“I ordered
destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons – biological, chemical,
missile, nuclear were destroyed”
(General
Hussein Kamel, son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, 22 August 1995)
Clare
Short suggested that Tony Blair thought it was honourable to back the US in
taking military action against Iraq and that therefore he saw the various ruses
and devices he used to get us there as “honourable deception”.
She was the second witness
to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry into whether the Government
presented “accurate and complete information to Parliament in the period
leading up to military action in Iraq, particularly in relation to Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction”.
The first witness
was Robin Cook, who proffered the alternative view that “the problem was the
burning sincerity and conviction of those who were involved in the exercise”.
We incline to the latter view:
that Blair sincerely believed that he was doing right thing in taking Britain
to war against Iraq alongside the US, and that he sincerely believed everything
he said in pursuit of that goal, at the time he said it, whether it was true or
not. Indeed, he seems capable of
believing contrary things at the same time with equal sincerity.
Be that as it may, it doesn’t take
a Select Committee inquiry, merely a passing interest in the issue, to prove
that the Government did not present “accurate and complete information”
to Parliament and the public in the lead up the war.
And the inaccuracies were not of
the trivial kind, which has dominated the Committee’s proceedings up to
now. The Committee appears to be
obsessed with investigating whether somebody in Downing Street drew unwarranted
conclusions from intelligence information and forced the inclusion, in the
Government dossier
published last September, of the claim that:
“Some of these [chemical and biological] weapons are
deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them.”
This dossier made extravagant
claims that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and the means of
delivering them (and had re-established the means of manufacturing chemical and
biological agents). If Iraq had
retained these weapons, it would be very strange indeed if it hadn’t plans to
deploy them, that is, for example, to transport filled shells from a bunker to
an artillery piece so that they could be fired, and to do so within a short
period.
In other words, the sentence whose
origin has generated so much heat is a bit more significant than the statement
that night follows day, but not much.
In
any case, the dossier published last September is a Government document, with a
foreword by the Prime Minister himself.
It doesn’t matter a damn who wrote what bits of it – the Government
published it, and the Government is therefore responsible for every word in it,
no matter who wrote it, be it Alistair Campbell, or the Chairman of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, or JK Rowling.
What
can be said without fear of contradiction is that the authors gave the
Government what it wanted: a casus belli.
Significant inaccuracies
The
dossier itself is at times opaque, and it even contains errors of fact. But it
is what it doesn’t tell us, and what the Government didn’t tell us in the lead
up to war, that is most significant.
Here, we are not talking about the Government making exaggerated claims
from secret intelligence information: we are talking about matters that are
wholly in the public domain.
Examples
of the Government’s failure to give “accurate and complete information” are:
1. The
failure to mention that Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, told UNSCOM
in 1995 that he had ordered the destruction of all of Iraq’s proscribed
weapons;
2. The
distortion of UN findings that that weapons were “unaccounted for" to
imply (or say) that they actually existed;
3. The
failure to mention that many of Iraq’s chemical and biological agents would by
now be useless as warfare agents, if they hadn’t already been destroyed;
4. The
failure to tell the public that UN inspectors had invalidated many of the
claims in the dossier;
5. The gross
distortion of Hans Blix’s report of 6 March 2003, entitled Unresolved
Disarmament Issues, to give the public the impression that there were many
of them;
6. The
blatant lie told that President Chirac said on 10 March 2003 that France would
never support military action, when in fact he said the opposite.
Last September’s dossier is said
to be the most important Government publication in a generation, and many
high-powered people in the intelligence services read it, not to mention the
Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and, last and definitely not least,
Alistair Campbell. Nevertheless, it was
published with at least two errors of fact in it. Not intelligence assessments that are arguably wrong, but facts
that are definitely wrong.
Both errors are in Part 2 of the
document, entitled History of UN Weapons Inspections. First, on page 34, paragraph 5, on UNSCOM
access to presidential sites:
“In December 1997 [the head of UNSCOM] Richard Butler
reported to the UN Security Council that Iraq had created a new category of
sites, ‘Presidential’ and ‘sovereign’, from which it claimed that UNSCOM
inspectors would henceforth be barred. The terms of the ceasefire in 1991
foresaw no such limitation. However,
Iraq consistently refused to allow UNSCOM inspectors access to any of these
eight Presidential sites. Many of these so-called ‘palaces’ are in fact
large compounds, which are an integral part of Iraqi counter-measures designed
to hide weapons material.”
