Center for International Policy

Investigate Deceptions of War's Inception

May 27, 2005
By: Jim Mullins
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The age-old question -- If a tree fell in the forest and no one heard, would that mean it never made a sound? -- is apropos to a scandal slowly emerging on the international scene.

The sound of a secret memo leaked to the London's Sunday Times some three weeks ago, but studiously ignored by the administration, is now being heard and has demonstrated in its stark wording that "the fix was in" in the deception of both Congress and the American people leading up to war against Iraq.

President Bush has managed up until now to avoid the reality that, rather than faulty intelligence portraying Saddam Hussein as an immediate threat to our national security, the impetus came from within the administration led by a president thirsting to invade Iraq and willing to "cook the books" in order to achieve his objective.

In all fairness, he may have been influenced by the neocons whose utopian ideology was rejected by Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; but the fact remains that, as President Truman said, "The buck stops here" in terms of presidential decisions and responsibility.

The saga began with the recent release of a March 2003 letter of resignation by a courageous woman: Elizabeth Wilshurst, deputy legal adviser to the U.K. Foreign Office. The letter was obtained by BBC under the Freedom of Information Act and outlines her position that an Iraqi invasion, absent a second U.N. resolution after 1441, was a violation of the U.N. charter and an act of aggression. She maintained that her office and Attorney General Lord Goldsmith concurred on that legal opinion in a 13-page brief given to Prime Minister Tony Blair prior to Goldsmith's unprincipled reversal of the legal consensus in a March 7 one-page memo immediately before the war began.

An anonymous leaker then provided the London's Sunday Times with copies of memos that outlined agreements between Bush and Blair a year before the Iraqi war began. They show that at an April 2002 Texas summit, Blair acquiesced with Bush in his desire to invade Iraq.

And the minutes of a London meeting on July 23, 2002, reveal that the leader of Britain's intelligence service, MI-6, reported that in a secret meeting he had attended with officials in Washington: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy." [italics mine]

The minutes continued with: "But the case was thin. Saddam was not threaterning his neighbors and WMD capacity was less than Libya, Iran and North Korea." Another memo counseled that America and Britain needed to "create conditions" legitimating war.

We know that, in 1999, Bush told his biographer that he intended to invade Iraq if elected, and that Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was dumbfounded by the new president's discussion of an Iraqi invasion at his first Cabinet meeting. We know from counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke that the incoming Bush administration had little interest in Osama bin Laden and was convinced that Saddam Hussein was the threat, all evidence to the contrary.

We know that the Bush administration's constant repetition that Saddam Hussein was the power behind the 9-11 attack was bogus. That our elite troops were pulled out of Afghanistan within three months to begin training for an Iraqi invasion, with Osama bin Laden still on the loose.

We know that Colin Powell's Feb. 23, 2003, U.N. presentation was a tissue of contrived deception and exaggeration, that the U.N. inspectors, if permitted to finish their mission, would have found that for all practical purposes Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed -- as Iraq's prime defector and director of Iraq's WMD development told the U.N. in the early 1990s and as Scott Ritter, the chief American weapons inspector before 1998, had contended.

Eighty eight members of Congress have signed a letter demanding an investigation of the circumstances leading up to our pre-emptive attack on Iraq. U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., authored the letter.

His remarks that "this should not fall down the memory hole during wall-to-wall coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and a runaway bride" should be heeded by all Americans.

Jim Mullins is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a resident of Delray Beach.