a surprise, he said

I haven’t really had the heart to look much at the Chilcott whitewash to be, but this struck me:

Sir William, the Foreign Office's director general for defence and intelligence between 2002 and 2004, insisted that the role of intelligence in the decision to go to war was "limited".

He also said it was a "surprise" no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were ever found in Iraq. "It was not what we had expected," he added.

The reasons for going to war in Iraq - including the now discredited claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which could be used within 45 minutes of an order being given - remain a long-standing source of controversy.

The lack of weapons wasn’t a surprise to the substantial number of people who never thought they were there in the first place. But “what was expected” was the point behind the scarcity and sloppiness of the evidence collected. The whole subtext was that you just had to cobble some bollocks or other together and get on with it, because you were fighting Saddam Hussein, and for that reason alone there were sure to be chemical weapons. With chemicals in them. Chemicals, you naïve fool, chemicals! Do you want us all to die?

In a way, inquiries on the reasons why Britain went to war in Iraq miss the point. We went because the Americans wanted to go, and that’s really all there was to it. It’s the how that matters, the casual depravity that informed the whole process of fabricating the case. Maybe I’m being unfair in describing the Chilcott enquiry as a whitewash to be: after all, both the Hutton and Butler inquiries told us many cogent and deeply unpleasant things about how the Blairites went to war, albeit in passing. It’s just that an enquiry can’t get to the heart of these things. What you really need is a trial.

Paul Waugh's worth following on this, as of course is Chris Ames.

Comments

[dsquared]

I was pretty surprised by the whole thing, because although I'd been (pretty vocally) of the opinion that the Bush gang were a bunch of incompetents, it hadn't occurred to me that it was beyond their talents to simply plant some fucking evidence.

[Phil]

The pocket cartoon in the Graun, one day in the run-up to war, had it about right. There are these military types around a sand-table, and one of them suddenly says "What if he really has got weapons of mass destruction?"

On the other hand, a friend of mine was deployed to the Gulf, & according to her the risk of incoming NBC munitions was taken very, very seriously.

[ajay]

Phil's right - personally I was surprised that they didn't have any at all, not a single FROG or 120mm mortar round, even though I didn't think that a few tactical chemical weapons were a justification for a war (rather than an excuse).

[chris y]

No, I agree with Daniel. I didn't think there was likely to be anything there before the war, because I felt it was more likely than not that the people looking for, and not finding them knew their job.

After the war, I was astonished that nothing conveniently turned up. I wonder if this is to be credited to the professional integrity of the US officer corps, or sheer arrogance on the part of the Cheney/Rumsfeld administration. Probably the latter.

[Richard J]

Like ajay, I was fairly surprised that nothing turned up, not even a cache buried in the desert as an insurance policy, or just forgotten about in a bureaucratic cock-up[1], but occasionally, even paranoid dictators tell the truth...

[1] The amount of heavy artillery shells that have turned up in IEDs suggests that the quartermaster corps wasn't the most professional bit of the Iraqi army.

[Charlie]

Yep, as if a corrupt state would have what it took to accurately account for every weapon. Even an army of Quakers is going to lose the odd hymn book. And the corruption in Iraq likely extended to weapons being in the official armoury that had never even been ordered, let alone delivered.

As far as our culpability goes: the clincher for me was (a) the presence of Swedish weapons inspectors repeatedly saying 'nothing here' and (b) the large volume of recycled bogus rhetoric, such as '30,000 chemical weapons warheads unaccounted for'. Blair used that phrase from 1998 onwards, without amendment. See:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/crisis_in_the_gulf/texts_and_transcripts/236932.stm

If to get anywhere near '30,000' you have to double or triple count everything in the official UN reports, taking the least charitable interpretation available each time, you're a bullshitter.

[Charlie]

This is the relevant UN report, if anyone's interested:

http://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/s99-94.htm

Back in 2003, I wrote the following summary of that document. Maybe I should blog it, but maybe I can't be bothered.

UNSCOM gives a total for CW-capable munitions (of all types) destroyed unilaterally by Iraq: 29,662. Is this the "30,000" figure?

Of these 29,662 filled and unfilled munitions, UNSCOM lists the numbers of each type of munition and specifies that there were at one time approximately 26,500 CW-capable (but unfilled) 122 mm rocket shells. Remnants of approximately 11,500 of these were seen by UNSCOM although
exact accounting was not possible. UNSCOM was also presented with ingots declared to be from the melting of 15,000 rockets, but could not accept this as adequate verification. They also could not verify the destruction of 600 bombs by a similar method.

So, there is doubt about the destruction of around 15,000 *unfilled* 122 mm rocket shells (and also 1,000-1,500 unfilled bombs). Note: "known to be in existence" is *not* a claim that is being made by the inspectors, and their report does *not* list these items as a priority, perhaps owing to the lack of sufficient chemical production capacity to turn such empty shells into filled chemical weapons.

The UNSCOM report *does* list the following as a priority:

- Clarification of Iraq's expenditure of CW-capable aerial bombs during the Iran-Iraq war: there is reason to think that Iraq has under-declared these munitions by around 6,000 (note: delivery of these weapons requires a working air-force).

- Evidence of the destruction of 550 mustard gas filled shells, currently unaccounted for.

[Alex]

A couple of years ago, some insurgents used a 155mm chem artillery round in a daisy-chain IED, having mistaken it for the ordinary kind. US Army engineers found it and blew it up. Of course, because this is a binary weapon that needs to spin through the air at 1000 mph for several seconds to actually mix the agent, it didn't have any chemical effect other than triggering their chemical alarm and causing Congressman Pete Hoekstra (You Guessed It Party) to wet himself.

That is the single confirmed WMD in Iraq, almost certainly due to sloppy book-keeping when they destroyed the rest.

[Charlie]

And I see that a certain spirograph picture is unique to me: I had thought one got one drawn at random each time one commented.

Is it absolutely unique to me, though, or just unique in the context of this post?

[Guano]

Quakers don't have hymn books. But anyway, Meyer today (Wednesday) seems to have admitted that the UK went to war because the US wanted to.

[Phil]

There's a scene in George Galloway's book where George asks Saddam, in a straight-talking man-to-man behind-closed-doors kind of way, why he still insists on this story that all the chemical weapons have been destroyed - why doesn't he let the inspectors see something and send them away happy? Saddam says to George, you see, George, dealing with UN weapons inspectors is very much like making love to a beautiful woman... sorry, wrong script. Saddam says to George, I keep saying it because it's the truth - all the chemical weapons have been destroyed.

It could have happened - and se non è vero è ben trovato.

[Charlie]

They have hymn book precursors.

[Richard J]

I think there's something wider in that, Phil. ' Too good to be true' is generally an incredibly useful heuristic to determine when someone's bullshitting you, and had Saddam been able to e.g. produce a cache of weapons mouldering away in a bunker because the paperwork had fallen down a gap in a filing cabinet, more otherwise sensible people would have been far more willing to believe his claims about genuinely having destroyed the rest.