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."
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