Authors: John Keegan
A time limit had indeed been attached to Resolution 1441. Iraq had to declare its acceptance of the resolution within a week of its adoption. It then had thirty days to provide the UN with evidence of what weapons of mass destruction it retained, if any, or of how and when such weapons had been destroyed if that was the case. Besides providing the evidence, Iraq also had to permit the readmission of UNMOVIC, successor to the earlier UNSCOM, which, frustrated by Iraqi non co-operation, had withdrawn from the country in 1999. Not, however, before submitting a final report; UNSCOM had stated that its inspectors, who had had access to Iraqi governmental documentation,
had been unable to account for 6,000 chemical aircraft bombs, seven Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles and two Russian-supplied Scuds. They had farther failed to account for much chemical and biological weapon material, including that capable of producing 26,000 litres of anthrax and 1.5 tons of VX gas. To exemplify the threat posed by such stocks, UNSCOM noted that 140 litres of VX could kill a million people.
UNMOVIC’s inspection teams arrived in Iraq on 25 November 2002. They were led by Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, not the American or British first choice. The Americans would have preferred the man who had led UNSCOM, Rolf Ekeus, another Swede who had impressed observers by his rigorous methods and his dissatisfaction at Iraqi evasions. Security Council members indulgent of Saddam’s pretensions to be a conventional head of state, including France and Russia, had opposed the re-appointment of Ekeus; the United States had opposed the choice of Blix, whom it regarded as ‘soft’, but without success. The UNMOVIC teams were accompanied by others from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), led by Mahomed ElBaradei, who would appear with Blix before the Security Council in the weeks to come. UNMOVIC’s teams, numbering almost 100 inspectors out of a strength of 270 available, began at once to visit suspect sites in Iraq and to interview Iraqi scientists identified as having knowledge which UNMOVIC needed. Resolution 1441 authorized their transferral to places outside Iraq where they could be debriefed beyond governmental supervision. There was a multiple mismatch between what the Americans and British wanted from the inspection, how Iraq was willing to co-operate with UNMOVIC’s methods and what UNMOVIC was trying to do. UNMOVIC sought to survey a country the size of France to declare it clean of WMD; the Iraqi government was concerned to provide paper evidence that it had nothing to hide; America and Britain wanted material verification that all Iraqi WMD had been destroyed. The latter, short of a physical occupation of the country, was impossible to provide; UNMOVIC had set itself an unfeasible task;
Iraq, however much documentation it published, was unlikely to be believed.
So proved to be the case. On 7 December Iraq delivered to the UN office in Baghdad an enormous cache of documents, having previously displayed it to the world media. The forty-three bound volumes, written in English, six folders and twelve CD-ROMs were claimed by General Hassam Muhammad Amin, the Iraqi government’s nominated liaison officer with UNMOVIC, to demonstrate that Iraq had already complied with Resolution 1441. ‘We are a country’, he said, ‘devoid of weapons of mass destruction. This fact is known to all countries including the United States of America and Britain and all those concerned.’ The delivery of the Iraqi documents to the UN caused a short-lived sensation. The BBC, with an unctuousness that would characterize much of its reporting on the politics of the crisis, declared Iraq to be ‘bullish’ in the aftermath of the documentary presentation and gave the impression that the prospect of war had receded.
When the documents were delivered for perusal to the competent authorities – UNMOVIC had an office in New York, the IAEA in Vienna – both Blix and ElBaradei announced that it would take weeks to analyse the contents, then months to verify the information in Iraq. President Bush was therefore confronted with the prospect of more delay before bringing Saddam to face the threat of military action if he did not physically demonstrate that he had disarmed. He was frustrated at the prospect and even more frustrated when Blix stated that the Iraqi disclosures would be distributed to all fifteen members of the UN Security Council. The President suspected that some would seek to protract the inspection process farther and that others – France foremost – would attempt to use the material to block resort to military action altogether. As the US had possession of the Iraqi documentation, however, Blix and potential procrastinators could be outflanked. Only the four other permanent members of the Security Council – France, Britain, Russia and China – were given a full set of the papers. The non-permanent members were provided with edited extracts.
