Geoff Davies' Home Page

Missing the Big Picture

24 August 2003

The trouble with the current Australian and British inquiries into possible intelligence failures or distortions regarding Saddam Hussein’s weaponry is their legalistic focus on the detail of who said what and when. They miss the larger political picture, and make themselves easy targets for the nitpicking, word games and flat denials at which politicians are so practised.

Modern politics is about impressions much more than it is about facts, and this was never more so than in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. It is when you step back to view the larger picture that you can connect the dots, as Americans say, and see a clear pattern of political deception. From the larger perspective of recent history, the holes in President Bush’s case for invading Iraq were so big you could drive freight trains through them.

Essential perspective on the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that it was planned long before Bush’s acquisition of power, and long before 9/11, by people who are now senior members of the Bush Administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The stated reason was that it was essential to U.S. strategic interests, as perceived by right-wing radicals. Their logic is not hard to follow: U.S. military-industrial power depends on oil, most of the oil is in the Middle East, so the U.S. must ensure the “security” of the Middle East.

Another essential perspective is the way the U.S. has conducted its foreign policy for the past half century. It has been about preserving and enhancing the power of the U.S. For most of that time this meant opposing the power of the Soviet Union and its sympathisers, real or imagined. One thing U.S. foreign policy has not been about is promoting democracy. It’s not that the U.S. objected to democracy, just that it has been simply irrelevant to U.S. considerations.

There is by now quite a long list of democratically-elected governments in whose overthrow the U.S. conspired. These include Iran in the fifties, Patrice Lumumba’s government of the Congo, the Allende regime in Chile and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

There is also a long list of despots and thugs that the U.S. has supported or still supports. The U.S. currently supports the military dictatorship of Pakistan and the medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia, though both are widely suspected of supporting or tolerating Al Qaeda terrorists. The U.S. has supported both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein when it suited its Machiavellian scheming.

The U.S., through its so-called Central Intelligence Agency, has actively supported terrorists in Central America, notably in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. During the nineteen seventies “right-wing death squads” in El Salvador were killing up to a hundred people a week in a country of three million. President Reagan was pleased to call their Nicaraguan counterparts “freedom fighters”.

The U.S. has also been happy to do business with regimes that are accused of systematically abusing the human rights of their citizens, including the regimes in China, Turkey, post-Allende Chile, many regimes in Africa and many others.

I don’t think any of these facts is seriously disputed. Neither are they secret. Some have been the subject of public inquiries themselves, such as the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of Lumumba. What they demonstrate is that democracy and human rights are pretty much irrelevant to what the U.S. does in the world. So please, spare us any more cant that the Iraq invasion was about freedom and democracy for the sadly oppressed Iraqi people.

Last March hundreds of thousands of Australians marched in the streets to demonstrate their opposition to invading Iraq, along with millions of other ordinary people around the world. The polls showed clearly that Australians opposed an invasion without a United Nations sanction.

The day after the Australian marches, Prime Minister Howard, Treasurer Costello and Foreign Minister Downer hit the airwaves, assuring us that Saddam was a wicked tyrant who put people through meat grinders, so he had to be removed. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? What was amazing was that they got away with it. The political circus moved on and the peoples’ wishes were ignored.

Apparently none of the hard-bitten mainstream media commentators had the nous to rub their noses in a little recent history. Of course the so-called Opposition had long since gone missing-in-action.

Another supposed reason for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda terrorists. By mid-2002 it was being fairly widely noted that Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein almost as much as he hates America, because Saddam was bringing the same evil Western influences into the Middle East.

The supposed Saddam-bin Laden connection had its genesis in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It was transparently obvious at the time that Bush’s declaration of a War on Terror would permit him to do almost anything, almost anywhere. Sure enough, the long-planned invasion of Iraq was soon trundled out, though there was not a shred of evidence connecting Iraq with the events of 9/11.

So, we come to the claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and – the key point - they would soon be made available to terrorists. There is no doubt that Saddam did, at some times, have weapons of mass destruction. He used them against Iran, with U.S. support, because the U.S. didn’t want Iran to win their war. Saddam also used them against his own Kurdish citizens, but the U.S. didn’t object at the time, let alone invade.

If Saddam had been inclined to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, he had a decade in which to do it, but he didn’t get around to it. Saddam was obviously concerned for his own survival in power, and he surely understood that he would have been quickly “removed” if he started handing out WMDs to terrorists. With this obvious rationale for Saddam’s non-action, there was no plausible case that he was about to support large-scale terrorism.

Unless, of course, he was at risk of being eliminated anyway. The world can be grateful to the UN weapons inspectors, whose systematic work had evidently led Saddam progressively to dispose of his WMDs, out his same concern for his own survival. In the process, Saddam also disposed of the case for an invasion, but by then Bush’s credibility was totally invested in having the invasion he had long been spoiling for.

The political case for invading Iraq was based fundamentally on cultivating fear. The handy thing about fear is you don’t need a lot of facts and figures to create it. You just need to create impressions – an innuendo here, a threatening shadow there – and let peoples’ imaginations do the rest. This was the nature of the great deception perpetrated by Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard.