If you go to the UNSCOM
website and look at a report
by Charles Duelfer in document S/1998/326, you will read:
“The initial entry to the eight presidential sites in
Iraq … was performed by mission UNSCOM 243 during the period from 25 March to 4
April 1998.”
In
other words, contrary to what the dossier says, access was allowed to all 8
sites. This was confirmed by the
Foreign Office in a written answer
to Paul Flynn MP on 4 February 2003:
“Paul
Flynn: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
whether UNSCOM 243 entered Iraqi presidential palaces between March and April
1998. [94724]
“Mr. Mike O'Brien: Yes.”
This error is of some importance,
since the alleged exclusion of the inspectors from these sites gives credence
to the view that Iraq was hiding something there that it didn't want inspectors
to see. To reinforce this proposition,
the next page of the dossier contains a map of an unnamed presidential site
with Buckingham Palace and its grounds superimposed on it to the same scale. The purpose of the map was to convey the impression
that there is more to this presidential site than just serving the needs of a
head of state. And there are 8
presidential sites in Iraq. Of course,
had an outline of Balmoral been superimposed instead, the impression would have
been entirely different.
(This device must have dreamed up
in Downing Street: perhaps it was one of the “presentational suggestions”
Alistair Campbell has admitted making to the chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee about the dossier. It served
its purpose well because it was a big talking point when the dossier was
published.)
The Government has known about
this error since early January, at least, but needless to say, it has made no
effort to publicise a correction. Of
itself, it is not very important in the argument about Iraq’s proscribed
weapons. But correcting it would have
meant admitting that the authors of this very important dossier got known facts
wrong, which doesn’t inspire confidence in their ability to assess
intelligence. So, the Government kept quiet about it, lest the authority of
their dossier be severely damaged.
The second error of fact, on page 39, paragraph 13, is yet another
instance of Government misrepresentation of what happened in December 1998, to
cause the UN inspectors to leave Iraq.
This is but one of the hundreds of such instances that took place in the
lead up to war, most memorably in Jeremy Paxman’s interview with Tony Blair on
6 February 2003, when he had to be corrected five times (transcript here).
The dossier speaks of “the effective ejection of UN inspectors” from
Iraq in December 1998. Of course, the
inspectors were not ejected by Iraq: they were withdrawn by Richard Butler at
the request of the US Government because of the imminence of Desert Fox, the
4-day US/UK bombing campaign on Iraq, as the following extract from his book Saddam
Defiant shows:
“I received a telephone call from US Ambassador [to the UN] Peter
Burleigh inviting me for a private conversation at the US mission. ... Burleigh
informed me that on instructions from Washington it would be 'prudent to take
measures to ensure the safety and security of UNSCOM staff presently in Iraq.'
… I told him that I would act on his advice and remove my staff from Iraq.”
(p224)
The people who caused the UN
inspectors to be ejected from Iraq were Bill Clinton and, his ally in Desert
Fox, Tony Blair.
It would be unfair to accuse the
people who got this wrong of lying. But
it reveals their mindset: they are believers in the myth of unceasing Iraqi
obstruction to inspection, which reached its zenith with the expulsion of UN
inspectors in December 1998, thereby proving that Saddam had something to hide
and, after almost four years without inspections, must have had even more to
hide in September 2002.
For people with that mindset, no
evidence was required to prove that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” in
September 2002. It was “palpably
absurd” to believe otherwise, to use Tony Blair’s words to the House of Commons
on 18 March 2003. It is easy to see why
those responsible for the dossier reached the bold conclusions they did:
without evidence of Iraqi disarmament since 1998, for them it would have
been “palpably absurd” to come to any other conclusions.
The Foreign Office must be keeping
things from him.)
The final UNSCOM report in January 1999
emphasises the importance to its work of the defection of General Hussein
Kamel, the former director of Iraq's Military Industrialisation Corporation, in
charge of Iraq's weapons programme.
Referring to him it says:
“… the overall period of the Commission's disarmament
work must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the
departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. General Hussein Kamal. This resulted in the provision to the
Commission of an extensive cache of documents on Iraq’s prohibited programmes.”
He was interviewed by a joint
UNSCOM/IAEA team in Amman on 22 August 1995, but it was not until February 2003
that details the interview became public knowledge, thanks to Glen Rangwala
(See here
for a facsimile of the official notes of the interview).
