Reading More of "My Year in Iraq"
If you're interested in a clear description of the nuanced politics and challenges of America's occupation of Iraq, don't read L. Paul Bremer's book. It reads more like a novel and it is an unabashed partisan hatchet job. I'm just over halfway through the book now, and I suppose if I hadn't stayed up to date on the events as they were happening, his persuasive yet carefully fictionalized version of the story would give me a very real but altogether false impression of the situation.
Many, many small items leaped out as I read them, but I finally had to get to pages 184-185 before I was driven to speak out again. On these pages, Mr Bremer toes the Republican party line about the justification for the Iraq invasion. He is masterful in his spin.
"One of the problems facing the American government was that we had found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the principal casus belli." wrote Mr Bremer. It is a subtle tactic, but notice that Mr Bremer characterized this as a problem for "the American government." In fact, it was a highly political problem for the Bush administration, who had misled the Congress on this very point.
"Dr David Kay and his large Iraq Survey Group had scoured the country for months. On October 2, Kay had delivered his initial report to a joint House and Senate committee. His bottom line was clear: at the war's outbreak, Saddam Hussein had almost certainly not possessed the thousands of tons of poisonous gas and their delivery warheads, the hundreds of kilos of deadly biological warfare agents, or the industrial system and fissile material needed to produce nuclear weapons that the intelligence services of all major Western countries judged he had."
It is amazing how a carefully misleading statement can still be squeezed into a single short paragraph that sounds cut and dried. What Mr Bremer has carefully chosen not to mention is that, prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the UN had sent inspection teams into Iraq that reported this very thing. And the President of the United States pointedly ignored those findings and warned the inspection teams to leave the country before they failed to discover even more. It is true that "the inteligence services of all major Western countries," who made their determinations without any in-country assets, were all wrong. But the UN inspectors, who were unquestionably in-country and allowed a high degree of access, made more accurate reports. They were ignored. The Bush administration blundered big-time.
"Still the WMD picture remained ambiguous. In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein had obstructed the work of UN weapons inspectors. His biological weapons program, whose existence he repeatedly denied, had come to light only after a defector revealed it. In November 2002, the United Nations Security Council had found Iraq in violation of sixteen UN resolutions and demanded that it come clean about its WMD programs."
Mr Bremer just keeps getting better and better with his dissembling. I really have to take this paragraph one sentence at a time.
First sentence: Let me get this straight. After months of scouring the country for WMDs—with absolutely no interference from any Iraqi governmental agency—the US inspectors found nothing. Yet that was ambiguous. Ambiguous to whom, exactly? It seems fairly straightforward to an independent observer.
Second sentence: "In the 1990s" would put this after the first Gulf War, during and after which Saddam Hussein's minimal reputed WMD capabilities did nothing but diminished. Dr Kay's report at one point suggested that, based on the complete and total lack of evidence of WMDs or WMD production facilities, Saddam Hussein never recovered from the first Gulf War. So it is questionable that Saddam Hussein effectively obstructed the UN inspectors. The inspectors indeed may have found nothing; but as we now know, there was nothing there to find.
Third sentence: Keep in mind that a lot of the faulty and incorrect "intelligence" the US got was from members of the Iraqi National Congress, who we now know fabricated whatever the administration wanted to hear to bolster its reason for invading Iraq. The "defector" might have been a manufactured propaganda ploy for the INC. I don't know. But I do know that whatever the "defector" said about Saddam Hussein's "biological weapons program," subsequent inspections have been unable to find it. Which calls into doubt whether it ever really existed in the first place.
Fourth sentence: This one never fails to make me laugh. Saddam Hussein said he didn't have WMDs or WMD production facilities. The United States claims that because he maintained that he didn't have them, he was in violation of disclosing them, as he was supposed to do to be in compliance with the "sixteen UN resolutions." The Bush administration maintains that he didn't tell the truth about his WMDs. But it turns out, in retrospect, that he was telling the truth after all. He said he didn't have any, and he didn't. So in reality he was never in violation of those resolutions. He was telling the truth. Mr Bremer seems to have misunderstood the implications of finding no WMDs.
"Kay stressed to Congress that his report was a 'snapshot.' He stated that his team had found disturbing evidence of compartmentalized biological programs in secret laboratories, whose personnel might have fled abroad, 'and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them.' While the team had not found the materials yet, 'we are not yet at the point where we can say definitely either that such weapons do not exist or that they existed before the war and our task is to find where they had gone.' Kay had told me before returning to Washington to testify that he was almost certain that Mukhabarat had cloaked an experimental germ-warfare program and that he was going to report this to Congress.
