Deep Blade Journal

In a March 18, 2004 interview with Jim Lehrer of the PBS Newshour, Pentagon deputy Paul Wolfowitz stuck to the “mistakes were made” line concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Jim Lehrer showed why his tough interviewing style strikes fear into the hearts of squirming public officials. In fairness, Lehrer did press Wolfowitz a little on remarks by President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland about “misleading” pre-war Iraq weapons claims, and the damage failure to find these weapons has done to US credibility.

Wolfowitz prevaricates on Iraq nuclear history
There was enough depth in this interview for an airing of past intelligence “mistakes” with respect to Iraq. Wolfowitz is known to despise former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix. Here is how Wolfowitz turned the failures of the administration he serves around to land on top of Blix:

WOLFOWITZ: “…let’s take an example from I guess it’s 15 years ago before the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Iraq was supposed to have no nuclear weapons. They signed a nonproliferation treaty. The U.N. inspection agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that Iraq has no nuclear weapons program. They were wrong. They weren’t misleading the world. They just were wrong….

“Well, you know, the IAEA which Hans Blix headed at one period of time was an organization that gave a clean bill of health to Saddam Hussein when he was building nuclear weapons. I don’t think it’s very useful to go throwing around charges about credibility. I think what people need to help folks understand is that intelligence is not a science. Just because we can read license plates from space doesn’t mean that we can penetrate the minds of people”.

Then later, when Lehrer asked his most pointed question of the interview about reports that Wolfowitz ordered an investigation of Blix, Wolfowitz continues to disparage the IAEA of the early 1990s.

WOLFOWITZ: “…I asked the CIA a perfectly reasonable question which is: what should we infer from Hans Blix’s leadership of the IAEA when they failed to detect that Iraq had nuclear weapons and was in violation of the nonproliferation treaty? I think it’s a perfectly reasonable — it was a factual question. It wasn’t an investigation. I wasn’t interested in his background or anything that would discredit him personally. I was interested in knowing his competence as a nuclear weapons inspector. It was a perfectly normal, natural question. It was a question”.

Lehrer was ill-equipped to challenge the notions inherent in these remarks. Wolfowitz refers to a period in 1991 when the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) discovered extensive unreported nuclear activities undertaken in Iraq from the latter part of the 1980s right up to the US bombing and ground assault during the Gulf War in January and February of 1991.

Here is how the IAEA itself assessed this period for the United Nations Security Council in report S/1997/779 dated 8 October 1997 (Introduction paragraph 59):

“Despite Iraq’s prevarication, the IAEA carried out a comprehensive campaign of destruction, removal and rendering harmless of the practical assets of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear programme. This campaign involved the extensive destruction of buildings and equipment at the EMIS sites at Tuwaitha, Al Tarmiya and Al Sharqat, and at the nuclear weapons development and production sites at Al Atheer and Al Qa Qaa; of the laboratory-scale reprocessing facilities at Tuwaitha; and of gas centrifuge related materials, components and equipment. In total, more than 50,000 square metres of facility floor space were destroyed by explosives and more than 1,900 individual items and 600 tons of sensitive alloys, useful in a nuclear weapons programme or in uranium enrichment activities, were destroyed or rendered harmless”.

If you read through this whole report, and also the other periodic reports of Iraq weapons inspectors from 1991 through 1997, a story of extensive disarmament of Iraq emerges, even of its most closely guarded secret programs. So the IAEA had some catching up to do and then admirably performed a massive job in Iraq after the 1st Gulf War, starting with close to zero resources. Contrary to the Wolfowitz line, the IAEA was highly credible during this period.

The United States under Clinton, especially after 1997, and G. W. Bush, especially after 9/11, never wanted to recognize these accomplishments, preferring instead to construct a cartoon caricature Saddam with ambition for evil–a handy scare crow for a public wary of military adventure.

Gore gave pre-1991 Iraq nuclear details in 1992
But there is a big part of the pre-1991 Iraq nuclear story that is missing from the Wolfowitz recitation of current administration propaganda. He told Lehrer, “…before the Gulf War in 1991, our intelligence was wrong the other way. We didn’t know how big a nuclear program it turned out — we later found that he had”.