	Missing the Big Picture 24 August 2003 The trouble with the current Australian and British inquiries into possible intelligence failures or distortions regarding Saddam Hussein’s weaponry is their legalistic focus on the detail of who said what and when. They miss the larger political picture, and make themselves easy targets for the nitpicking, word games and flat denials at which politicians are so practised. Modern politics is about impressions much more than it is about facts, and this was never more so than in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. It is when you step back to view the larger picture that you can connect the dots, as Americans say, and see a clear pattern of political deception. From the larger perspective of recent history, the holes in President Bush’s case for invading Iraq were so big you could drive freight trains through them. Essential perspective on the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that it was planned long before Bush’s acquisition of power, and long before 9/11, by people who are now senior members of the Bush Administration, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The stated reason was that it was essential to U.S. strategic interests, as perceived by right-wing radicals. Their logic is not hard to follow: U.S. military-industrial power depends on oil, most of the oil is in the Middle East, so the U.S. must ensure the “security” of the Middle East. Another essential perspective is the way the U.S. has conducted its foreign policy for the past half century. It has been about preserving and enhancing the power of the U.S. For most of that time this meant opposing the power of the Soviet Union and its sympathisers, real or imagined. One thing U.S. foreign policy has not been about is promoting democracy. It’s not that the U.S. objected to democracy, just that it has been simply irrelevant to U.S. considerations. There is by now quite a long list of democratically-elected governments in whose overthrow the U.S. conspired. These include Iran in the fifties, Patrice Lumumba’s government of the Congo, the Allende regime in Chile and the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. There is also a long list of despots and thugs that the U.S. has supported or still supports. The U.S. currently supports the military dictatorship of Pakistan and the medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia, though both are widely suspected of supporting or tolerating Al Qaeda terrorists. The U.S. has supported both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein when it suited its Machiavellian scheming. The U.S., through its so-called Central Intelligence Agency, has actively supported terrorists in Central America, notably in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. During the nineteen seventies “right-wing death squads” in El Salvador were killing up to a hundred people a week in a country of three million. President Reagan was pleased to call their Nicaraguan counterparts “freedom fighters”. The U.S. has also been happy to do business with regimes that are accused of systematically abusing the human rights of their citizens, including the regimes in China, Turkey, post-Allende Chile, many regimes in Africa and many others. I don’t think any of these facts is seriously disputed. Neither are they secret. Some have been the subject of public inquiries themselves, such as the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of Lumumba. What they demonstrate is that democracy and human rights are pretty much irrelevant to what the U.S. does in the world. So please, spare us any more cant that the Iraq invasion was about freedom and democracy for the sadly oppressed Iraqi people. Last March hundreds of thousands of Australians marched in the streets to demonstrate their opposition to invading Iraq, along with millions of other ordinary people around the world. The polls showed clearly that Australians opposed an invasion without a United Nations sanction. The day after the Australian marches, Prime Minister Howard, Treasurer Costello and Foreign Minister Downer hit the airwaves, assuring us that Saddam was a wicked tyrant who put people through meat grinders, so he had to be removed. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? What was amazing was that they got away with it. The political circus moved on and the peoples’ wishes were ignored. Apparently none of the hard-bitten mainstream media commentators had the nous to rub their noses in a little recent history. Of course the so-called Opposition had long since gone missing-in-action. Another supposed reason for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda terrorists. By mid-2002 it was being fairly widely noted that Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein almost as much as he hates America, because Saddam was bringing the same evil Western influences into the Middle East. The supposed Saddam-bin Laden connection had its genesis in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It was transparently obvious at the time that Bush’s declaration of a War on Terror would permit him to do almost anything, almost anywhere. Sure enough, the long-planned invasion of Iraq was soon trundled out, though there was not a shred of evidence connecting Iraq with the events of 9/11. So, we come to the claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and – the key point - they would soon be made available to terrorists. There is no doubt that Saddam did, at some times, have weapons of mass destruction. He used them against Iran, with U.S. support, because the U.S. didn’t want Iran to win their war. Saddam also used them against his own Kurdish citizens, but the U.S. didn’t object at the time, let alone invade. If Saddam had been inclined to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists, he had a decade in which to do it, but he didn’t get around to it. Saddam was obviously concerned for his own survival in power, and he surely understood that he would have been quickly “removed” if he started handing out WMDs to terrorists. With this obvious rationale for Saddam’s non-action, there was no plausible case that he was about to support large-scale terrorism. Unless, of course, he was at risk of being eliminated anyway. The world can be grateful to the UN weapons inspectors, whose systematic work had evidently led Saddam progressively to dispose of his WMDs, out his same concern for his own survival. In the process, Saddam also disposed of the case for an invasion, but by then Bush’s credibility was totally invested in having the invasion he had long been spoiling for. The political case for invading Iraq was based fundamentally on cultivating fear. The handy thing about fear is you don’t need a lot of facts and figures to create it. You just need to create impressions – an innuendo here, a threatening shadow there – and let peoples’ imaginations do the rest. This was the nature of the great deception perpetrated by Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard.