The US, UN & Iraq II

Iraq war planned long in advance; banned arms not the priority: Blix

MADRID (AFP) - The invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) was planned a long time in advance, and the United States and Britain are not primarily concerned with finding any banned weapons of mass destruction, the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said.

There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections," Blix told Spanish daily El Pais.

"I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been relegated, I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States and Britain are now waging war on Iraq. Today the main aim is to change the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)," he said, according to the Spanish text of the interview.

Blix said US President George W. Bush (news - web sites) had told him in October 2002 that he backed the UN's work to verify US and British claims that Baghdad was developing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

But he said he knew at the time "there were people within the Bush administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime change". By the start of March the hawks in both Washington and London were getting impatient, he added.

Blix said that he thought the US might initially have believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction -- although its "fabrication" of evidence raised doubts about even that -- but that Washington was now less convinced by its own claims.

"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some. I think they now believe less in that possibility. But I don't know -- you ask yourself a lot of questions when you see the things they did to try and demonstrate that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons, like the fake contract with Niger," he explained.

That was a reference to US allegations -- later denied -- that Iraq had sought to purchase uranium from the west African state of Niger.

"I'm very curious to see if they do find any (weapons)," he said.

Blix said the war, which on Wednesday entered its 21st day, was "a very high price to pay in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when the threat of weapons proliferation could have been contained by UN inspections.

By attacking Iraq, Washington had sent the wrong message -- that if a country did not possess biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, it risked being attacked.

"The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction. But people are getting a different message. Take the announcement North Korea (news - web sites) has just made. It's tantamount to saying 'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'.

North Korea accused the United States on Sunday of using a UN Security Council discussion of its nuclear programme as a "prelude to war" and warned that it would fully mobilise and strengthen its forces.

"It's an important problem," Blix continued. "If a country perceives that its security is guaranteed, it won't need to consider weapons of mass destruction. This security guarantee is the first line of defence against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

The 74-year-old Swede announced in March that he would step down from his post when his contract runs out in June.

Blix's reputation for independence and resisting political pressure was sorely tested as the Iraq crisis unfolded and US officials became exasperated with his measured reports on Iraqi cooperation with his inspection teams.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?
tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030409/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_war_un_blix_030409135638

Rumsfeld now tells us Saddam might be in Syria, and (rather like a woman's trousseau) his weapons of mass destruction have gone on ahead.

This must be a likudnik's paradise. So many excuses, so many opportunites. Remnants of Saddam's Ba'athist regime in Ba'athist Syria. Weapons of mass destruction (crates of them, with WMD in English and Arabic stencilled on the side) in, well where do we want to find them? Mr bin Laden, or is it just Ali Qaida and his 40 looters in oooh lets think Tehran, no Yemen could be Libya. Enough to make one howl like a wolfowitz, but not with joy.

He (Dr. Ahmad Chalabi) has been returned to Iraq with 700 followers and is being tested by the Bush administration at this time.

timber, I don't recognize the "gloat," but it won't be the first nor the last. c.i.

perception: Is Dr. Ahmad Chalabi too controversial to be the new leader of Iraq?

Ahmad Chalabi
Why shouldn't a politician be president of Iraq?
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 4:16 PM PT

"I have returned home," Ahmad Chalabi declared today on CNN from the city of Nasiriyah, in a country that he has barely set foot in for more than 40 years. It was a stirring moment and a nice sentiment. But it's more accurate to say that the 58-year-old leader of the Iraqi National Congress finds himself in a place where almost no one knows his name. If Iraq were New Hampshire, Chalabi would be polling somewhere behind Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley-Braun. Luckily, Chalabi is running in a democratic primary and not a Democratic one. But perhaps he's learned a lesson during his lifelong project to bring American-style democracy to the Middle East: If Hillary Clinton can be a senator from New York, why can't Ahmad Chalabi be the president of Iraq?

For now, Chalabi denies that he wants to be his country's first democratically elected president. But his statements are something less than Shermanesque. In fact, they sound suspiciously like the carefully crafted formulations that American presidential candidates use when they're pretending not to be presidential candidates. "I'm not a candidate for any position in Iraq, and I don't seek an office," Chalabi told 60 Minutes this past week, echoing a statement he made to the Financial Times last year: "I have no desire or inclination to seek office in Iraq." Chalabi's slipperiness on the subject plays into the hands of his critics, who point out that he's a showman, an operator who was better at using his political skills to garner credit for himself than he was at mounting a serious opposition to Saddam Hussein. Let's assume the critics are right. Their objections raise an obvious question: Since when did that ever stop someone from winning an election?

It's certainly true that as a military leader, Chalabi was an abject failure. The best anyone can say about him is that he tried hard, and for the right side. From 1993 until 1996, he spent time in Iraq's north, trying to put together an organized, armed resistance to Saddam. His efforts culminated in disaster when a Kurdish faction, the Kurdish Democratic Party, invited Saddam's tanks into Kurdistan to crush their rivals, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, as well as the INC. More than 100 INC officials were executed, and thousands more had to be evacuated by the United States.

