Jesse Lee,
There's one huge mystery about the run-up to war of which virtually
nothing has been said, but which might answer quite a few others if the
answer came to light:
What the hell was Saddam thinking?
Of more specifically, how is it that he could not convince the inspectors
he had disarmed?
The neocons' only remaining defense with even the slightest bit of
credence is that many in the intelligence community, and indeed around the
world were inclined to believe that Saddam still had something.
Even those who spoke up to decry the nuclear hype admitted that they too
were so inclined. Now it appears that was not so. And not because we've
combed over every inch of a country the size of blah blah blah, but
because by all accounts, the captured regime members are talking (the
administration has surprisingly not even denied this), and they're all
saying the same thing: the weapons were all destroyed.
So why couldn't, or didn't Saddam prove it? Why was he not more
cooperative before 1998?
It was always difficult to tell what Blix and Co. really believed, and
this was linked to the lack of information on what negotiations between
inspectors and the Iraqi regime consisted of. When Blix asked about the
"unaccounted for stockpiles" and the pre-1998 obstruction, what
was the Iraqi response? Was it that they had destroyed the weapons but had
no proof because (understandably) they had not wanted to document the
destruction of weapons they were not supposed to have?
The bluff theory was fashionable for a period. The idea here was that
Saddam had destroyed the weapons out of fear of the US, but that they
could not admit it because of the threat from Iran (chemical weapons had
already saved him in the first war). The theory seemed alright, if only
because an incomplete explanation was better than none at all, but then
came this bizarre
piece from NYTimes:
As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats
argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret
message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to
make a deal.
***
He said, if this is about oil, we will talk about U.S. oil
concessions. If it is about the peace process, then we can talk. If this
is about weapons of mass destruction, let the Americans send over their
people. There are no weapons of mass destruction.
If you haven't read it, it's quite the intriguing and entertaining
narrative, and while there is plenty of reason to be skeptical, the source
and the thoroughness of the research were enough to more or less convince
me. Nobody seemed to know what quite to say about it, but if true it
offers a pivotal piece of evidence as to Saddam's thinking, which surprise
surprise was exactly what one would expect any half-sane person in his
position to think:
I'm fucked, please don't kill me and take my country.
The question now becomes: If he was willing to do virtually anything, even
promise elections, what was he not willing to do for the inspectors?
Doesn't make much sense.
Seymour Hersh in The
Stovepipe wrote of this testimony:
Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied
to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against
Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he
said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it
acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the
weapons at all.
Another clue perhaps, but still, would Saddam promise elections before he
admitted that?
Another possible part of the explanation might be understood by looking at
how our own president was persuaded into war. He doesn't read the news,
Condi does it for him, he doesn't formulate policy, the neocons do it for
him. Who knows how much Bush doesn't know, the sky's the limit.
One has to imagine it was much worse for Saddam. Even if he was not the
comic-book arch-evil sadist he's supposed to be, one can imagine his
cabinet being a bit hesitant to tell him any bad news. It seems highly
probable that Saddam was not on the plane of reality.
But here is the thing. Whatever Saddam was thinking, somebody in his
cabinet knew, and you can bet they've told their captors (keep in mind
that cooperation equals freedom and money, non-cooperation equals never
seeing the light of day again). Bush knows, and he's not saying.
Frustratingly, nobody seems to be asking.
What are they hiding...
One of the other biggest conundrums about the war was that all
intelligence agencies warned Bush and Blair that the war would likely make
the remote threat of Saddam's weapons a virtual
certainty.
The new British information, arising from three government inquiries,
also showed that there were two points on which the United States and the
British agreed: that there was no evidence before the war that Hussein had
given chemical or biological materials to terrorists, and that the Iraqi
leader probably would take such a step only if his government was about to
collapse under attack.
Even if one argues that Bushco don't care about the lives lost in such an
attack, it would be very difficult to spin the fact that the war has
precipitated what it was supposed to prevent, and I believe it's safe to
say it would have easily cost them the 2004 election. So how could they be
so stupid?
There's one explanation, and I certainly am only putting this forth for
consideration, but this conundrum is eliminated if in fact they knew there
were no weapons. This would obviously be staggering, and would mean that
Cheney and the boys were literally acting for almost every waking moment,
both public and private. But like I say, it would explain a lot. And
although there might have been plenty of good reason to suspect Hussein,
there was also ample evidence to the contrary. All they would have had to
do to come to the conclusion that there were no weapons would have been to
verify the account of Hussein
Kamal:
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.
(25 January 1999 letter to U.N. Security Council, Enclosure 1,
para.12).
