Salocin

No WMD in Iraq. So What?

So there's no WMD in Iraq. Big deal, that hardly classifies as news anymore, some of us have been saying that since before we went to war in the first place. Nevertheless, the BBC News Website, along with much of the rest of the press, have felt obliged to communicate the news now that the bleeding obvious has been made official. Nothing like red tape and an enquiry to legitimise the truth. So what do most people make of the news that Saddam was as dangerous as a cat with it's claws pulled?

The BBC News (a different article) reports Jack Straw (The UK's foreign secretary) as saying that Saddam posed a bigger threat than previously imagined. I'm not sure what previous imaginings that refers to, but if it was the Prime Minister's celebrated public imagining of Saddam being able to strike in 45 minutes, I wait with breathless anticipation to find out what has been discovered to substantiate this claim.

No such luck, Jack Straw is referring to the fact that Saddam had "plans" to develop weapons and to build his army back up. What a shock - after being utterly humiliated in the first Gulf War, his army in tatters, he felt the need to build it up again - so would I, given his relations with some of his neighbours. How those plans are worse than the former belief that he could strike worldwide within the hour is something that no doubt makes sense only if it serves your political purpose that it should do so.

On the other side of the argument, we have the peaceniks who claim this proves that Saddam was never a threat, that containment was working and that we shouldn't have gone to war. Although I am closer to this argument than I am to the hawk point of view, there are clearly lots of flaws in this too. It appears fairly clear that Saddam's intention was to tie the inspectors up and generally impede the United Nations by leveraging that body's inability to act decisively on anything at all. From the US Department of Defense...

Powell presented considerable evidence that Saddam Hussein is actively discouraging people from cooperating with inspectors and trying to keep inspections from being effective.
 
He said Iraq has a "higher committee for monitoring the inspection teams," which includes Iraq's vice president, Hussein's son Qusay, and several notorious generals.
 
"This effort to hide things from inspectors is not one or two isolated events. Quite the contrary," Powell said. "This is part and parcel of a policy of evasion and deception that goes back 12 years, a policy set at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime."

Now I know what you're going to say about that source, but I think it's fair to say that, from the above and other sources, Saddam was deliberately stalling the UN and seeking to end the embargo, dodging their obligation to give the world some reassurance that their aggressive regime didn't have the weapons to make them a real threat.

The point is that Saddam was playing the UN game where you ignore the resolution, but yield as much as is required, and only when required, to keep at least one ally willing to veto any action against you, while never getting a critical mass of the Security Council mad at you. He should take a page out of Israel's book, they've been doing it for years with far greater success. He didn't manage it because he didn't have the allies, no-one trusted him, his intentions were unclear and his malice proven, so stretching the UNs permissiveness wasn't going to end well for him, and perhaps had he known he couldn't get away with it, he wouldn't have tried, and this would all have been avoided.

So what's the end result? Well, the hawks say one thing, which is clearly in their political interest and a very biased interpretation of the facts. The liberals say another, which is equally biased, especially given election and popularity angst among the Americans, and the UK Conservatives fear that they are about to be relegated to the political scrapbook. Where do we, the confused, uninformed masses that they all represent, end up?

Confused and uninformed, I am afraid. There is no agency, representative or organization on this planet capable of giving a perspective and analysis of the situation in Iraq, including the benefits, costs, new and averted dangers (if any) arising from the decision by the US to go to war, that is untainted by a western or international political point of view. Those of us hungry to understand will have to trade off the misinformation of the present with the history books of the future, which will as always have been written by the victors - our governments. These will be based on information available in the archives, which means reports from biased media outlets and the documents that these same governments have chosen to file outside of their secrets acts, and which will be declassified after the accepted version of events has sunk so deeply into the popular psyche that the truth will be an interesting sidebar on some future news website.

How does one live in this world and not become a cynic?

Posted by nlvp at October 6, 2004 06:30 PM