I've always thought it a bit mad to believe that Bush and Blair conspired to "lie" about the existence of Iraqi WMD, rather than genuinely, mistakenly believing Saddam had them. Apart from anything else, why would you make up a huge lie in full knowledge that you would be found out? And, if you were going to engage in said deceit, wouldn't you try harder to ensure you weren't found out?
During the research for my book, Born Liars (which, perhaps disappointingly, is not a fearless exposé of Bush and Blair but an investigation of the role of deceit in our lives) I conducted a fascinating interview with Kevin Woods, a retired US army officer, former member of the Joint Forces Command and veteran of the 1991 Gulf war. After the 2003 the US army asked Woods to conduct a "lessons learned" exercise, focusing on what Saddam's government had been thinking and doing in the run-up to war.
Woods and his team interviewed hundreds of former senior members of the Iraqi army and government, and were handed tapes of Iraqi government meetings, including meetings chaired by Saddam. It took them about five years to piece the story together. There's too much of interest to cover here - you'll have to buy the book - so I'll focus on what Iraqi officials said to him about WMD.
Woods was surprised to find that many of the Iraqi officials had drawn the same conclusions about Iraq's WMD as the West had done. Saddam constantly signalled that he was playing the West along when he denied he had WMD.
Woods asked the regime's head of research into WMD whether he had ever thought it possible there was a secret WMD programme that even he didn't know about. The official nodded. Yes, he had thought it a possibility. After all, he explained, the government was extremely compartmentalised and secretive, and everyone lied to everyone else. Only one man knew everything.
"Also", he continued, "Your president said it was so!". Iraqi officials had been impressed by Bush's certainty, and thought of the CIA as an intelligence service of legendary prowess which wouldn't make a mistake like this. (This raises the Heller-esque possibility that some Iraqis were telling Western intelligence that the WMDs existed because they believed Western intelligence when it said they existed).
Saddam had constructed a hall of mirrors into which everyone, including the West, had allowed themselves to be drawn into. When the U.S military turned up in Iraq and discovered no WMD, they were amazed. So were Iraqi officials - not so much because it turned out that Saddam had been bluffing, but because they couldn't believe that Bush would be so stupid as to neglect to take the precaution of planting some WMDs on Iraqi soil, so that the Americans had at least something to "discover". To their minds, it was incompetence of the highest order.
I'm not a student of the topic, but it seems to me maybe both Saddam and Bush/Blair were playing the same game. It suited all parties to believe (or make others believe) that Iraq had NBC weaponry. Where the evidence was scant, it was enhanced by the West for public consumption; where there was no evidence, it was assumed a sign of double secret deception or evasion - which is obviously even more of a threat!
The real incompetence was Saddam's in not believing that Bush and Blair would launch an all-out war against him. It was a bad bluff (which, to be credible, had to include his own people.) Bush and Blair weren't incompetent at all. They got their war, they ousted their dictator. I really don't think it's credible to argue that the NBC weaponry was ever anything other than a fig-leaf for these broader aims, and it didn't serve any purpose to plant any after the event.
(Please not: I'm not making a value judgment about those aims. One might sincerely believe, as Blair does, that overturning the Iraq regime was both moral and geopolitically necessary. I might not agree. But I'm trying not to let that colour my view of the weapons issue.)
Posted by: RichardYoung | February 27, 2013 at 11:53 AM
I agree with you that the person most to blame for this war was Saddam, a truth that is oddly obscured.
"I really don't think it's credible to argue that the NBC weaponry was ever anything other than a fig-leaf for these broader aims, and it didn't serve any purpose to plant any after the event."
As "NBC" makes me think of Tom Brokaw I'm going to stick with WMD. I don't think it's credible to claim that it's *not* credible to claim that WMD was the central motivation - yes Bush and Blair had long wanted rid of Saddam, but it was Saddam's failure to comply with UN resolutions on WMD that made them conclude that war was the only option.
As for planting - it sure would have served a political purpose.
Posted by: Ian Leslie | February 27, 2013 at 12:07 PM