Posted 5:08 PM by Dil
Will Lebanon’s Horror Become Iraq’s?
Robert Baer • The Washington Post

WASHINGTON, 24 August 2003 — As soon as I heard about the truck bombing of UN headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, my first thought was, oh, no, here we go again, the nightmare of Beirut, 1983.

The UN bombing has all the markings of a professional terrorist attack, the same expertise we saw in Lebanon during the ’80s, even the same delivery system that was used to kill 241 US servicemen in their Beirut barracks on Oct. 22, 1983 — the strike that brought US policy in Lebanon to a halt and altered the course of Middle East politics. Like the one in Beirut, the UN truck bomb was expertly placed. It wasn’t just designed to do massive damage — although it did. It was apparently intended to hit the office of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN secretary general’s special representative to Iraq. Using a suicide bomber ensured that the bomb went exactly where it was supposed to go. The attack may even have been timed to coincide with a news conference under way inside the building so that the bomb would kill as many people as possible.

The truck was packed with enough explosives (more than a thousand pounds of military munitions) to blast through a twelve-foot wall.

Although the FBI says the bomb itself wasn’t particularly sophisticated, I know from experience how difficult it is to string explosives together and make all or most of them detonate at the same time. And remember:

This was the second successful bombing in just 13 days. Combine this well-coordinated attack with the car bombing of the Jordanian Embassy, which killed 17, and it is starting to look like we are up against a lot more than the “remnants’’ of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

One bomb is an outrage. Two bombs are a campaign. Anybody who was dealing with the Middle East in the early ‘80s can tell you exactly when things began to change: April 18, 1983, the day a suicide bomber drove a beat-up GMC pick-up truck through the front door of the US Embassy in Beirut and detonated it. Seventeen Americans and 32 Lebanese died in the blast.

I was working for the CIA in the Middle East at the time. As best we were able to figure out, the target of the attack was Ambassador Philip Habib, the president’s special representative to the Middle East. Habib, who was trying to help negotiate a truce between Lebanon and Israel, was not in the embassy when the bomb went off. But the bombing had a larger goal than killing Habib: As we later realized, it was the opening shot in a well-coordinated and well-financed effort that eventually drove the United States out of Lebanon. After the second suicide bombing at the barracks, President Reagan ordered the Marines “redeployed’’ offshore. With the official American presence gone, the terrorist campaign switched to kidnapping. Most Americans soon left Lebanon.

Those of us who lived through the Lebanon horror will be asking if Beirut 1983 might not be a template for what’s happening in Iraq.

While Iraq isn’t Lebanon, there are enough similarities that we should be worried. Starting with the obvious, neither Lebanon then nor Baghdad now has a functioning government. At the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, that country’s government collapsed. By 1983, there was no army or police to protect our embassy, let alone an effective internal intelligence service to warn us of possible attacks.

Iraq today is probably worse off than Lebanon was in 1983. There isn’t even the skeleton of an army or a police force. Members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council now claim they warned us of a bombing, possibly aimed at the United Nations. But don’t forget the council includes some of the same people who were telling us that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, deployed and ready for his orders. The only intelligence in Iraq that we can count on is our own.

Both Iraq and Lebanon are fractured societies, divided by deep ethnic and religious differences. Foreigners have tended to get caught up in these conflicts, inevitably paying a price in blood. In 1983, Lebanon’s Christian Maronites, who once ruled Lebanon, were fighting for their survival, while Lebanese Muslims were fighting to take their place. Because the Muslims thought the United States was propping up the Maronites, we became the Muslims’ target.

When Baghdad fell on April 9, we hurled ourselves into the middle of the same sort of violent social conflict. By invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the United States in effect deposed the ruling Sunni minority, about 20 percent of Iraq’s population. In case there was any doubt about the end to Sunni power, the coalition made it final when it dissolved the Baath Party on May 16 and the army on May 23 — the two organizations through which the Sunnis had ruled. Having destroyed Iraq’s social and political balance, we can pretty much count on taking casualties.

So why was the UN headquarters hit rather than an American target? After all, the group behind the UN bombing could have easily run the same truck into an American patrol, killing dozens of soldiers. Again, I go back to Lebanon, 1983. The objective of the terrorists then was to create a sense of complete hopelessness in Washington. The terrorists wanted to show the Americans that no amount of military might, money or international assistance would help — that US deaths would be in vain and that the only logical response was to pull out.

