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Iraq:
War of Mass Deception
Adam Hodges
June 17, 2005
Misled
into War
Will America Demand Accountability or
Remain Complicit in the War of Mass Deception?
It’s June 2005, over
two years after the invasion of
Front #1: Human suffering. As of June 2005,
over 1,700 US
soldiers are dead, over 12,000 wounded, and more than 22,000
Iraqi civilians have
died as directly reported by the media. In addition, an October
2004 study published in the medical journal Lancet projected
a conservative estimate of an excess of 100,000 Iraqi deaths between
the March 2003 invasion and the release of the study.
Front #2: Starving domestic needs to feed the war.
Since the start of the war, the US Congress has allocated $207.5 billion in funding.
These costs are above and beyond the over $400
billion annual military budget, which has also continued to
rise during the Bush administration. The additional money allocated
for the war in Iraq has come in the form of supplemental requests
by the administration: approximately $54.4 billion for the war enacted
in April 2003, $70.6 billion enacted in November 2003, $21.5 billion
passed with regular Defense Department appropriations for 2005,
and a request made by the administration in February 2005 for an
$81.9 billion package with $61 billion of that marked for the war.
The annual US military budget—which accounts for about half of the
world’s military expenditures—is staggering in itself,
let alone the extra $207.5 billion allocated through September 30,
2005 for the war in
Yet the costs of war don’t end here. The tally continues to
mount on American democracy and international law.
Wars are costly, devastating and unwanted. No democratic nation
desires war. International law and the ethos of democracy in the
modern world condemn any unprovoked act of aggression by one nation-state
against another. In short, war is something only to be waged with
just cause, in
self-defense, by proportional means, and as a last resort.
Modern democracies are marked by transparency and important checks
that hold government accountable to the rule of law and the ethos
of the international community. In theory, democracies don’t
wage illegal wars; which is to say, if a democracy engages in war,
it must be for defensive reasons—or, as in the case of the
war against Iraq, attempt to appear that way.
And this brings us to the thorn in the Achilles’ heel of the
Bush administration that won’t go away. Why was war
waged against
Yes, we know the administration’s reasoning and rationale.
In a post-9/11 world, Saddam Hussein, who supposedly possessed weapons
of mass destruction, could not be trusted for fear he would slip
a nuclear bomb to al Qaeda terrorists. And the administration wove
a beautiful narrative that positioned a war against
It didn’t matter that Osama bin Laden detested the secular
regime of the ‘infidel’
Saddam. Nor did it matter that the two never engaged in any collaborative
relationship prior to or after 9/11—facts verified by the 9/11
Commission (see Staff Statement No. 15 as well as the commission’s final report);
the administration narrative created an image of an Iraq/al Qaeda
alliance in the minds of many Americans so powerful that as recently
as March 2005, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 61% of respondents
still erroneously believed that Iraq provided direct support to
al Qaeda before the war—numbers that are similar to previous
studies by the Program on International
Policy Attitudes in April 2004 and October 2003, as well as a Pew
Research Center poll in October 2002.
The administration narrative also convinced many, evidently including
a majority of Congress, that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles
of WMDs, an assertion that has become so thoroughly discredited
that even the administration had to explain why it was wrong. The
official party line, of course, put the blame on ‘faulty intelligence.’
Yet myriad contradictory pieces of evidence were available to dispute
administration claims in the lead up to war. Outside the borders
of the
Yet within the administration, counter-evidence was ignored and
supportive evidence highlighted. The (seemingly selective) intelligence
gathering was helped along by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
According to a Pentagon official cited in a May
2003 article by Seymour Hersh in the New
Yorker, “Special Plans was created in order to find evidence
of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had
close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of
chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened
the region and, potentially, the United States.”
Former ambassador Joseph Wilson, among others including arms inspectors,
provided further counter-evidence. His trip to
At issue, then, is whether the intelligence was ‘faulty’,
as the official administration interpretation claims, or whether
it was selectively manipulated to justify a preordained policy—a
policy dead set on regime change in Iraq by war.
The administration’s long-standing desire for regime change
in
In addition, we have the accounts of former administration officials,
such as terrorism czar Richard Clarke and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil
that testify to this policy; and the 9/11 Commission Report cites
Secretary of State Colin Powell as having “recalled that Wolfowitz…argued
that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and
should therefore be attacked. Powell said that Wolfowitz
was not able to justify his belief that
In short, 9/11 provided an opportune platform for justifying the
neo-conservatives’ policy toward
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products
in August," explained White House chief of staff Andrew H.
Card Jr. to New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller
in a September 7, 2002 article, “Traces of Terror: The Strategy;
Bush Aides Set Strategy to Sell Policy on Iraq.”
In her piece, Bumiller details the White
House’s choice of Ellis Island in
Of course, that action officially started on March 20, 2003, after
what Bush termed the “final days of decision” in his ultimatum to Iraq. Yet recent evidence in the Times of London—“RAF bombing raids tried to goad Saddam into war,” by
Michael Smith, May 29, 2005—reports that the “RAF
and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs
on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving
the allies an excuse for war.”
The article goes on to state, “The attacks were intensified
from May, six months before the United Nations resolution that Tony
Blair and Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, argued gave the
coalition the legal basis for war. By the end of August the raids
had become a full air offensive.” (See also, “The Other Bomb Drops,” by Jeremey
Scahill in The Nation, June 1, 2005.)
The unofficial war was well underway before the marketing campaign
barely got rolling, and long before the official war was launched.
While the ‘marketing campaign’ worked to gain approval
from the US Congress and gain consent from a large portion of the
American population, the campaign for legal justification failed
on all accounts. As Kofi Annan stated explicitly upon being pressed in a September
2004 interview, the war was illegal; and current debates
in the UK keep running up against this fact.
Bush administration expostulations that it did everything it could
to avoid war against
Yesterday, Representative John
Connors held hearings to examine the legal implications of the minutes for potential impeachment proceedings against President Bush and other administration
officials responsible for misleading America into war.
While it is true that nothing new has been revealed in the memo
insofar as much of the world saw through the Bush administration’s
bogus rationale for war from the beginning, the memo provides prima
facie evidence in the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of senior ministers and advisors
in the Blair government that "Bush had made up his mind to
take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided."
The minutes state that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.
But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
The thrust of the meeting focused on how best to legally justify
the already determined war. It noted, "We should work up a
plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons
inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for
the use of force."
War should be a last resort effort justified by truly genuine rationale
based on self-defense. A government that decides on war and then
attempts to justify its acts of aggression to satisfy public opinion
can hardly be called democratic. It is up to the people in that
country to maintain democracy and hold those government officials
accountable for their actions.
The recent publicity over the Downing Street minutes provides new
hope in attempts to bring these issues to light in mainstream
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