In the interview, Kamel says:
“I ordered
destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons – biological, chemical,
missile, nuclear were destroyed” (p13).
Earlier
(p7), he described anthrax as the “main focus” of Iraq biological programme and
when asked “were weapons and agents destroyed?”, he replied: “nothing
remained”.
Of
missiles, he said: “not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds
[sic] for production. All missiles were destroyed.” (p8)
The
Government’s dossier emphasises the importance of the defection of Hussein
Kamel, but strangely in this supposedly objective document there is no mention
that he told UN inspectors that, on his orders, all of Iraq’s proscribed
weapons and weapons-related material were destroyed.
A
regular feature of Government pre-war propaganda was for ministers to read out
a long list of weapons and weapons-related material, which UN inspectors had
been unable to account for. That is,
inspectors knew that the items had existed at one time; Iraq said it had
destroyed them, but was unable to present quantitative evidence of their
destruction to inspectors.
In
making the case for war, ministers never made it clear that weapons and
weapons-related material that UN inspectors could not account for did not
necessarily exist. As Hans Blix said
to the Security Council on 5 June 2003
“…it is not justified to jump to the conclusion that
something exists just because it is unaccounted for.”
The Prime Minister encouraged his listeners to make that jump when he
made a statement
on the dossier to the House of Commons on 24 September 2002:
“As the dossier sets
out, we estimate on the basis of the UN's work that there were up to 360 tonnes
of bulk chemical warfare agents, including 1.5 tonnes of VX nerve agent; up to
3,000 tonnes of precursor chemicals; growth media sufficient to produce 26,000
litres of anthrax spores; and over 30,000 special munitions for delivery of
chemical and biological agents. All of this was missing and unaccounted for.”
99% of people reading that would conclude that we had
it on UN authority that on 24 September 2002 Iraq possessed chemical and
biological weapons, plus material for making more, when all the UN inspectors
have ever said is that such weapons and material have not been accounted for.
In his war speech on 18 March 2003, he told
the House of Commons:
“When the inspectors left in 1998, they left
unaccounted for 10,000 litres of anthrax; a far-reaching VX nerve agent
programme; up to 6,500 chemical munitions; at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas,
and possibly more than 10 times that amount; unquantifiable amounts of sarin,
botulinum toxin and a host of other biological poisons; and an entire Scud
missile programme. We are asked now seriously to accept that in the last few
years—contrary to all history, contrary to all intelligence—Saddam decided
unilaterally to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably
absurd.”
Think
about that: he is saying that Iraq must have proscribed weapons now, since it
is palpably absurd to claim that Saddam Hussein destroyed them since 1998 –
even though according to the first sentence they were merely unaccounted for in
1998. Obviously, there is no
distinction in the Prime Minister’s mind between being unaccounted for and
existing.
These
are but two of the many examples of the genre in which ministers gave the
impression, to put it at its mildest, that UN inspectors had said that weapons
and weapons-related material actually existed, when they had merely said they
were unaccounted for.
It
is difficult to work out whether the authors of the dossier itself made the
jump that Hans Blix warned about – because the sources of the claims in it, and
sometimes the claims themselves, are often obscure. This applies particularly to the core claims in paragraph 2 of
the Executive Summary, which says:
“Much information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is already in
the public domain from UN reports and from Iraqi defectors. This points clearly to Iraq’s continuing
possession, after 1991, of chemical and biological agents and weapons produced
before the Gulf War. It shows that Iraq
has refurbished sites formerly associated with the
production of chemical and biological agents. And it indicates that Iraq
remains able to manufacture these agents, and to use bombs, shells, artillery
rockets and ballistic missiles to deliver them.”
That paragraph is extraordinarily
opaque for any document, let alone a supposedly objective document, drawn up to
inform the decision on peace or war.
The first sentence seems to place
the same value on information from defectors as information from UN reports,
which cannot be intended given the well-known unreliability of defectors.
The meaning of the second sentence
is unfathomable. Is it saying that Iraq
continued to possess these agents and weapons after 1991, which is a
well-established fact attested to by UNSCOM?
Or is it saying that it is well-established fact that Iraq continued to
possess these agents and weapons right up to September 2002? Or is it merely an intelligence judgment
that Iraq possessed these agents and weapons in September 2002? Likewise, are sentences 3 and 4 saying that
it is a well-established fact that Iraq has reconstituted its production
facilities, or merely an intelligence judgment?
