Posted on 12-11-2003

Bush & Blair War Mongers
By George Monbiot.

(The Guardian. 11th November 2003) Those who would take us to war must
first shut down the public imagination. They must convince us that there is
no other means of preventing invasion, or conquering terrorism, or even
defending human rights. When information is scarce, imagination is easy to
control. As intelligence gathering and diplomacy are conducted in secret,
we seldom discover - until it is too late - how plausible the alternatives
may be.

So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and
Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our
governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were
immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies, what would we
do?, the hawks asked, and our responses felt timid beside the clanking
rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were "indulging ...
in a cosmic whinge".1 To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama bin
Laden's useful idiots".2

Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards
suggested, this may have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the
time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to
have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to suggest that,
as President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed ... al
Qaeda".3 Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president of Uzbekistan
reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of
foreigners.

But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now beginning to come
to light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies
and their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal
and just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we
discovered last week, Saddam Hussein proposed to give Bush and Blair almost
everything they wanted before a shot had been fired.4 Our governments
appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have
lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy. Over the four months
before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein's government made
a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United States. In
December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent Cannistraro,
the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an
offer to prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11th attacks, and
to permit several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for
weapons of mass destruction.5 If the object was regime change, then Saddam,
the agents claimed, was prepared to submit himself to
internationally-monitored elections within two years.6 According to Mr
Cannistraro, these proposals reached the White House, but were "turned down
by the president and vice president."7

By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the US
government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of
mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position on Israel
and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil.8 Among the people they
contacted was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been
urging a war with Iraq. He passed their offers to the Central Intelligence
Agency. Last week he told the New York Times that the CIA had replied,
"Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad."9

Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything possible to
find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government
appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the
opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On March 6th,
13 days before the war began, Bush said to journalists, "I want to remind
you that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's
Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war and peace.
Thus far, he's made the wrong choice.".10 Ten days later, Blair told a
press conference, "we have provided the right diplomatic way through this,
which is to lay down a clear ultimatum to Saddam: cooperate or face
disarmament by force ... all the way through we have tried to provide a
diplomatic solution."11 On March 17th, Bush claimed that "Should Saddam
Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every
measure has been taken to avoid war".12 All these statements are false.

The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan. On September 20th
2001, the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic
country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was
responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.13 The US rejected
the offer. On October 1st, six days before the bombing began, they repeated
it, and their representative in Pakistan told reporters "we are ready for
negotiations. It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only negotiation
will solve our problems."14 Bush was asked about this offer at a press
conference the following day. He replied, "There's no negotiations. There's
no calendar. We'll act on [sic] our time."15 On the same day, Tony Blair,
in his speech to the Labour party conference, ridiculed the idea that we
could "look for a diplomatic solution". "There is no diplomacy with Bin
Laden or the Taliban regime. ... I say to the Taliban: surrender the
terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice."16 Well, they had just
tried to exercise that choice, but George Bush had rejected it.

Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to trust the Taliban or
Saddam Hussein: these people were, after all, negotiating under duress. But
neither did they have any need to trust them. In both cases they could have
presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting the concessions they
had offered. Nor could the allies argue that the offers were not worth
considering because they were inadequate: both the Taliban and
SaddamHussein were attempting to open negotiations, not to close them:
there appeared to be plenty of scope for bargaining. In other words,
peaceful resolutions were rejected before they were attempted. What this
means is that even if all the other legal tests for these wars had been met
(they had not), both would still have been waged in defiance of
international law. The charter of the United Nations specifies that "the
parties to any dispute ...shall, first of all, seek a solution by
negotiation."17

None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these conflicts were
unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of
civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks
should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been
attempted, Osama bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a pliant
and largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the
prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the
United States, rather than anger and resentment. Now who are the dreamers
and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. David Aaronovitch, 16th November 2001. Stop trying to stop the war.
Start trying to win the peace. The Independent.
2. Throughout the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, the Telegraph ran a
column on its leader page entitled "Useful Idiots", dedicated to attacking
campaigners for peace.
3. George Bush, 6th March 2003. National Press Conference in the White
House. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030306-8.html
4. James Risen, 6th November 2003. Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach
Last-Minute Deal to Avert War. The New York Times; Bill Vann, 7th November
2003. Washington rejected sweeping Iraqi concessions on eve of war.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/iraq-n07.shtml; Newsweek Web
Exclusive, 5th November 2003. Lost Opportunity? On the eve of the invasion
of Iraq, Defense officials were offered a secret, back-channel opportunity
to talk peace with Saddam. www.msnbc.com/news/989704.asp; Julian Borger,
Brian Whitaker and Vikram Dodd 7th November 2003. Saddam's desperate offers
to stave off war. The Guardian.
5. Julian Borger, Brian Whitaker and Vikram Dodd, ibid.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. Newsweek Web Exclusive, ibid
9. James Risen, ibid.
10. George Bush, 6th March 2003, ibid.
11. Tony Blair, 16th March 2003. Press Conference with George Bush and Jose
Maria Aznar, the Azores.
12. George Bush, 17th March 2003. Remarks by the President in Address to
the Nation.
13. Luke Harding and Rory McCarthy, 21st September 2001. Bush rejects Bin
Laden deal. The Guardian.
14. Julian Borger, 3rd October 2001. White House rejects call for proof;
Taliban 'ready to negotiate'. The Guardian.
15. Julian Borger, ibid.
16. Tony Blair, 2nd October 2001. Speech to the Labour Party conference,
Brighton.
17. Article 33, Charter of the United Nations. The full text of this
article reads: "1. The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is
likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security,
shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation,
conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies
or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice. 2. The
Security Council shall, when it deems necessary, call upon the parties to
settle
their dispute by such means."