If the people behind the UN bombing are the same ones who are responsible for last week’s sabotage of Baghdad’s water main and the oil pipeline to Turkey, this may very well be their plan. By attacking the UN and other indirect targets, they are probably attempting to drive away any potential international investment. They want the Bush administration to feel isolated. As for the common Iraqi who has been taking the brunt of their campaign, the terrorists believe it is worth it. They think in the long term.

If things go from bad to worse in Iraq, Washington will want to blame outside agitators. It will find it difficult to admit that the Iraqi population has turned against the occupation. We saw this happen in Lebanon: The Reagan administration convinced itself that Syria was behind the attacks on the embassy and the Marines. It came close to fighting a real war when a US battleship shelled Syrian-controlled positions in the mountains outside Beirut. As it turned out, it was the Lebanese (with Iranian financial backing) who had carried out the bombings against us.

It’s still too early to tell how much outsiders are involved in Iraq. With the Lebanon template in mind, I tried to get a sense of this earlier this year, in the weeks running up to the war. I was on contract with ABC News at the time. My first meeting was with Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Lebanese Shiite cleric accused of issuing a fatwa that encouraged the Beirut embassy bombing. We met at his Sitt Zaynab mosque office, outside Damascus. One reason Fadlallah kept an office there was to court support with Iraqi Shiite exiles, who also had offices in the area. I thought Fadlallah might have a good idea of what was going on in Iraq.

My first question was whether he or other Islamic leaders would declare a jihad against the United States if it invaded Iraq. “We don’t need to,’’ he said. “The Iraqi people will spontaneously rise in opposition to a US invasion.’’ When I pressed him about whether he thought fighters from other countries would come to Iraq, he said some would — but in the end, it would be Iraqis themselves who would expel the coalition forces.

I also talked to Munir Makdah, a member of PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement and a key leader of the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon — the same resistance that forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Makdah was less guarded than Fadlallah. He said he intended to send fighters into Iraq, and if the coalition managed to occupy the country, a relentless jihad would ensue, drawing believers from everywhere. To make his point, Makdah handed me a document circulating on the Internet that called for a jihad against the United States.

Whether you believe Fadlallah or Makdah, or even the theory that “remnants’’ of the regime are behind the latest attacks, my sense is that we are in for a rougher time in Iraq.

One of the lucky ones to survive Tuesday’s bombing, Ghassan Salame, shares this view. Salame, my professor at the Sorbonne years ago and a minister in the Lebanese government until this year, was working for the UN mission and had left Vieira de Mello’s office minutes before the bomb went off.

When we talked in March, he declined to predict how the war would go, but he was convinced the United States would end up in the middle of a violent social upheaval in Iraq. By removing Saddam, he said, we would disenfranchise the Sunnis. Smashing a fractured society like Iraq could only lead to sustained violence, he warned, at least until a new balance is found.

“But you know,’’ Salame said, as best as I can recall the conversation, “you can’t just get up and walk away from Iraq like you did Lebanon. No matter how bad it gets. If Iraq turns into anarchy, it’s likely to spill into the rest of the Gulf. It would be a catastrophe.’’

Salame is right. Leaving Iraq now, in a state of anarchy, would lead to civil war. And then almost anything could happen, from pulling in Iran to spreading chaos to the Arab states of the Gulf — which, by the way, control something like 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves. No matter how tough things get in Iraq, we cannot leave until it is mended.

— Robert Baer is a former CIA officer who served in the Middle East for 21 years, leaving the agency in 1997.

Posted 6:12 AM by Dil
It's official - Saddam was not an imminent threat

Hutton's remit was narrow - yet he has exposed the truth about the Iraq war

Clare Short
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

After eight days of the Hutton inquiry and enormous quantities of media coverage, it is worth pausing to try to take stock. Many of us have said that, deliberately or otherwise, Alastair Campbell's decision to go to war with the BBC had the potential to distract attention from the most important questions arising from the Iraq crisis - whether the nation was deceived on the road to war, and where responsibility lies for the continuing chaos and loss of life in Iraq.
Lord Hutton has been charged with inquiring into the narrower question of the circumstances that led to the death of Dr David Kelly and will report on this very important question. But his inquiry is revealing important information that casts light on the bigger question of how we got to war.

There is an unfortunate tendency among some commentators to seek to narrow the issue to a blame game between the BBC and 10 Downing Street. This has led to comment to the effect that Dr Kelly was the unfortunate victim of a battle between two mighty institutions, accompanied by a campaign of vilification against Andrew Gilligan and the Today programme. It is important to remain constantly aware of the vested interests at play: the Murdoch empire and other rightwing media operations would like to weaken and break the BBC so that British broadcasting might be reduced to the sort of commercially dominated, biased news reporting that controls the US airwaves. It is extremely unfortunate that a Labour government has been willing to drive forward this campaign against the BBC.