To add to the confusion, in
Part 3 of the dossier (Iraq under Saddam Hussein) page 46, paragraph 16,
it says:
“Some
twenty thousand Iranians were killed by mustard gas and the nerve agents tabun
and sarin, all of which Iraq still possesses.”
Is this categorical statement that Iraq possesses chemical agents a
well-established fact, or is it based on intelligence judgment? Or perhaps the authors have jumped to the
conclusion that Hans Blix warned against.
All
of Iraq’s unaccounted for chemical and biological agents were manufactured
before the Gulf War. The dossier said nothing about the possible degradation of
these agents, despite much independent evidence that many of them would no
longer be useful as warfare agents.
The
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) published a report
on Iraq’s proscribed weapons on 9 September 2002, which the Government’s
dossier refers to approvingly in its Executive Summary as “an independent and well-researched overview”.
It comments on the possible deterioration of nerve
agents manufactured prior to the Gulf War.
Here, we are talking about so-called G-agents (tabun, sarin and
cyclosarin) and V-agents (VX). The IISS
assessment is as follows:
“As a practical matter, any nerve agent from this
period [pre-1991] would have deteriorated by now …” (p51)
“Any VX produced by Iraq before 1991 is likely to
have decomposed over the past decade …”
(p52)
“Any G-agent or V-agent stocks that Iraq concealed
from UNSCOM inspections are likely to have deteriorated by now.” (p53).
And
as regards botulinum toxin, the IISS dossier concluded:
"Any
botulinum toxin produced in 1989-90 would no longer be useful" (p40).
None of this was included in the
Government’s dossier. That cannot have been an oversight.
Before the
invasion of Iraq, UNMOVIC published (on 6 March 2003) a 173-page document
entitled Unresolved
Disarmament Issues. Tony Blair
and Jack Straw are very fond of referring to this document, and every time they
refer to it they mention its title and its size. What more proof is needed that
Iraq has “weapons of mass destruction”, they imply, than an account of
unresolved disarmament issues by the nice Mr Blix that is 173 pages long.
In fact,
the title of the document is misleading: it contains an historical survey of
Iraq’s development of chemical and biological weapons and missiles, of their
use and destruction by Iraq itself and by UN inspectors, ending with a
statement of unresolved issues for each item, plus suggestions as to what Iraq might
do to resolve these issues. It also has
something to say about the probable lack of effectiveness of some of the
chemical and biological agents, if they still exist.
The
Prime Minister quoted from it in his war speech to the House of Commons of 18 March
2003. In the course of that speech (see
quote above), he spoke of “unquantifiable amounts of sarin”, but he
failed to mention the following UNMOVIC assessment about these “unquantifiable
amounts”:
“There is no evidence that
any bulk Sarin-type agents remain in Iraq - gaps in accounting of these agents
are related to Sarin-type agents weaponized in rocket warheads and aerial
bombs. Based on the documentation found by UNSCOM during inspections in Iraq,
Sarin-type agents produced by Iraq were largely of low quality and as such,
degraded shortly after production. Therefore, with respect to the unaccounted
for weaponized Sarin-type agents, it is unlikely that they would still be
viable today.” (Unresolved
Disarmament Issues, p73)
Tony Blair also mentioned VX
as an awful threat (again, see above).
This VX was produced in 1990 by what UNMOVIC called “route B”. According to UNMOVIC:
“VX produced through route B must be used relatively quickly after
production (about 1 to 8 weeks), which would probably be satisfactory for
wartime requirements.” (ibid, p82)
Tony Blair also mentioned “a host of
other biological poisons” (again,
see above). One of the
biological poisons known to have been manufactured by Iraq is botulinum
toxin. Tony Blair failed to mention the
following UNMOVIC assessment on botulinum toxin:
“Any botulinum toxin that was produced and stored according to the
methods described by Iraq and in the time period declared is unlikely to retain
much, if any, of its potency. Therefore, any such stockpiles of botulinum
toxin, whether in bulk storage or in weapons that remained in 1991, would not
be active today.” (ibid, p101)
Tony Blair also mentioned
mustard gas, but he failed to mention the following UNMOVIC
assessment:
“There is much evidence, including
documents provided by Iraq and information collected by UNSCOM, to suggest that
most quantities of Mustard remaining in 1991, as declared by Iraq, were
destroyed under UNSCOM supervision. The remaining gaps are related to the
accounting for Mustard filled aerial bombs and artillery projectiles. There are
550 Mustard filled shells and up to 450 mustard filled aerial bombs unaccounted
for since 1998. The mustard filled shells account for a couple of tonnes of
agent while the aerial bombs account for approximately 70 tonnes. According to
an investigation made by the Iraqi “Depot Inspection Commission”, the results
of which were reported to UNMOVIC in March 2003, the discrepancy in the
accounting for the mustard filled shells could be explained by the fact that
Iraq had based its accounting on approximations.” (ibid, p76)
Mustard
is the only chemical agent once possessed by Iraq that, it is generally
thought, does not degrade; however, UNMOVIC was content that the vast bulk of
it was accounted for. As for biological
agents, only anthrax was unaccounted for to any substantial degree. Opinion is divided as to whether the “wet”
anthrax produced by Iraq degrades, but Blix was of the opinion that even after
15 years “it could be viable” (ibid, p98).
