When did the Bush administration decide to go to war with Iraq? Here's one hint among many. This is from back in 2002, a few months after Bush's "axis of evil" speech and eleven months before the invasion took place.
Skirmish on Iraq Inspections: Wolfowitz Had CIA Probe U.N. Diplomat in Charge by Walter Pincus and Colum Lynch Washington Post 04/15/02. The diplomat in question would be Hans Blix, one of the many bogeymen of the conservatives back in those days. Blix' insistence on trying to carry out professional weapons inspections in Iraq in accordance with UN resolutions was seen as a frightening barrier to the neocons' dream of staging a "cakewalk" liberation of Iraq.
How better to go about dealing with it than the trademark Bush administration way: slime your opponent? So Wolfi got the CIA to try to dig up dirt on Blix. Pincus and Lynch wrote:
In an unusual move, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz earlier this year asked the CIA to investigate the performance of Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, chairman of the new United Nations team that was formed to carry out inspections of Iraq's weapons programs.
Wolfowitz's request, involving Blix's leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, illuminates the behind-the-scenes skirmishing in the Bush administration over the prospect of renewed U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq.
Richard "the Prince of Darkness" Perle was pretty clear about his position on inspections:
The inspection issue has become "a surrogate for a debate about whether we go after Saddam," said Richard N. Perle, an adviser to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
Remember, as late as March of 2003, the Bush administration was still publicly claiming that Iraqi cooperation with UN weapons inspections would avert war. Wolfi wasn't happy with the CIA's findings on Blix:
Officials gave contradictory accounts of Wolfowitz's reaction to the CIA report, which the agency returned in late January with the conclusion that Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants "fully within the parameters he could operate" as chief of the Vienna-based agency between 1981 and 1997.
A former State Department official familiar with the report said Wolfowitz "hit the ceiling" because it failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program.
But an administration official said Wolfowitz "did not angrily respond" when he read the report because he ultimately concluded that the CIA had given only a "lukewarm assessment." The official said the CIA played down U.S. criticism of Blix in 1997 for closing the energy agency's books on Iraq after an earlier U.N. inspection program discovered Baghdad had an ongoing weapons development program.
Whatever the outcome, the request for a CIA investigation underscored the degree of concern by Wolfowitz and his civilian colleagues in the Pentagon that new inspections -- or protracted negotiations over them -- could torpedo their plans for military action to remove Hussein from power. (my emphasis)
The reference to the 1997 action by Blix was a bit imprecise, especially in the war-fevered context of April 2002. For one thing, Blix and the IAEA were involved in inspecting Iraq's nuclear weapons program in particular, not the broader category of "weapons of mass destruction", which includes biological and chemical weapons, as well. (The whole concept of "WMDs" was basically a propaganda ploy to blur the crucial distinction between nukes and chem-bio weapons.)
In his book Disarming Iraq (2004), Blix writes that by October 1997, the IAEA "had made it clear that there remained few questions to solve in Iraq's nuclear dossier." Now, of course, we know why. Iraq had closed down its nuclear program. And the fake stories about it still going in 2002 were phony war propaganda. But its even wrong to suggest that the IAEA had "closed the books". The IAEA did not formally close Iraq's nuclear dossier, although Blix writes that "there were no [nuclear] disarmament issues left in 1997-1998, only minor questions".
Pincus and Lynch should have been more clear in the article on that point. Because in 2002, Blix was the head of UNMOVIC, the UN agency charged with the broaderresponsibility of inspections for chemical and biological weapons, as well as the unresolved points on the nuclear program.
They do explain later on in the article:
Determining the level of cooperation required will be done by Blix based on a list of "key remaining disarmament tasks," according to the resolution. Among those tasks will be seeking to determine whether Iraq is continuing to develop the VX nerve agent, whether it has continued its medium- and long-range missile program, and searching for documents that could provide insight into Iraq's efforts to develop chemical and biological warheads.
Notice what's not mentioned there: nuclear weapons programs. Those familiar with the results of the UN inspections knew that there was no reason to believe that any such programs existed. Which is why the hawks needed something like, say, forged documents showing Iraq was purchasing large quantities of uranium, to make the case about Iraq's nuclear threat.
And it was the claims about nuclear programs and materials that were by far the most frightening - Bush and Condi-Condi's famous "mushroom cloud" warning. It's very doubtful that even a Congress in the grips of war fever and intimidated by Bush's popularity at the moment would have been willing to vote a war resolution simply over the possibility of aging stocks of chem-bio weapons in Iraq.
And according to the Post's sources in April 2002, this is how the Iraq hawks in the administration were thinking of the inspections the administration claimed publicly that they wanted so badly:
"The hawks' nightmare is that inspectors will be admitted, will not be terribly vigorous and not find anything," said a former U.S. official. "Economic sanctions would be eased, and the U.S. will be unable to act."
A former member of the previous U.N. inspection team said the Wolfowitz group is "afraid Saddam will draw us in to a diplomatic minuet."
"While we will have disputes, they will be solved at the last minute and the closer it comes to the 2004 elections the more difficult it will be to take the military route," the former official said. (my emphasis)
The very last paragraph of the article reports:
Blix said that if Iraqcooperates, he is confident that he could issue a report that would trigger a suspension of sanctions within a year after arriving in Baghdad.
And we know now that this would have been the near-certain outcome, if Cheney and Scooter and Karl and Richard Perle and Colin Powell and the rest of those fines folks hadn't pumped up phony claims to justify the Iraq War. There could have been a peaceful resolution of the inspections issue. But that's not what the Bush administration wanted.
War the Republican Party way. Nothing quite like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment