Blair’s reasons for war

Elizabeth Wilmshurst

Well, I think it is clear Blair was desperate to get the UN to back the war at that time (not to mention his own parliament) — and as we know, it takes more than a spot of genocide to move the Security Council. (The Balkan dust-up wasn’t “legal” either). WMD would qualify as sufficient cause, legally and presumably under existing UN resolutions. As we now know, it didn’t help with the council at all.

Politically Blair needed the WMD case and I am prepared to believe he trusted his intelligence on that; even Dr David Kelly asserted before the dodgy dossier inquiry that there was no doubt Saddam did have such weapons.

In fact, as one of those who believe the war was necessary to remove a genocidal dictator, I also believe that we will never know if there were actual WMD. If Saddam didn’t want them found, he had a whole country to hide them in.

As for Blair, I voted Labour when in Britain and would probably do so now. Whatever you say about the guy, he put his money where his mouth was. That is not self-serving, even if he isvery adept at political manouevring. Bush is pretty awful in many ways; right about Saddam. Yes, I know the US shifted 180 degrees on him when he burst his boundaries.

Now pile on

[W]e will never know if there were actual WMD.

That and the Blair WMD “facts” deserve a new category instead of just being called lies.

I’d vote for “rubber duck lies”. Having the credibility of a story told by a grown man in a bathtub with a rubber duck.

Remember that keynote speech Blair made to the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999?

” . . If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar. . . ”
http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/politics/blair.htm

From my perspective, the real reason for the Iraq war is quite straight forward:

“Pentagon auditors have found that the Halliburton Co., which was awarded a no-bid $2.5 billion contract to deliver fuel to Iraq, may have overcharged by more than $108 million. That includes $61 million auditors found in questionable charges more than a year ago. . . Yet another Pentagon audit completed last August and obtained by NBC News found that a Halliburton contract to provide food and housing for American troops had a staggering $1.8 billion in unsupported costs.”
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7201320/

“An official US audit has unearthed evidence of widespread corruption in postwar Iraq, finding that the occupying authorities failed to keep track of nearly $9 billion (£4.8billion) of Iraq’s oil and other revenues.”
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/218275/110736089491.htm

Of course, a missing $8.8 billion is mere chicken feed compared with this:

“The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn’t account for more than a TRILLION dollars [emphasis added] in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. . . A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the US Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL

The Iraq war was a money-making scam planned by the Bush administration months before 9/11, as you can check in mainstream US media:

“(CNN) — The Bush administration began planning to use US troops to invade Iraq within days after the former Texas governor entered the White House three years ago, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told CBS News’ 60 Minutes.”
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/

“(CBS MarketWatch) — A second former Bush administration official is set to accuse top presidential aides, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of planning retaliatory strikes on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, despite briefings from intelligence officials explaining that Iraq likely wasn’t responsible. . . Although O’Neill said the Bush administration began planning an Iraqi invasion just after taking office, Clarke said Bush’s top aides immediately sought to use the terrorist attacks to levy a war against Iraq even though it appeared that al Qaeda, not Saddam, was responsible. . . ‘Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq … We all said, “but no, no, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan,”‘ Clarke said in the interview. ‘And Rumsfeld said, “There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.” I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with [the September 11 attacks].'”
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/03/20/clarke.cbs/

That looks a pretty conclusive to me. At least the Bush administration had the good manners to be suitably appreciative of Tony Blair’s unstinting efforts to be their stooge in creating a credible narrative to justify war: http://www.thankyoutony.com/

Wolfowitz, who is shortly to head the World Bank, has already admitted the real case for the Iraq war was “oil”:

“US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz – who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a ‘bureaucratic’ excuse for war – has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is ‘swimming’ in oil.”
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/aboutoil.htm

“But even now he can save it by complying with the UN’s demand.”

Two problems that almost always go unaddressed in the anti-war understanding of foreign policy.

A) Saddam was always hiding things from the UN inspectors and interfering with their ability to work. Why he did so for a decade seems somewhat mysterious in retrospect, but he never completely cooperated with the inspectors even at the end.

B) There has to be some point before the first shot is fired when non-compliance is enough to commit to war even if token compliance is thrown out at the very last second. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea all have very long and established histories of taking things all the way to the brink, then offering momentary compliance, and then taking it to the brink again. From a military and economic point of view, you can’t let that continue again and again. From a diplomatic point of view, everyone learns that you don’t mean it when you make threats. In other words you have to eventually be willing to look at a history of token compliance (only at the moments of highest crisis) and realize that there is a pattern.

The problem with many anti-war folks around here is that they claim they have a point of no return regarding proliferation, but that point is never ever reached before the country gains nuclear weapons.