Needless
to say, the above is not the whole story – for example, there are also
outstanding questions about precursor material – but there is no doubt that
Tony Blair gave grossly inaccurate information to Parliament about Iraq’s
proscribed chemical and biological agents.
Had he given accurate information, it is highly unlikely that Parliament
would have voted for war.
In
the limited time they were allowed, the IAEA inspectors confirmed that Iraq had
not revived its nuclear weapons programme, which had been dismantled by
UNSCOM. They also went close to
disproving all of the claims in the September dossier that Iraq was trying to
revive it. The documentation from
British sources “proving” that Iraq had recently tried to import uranium from
Niger was easily identified as a forgery.
And the inspectors accepted that the aluminium tubes, which Iraq was
trying to import, were for rockets, not to build centrifuges for uranium
enrichment, as was claimed.
The
September dossier named about eight sites suspected of producing chemicals,
which could be used for the production of proscribed chemical agents. Before the end of January, all these sites
had been visited by UN inspectors and nothing suspect has been found. Replying to a written question from Labour
MP. Harry Cohen, in the House of Commons on 22 January 2003, Foreign Office
Minister, Mike O’Brien, was admitted:
“We
understand from published information from UNMOVIC and the IAEA inspectors have
visited all of the sites identified in the UK dossier. They have not reported
uncovering any signs of weapons of mass destruction, or programmes for their
production at the sites.”
That
doesn’t entirely rule out that proscribed activity was going on at these sites
last September as claimed in the dossier, but by January it was no longer going
on – which is argument for continued inspection.
The
Government never attempted to draw to public attention any of this information,
which modified the assessment in the September dossier. On the contrary, the Government constantly
derided anything the inspectors discovered as unimportant.
And
finally, there was the Government’s gross misrepresentation of the French
position on military action against Iraq.
For
example, the Prime Minister told
the House of Commons on 18 March 2002:
“Last
Monday [10 March], we were getting very close with it [the second resolution].
We very nearly had the majority agreement. ... Then, on Monday night, France
said that it would veto a second resolution, whatever the circumstances.”
It is
quite untrue to say that President Chirac ruled out military action in all
circumstances on 10 March: on the contrary, he specifically ruled it in, if the
inspectors reported that they couldn’t do their job, as the following extract
from his TV interview on 10 March shows:
“The inspectors have to tell us: ‘we can continue
and, at the end of a period which we think should be of a few months’ - I'm
saying a few months because that's what they have said – ‘we shall have
completed our work and Iraq will be disarmed’. Or they will come and tell the
Security Council: ‘we are sorry but Iraq isn't cooperating, the progress isn't
sufficient, we aren't in a position to achieve our goal, we won't be able to
guarantee Iraq's disarmament’. In that case it will be for the Security Council
and it alone to decide the right thing to do. But in that case, of course,
regrettably, the war would become inevitable. It isn't today.” (see English
translation of the interview here)
* * *
That
the Government failed to give “accurate and complete information to Parliament
in the period leading up to military action in Iraq, particularly in relation
to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” is not in doubt. The case against the Government is
overwhelming.
The
above should be the substance of the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report. To write it, we didn’t need sight of raw
intelligence, or the Joint Intelligence Committee’s assessments of raw
intelligence. Nor did we need to take evidence from the Prime Minister, or the
Foreign Secretary, or even Alistair Campbell.
We just read publicly available sources, all of which were available
prior to Parliament voting for war on 18 March 2003.
Labour & Trade Union Review
July 2003