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You Wanted to Believe Him
Colin Powell Does Sam Beckett
by Robert Fisk
Sources, foreign intelligence sources,
"our sources," defectors, sources, sources, sources.
Colin Powell's terror talk to the United Nations Security
Council yesterday sounded like one of those government-inspired
reports on the front page of The
New York Times--where it will most
certainly be treated with due reverence in this morning's
edition. It was a bit like heating up old soup. Haven't we
heard most of this stuff before? Should one trust the man?
General Powell, I mean, not Saddam.
Certainly we don't trust Saddam but
Secretary of State Powell's presentation was a mixture of
awesomely funny recordings of Iraqi Republican Guard telephone
intercepts a la Samuel Beckett that just might have been some
terrifying little proof that Saddam really is conning the UN
inspectors again, and some ancient material on the Monster of
Baghdad's all too well known record of beastliness. I am still
waiting to hear the Arabic for the State Department's
translation of "Okay Buddy"--"Consider it done,
Sir"--this from the Republican Guard's "Captain
Ibrahim", for heaven's sake--and some dinky illustrations
of mobile bio-labs whose lorries and railway trucks were in
such perfect condition that they suggested the Pentagon didn't
have much idea of the dilapidated state of Saddam's army.
It was when we went back to Halabja and
human rights abuses and all Saddam's old sins, as recorded by
the discredited Unscom team, that we started eating the old
soup again. Jack Straw may have thought all this "the most
powerful and authoritative case" but when we were forced
to listen to Iraq's officer corps communicating by
phone--"yeah", "yeah", "yeah?",
"yeah..."--it was impossible not to ask oneself if
Colin Powell had really considered the effect this would have
on the outside world.
From time to time, the words "Iraq:
Failing To Disarm--Denial and Deception" appeared on the
giant video screen behind General Powell. Was this a CNN logo,
some of us wondered? But no, it was CNN's sister channel, the
US Department of State.
Because Colin Powell is supposed to be
the good cop to the Bush-Rumsfeld bad cop routine, one wanted
to believe him. The Iraqi officer's telephoned order to his
subordinate--"remove 'nerve agents' whenever it comes up
in the wireless instructions"--looked as if the Americans
had indeed spotted a nasty new little line in Iraqi deception.
But a dramatic picture of a pilotless Iraqi aircraft capable of
spraying poison chemicals turned out to be the imaginative work
of a Pentagon artist.
And when General Powell started
blathering on about "decades'' of contact between Saddam
and al-Qa'ida, things went wrong for the Secretary of State.
Al-Qa'ida only came into existence five years ago, since Bin
Laden--"decades" ago--was working against the
Russians for the CIA, whose present day director was sitting
grave-faced behind General Powell. And Colin Powell's new
version of his President's State of the Union lie--that the
"scientists" interviewed by UN inspectors had been
Iraqi intelligence agents in disguise--was singularly
unimpressive. The UN talked to scientists, the new version
went, but they were posing for the real nuclear and bio boys
whom the UN wanted to talk to. General Powell said America was
sharing its information with the UN inspectors but it was clear
yesterday that much of what he had to say about alleged new
weapons development--the decontamination truck at the Taji
chemical munitions factory, for example, the
"cleaning" of the Ibn al-Haythem ballistic missile
factory on 25 November--had not been given to the UN at the
time. Why wasn't this intelligence information given to the
inspectors months ago? Didn't General Powell's beloved UN
resolution 1441 demand that all such intelligence information
should be given to Hans Blix and his lads immediately? Were the
Americans, perhaps, not being "pro-active" enough?
The worst moment came when General Powell
started talking about anthrax and the 2001 anthrax attacks in
Washington and New York, pathetically holding up a teaspoon of
the imaginary spores and--while not precisely saying
so--fraudulently suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein
and the 2001 anthrax scare.
When the Secretary of State held up
Iraq's support for the Palestinian Hamas organisation, which
has an office in Baghdad, as proof of Saddam's support for
"terror''--there was, of course, no mention of America's
support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian land--the
whole theatre began to collapse. There are Hamas offices in
Beirut, Damascus and Iran. Is the 82nd Airborne supposed to
grind on to Lebanon, Syria and Iran?
There was an almost macabre opening to
the play when General Powell arrived at the Security Council,
cheek-kissing the delegates and winding his great arms around
them. Jack Straw fairly bounded up for his big American hug.
Indeed, there were moments when you might
have thought that the whole chamber, with its toothy smiles and
constant handshakes, contained a room full of men celebrating
peace rather than war. Alas, not so. These elegantly dressed
statesmen were constructing the framework that would allow them
to kill quite a lot of people, the monstrous Saddam perhaps,
with his cronies, but a considerable number of innocents as
well. One recalled, of course, the same room four decades ago
when General Powell's predecessor Adlai Stevenson showed photos
of the ships carrying Soviet missiles to Cuba.
Alas, today's pictures carried no such
authority. And Colin Powell is no Adlai Stevenson.
Robert Fisk
February 6, 2003
February 6, 2003