"Indeed, Kay described to Congress a secret 'network of laboratories within the Iraqi Intelligence Service' dedicated to chemical and biological warfare, which United Nations WMD inspectors did not discover during their frenetic searching in early 2003. Kay also had uncovered 'dual use' facilities capable of producing both poison gas and fertilizer. He and his team were able to uncover this information only because the Baathist regime's wall of secrecy had been smashed."
In short: They didn't find anything, but they think maybe possibly people in Saddam Hussein's government might have been thinking about something, although they can't say for sure what that something might potentially be, if anything. If you want to think about the safety of America, consider that chemical plants all across the United States are housing what Dr Kay and his team would characterize as "dual use" facilities that they SAY are for manufacturing fertilizer but which could ACTUALLY be producing poison gas. Just something to think about.
I would like to remind readers that the reason the UN's inspection was so "frenetic" was because the US had given it a deadline to find something "or else." And just in case I haven't hammered it home quite enough, the UN inspectors didn't find the same non-existent WMDs and production facilities that the US inspection team didn't find, and it took the UN team a lot less time, effort and manpower.
"For years I had condemned Saddam's support for terrorism. The bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism, which I had chaired, reported to President Clinton and the Congress, fifteen months before 9/11, that America faced the daunting prospect of Islamist extremists conducting mass casualty terrorism on our soil. American security would be gravely threatened if terrorists got their hands on WMD. So I had been fully behind the president's decision to invade Iraq and topple Sadddam's dangerous regime. Like David Kay, I'd been surprised when his Iraq Survey Group hadn't unearthed stocks of WMD.
"But having seen firsthand the graves in the hills of Iraqi Kurdistan and the gruesome photos of the Kurds of Halabja killed by Saddam's chemical weapons, I sleep easier knowing Saddam Hussein had been deposed and no longer had access to such weapons of terror. Whether he had an actual WMD arsenal or only the military-industrial base primed and ready to assemble one, I am convinced that we prevented the tyrant from massacring more innocent people."
More administration lies. First of all, Saddam Hussein did not support terrorism. He was a cruel dictator who brutally repressed his countrymen, in much the same way the Saudi Arabian royal family maintains control over the Saudi people. We are not engaged in a war against terrorism conducted by brutal regimes against its own people. We are engaged in a war on terrorism that exports violence to other countries, or more specifically, to the US. Saddam Hussein and the War on Terrorism have nothing to do with one another, except that the Bush administration propaganda machine wants to link the two in the feeble minds of the American people.
Notice how we get to blame President Clinton again? Mr Bremer messed up a bit here by including the Republican-dominated Congress as well, though. And of course no mention at all is made of the inaction of the Congress or the Bush administration for not taking action on the commission's recommendations. Then there's the massing-together of Saddam Hussein and terrorism and non-existent WMDs again to manufacture a vague threat (that didn't exist) to American security.
And finally, Mr Bremer sleeps easier knowing that Saddam Hussein no longer has access to the weapons that he didn't have access to in the first place? It is immaterial, it seems, that he had no WMDs. It is a leap over the available facts to state that he had "the military-industrial base primed and ready" to do anything. That is unsubstantiated by the Iraq Survey Group or Dr Kay's report..
"When Kay gave his initial report to Congress, I wasn't surprised that most media accounts focused on his admission of not finding any WMD stocks, and downplayed his uncertainty as to whether such weapons might have once existed, might still remain hidden, or have been spirited out of the country."
Just like the damn liberal media. Focusing on the facts and discounting the political hedging. There are Christian fundamentalists who deny that dinosaurs ever existed and the proof for that is much stronger than Dr Kay's suppositions as to what might possibly be. Why not propose that angels of Allah swooped down and spirited the WMD stocks away? Surely THAT cannot be easily discounted.
And consider the implications. If the weapons existed at one time, why didn't Saddam Hussein use them, and where are they now? How is it that the Iraq Survey Group, given free reign over the entire countryside of Iraq, failed to find anything? And why would the US military not take steps to prevent people from fleeing from Iraq loaded up with WMDs? Are all of these people that incompetent? Or is it because maybe, just maybe, there were and are no WMDs anywhere to be found?
Mr Bremer's book is a delicately woven story that reads extremely easily but plays fast and loose with the facts as we know them and reality as it exists in this universe. What a disappointment.