In fact, officials in the US government did know about the Iraqi nuclear program during the time international authorities were in the dark.

Let’s let Al Gore tell us all about it. In a campaign speech at The Center for National Policy on September 29, 1992, Gore explained how the G. H. W. Bush administration held detailed knowledge of and participated in supplying Iraq’s nuclear program.

GORE: “In April 1989, a nuclear proliferation expert from the Department of Energy reported intelligence indicators that Iraq had a crash program underway to build an atomic bomb. In June, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Iraq was running a major European network to procure military goods that were not supposed to be sold. In August, the FBI raided the Atlanta Branch of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and seized evidence of over $4 billion in illegal loans to Iraq, as well as use of about $2 billion of those funds to buy nuclear and other military technologies. And on September 22nd, Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly wrote a memo acknowledging that money coming to Iraq through the Atlanta branch of the BNL did “appear to have been used” to finance acquisition of sensitive military technology. Also in September, the USDA reported kickbacks and possible diversions of US-supplied agricultural funds for military purposes.

“Most significant of all, in the same month, the CIA reported to Secretary of State James Baker and other top Bush administration officials that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons technology through a global network of front companies.

“Now, in the midst of this flood of highly alarming information, on October 2, 1989, President Bush signed a document known as NSD-26, which established policy toward Iraq under his Administration. This document is the benchmark for judging George Bush’s record for the direction of American policy toward Iraq in the period that would ultimately lead to war. We have only a partial idea of what is in that document, since the version that was finally released to Congress has been heavily censored. But the core statement of purpose and the fundamental assumptions behind it are clear. And so is the incredibly poor judgment of George Bush.

“NSD-26 mandated the pursuit of improved economic and political ties with Iraq on the assumption that Iraqi behavior could be modified by means of new favors to be granted”.

Wolfowitz depends on public delusion to ply his trade
The solid propaganda front in which Wolfowitz now participates depends on public ignorance and willingness to be deluded into continuing to accept the completely discredited administration story on weapons in Iraq from last year.

All of the “violations” Wolfowitz cites are moot if, as it appears, Iraq possessed no proscribed weapons at the time of the invasion:

“Iraq was in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441. It was the 17th and supposed to be last resolution after 12 years of Iraq defying the United Nations. They did not comply with that. They lied in their declarations. They obstructed the inspectors….

“…Saddam Hussein was given a chance to come clean, he was given a chance to tell the world the truth and get rid of what he had, and he did not do that….

“…I know what I was told and it was the best judgments of our intelligence community at the time. Were they all accurate, no, they weren’t all accurate, but nobody was misleading anybody….

“The reason for going to war was because Iraq was in violation of the U.N. Security Council resolution….It is their support for terrorism, and it’s the oppression of their people and we had agreed in fact with Resolution 1441 to limit it to weapons of mass destruction and give them one last and final chance to come clean and he did not come clean”.

If Iraq had no weapons then the December 2002 declaration issued by Iraq was not a lie. They said they didn’t have the weapons! Wolfowitz admits this when he says intelligence judgments were not accurate. It was up to the UNMOVIC inspectors to determine the truth or untruth of those judgments. The right of the United States to decide and enforce consequences was not conveyed by UNSCR 1441. As explained in a previous post, war was not to be automatic.

It was the United States that grossly violated UNSCR 1441, and trashed international law while wearing its shredded tatters.

US accountability?
How will the world hold Wolfowitz and the rest of the Bush administration accountable for what clearly is aggression against Iraq? No amount of purported benevolence, imposition of American-style political organization, or market economic transformation in this colonial project can reverse the crime against peace that ushered in this occupation. Given the trumping power the US seems to hold over any meaningful international process, no immediate accounting will occur. However, the future portends realignment with impetus that will be traceable to this episode. Meaning will return to international relations, as it must. Drunken delusion of unlimited power within the United States will face a reckoning of a scope and nature we cannot now predict.