Kamal was a son-in-law of Saddam's and the highest-ranking defector to
come out of Iraq, later killed by Saddam Hussein along with his brother.
In an interview with high-level UNSCOM representatives, he revealed
the details of the clandestine programs of the previous years.
Bush and Blair routinely misrepresented his testimony in statements
such as:
"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law."- President Bush
Not only did Bush neglect to mention that Kamal was seven-years dead, he neglected to quote what was by far the most important part of his testimony:
"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed"
It now appears that he was telling the truth. UN inspectors obviously gave the account a great deal of weight (as the letter to the Security Council indicates), and Newsweek has even quoted inspectors as saying that they kept the testimony out of public view because they were attempting to "bluff" Saddam into revealing even more information. Also mysterious.
In any case, the point here is that there was good reason to believe that Saddam had destroyed his weapons, and therefore the possibility that the administration was actually operating on that assumption cannot be eliminated off-hand. But isn't it still too ludicrous to believe?
Well, compared to what?
The investigative reporting on Cheney has presented a different picture. Very credible and breathtakingly researched pieces from Seymour Hersh, and Spencer Ackerman have depicted Cheney as a man increasingly driven by a fervent ideology and an intense disdain for the CIA. The depiction strikes one as extremely compelling, largely because it paints Cheney as man not driven by overt malice, but rather drunk on his own theories and (presumably) power- a sort of middle ground between the narratives of the right and the left. But is this really any more believable? Both Hersh and Ackerman describe scenarios in which Cheney was so blinded by ideology that he became literally idiotic, perhaps even psychotic in his judgments. One such judgment would be the one cited above in which he and the administration supposedly simply ignored intelligence findings (and common sense arguments) that a war would precipitate what it was supposed to prevent. They seem perfectly clear-headed on this point in relation to North Korea.
But a focal point of both Hersh's and Ackerman's pieces is the Office of Special Plans. This office consisted of a handful of neocons hand-picked by Cheney, who simply cherry-picked the most spectacular raw intelligence and fed it to Cheney for use in selling the war. Ackerman's piece in particular portrays the formation of this office as a disgusted reaction to the CIA, which Cheney had by this time completely lost faith in, with some good reason (the CIA does indeed have a poor record on many important crises over the years). According to Ackerman's portrayal, the Office of Special Plans was conceived to detect what the CIA had missed. But does this make sense?
Rather than attempt to revamp the CIA and the culture that Cheney supposedly felt was acting consciously against him, he simply decided to put the weight of the entire intelligence community on four or five of his friends with absolutely no intelligence training, and that even though they were overtly accepting as gospel anything that gave credence to the pro-war argument and rejecting everything else, he trusted in full that he was getting objective, truthful analysis? The entire function of the intelligence agencies is to filter through thousands of intelligence reports (most from imperfect sources to say the least) in order to fish out the handful that are probably credible. If Cheney honestly believed OSP was providing "solid intelligence" than he was nothing short of completely off his rocker. This was only one example, but obviously an important one, and the question to my mind is still very much open whether Cheney was swept up in ideology, or firmly and irreversibly committed to a platform of grand, noble lies. Another example for consideration is "we will, in fact, be welcomed as liberators" line. According to the Hersh-Ackerman narrative, we are to believe that Cheney and the neocons were simply so convinced by Chalabi and others that there would be flowers, and that the entire regime would simply start taking orders from Bush instead of Hussein without the blink of an eye, that they simply felt it was unnecessary to create a contingency plan at all. Again, was Cheney really that blind, that stupid or psychotic, or did he simply not give the slightest damn what happened to Iraq after we got control of the oil?
Two of the administration's greatest assets have been it's general secrecy and loyalty at the highest levels, and circumstances of its own creation that literally overwhelm the American media, thus successfully tempting the media to ignore the most difficult questions in favor of more accessible stories. Slow news day are dreaded.
But truly it is time for the media to get off their asses. Nobody will ever be able to compile any sort of coherent history of this period from the information now on the table, it simply doesn't make sense. The question of what Saddam was thinking is by far the most important, and most perplexing unexplored story of the day, and it is time that the handful of decent journalists left in this country start asking.
originally a www.MoneyJungle.org blog entry
Jesse Lee is a regular columnist for www.opednews.com and operates Common Sense, a biweekly newsletter designed for distribution by online readers in Bush Country. He co-operates the blog www.moneyjungle.org and is a founding contributor to the platform of 2020 Democrats. To comment on this column, or to receive Common Sense via email, contact Jesse at commonsense@opednews.com. This article is copyright by Jesse Lee and published by opednews.com but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