Yet the Iraqi presentation, because of its inadequacy, provided the United States with the opportunity it now sought: to demonstrate that Saddam was defying the authority of the UN. The Iraqi papers were a tired collection of old material, disclosing nothing not already known. Hans Blix privately admitted as much. He told some of his UNMOVIC associates, ‘Saddam might not like foreigners crawling around his country but if he wants to get out of this mess, he has to engage with us’. Saddam’s difficulty, like Blix’s, was that the UN’s success in securing the readmission of UNMOVIC to Iraq solved nothing. It was posited on the notion, which became an endlessly repeated media catchphrase that somewhere in Iraq there was waiting ‘a smoking gun’ to be discovered by the inspectors. The ‘smoking gun’, a particularly vacuous media notion, would have been a cache of chemical weapons, a WMD production facility, a stock of weapons-grade nuclear material or an armoury of missiles capable of delivering warheads to ranges greater than 150 kilometres. Given the size of Iraq relative to that of the inspection teams, and the very small compass of any hiding place in which forbidden weapons could be concealed, Blix’s inspectors could have beaten the coverts for years without statistically material hope of finding anything relevant to their investigation. UNMOVIC had been sent on a wild goose chase, as Blix knew and partially admitted in the months following the Iraqi disclosure of 7 December by his begging for time. Saddam knew the same. UNMOVIC had been set the impossible task of proving a negative, that Saddam no longer had forbidden weapons. It was unlikely that, over any foreseeable period, Blix or ElBaradei could prove anything, one way or the other. Saddam was in a comparable fix. He had turned himself into a victim of his own fictions and evasions. Because of his systematic mendacity, he had lost the capacity to persuade anyone that he was telling the truth. Even had he, in the last weeks of free action he enjoyed as President of a sovereign country, had the UN inspectors escorted to the places he knew to be WMD sites, he would not have convinced the powers gathering against him that he had made a full disclosure. The tangled web of
deception he had contrived in his last ten years of power was the cause of his own downfall.
President Bush was not prepared to follow Blix or anyone else through the tortuous process of an inspection fated not to produce results. On 19 December 2002, he declared Iraq to be in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 1441. Colin Powell, his Secretary of State and a known moderate, stated that ‘Iraq’s non-compliance and defiance of the international community has brought it closer to the day when he has to face the consequences. This declaration [the presentation of December 7] fails totally to move us in the direction of a peaceful solution.’
The policy of direct confrontation with Saddam met with acceptance in the United States. The administration’s equation of his defiance of the UN over WMD with its war on terrorism evoked popular support. In Europe the situation proved different. The American government was already aware that in Western Europe it could count only on Italy, Spain and Britain to support its war policy. During the first months of 2003 the British government’s difficulty in sustaining commonality of purpose with America became apparent. The beginnings of popular dissent, which were to culminate in large-scale anti-war demonstrations, emerged. Much of the British media, including the BBC, revealed its hostility. Most troublingly for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Labour Party in Parliament, which he had controlled sinuously throughout his first years in power and at the beginning of his second term of government, began to show signs of serious dissent. Labour is a broad church, accommodating many doctrines. Two which have to be placated at all times, however, are anti-Americanism and anti-militarism, particularly if the use of military force is threatened in what might be represented as a neo-colonialist cause. Saddam was an unlikely favourite of Labour’s anti-colonialist wing. He was patently a tyrant and oppressor of his own people. He ought also to have been disfavoured by the Labour anti-war party, being one of the most flagrant regional warlords of modern times. Nevertheless, he had credentials which resonated with some Labour ideologues. He was undeniably anti-American; he was also anti-Israeli, a new
enthusiasm with some Labour backbenchers; and he made himself appear a military underdog, threatened with the overwhelming force of Western military power.
Many on the Labour backbenches did not like the manifestation of military power in any form; they were, in most cases unwittingly, adherents of the Olympian outlook that believed treaty, legal agreement and diplomatic negotiation sufficient to settle international differences. When, after President Bush’s declaration of 19 December 2002 that Iraq was in ‘material breach’ of Resolution 1441, which threatened ‘serious consequences’ to Iraq for its failure fully to disclose its WMD state, a declaration falling short of the UN’s usual warning that ‘all necessary measures’ would follow, the dissenters began to demand what became known as the ‘second resolution’. They wanted, in effect, the case for military action against Iraq to be taken back to the Security Council and authorized by an additional vote.