I’m not sure I even agree with Chris’ initial point here that it’s all secondary stuff piled on to the WMD charge.
“The purpose in our acting is disarmament. But the nature of Saddam’s regime is relevant in two ways. First, WMD in the hands of a regime of this brutality is especially dangerous because Saddam has shown he will use them. Secondly, I know the innocent as well as the guilty die in a war. But do not let us forget the 4 million Iraqi exiles, the thousands of children who die needlessly every year due to Saddam’s impoverishment of his country – a country which in 1978 was wealthier than Portugal or Malaysia but now is in ruins, 60 per cent of its people on food aid. Let us not forget the tens of thousands imprisoned, tortured or executed by his barbarity every year. The innocent die every day in Iraq victims of Saddam, and their plight too should be heard. [Emphases added]
”
Look at two important phrases in the speech.
1)’But the nature of Saddam’s regime is relevant in two ways.’
2)”But let us not forget…60% on food aid’.
Sounds to me like two distinct cases. “He’s a shifty SOB working toward WMD.” AND “He’s a royal SOB killing his own people, and we should’ve taken him just for that.”
It seems to me that this comes down to how one wants to interpret the speech. Hearing a recording of it and how it was delivered would show what was emphasized and how it should be interpreted. Anyone have a link to audio?

I always enjoy watching the crocodile tears of Western leaders crying over Iraq’s impoverishment under Saddam, knowing that the poverty was caused by the sanctions imposed on that country, sanctions which were intended to impoverish Iraq in hopes that it would lead to Saddam’s toppling. The insurgents are using the same strategy–make life miserable and hope all the blame goes to the occupiers. I wonder if they shed tears over power outages after they blow up a transmission tower?

“I would argue that deciding on the ‘point of no return’ was the UN’s job, as a matter of International Law.”

Actually, the cease-fire agreement that Iraq signed after the Gulf War – the one demanding disarmament – was with the US, not with the UN. Iraq violated this cease-fire repeatedly; by obstructing inspectors, by firing on US planes, etc. According to international law, a violation of a cease-fore agreement renders that agreement void. Iraq was technically already at war with the US before the US invaded in 2002.

“Sounds to me like two distinct cases. “He’s a shifty SOB working toward WMD.” AND “He’s a royal SOB killing his own people, and we should’ve taken him just for that.”
It seems to me that this comes down to how one wants to interpret the speech. Hearing a recording of it and how it was delivered would show what was emphasized and how it should be interpreted. Anyone have a link to audio?”

I really don’t think so. For a start, this is just a single example of his argument, if you also refer to interviews and other contemporaneous evidence (or just remember back to being in the UK at the time), his argument was most certainly not two pronged. It couldn’t be because, as someone else has pointed out, it is illegal under international law to go about deposing people you don’t like, and Britain takes international law a little more seriously than the US. In particular, if he intended to depose Saddam, then why was he constantly saying that Saddam could prevent war by compliance? That is why he always refers to resolution 1441 in making his case.

However, he did begin to sling in additional moral appeals to the general nastiness of Saddam at around this time to try and persuade more people of the case for war, whilst at the same time making it clear that his basis for war was WMD.

Also, if you look at the motion in Parliament, Blair’s authority for war from the UK:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2859381.stm

it makes no mention of these moral grounds for war, only WMD [also note the amusing, in retrospect, reference to the attorney general]

Here’s some good coverage from the time:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2845665.stm

I particularly like this:

“Despite the speculation that a resolution may never be tabled, Britain has nonetheless been proposing amendments to its draft motion, which it hopes will make it more palatable to Security Council members.

These involve attaching six conditions that Iraq must fulfil before a deadline to avoid war

The six new tests of disarmament include demands for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to make a public statement admitting he has weapons of mass destruction and for Baghdad to allow scientists to be questioned abroad before a set deadline.”

“UK BENCHMARKS FOR IRAQ
Saddam must publicly acknowledge his arsenal
30 scientists must be allowed to be interviewed abroad
Stocks of anthrax and other material must be identified
Al-Samoud II missiles and their engines must be destroyed
Drones must be accounted for
Mobile bio-warfare laboratories must be surrendered”

So we were going to require Saddam Hussein to make a public statement admitting that he had WMDs that we now know he didn’t have, or we would go to war against him to destroy those non-existent weapons.

The fact that Blair acknowledged that Saddam could avoid war by disarming does not mean that Blair was not motivated by, and did not make the case for war in terms of, the goal of removing Saddam’s regime regardless of WMDs. He did, after all, rather famously say:

‘People ask why we don’t get rid of Mugabe, why not the Burmese lot. Yes, lets get rid of them all. I don’t because I can’t, but when you can you should.’