We must not allow the barrage of biased comment to mislead us into a fudged conclusion that it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. And we must focus both on the pressures that were placed on Dr Kelly and the wider question of how we got to war in Iraq.

The inquiry has already established beyond doubt that, despite government briefing that Dr Kelly was a medium-level official of little significance, he was in fact one of the world's leading experts on WMD in Iraq. It is also clear that Dr Kelly chose to brief three BBC journalists - and presumably others - to the effect that the 45-minute warning of the possible use of WMD was an exaggeration. He said to the Newsnight reporter Susan Watts, as well as to Gilligan that Campbell and the Downing Street press operation were responsible for exerting pressure to hype up the danger. The inquiry is exploring the reality of that claim. But it is already clear that Dr Kelly made it, to Gilligan and Watts.

The BBC would have been grossly irresponsible if it had failed to bring such a report - from such an eminent source - to public attention. It is a delicious irony that Alastair Campbell castigates the BBC for relying on one very eminent source for this report ... and yet the 45-minute claim itself came from only one source.

As a result of the Hutton inquiry, we now know that two defence intelligence officials wrote to their boss to put on record their disquiet at the exaggeration in the dossier. Moreover, one official asked his boss for advice as to whether he should approach the foreign affairs select committee after the foreign secretary had said that he was not aware of any unhappiness among intelligence officials about the claims made in the dossier.

We know through emails revealed by Hutton that Tony Blair's chief of staff made clear that the dossier was likely to convince those who were prepared to be convinced, but that the document "does nothing to demonstrate he [Saddam Hussein] has the motive to attack his neighbours, let alone the west. We will need to be clear in launching the document that we do not claim that we have evidence that he is an imminent threat. The case we are making is that he has continued to develop WMD since 1998, and is in breach of UN resolutions. The international community has to enforce those resolutions if the UN is to be taken seriously."

I agree completely with Jonathan Powell's conclusion. But it follows from this that there was no need to truncate Dr Blix's inspection process and to divide the security council in order to get to war by a preordained date.

If there was no imminent threat, then Dr Blix could have been given the time he required. He may well have succeeded in ending all Iraq's WMD programmes - just as he succeeded in dismantling 60-plus ballistic missiles. Then sanctions could have been lifted and a concentrated effort made to help the people of Iraq end the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein - just as we did with Milosevic in Serbia.

Or if Blix had failed, we would have been in the position President Chirac described on March 10, when the issue would have come back to the security council. And in Chirac's view, this would have meant UN authorisation of military action.

The tragedy of all this is that if we had followed Jonathan Powell's conclusion, and the UK had used its friendship with the US to keep the world united on a UN route, then, even if it had come to war, a united international community under a UN mandate would almost certainly have made a better job of supporting Iraq's reconstruction. In this scenario the armed forces would have concentrated on keeping order; the UN humanitarian system would have fixed the water and electricity systems; Sergio Vieira de Mello, as Kofi Annan's special representative, would have helped the Iraqis to install an interim government and begin a process of constitutional change, as the UN has done in Afghanistan; and the World Bank and IMF would have advised the Iraqi interim authority on transparent economic reform, rather than a process of handover to US companies.

Following the terrible bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, there is a danger that those who favour chaos in Iraq will make further gains, at great cost to the people of Iraq and coalition forces. The answer remains a stronger UN mandate and internationalisation of the reconstruction effort. The worry is that the US will not have the humility to ask for help, and the chaos and suffering will continue.

In the meantime, Lord Hutton will draw his conclusions about the tragic death of Dr Kelly. My own tentative conclusion is that Downing Street thought they could use him in their battle with the BBC, and that the power of the state was misused in a battle to protect the political interests of the government.

· Clare Short resigned as international development secretary in May

Posted 6:04 AM by Dil
Emails show how No 10 constructed case for war

Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Saturday August 23, 2003
The Guardian

Two radically different versions of what happened inside Downing Street in September last year in the run-up to the war with Iraq emerged this week from Lord Hutton's inquiry.
The version that Downing Street presented to the public at the time was of a prime minister struggling to avoid war, intent on working within international law by going through the United Nations, and hinting that Britain was acting as a check on the wilder and more belligerent elements within Washington.

But the emails from various staff members at Downing Street produced in evidence to the Hutton inquiry this week suggest an alternative narrative. These emails, covering the period between September 5 and the publication on September 24 of the government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, are not full of concerns and proposals about how the dossier will impact on efforts to get the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq and ensure that Saddam Hussein cooperated with them.

Instead, the thoughts expressed in the emails convey a frantic attempt to produce a dossier that will justify aggressive action against Saddam Hussein. Within the space of a fortnight and with almost no new evidence - other than the now infamous "45-minute warning" - Mr Blair's aides turned British policy towards Iraq upside down.

For more than 10 years, British policy was to contain Saddam by keeping him weak through sanctions, imposition of no-fly zones and diplomatic isolation. He was regarded as a potential threat but not a pressing one. He dealt with his own people brutally but, with regard to the threat posed to his neighbours and the west, he was in his box and, as long as the US and British planes remained in the region, he could be kept there.

By the time the dossier was published, Saddam had become someone that had to be dealt with as a matter of urgency, one intent on aggression towards his neighbours and the west. Downing Street had produced a new narrative.

In an email released this week Daniel Pruce, a Foreign Office diplomat seconded to the Downing Street press department, offers a glimpse into how No 10 worked to achieve this transformation. "Can we insert a few quotes from speeches he [Saddam] has made which, even if they are not specific, demonstrate that he is a bad man with a general hostility towards his neighbours and the west?" Mr Pruce wrote in the email on September 10 to another diplomat, Mark Matthews, who at the time was in the Foreign Office press department.

He set out a sneaky course of action for bringing public opinion round: "Much of the evidence we have is largely circumstantial so we need to convey to our readers that the cumulation of these facts demonstrates an intent on Saddam's part - the more they can be led to this conclusion themselves rather than have to accept judgments from us, the better."

In a separate email, Mr Pruce said: "Our aim should be to convey the impression that things have not been static in Iraq but that over the past decade he has been aggressively and relentlessly pursuing WMD while brutally repressing his own people."

He added that any reference to weapons should describe their destructive capacity, for example that UN weapons inspectors between 1991 and 1998 "found enough chemical warfare agent to kill x thousand people or contaminate an area the size of Wales."

Other Downing Street aides were also throwing in suggestions that would contribute towards an alarming picture of the Iraqi threat. Tom Kelly, a Downing Street press officer, in an email to Alastair Campbell, the director of communicationson September 11, wrote that there was a need to demonstrate that Saddam had not only the capability to mount an attack but the intent: "We know that [Saddam] is a bad man and has done bad things in the past. We know he is trying to get WMD - and this shows those attempts are intensifying. But can we show why we think he intends to use them aggressively, rather than in self-defence? We need that to counter the argument that Saddam is bad, but not mad."

Mr Kelly also wrote to another Downing Street press officer, Godric Smith, expressing regret that the dossier could not talk up the nuclear threat. The MI6 assessment was that while Saddam wanted a nuclear capability, he did not possess one and was unlikely to do so for years to come. Mr Kelly reluctantly acknowledged this: "The weakness, obviously, is our inability to say he could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon."

Mr Campbell, when asked at the inquiry on Tuesday about Mr Pruce's emails, played down his importance, saying that decisions about what should be in the dossier were taken by staff above his pay grade.

But such emails cannot be dismissed that easily. These emails were in response to a remit set out by someone senior at Downing Street.

The tone of the exchanges suggest that the remit was not to draw up a dossier presenting a realistic appraisal of the threat posed by Saddam but to exaggerate it.

The alternative narrative is that after Mr Blair saw George Bush at Camp David on September 8, the prime minister was readying British and international opinion for war. The flurry of emails came im mediately after that Camp David meeting.

Peter Stothard, the former Times editor who had access to Downing Street at the time, describes in his book 30 Days how Mr Blair in September based his policy on six points, one of which was that "Gulf war 2 - president George W. Bush vs Saddam Hussein - would happen whatever anyone else said or did".

This sense that the decision had been made is also echoed by the former cabinet minister, Clare Short, who opposed the war and who told the Commons foreign affairs committee that she had been informed by three senior people - believed to be another cabinet minister, an MI6 chief and a top civil servant - that war was inevitable. One of them told her to stop fretting because it could not be stopped.

Seen against that background, the frenzied tone of the Downing Street emails makes sense.