By 1998, however, Chalabi had used his formidable lobbying skills to restore the INC's luster in Washington. He helped to win passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, in which Congress endorsed regime change in Iraq and appropriated funding to the INC. Chalabi's plan was to use INC soldiers and U.S. air power to take the cities of Kirkuk, Mosul, and Basra, then pray for Iraqi soldiers to defect and for a popular uprising to begin. In Foreign Affairs, Kenneth Pollack, Daniel Byman, and Gideon Rose dubbed the plan "militarily ludicrous."

It's not clear that Chalabi's forces are any less absurd in 2003. A Financial Times report last week questioned the discipline of the INC troops and described a drunken soldier at the INC's northern headquarters at Dokan; he was "falling over into the gutter, where his plastic bag containing beer and stronger liquor burst open." And according to U.S. News, Chalabi's Free Iraqi Forces, which were recently airlifted by the United States into southern Iraq, are off to an inauspicious start, too. The FIF's first move was to take over some local government offices, only to be told by the British to get out in an hour unless they wanted to be regarded as "hostile forces." U.S. News added that Chalabi's men have not been given any weapons, and their job so far consists mainly of identifying fleeing Baath Party leaders at U.S. checkpoints.

There are other reasons to be suspicious of Chalabi. In 1992, a Jordanian military court convicted him in absentia of bank fraud for allegedly embezzling $70 million from Petra Bank, which Chalabi founded in the 1970s in Amman. Chalabi's supporters argue that he was set up by the Jordanian government because he was helping to fund the opposition to Saddam. But Chalabi's money-management skills didn't necessarily improve over time. According to a State Department report, nearly half of the $4.3 million in U.S. dollars doled out to the INC under the Iraq Liberation Act wasn't properly accounted for. Ultimately, State cut Chalabi off, and the INC's funding was turned over to the Pentagon, where Chalabi has more political allies. Chalabi also reportedly ran through $100 million in CIA money.

Chalabi's military failures, his poor bookkeeping, and his lack of support inside Iraq have led some people at the State Department and the CIA to be skeptical about his prospects. But a more worrisome possibility is that some people inside the United States government don't like Chalabi because he's serious about trying to create an Iraqi democracy. Foreign-policy "realists" may prefer a pro-American dictator who is more interested in security than popular sovereignty. The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya said as much in the New York Times Magazine in March: "Some people in the government are talking democratic change," Makiya told the writer George Packer, "and there are other people who think that's all a pile of garbage. These others are in the State Department and the C.I.A. today."

Of course Chalabi should not be imposed on the Iraqi people as their ruler. But there's no reason for the United States not to encourage him in his project to build a real, democratic government inside Iraq. Now that Saddam Hussein has been defeated, Chalabi's military prowess isn't all that relevant, and it's hard to see how allegedly wasting American taxpayer dollars disqualifies him for elective office. If anything, it should qualify him for it. The very attributes that sometimes hurt Chalabi as leader of the Iraqi National Congress?-his over-optimistic assessment of his abilities, his penchant for mismanaging other people's money, his failure to always be truthful, and his self-promoting style?-sound like virtual prerequisites for higher office in the United States. Chalabi "has been entirely ineffective, except in one area, which is undermining other opposition groups," an anonymous U.S. official told the Philadelphia Inquirer last year. In a war, behavior like that can get you killed. In a democracy, it makes you president.

Rumsfeld now tells us Saddam might be in Syria, and (rather like a woman's trousseau) his weapons of mass destruction have gone on ahead.

This must be a likudnik's paradise. So many excuses, so many opportunites. Remnants of Saddam's Ba'athist regime in Ba'athist Syria. Weapons of mass destruction (crates of them, with WMD in English and Arabic stencilled on the side) in, well where do we want to find them? Mr bin Laden, or is it just Ali Qaida and his 40 looters in oooh lets think Tehran, no Yemen could be Libya. Enough to make one howl like a wolfowitz, but not with joy.

My other impression from the coverage I've been able to watch is that we see no images or interviews with angry or unhappy Iraqis. There was one short statement by an Iraqi saying he didn't want America to govern Iraq, and his tone was stern. But he also said that any honest Iraqi would tell you they are glad to see Saddam out. Logically, it seems to me, if the news weren't being so tightly controlled, we would see at least a mix of feelings. I don't care to have my news strained through a sieve as if I were a child, unable to make up my own mind. I resent being fed pablum when what I want is honest information.

Lola wrote:

My other impression from the coverage I've been able to watch is that we see no images or interviews with angry or unhappy Iraqis. There was one short statement by an Iraqi saying he didn't want America to govern Iraq, and his tone was stern. But he also said that any honest Iraqi would tell you they are glad to see Saddam out. Logically, it seems to me, if the news weren't being so tightly controlled, we would see at least a mix of feelings. I don't care to have my news strained through a sieve as if I were a child, unable to make up my own mind. I resent being fed pablum when what I want is honest information.

On Dutch news at least even last night they had a mix of reactions - as I already quoted above, there were the cheering Iraqis kissing the soldiers and calling out "Thank you, thank you America", but there was also the angry man yelling at the cameraman, bloodied cloth in hand: "this was a child's! You did this, America, you did this!", and he showed the family of the child in question, weeping and crying.

I'm sure the first kind of reaction is the more common one, but if you do only get the first kind of images, it does indeed say more about your media than about Iraq.