There was no such demand in the American Congress, whose members were satisfied that fifteen UN resolutions, including 1441 but originating in 687 of March 1991, which required Iraq to accept under international supervision the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, sufficed to justify military action in the face of Saddam’s noncompliance. The British Parliament, and a sizeable portion of the British electorate, was soon to show that it dissented. By early February 2003, the anti-war movement in Europe was in full flood. On Saturday 15 February some 100 million protesters in 600 cities took to the streets; perhaps as many as 2 million demonstrated in London. They were not a rent-a-crowd of ageing anti-nuclear protestors or anti-everything dissidents. Many were members of the sober middle class, who had been touched by the Olympian ethic of opposition to any form of international action lying outside the now commonly approved limits of legal disapproval and treaty condemnation. Tony Blair, the ‘pretty straight sort of guy’, had been hoist with his own petard of decency. Many of the marchers who thronged London’s streets were exactly the people whose votes he solicited: Christian, high-minded, internationalist, pro-European.
Worse was to come. The anti-war feeling in the parliamentary Labour Party was strengthening and when on 21 February the chief whip issued an instruction demanding support for a pro-war vote five days later, the dissidents began to organize. An anti-war amendment to the motion was tabled within the hour, getting sixty names underneath the statement that ‘the case for military action is not yet proven’. The Labour whips kept calm, believing that, as usually happened, much of the support would fall away on the day. The Prime Minister, his party’s chief electoral asset, lobbied hard, inviting the leading anti-war protesters to meet him to discuss their concerns. He had confidence in his own very great powers of persuasion; he also doubted his backbenchers’ willingness to weaken his standing. Many of them, however, were in an unreasonable mood. The temptation to indulge deep-seated ideological emotions – anti-Americanism, anti-militarism – was too strong to resist. The Prime Minister told the visiting German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, himself a leading opponent of any war, that he was confident of keeping the number of votes against the motion below 100, perhaps even below fifty. In the event, the tone of the debate was against the government and when the house divided on the evening of 26 February, 121 Labour members voted for the anti-war amendment. It was a deliberate slight to the Prime Minister and a serious setback for his policy.
Yet, strained as he was by the intensity of the crisis and harassed by the disaffection of many he had counted as personal as well as political friends, he retained his resilience and his belief in himself. Tony Blair is that unusual being, a politician sustained by a sense of morality. He believed New Labour, a party he had invented almost single-handedly, was a necessary force for good in his country’s domestic life. He also believed that its foreign policy was a necessary force for good in a wicked world. Soon after the vote of 26 February, on a flight to see his European ally, the Spanish Prime Minister, he made to attendant journalists a declaration of faith. Its tone was the opposite of Olympian. It had historical echoes, but not those favoured by his party
opponents. He did not hark back, as so many of them did, to the idealist illusions of the appeasers of the 1930s or to the deflated expectations of the supporters of the League of Nations. He took, instead, a Churchillian tone. ‘A majority of decent and well-meaning people’, he told his little audience in the aircraft, ‘said that there was no need to confront Hitler and that those who did were warmongers.’ Then, referring to his earlier support for ‘progressive war’ in the Balkans and elsewhere, ‘progressive war’ being another of his moralistic inventions, he went on, ‘I’m proud of what we’ve done in Kosovo and Afghanistan, and, in a different way, by supporting the régime in Sierra Leone … if you go back now, for all the problems they have got, and you ask if we did the right thing, I believe we did. Those who benefited most from military action had been the people of those countries … I believe we have to do this in Iraq, the people of Iraq will be the main beneficiaries.’ In a final affirmation of his moral position as the apostle of progressive war, he replied to a questioner who asked why he was so committed to the American President’s war policy: ‘I believe in it. I am truly committed to dealing with this, irrespective of the position of America. If the Americans were not doing this, I would be pressing for them to be doing so’.