Posted 4:55 PM by Dil
Saddam destroyed WMD, says former aide

CASUS BELLI: The Iraqi dictator had got rid of his WMD long before the war, but didn't want to admit it for fear of losing credibility among Arabs, a former advisor claims

AP
Sunday, Aug 03, 2003,Page 1
A close aide to Saddam Hussein says the Iraqi dictator did in fact get rid of his weapons of mass destruction but deliberately kept the world guessing about it in an effort to divide the international community and stave off a US invasion.

The strategy, which turned out to be a serious miscalculation, was designed to make the Iraqi dictator look strong in the eyes of the Arab world, while countries such as France and Russia were wary of joining an American-led attack. At the same time, Saddam retained the technical know-how and brain power to restart the programs at any time.

US defense officials and weapons experts are considering this guessing-game theory as the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons continues. If true, it would indicate there was no imminent unconventional weapons threat from Iraq, an argument US President George W. Bush used to go to war.

Saddam's alleged weapons bluff was detailed by an Iraqi official who assisted Saddam for many years. The official was not part of the national leadership but his job provided him daily contact with the dictator and insight into the regime's decision-making process during the past decade and in its critical final days.

The official refused to be identified, citing fear of assassination by Saddam's paramilitaries who, he said, remain active throughout Iraq. But in several interviews, the former aide detailed what he said were the reasons behind Saddam's disinformation campaign -- which ultimately backfired by spurring, rather than deterring a US invasion.

According to the aide, by the mid-1990s "it was common knowledge among the leadership" that Iraq had destroyed its chemical stocks and discontinued development of biological and nuclear weapons.

But Saddam remained convinced that an ambiguous stance about the status of Iraq's weapons programs would deter an American attack.

"He repeatedly told me: `These foreigners, they only respect strength, they must be made to believe we are strong,'" the aide said.

Publicly Saddam denied having unconventional weapons. But from 1998 until 2002, he prevented UN inspectors from working in the country and when they finally returned in November, 2002, they often complained that Iraq wasn't fully cooperating.

Iraqi scientists, including those currently held by the US military, have maintained that no new unconventional weapons programs were started in recent years and that all the materials from previous programs were destroyed.

Both Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have come under fire in recent weeks as weapons hunters come up empty handed and prewar intelligence is questioned.

Before the invasion, the British government claimed Saddam could deploy unconventional weapons within 45 minutes. The Bush administration insisted the threat was so immediate that the world couldn't afford to wait for UN inspectors to wind up their searches. Despite the warnings, Iraqi troops never used such weapons during the war.

US intelligence officials at the Pentagon in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some experts had raised the theory that Iraq put out false information to persuade its enemies that it retained prohibited chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

"That explanation has plausibility," said Robert Einhorn a former assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation. "But the disposition of those missing weapons and materials still has to be explained somehow."

Iraq's claims that it destroyed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons materials could never be verified by UN inspectors who repeatedly requested proof.

However, UN inspectors, who scoured Iraq for three and a half months before the war, never found any evidence of renewed weapons programs.

"The longer that one does not find any weapons in spite of people coming forward and being rewarded for giving information, etc., the more I think it is important that we begin to ask ourselves if there were no weapons, why was it that Iraq conducted itself as it did for so many years?" Hans Blix, the former chief UN weapons inspector, told AP in June.

Posted 4:55 PM by Dil
On the same day in Basra, an officer with the British military, Major Andrew Jackson, said that a body believed to be al-Majid was found in the rubble after the air strike.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/06/05/sprj.irq.chemical.ali/

Posted 4:40 PM by Dil
"As far as Ali Hassan al-Majid is concerned, we have some strong indications that he was killed in the raid," British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said at the time. "I cannot yet absolutely confirm the fact that he is dead, but that would certainly my best judgment of the situation."

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/iraq_06-12-03.html

Posted 4:39 PM by Dil
http://icnorthernireland.icnetwork.co.uk/news/iraq/content_objectid=12864884_method=full_siteid=66002_headline=-Chemical-Ali--May-Still-be-Alive--name_page.html

"Critical was the whereabouts of Chemical Ali, and when we were able to take that building out, and we're pretty sure, 99% sure, that he was killed in that air strike, that really decapitated the brain, the final brain power of the Baath Party and that really set the conditions for us to come in, in the final move as we did."

Asked why he was not 100% sure that Chemical Ali was dead, Capt Vernon said: "If there is a body, it will be under a lot of rubble, but I am pretty sure that I can say almost absolutely that he was killed in that air raid, and we've had no subsequent sighting or any intelligence that he survived."