Iraq. It does help that most of what he said about Iraq's behavior was 
true, so even if they would not have put Baghdad at the top of their agendas, 
many nations were prepared to go along, although no one outside the U.S. 
bought seriously the suggestion that Iraq had anything to do with September 
11.
 
             But even at that stage there was a sort of quantum indeterminacy 
about the U.S. position. Other countries are never sure at any moment whether 
they are dealing with the caring Colin Powell, who shares their concerns for 
due process and consensus, or with the motley obsessive crew around Dick 
Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld, whose 
fundamentalism and complete unconcern for the views of others rub even the 
closest allies the wrong way. Powell has had to do a lot of stroking to 
smooth the feathers the hawks have ruffled.
 
             Thanks to Powell's diplomacy and flexibility, the U.S. managed a 
unanimous vote for Resolution 1441. Even until a month or so ago, if the 
White House had produced the conclusive evidence that it had told everyone it 
had, it would have had the support of the Security Council, even for military 
action. Even so, the hawks maintained an annoying background squawking about 
the failures of the inspectors.
 
             The inspectors, who are no fans of Iraq, grumbled back about the 
lack of promised intelligence information from the U.S. Chief U.N. weapons 
inspector Hans Blix made comments about librarians who refuse to lend books. 
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press that Bush and top U.S. 
officials "would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has 
weapons of mass destruction if it was not true and if they did not have a 
solid basis for saying it."
 
             Demetrius Perricos, chief inspector of the U.N. Monitoring, 
Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), commented, "What we're 
getting and what President Bush may be getting is very different, to put it 
mildly."
 
             The events of the last weeks make it seem likely that in the 
best Texan death-row tradition of first deciding verdict and sentence, and 
only then looking for clues, the White House does not in fact have any 
substantive evidence.
 
             As that became increasingly obvious, so did the change in what 
passes for American diplomacy. One sign of desperation was when both Brits 
and Americans began to say that instead of looking for the smoking gun or the 
bubbling vat of botulin, the Security Council should draw conclusions from 
the "cumulative" buildup of clues that Iraq was in flagrant material breach, 
and therefore the Security Council should attack.
 
             However, even much of what has been brandished as part of this 
pattern has not held up under examination. The aluminum tubes for nuclear 
weapons materials were in fact for artillery rockets. Even people with 
UNMOVIC think that the empty chemical warheads discovered were in fact 
mislaid rather than concealed.
 
             In the meantime, instead of showing the proof, the 
administration warned the U.N. that its relevance and survival depended on 
complete and prompt acquiescence to the American agenda and timetable.
 
             Unnamed U.S. officials threatened "dire consequences" for 
Germany if it persisted in asking for evidence before a vote. France was 
accused of being anti-American. You would really expect guys who are so hot 
on American sovereignty to have a little more empathy with others' tender 
feelings about their independence.
 
             A steady stream of leaks about the military deadline and the 
need to get the troops moving before the desert got too hot alarmed even the 
British, who warned against "climatic deadlines." The "cumulative" evidence 
of White House threats and bluster is actually convincing other countries 
that the U.S. does not have the smoking gun that it has bluffed about all 
along, Ari Fleischer notwithstanding.
 
             Neither Blix nor anyone else at the U.N. thinks that Saddam 
Hussein is "innocent." The mere suggestion will raise the same type of 
sardonic smile as President Bush's description of Ariel Sharon as "a man of 
peace." But none of them is prepared to trigger a war that would kill 
thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and have ripple effects across the 
region and the world, simply because a fundamentalist White House truly, 
deeply and sincerely believes that Iraq is guilty. Washington's hostile 
reaction to this skepticism has converted passive support from other 
countries into active opposition.
 
             The result has been to make it even harder for Colin Powell to 
use his charms on his foreign colleagues. Indeed, so fevered are the hawks in 
the White House that Powell himself has had to abandon his usual tact and 
make threatening noises to cover his back with the fundamentalists.
 
             So where are we? Despite, or rather because of, the bluster from 
the White House, it has become less likely that there will be a U.N. 
resolution for war. Without that resolution, many crucial countries, such as 
Turkey and neighboring Arab states, may demur at lending support. Certainly 
if the U.S. goes ahead without the resolution, it will be ostentatiously 
ripping up the U.N. Charter and the corpus of international law.
 
             Without those allies, the military cost, both in dollars and 
body bags, will go up, and the American public, whom polls show to be already 
deeply skeptical of any go-it-alone venture, may react badly. Is this 
administration so fundamentalist that it would risk the chances of a second 
term for a war on Iraq? We can hope not - but on the evidence so far, I 
wouldn't bet the shop.
 
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