On a purely humanitarian basis, intervention in Sudan would seem to have a very great amount of argument in favor of it. Yet somehow, there are few banging the war drums of freeing the oppressed.

“This anxiety led to what many saw as a “rush to war” before the inspectors had finished,”

I would say the rush was brought on by a combination of slipping public support as the inspectors found nothing, the necessity of launching the war before the summer heat begun, and the desire to have it brought to a conclusion well before the 2004 elections.

I apologize but I’m on childcare duty for the rest of the day, so I won’t be able to respond further until later. Good discussion though, I hope it continues.

Blix’s report was very clear that Saddam was not fully complying and that Saddam’s compliance list did not provide the required destruction information. Information which by the way was never provided.

Hans Blix report.

Iraq was complying substantively: it seemed […] that Iraq had decided in principle to provide cooperation on process, most importantly on prompt access to all sites […] This impression remains, and we note that access to sites has, so far, been without problems, including […] presidential sites and private residences.

It looks like Saddam declared everything they could find records for, and provided access everywhere the inspectors wanted to go. But Sebastian and the dead-enders could also be technically correct, since there were “outstanding issues” which remained unresolved (the documentation proving the destruction of weapons from the Iran/Iraq war, from the 1980’s).

Does the public at large (in the US) know the reason we “technically” went to war was because Saddam couldn’t provid documentation of the destruction of long-inert shells of mustard gas? Or are they laboring under other perceptions?

Doesn’t that tell us that the US public was misled? The case against Saddam was misrepresented. I don’t see how an honest person could say otherwise.

the fact that the international community’s point of no return seems to be after weaponization, at which point it throws up its hands and says “What can we do now? They have nukes”.

I am aware of only case of a NPT signator getting a nuclear weapon – N.Korea. And they only decided to withdraw from the NPT and actively pursue it after it became crystal clear that the inmates took over asylum in Washington, so who can blame them? Ditto Iran.

So, what’s all this nonsense about ‘international community’s point of no return’? International community was doing just fine before the crazies came to the WH and destroyed everything sane and decent.

North Korea before Bush was doing just fine. There is absolutely no evidence to this day that they were developing nuclear weapons until the Bushies broke the agreement negotiated by Clinton’s people and started their bullying.

As far as Iran is concerned, there’s no evidence even now that they are doing anything at all proscribed by the NPT. But it would be hard to blame them if they did under the circumstances. As that Ward Churchill guy said: some people push back. That’s just how it is, the law of nature.

Enforcement by the international community is a joke. The only time enforcement occurs is when a more powerful member nation takes exception to something and uses “international law” as a cover for its actions. Either force was warranted in the case of Iraq or it wasn’t.

The fact that the UN or “International Community” chose another direction means absolutely nothing. Both have consistently refused to act on genocide or really anything requiring the making of war. Even peace keeping forces refuse to use force to defend those they have been sent to protect. How can these groups be relied on to make a determination in this area?

Wow, this debate is degenerating quickly.

Look, I’ve read the Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy criticims of the ‘evidence’ NorKor breaking the agreed framework and NPT(though I do believe they withdrew from NPT) too. I’ve also seen stuff at FAS blow it apart as well as talking to others involved in proliferation issues that tear that argument to shreds.

NorKor cheated. To have zero weapons and zero material with which to make the weapons in 1998 to having 6 in 2003 isn’t possible without cheating throughout the 5 year period. That’s just physics and logistics(covered at FAS and FA/FP in the related articles).
Hate Bush to your hearts desire, but at least do so with honest arguments.

“If there had been WMD, and Sadam handed each and every one of them over, does anyone believe that Bush wouldn’t have gone ahead with the war?”

It depends on the time frame. January 2003? Probably not. January 2002? Very likely Saddam could have avoided the war.

>>”Just today, the CIA said (yet again) that there are and were NO WMD in Iraq. And that’s what Blix said, based on his work on the ground. But you, and Bush, and Blair, all said otherwise.”

>>”Does the public at large (in the US) know the reason we “technically” went to war was because Saddam couldn’t provide documentation of the destruction of long-inert shells of mustard gas? Or are they laboring under other perceptions?”

Luci Phyrr and J Roth, you’re both misrepresenting what Blix said and believed, and what UNMOVIC had concluded up until the point of invasion in 2003.

J Roth, Blix did not say that there were no WMD, in fact, if you have a look at his book, written well after regime change, Blix states that he believed the coalition would find WMD in Iraq after regime change.

Luci Phyrr, the main areas of dispute involving Saddam’s suspected retention of WMD just prior to regime change did not involve “ long-inert shells of mustard gas,” but rather anthrax, VX nerve agent, and missile development. Very serious stuff

If you read through the UNMOVIC Cluster Document, released just days before invasion, you’ll see some very damning statements made by Blix concerning the likelihood that Saddam was lying about these aspects of his WMD capabilities:

Page 98:

“It, therefore, seems highly probable that the destruction of bulk agent, including anthrax, stated to be at Al Hakam in July/August 1991, did not occur.

Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 litres of anthrax was not destroyed, and may still exist.”

Page 83:

“It would have made no sense for Iraq to conceal a programme (VX) that in its estimation was a failure and in which it had no further interest.”
To provide some background for this statement, Iraq’s initial WMD declaration in 1991 included the claim that it had only experimented with VX in small laboratory batches, but had abandoned the program prior to producing any significant quantities. However, by 1995, UNSCOM investigators had forced Iraq to admit it had lied, and had actually produced several tons of VX. Iraq subsequently claimed it destroyed all the VX it had lied about making, because it was essentially worthless. As the UNMOVIC document points out, why then, would Iraq lie about it back in 1991? Further, Duelfer’s ISG was able to establish that Iraq had actually dropped 3 VX bombs against Iran in 1988.

It’s also worth noting that UNSCOM, in its final 1999 report, accused Iraq (in typical UN diplomatic terms of course) of lying about having eliminated its biological weapons programme.

Yet no one who accuses Bush and Blair of lying has ever bothered to level the same accusation against UN weapons inspectors. Why is that? In reality, the foundation for believing Saddam was still lying about his WMD programmes in 2003 comes from the investigations and reports carried out by these inspectors.

Taking this one step further, it is beyond absurd that the “ Bush and Blair lied “ crowd includes high profile individuals such as Scott Ritter, Robin Cook, and numerous Democrat politicians, all of whom are on public record having made extremely alarmist prior statements about the threat posed by Saddam’s WMD.

Those who so desperately want the “ lie “ accusation to be true are willing to abandon all objectivity and regard for the facts, to enable a manufactured truth to be born. How else can one explain the meme currently gaining steam, that Saddam was telling the truth all along, when it is historical fact that Saddam lied for 4 years (1991-95) about the very existence of an entire WMD programme! (bio-weapons)

It seems to me that few on the Left disputed that Saddam was a genocidal madman, and still possessed WMD, so long as the U.S. and Britain didn’t make any overt attempt to remove him. How quickly did the Left’s position change on both issues, once regime change emerged as a likely outcome.

Why is it that I’m able to keep my nose out of every thread on CT except when the topic is Iraq? I guess it’s because the layers of lies needed to justify this as a “good war” are so absolutely obvious.

Sebastian wrote:

“Blix’s report was very clear that Saddam was not fully complying and that Saddam’s compliance list did not provide the required destruction information. Information which by the way was never provided.”

Of course, the earlier post by “bob b” suggests that the US could never come close to providing the kind of documentation we feel perfectly justified in demanding of others before we bomb them:

“The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn’t account for more than a TRILLION dollars [emphasis added] in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes. . . A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the US Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.”

http://tinyurl.com/c4bn

So can we all admit that it’s pretty audacious for us to bomb another country based — in part — on their faulty accounting?

I clearly recall being assured by the Republican leadership that they knew precisely where to find the WMD. I also remember Carl Levin suggesting that if this was true then we ought to simply let the UN inspectors know about those sites so that they could go scoop up all that bad WMD. It was all the most transparent BS imaginable. Guess that’s why it drives me crazy.

Look, governments are required to lie about these things. We can’t just come out and say we’re going to bomb another country to shore up the flow of oil, to add another American base of operations in the heart of the Middle East, to open up the Iraqi economy to our wonderful corporations, and to strike fear in the hearts of other Axis of Evil-doers — even though that’s the obvious geopolitical subtext to all of this. I think that what really gets to me is that so few pro-war typers will simply admit that these are the only real reasons for any of this. Can you all really believe that the US was a-scared of Big Bad Saddam? Or that the US just cared so much about Kurds and Shia that we had to risk thousands of American lives and billions upon billions of American dollars for their sakes?

Governments have to lie when they decide to create a war for their own geopolitical purposes. Now that it’s all been said and done, can’t we all just admit to ourselves that the real reasons were quite a bit different than the ones we tell the children?

If the UN’s point of no return was not after nuclear status had been acheived I would be more ok with that.

Except that, as you may have noticed, in this case it wasn’t. It’s more usual to argue that vigilante action is justified when the courts have failed, not when they turn out to have been right all along.

Ditto to whoever said this debate degenerated quickly. My only further remark: I just noticed that for some odd reason I kept using the abbreviation SD for Saddam Hussein above. I think I meant to use SH, but hopefully it was clear anyway.

“It seems to me that few on the Left disputed that Saddam was a genocidal madman, and still possessed WMD, so long as the U.S. and Britain didn’t make any overt attempt to remove him. How quickly did the Left’s position change on both issues, once regime change emerged as a likely outcome.”

This is one of the troubling things about many of the complaints on the left. When it comes time to actually do something, the complaints are suddenly abandoned as too provacative.

Ditto to whoever said this debate degenerated quickly.

George, it is a liitle ungracious to complain about a thread which only exists because Chris Bertram corrected you about Blair’s case for war. Nobody seems to be disputing that without the alleged WMD threat, that case would have collapsed. Since you have more-or-less conceded the point – “the words of Blair that you reproduce do not put the enterprise in a good light” – what are we supposed to be discussing? The usual complaints about “The Left” and suchlike?

You suggest that Blair was mistaken to put such emphasis on WMD, but without that excuse not even Lord Goldsmith would have been prepared to say the war was legal. Bush didn’t need to worry about such things, but Blair did.

and now we’ve moved on to other things

The hell we have. Two years from now, when we still have 100,000+ troops camped out in Iraq, I hope you’ll ask their family members whether they’ve “moved on.”

The anti-war left keeps discussing WMDs because that’s the only taunt they have left.

Oh, fuck right off, and take your drunk Rothmans-smoking stalkee with you. Is ‘Gulf of Tomkin’ a taunt, too?

George, the point to which Chris responded was your one about multiple planks. Although Blair frequently alluded to Saddam’s tyranny etc. it was always clear that his legal case for war rested entirely on the WMD threat. As the UNSC made clear when the Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot, you don’t have a right to change a regime just because it is tyrannical. In that case even a genocide in progress was deemed insufficient. International law has evolved since then so that it is now considered permissible to intervene in such extreme circumstances. (Blair can take some credit for that change in thinking.) However it remains unlawful to invade for less pressing reasons, such as a regime’s past behaviour. You miss the significance of WMDs for Blair when you say they were “the most important issue.” They were essential to his case.

You ask where that leaves us and wonder whether Blair is politically vulnerable. No he isn’t. He has the great good fortune that the opposition is useless. If Peter K wants to back his prediction that Blair will be re-elected he will find that the bookies are not offering generous odds. But Blair’s credibility has suffered and so have the prospects for international cooperation even in cases where it is really warranted.

As to lies, you must have very demanding standards if you don’t regard the statement quoted by Kenny in the previous thread as a lie: “The intelligence picture… is extensive, detailed and authoritative.” That statement was clearly false, since the JIC had told him their intelligence was “limited.” Only a fool or a liar would translate “limited” into “extensive, detailed and authoritative” and Blair is not a fool.

Hi Kevin, thanks for responding again. (And thanks for being civil, I appreciate it.) Regarding WMDs as a rationale for Blair, we’re perhaps getting into a subjective area where no amount of argument will provide a resolution. I’ve now read and reread Blair’s words (as reproduced above), and I think one could plausibly defend either claim: that WMDs were “the most important issue” or were “essential to his case,” or (more likely) both simultaneously. (I note that Chris chose to italicize “the purpose in our action is disarmament,” but not the immediately subsequent qualifying statement.) But it would be difficult, I think, to defend the claim that there were no other factors in the rationale, which is all I was saying. Some (like Uncle K in the prior thread, if I recall) want to portray the other rationales for the war (democracy, eg) as post-bellum justifications seized when the WMD threat proved hollow. We could argue all day about how important they were versus the WMD rationale — which, again, I will concede was the most important plank, at least to the strictly legal case — but they were all present.

In any case, I still don’t see where this gets us. If it were established that WMD disarmament were in fact essential to Blair’s (or Bush’s) case, what then? Remember, all those UNSC resolutions required SH to to disarm *verifiably*, which he certainly did not do. And this too is not some post-bellum rationalization: Condoleeza Rice wrote an article that ran in several major newspapers prior to the invasion saying, in effect, that we all know what real, verifiable disarmament looks like (she used Ukraine and South Africa as examples) and Saddam ain’t doing it. By early 2003, the trust had long since run out.

On your last point, if it can be shown that the word “intelligence” in both statements refers to precisely the same thing, that looks rather damning for Blair. Out of context, it’s difficult to say.