WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz

[Bart Meerdink]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Het toneelstukje in de VN Veiligheidsraad over de veronderstelde
'Weapons of Mass Desruction' in Irak lijkt nu ook officieel toegegeven
te worden, zo lijkt het. Bush & Co nemen alleen nog maar 'the Lord
above' serieus geloof ik, of is zelfs dat een toneelstukje?

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=410730

WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz
By David Usborne

30 May 2003

The Bush administration focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction
as the primary justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force
because it was politically convenient, a top-level official at the
Pentagon has acknowledged.

The extraordinary admission comes in an interview with Paul Wolfowitz,
the Deputy Defence Secretary, in the July issue of the magazine Vanity Fair.

Mr Wolfowitz also discloses that there was one justification that was
"almost unnoticed but huge". That was the prospect of the United States
being able to withdraw all of its forces from Saudi Arabia once the
threat of Saddam had been removed. Since the taking of Baghdad,
Washington has said that it is taking its troops out of the kingdom.
"Just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to the door"
towards making progress elsewhere in achieving Middle East peace, Mr
Wolfowitz said. The presence of the US military in Saudi Arabia has been
one of the main grievances of al-Qa'ida and other terrorist groups.

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass
destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr
Wolfowitz tells the magazine.

The comments suggest that, even for the US administration, the logic
that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. They
come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz's immediate
boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, conceded for the first
time that the arms might never be found.

The failure to find a single example of the weapons that London and
Washington said were inside Iraq only makes the embarrassment more
acute. Voices are increasingly being raised in the US ­ and Britain ­
demanding an explanation for why nothing has been found.

Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr
Wolfowitz, recognised widely as the leader of the hawks' camp in
Washington most responsible for urging President George Bush to use
military might in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz
was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11
September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan.

There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been
running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring
that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way
into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the
author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that
was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa'ida attacks.

In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for
attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was
presumably referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin
Powell. He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to
the push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that
removing Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option.

The conversion of Mr Powell was on full view in the UN Security Council
in February when he made a forceful presentation of evidence that
allegedly proved that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction.

Critics of the administration and of the war will now want to know how
convinced the Americans really were that the weapons existed in Iraq to
the extent that was publicly stated. Questions are also multiplying as
to the quality of the intelligence provided to the White House. Was it
simply faulty ­ given that nothing has been found in Iraq ­ or was it
influenced by the White House's fixation on the weapons issue? Or were
the intelligence agencies telling the White House what it wanted to hear?

This week, Sam Nunn, a former senator, urged Congress to investigate
whether the argument for war in Iraq was based on distorted
intelligence. He raised the possibility that Mr Bush's policy against
Saddam had influenced the intelligence that indicated Baghdad had
weapons of mass destruction.

This week, the CIA and the other American intelligence agencies have
promised to conduct internal reviews of the quality of the material they
supplied the administration on what was going on in Iraq. The heat on
the White House was only made fiercer by Mr Rumsfeld's admission that
nothing may now be found in Iraq to back up those earlier claims, if
only because the Iraqis may have got rid of any evidence before the
conflict.

"It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them
prior to a conflict," the Defence Secretary said.

* The US military said last night that it had released a suspected Iraqi
war criminal by mistake. US Central Command said it was offering a
$25,000 (315,000) reward for the capture of Mohammed Jawad An-Neifus,
suspected of being involved in the murder of thousands of Iraqi Shia
Muslims whose remains were found at a mass grave in Mahawil, southern
Iraq, last month.

The alleged mobile weapons laboratories

As scepticism grows over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, London and Washington are attempting to turn the focus of
attention to Iraq's alleged possession of mobile weapons labs.

A joint CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency report released this week
claimed that two trucks found in northern Iraq last month were mobile
labs used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with
hi-tech laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery
represented the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a
biowarfare programme".

The design of the vehicles made them "an ingeniously simple
self-contained bioprocessing system". The report said no other purpose,
for example water purification, medical laboratory or vaccine
production, would justify such effort and expense.

But critics arenot convinced. No biological agents were found on the
trucks and experts point out that, unlike the trucks described by Colin
Powell, the Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN Security Council,
they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for
weapons inspectors to detect. One former UN inspector said that the
trucks would have been a very inefficient way to produce anthrax.

Katherine Butler


30 May 2003 13:11

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********