The Iraq war continues to dominate the domestic as well as foreign news agenda in the United States and Britain. In America, criticism over the inclusion of dubious intelligence findings in the public statements of President Bush before the war is being voiced; while in Britain, the aftermath of the death of the biological weapons inspector David Kelly has intensified the already bitter arguments between the government and the BBC over alleged manipulation of the military threat posed by the Saddam regime.
Before the war, British government dossiers on the threat from Iraq made much of an immediate risk to Britain and its interests, not least through a claimed Iraqi capability to launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order being given. The implied urgency of the threat did much to ensure that the UK government had sufficient support from its own members of parliament; this was a much less significant issue in the United States, where the intended fall of the Saddam Hussein regime was widely represented as a necessary part of the war on terror.
Official: no immediate threat from Iraq
While there remains the possibility that some evidence of a limited weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme may be uncovered, it is now frankly unlikely that evidence will be found to support any kind of precipitous threat. But in any case, a somewhat obscure yet official document from the British ministry of defence (MoD), published since the war, itself casts doubt on the motives for launching it.
Operations in Iraq: First Reflections was published by the MoD in early July, before the media-political firestorm over Andrew Gilligan's claims of government manipulation of intelligence information and the subsequent suicide of David Kelly. The document represents an initial analysis of the war from a UK military perspective. While it argues that there was a need to destroy the Saddam regime, it also emphasises that: The Governments overriding political objective was to disarm Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction, which threatened his neighbours and his people. (para 1.3, emphasis added).
Note that even at this level, there is not assumed to be any direct threat to Britain, an assessment supported later in the document where it is stated that: The UK was engaged in a limited (rather than total) conflict with the Iraqi regime and there was no tangible Iraqi military threat to the UK. However, it has been apparent since 11 September 2001 that the UK itself could be a target for specific hostile attack or disruptive action by terrorists, especially when it is engaged in operations abroad. (para 6.10, emphasis added)
Thus, even on this official account, Iraq did not present a direct threat to Britain, and British interests were more likely to be threatened by terrorists rather than Iraq. On the question of whether Iraq was aiding terrorist organisations, the document has little to say. Certainly, repeated efforts in the past eighteen months to link the Saddam Hussein regime to sub-state paramilitary groups have come up with little or no evidence.
Hardly any of the thousands of putative terrorists detained in the US, Guantanamo and elsewhere have been Iraqi citizens or have even had any links at all with Iraq. If anything, the international support for al-Qaida and its many affiliates has stretched across scores of countries, with Iraq being far down at or near the bottom of the list.
Strategies of concealment
As the intensive WMD search continues to draw a blank, it becomes even more difficult to see why the WMD issue was presented as the official reason for the necessity of the war at the particular moment of late March 2003. It is especially problematic that the Unmovic inspectors, led by Hans Blix, were not given much more time. The inspectors argued then that they would need many months to do a competent job, even though they had come to operate at a much higher inspection tempo in the days before they had to withdraw.
Furthermore, one issue in relation to the Unmovic process has continuing implications. In the weeks prior to the war, Hans Blix and his colleagues were persistent in their requests for serious intelligence data from the US and UK, so that they could marry such data to their inspections. After the war, Blix acknowledged that such intelligence was indeed forthcoming but when it was acted on, nothing of significance was found.
The implications of this are clear: that the stated motive for war was questionable at the time the war started. Unmovic was at the time checking out intelligence findings on the ground but was finding them to be almost wholly inaccurate.
This does at least suggest that the precise timing of the war had much more to do with two factors. The first was the need to terminate the regime before the onset of the summer heat made combat far more difficult; the second was that the longer Unmovic had to demonstrate the paucity of evidence of an immediate Iraqi WMD threat, the more the stated motive for the war was eroded.
Retaliation or aggression?
The wider issue remains as to whether the motive for war had much more to do with Iraq as a geopolitical threat to oil security (see the articles in this series of 9 January 2002 and 27 December 2002).
Within the current British political climate this, curiously, remains a side-issue. The current emphasis is on Iraqi WMD and manipulated intelligence, and any discussion of the relevance of oil is strongly denied by officialdom even if it continues to be raised in the media and parliament. ((For illustration of the argument, see the written evidence presented on behalf of the Oxford Research Group to the recent foreign affairs committee parliamentary hearings.
Meanwhile, evidence that the war was planned well in advance of March 2003 has now emerged in relation to a military operation codenamed Southern Focus that began in 2002 and continued for a year, until the spring of 2003.
In the run-up to the war, a number of analysts pointed to the increase in air raids by US and UK strike aircraft as, it seemed, part of the process of policing the air exclusion zones. At the time, these raids were said to be in direct retaliation for Iraqi attempts to counter this policing function, but it has since emerged that the process was a carefully planned operation whose retaliatory function was a mere disguise.
Southern Focus was targeted at a number of features of the regime including the fibre-optic cable network that had been established with Chinese aid, together with a range of command centres and air defence systems. It was a substantial military operation that involved the dropping of over 600 weapons, most of them precision-guided bombs, on 391 targets. All of this was undertaken well before the war started, and much of it even preceded the seeking of UN resolutions in support of war.
How was the war waged?
The continuing refusal of US and British sources to give any assessments of the numbers of Iraqi civilian and military killed in the war has been frequently remarked on in this series. In this context, a further revelation throws light on coalition attitudes during the war.
It is now known that military commanders were required to submit for Donald Rumsfelds approval plans for any air attacks that were thought likely to kill more than thirty civilians. In the event, over fifty such attacks were planned and all of them were approved.
The total civilian casualty rate is now believed to be 6-7,000. This figure may in part be explained by such revelations, and raises the awkward question of culpability for war crimes. It is not known whether UK forces were involved in such operations or whether a similar process existed separately for their own strike operations. It is yet another question that is currently sidelined.
Perhaps what is most significant in all of this is how these issues relate to what is now happening in Iraq. As more details of the preparations for war and its conduct emerge, more hard questions are arising. In reality, though, hardly any of these questions would even have been posed as matters of legitimate political concern if the short-term post-war situation in Iraq had developed as expected.
If, that is, the coalition forces had been widely welcomed as liberators, if civilian casualties had been low, and if the country had shown evidence of an instant socio-economic improvement, there would have been little or no concern for the conduct of the war itself, or even its motives.
The momentum of conflict
The reality on the ground over much of Iraq is of course very far from this benign scenario, and it is one that even the killing of Saddam Husseins sons may not substantially alter. Although the death of Qusay and Uday Hussein has been presented as a major morale boost for US forces, it is already clear that the brothers were effectively in hiding in the Mosul villa, and were not protected by a large number of well-armed bodyguards as might have been expected. Thus, they were unlikely to have been playing a significant role in coordinating the guerrilla warfare now affecting US forces.
The three further attacks on US troops in the two days after the brothers were killed lend credence to this analysis. Its ominous implication for the US military in Iraq is that even Saddam Hussein may not be crucially significant a factor in the current violence, and that even his own death or capture may not bring the conflict to an end.
Thus, it is the very fact of the instability, violence and burgeoning guerrilla war, stemming in part from the coalitions post-war policies, that is beginning to focus attention on the wider issues raised by the war, especially the key question of its essential motive. These issues may well receive increased attention in both London and Washington as current media concerns recede; and in time they may even have serious political implications for the respective governments.
