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Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Volume 3, Number 17 June 1 - 7, 2003 Quezon City, Philippines |
WMD
Just a Convenient Excuse for War, Admits Wolfowitz By
David Usborne Back
to Alternative Reader Index
The Bush
administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary
justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force because it was politically
convenient, a top-level official at the Pentagon has acknowledged. The
extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy
Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair. Mr
Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was "almost
unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States being able
to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the threat of Saddam had
been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad, Washington has said that it is taking
its troops out of the kingdom. "Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is
itself going to the door" towards making progress elsewhere in achieving
Middle East peace, Mr Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi
Arabia has been one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist
groups. "For
bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,
because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz tells
the magazine. The
comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic that was
presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They come to light,
moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld,
the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be
found. The
failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and Washington said
were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more acute. Voices are
increasingly being raised in the US and Britain demanding an explanation for why
nothing has been found. Most
striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz,
recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in Washington most
responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq. The
magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack
Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading
Afghanistan. There
have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been running a
shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing
views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American
foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the policy of first-strike
pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida
attacks. In
asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for attacking Iraq
that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably referring in
particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was the last senior
member of the administration to agree to the push earlier this year to persuade
the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force was the only remaining
viable option. The
conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council in February
when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that allegedly proved that
Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Critics
of the administration and of the war will now want to know how convinced the
Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to the extent that was
publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as to the quality of the
intelligence provided to the White House. Was it simply faulty given that
nothing has been found in Iraq or was it influenced by the White House's
fixation on the weapons issue? Or were the intelligence agencies telling the
White House what it wanted to hear? This
week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate whether the
argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted intelligence. He raised the
possibility that Mr Bush's policy against Saddam had influenced the intelligence
that indicated Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction. This
week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have promised to
conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they supplied the
administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on the White House was
only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that nothing may now be found in
Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if only because the Iraqis may have got
rid of any evidence before the conflict. "It
is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a
conflict," the Defence Secretary said. *
The US military said last night that it had released a suspected Iraqi war
criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering a $25,000 (315,000)
reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus, suspected of being involved
in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia Muslims whose remains were found at a
mass grave in Mahawil, southern Iraq, last month. The
alleged mobile weapons laboratories As
scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of attention to Iraq's
alleged possession of mobile weapons labs. A
joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week claimed that
two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile labs used to develop
biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with hi-tech laboratory equipment and
the report said the discovery represented the "strongest evidence to date
that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare programme". The
design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple self-contained
bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose, for example water
purification, medical laboratory or vaccine production, would justify such
effort and expense. But
critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the trucks and
experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Colin Powell, the
Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security Council, they were open sided
and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons inspectors to detect. One
former UN inspector said that the trucks would have been a very inefficient way
to produce anthrax. May 30, 2003 Bulatlat.com We want to know what you think of this article.
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