Another liar surfaces in the Iraqi tragedy and, yet again, doesn’t turn out to be Tony Blair
Oh dear – another liar surfaces in the Iraq tragedy and, yet again, doesn’t turn out to be Tony Blair.
If you haven’t yet read the Guardian’s sensational disclosure that the Iraqi intelligence source known as Curveball deliberately lied, you should read it right away.
Who says he lied? He does. His name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, and he’s a chemical engineer now living with his family in the German industrial town of Karlsruhe with German citizenship but no work, and no €3,000 a month stipend from German intelligence any more either.
What did Janabi lie about? Saddam Hussein’s secret biological weapons programme. Why did he do it? “I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy,” he explains.
That’s quite a bold claim after what Martin Chulov – the Guardian’s Baghdad correspondent – and Helen Pidd’s background reportdescribed as “more than 100,000 civilian deaths and a savage sectarian war.” It’s not a description I’d dispute, but others will.
The details are fascinating. Read them as they go round the world – via US and Australian radio among others. The BBC has made little mention of the story, displaying a welcome degree of caution before following a Fleet Street story which it does not always show, alas.
By all means check it out, lads, but it reads pretty persuasively to me.
Assuming Janabi – a self-confessed liar, after all – is telling the truth this time, what conclusions might we safely draw? He has talked to the Guardian after not talking to others as frankly since being outed by US network TV in 2007.
Janabi says his claims were not motivated by his need for asylum status for himself and (later) his wife. He also says that, when parts of his story didn’t check out, he admitted making it up. He was amazed when he watched Colin Powell relying heavily on his claims when addressing the UN security council just before the US-led invasion began in March 2003.
US intelligence officials seem to be relieved to be seen to have a source to justify their conclusion that Saddam had WMD – a verdict shared by major intelligence agencies around the world at the time, even those who opposed the war.
The Iraqi dictator himself lied about it, if you remember. Yet German intelligence (BND) knew it was flakey. So must the Brits and Americans have done, Janabi now suggests.
But it doesn’t end the buck-passing that has marked the entire policy since the lightning military victory descended into a bloody occupation and brutal sectarian terror.
In today’s paper, the US neocon and armchair Pentagon warrior Richard Perle is still saying Janabi wrote to him just before the invasion and bemoaned the fact that US intelligence wasn’t taking him seriously enough.
He blames the CIA – neocons like him and Dick Cheney usually do – for failing to do its job properly and sort the wheat from the chaff. Others say it eases the burden of blame on George Bush and, by implication, Blair.
As ever, intelligence involves a lot of smoke and mirrors. In his UN speech, Powell also rested his case in part on Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium – “yellowcake” from Niger – which the US has also since disowned as forged, but M16 still insists was correct.
“Niger exports chickens and yellowcake (to France mostly) and the Iraqis didn’t go there to buy chickens,” I once heard a top spook avow.
It’s still clear that politicians keen to bring down the restlessly ambitious and ruthless Saddam, by war if all other means failed, and were happy to accept intelligence data that was already ringing bells – and that Janabi’s later uncertainties were deemed unhelpful.
Evidence to the Chilcot inquiry also underlines (we knew most of it anyway) that there were unrealistic expectations about the occupation and woefully poor planning for it. The vacuum thus created allowed sectarian violence – triggered by resentful, usurped and unemployed Sunnis, Saddam’s own people – to flare up.
Among our own sectarians, there’s an eagerness to see Sir John Chilcot dump the whole can of worms for failure at Blair’s front door – at one or other of them – though the sound of officials and soldiers passing their own bit of buck at Chilcot’s tribunal has been unedifying.
By coincidence, last weekend the Times (paywall) carried a welcome attempt at balance. Written by Brigadier Paul Gibson, a former director of counter-terrorism and UK operations who also commanded the 4th Armoured Brigade in Basra during part of the war – one of many in a (too) fast-changing command structure, he notes.
Gibson’s article does not exempt the politicians from mistakes, from being too keen to get into Iraq, with Janabi’s assistance, and then too keen to proclaim assorted successes for “Iraqi-isation” and get out again.
But he usefully says the military made a lot of mistakes too, discredited themselves with the Americans (who learned faster from their mistakes) and were often both insular and complacent.
Too many of our 46,000 troops (2003) left too soon (UK troop levels were down to 8,600 within a year), writes Gibson – an error that matched the Pentagon’s own. It allowed the bad guys free rein.
I suppose I could interpolate the thought, too, that the anti-war movement’s pressure for withdrawal and for delegitimising the invasion also contributed to the desire to scuttle and emboldened the suicide bombers and sectarians.
But when the Brits finally left Basra with their tails between their legs – “ignominious” is Gibson’s description – the Iraqis and the Americans had to sort out the local militias we had “allowed to flourish”, he says.
As with Janabi’s testimony, Gibson provides a useful correction to the dominant narrative: Bush and Blair went to war eagerly and on a lie. The decision to bring home Britain’s fallen soldiers (it didn’t ever happen as recently as the Falklands war of 1982) and thereby trigger coroners’ inquests has accentuated that tendency.
It has allowed inexperienced coroners to blame politicians for battlefield deployments, decisions and kit, blame which really belong in the military witnesses’ knapsacks.
I note in passing, and without complaint, that the current defence secretary, Liam Fox, had no compunction in blaming MoD officials for sacking long-serving soldiers via email.
Beware the dominant narrative – it skews clear judgment and affects future decisions: Iraq will be inhibiting any urge to intervene in rogue states for decades. Perhaps that is a good thing, though innocents will die as a result, and do die daily, for instance in the Congo.
Which leads me to a relevant footnote about the Nato war in Kosovo – not sanctioned by the UN, incidentally – in 1999. Do you remember how the US “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and caused a huge stink for which Washington apologised?
Tucked away in this week’s Sunday Times (paywall), Michael Sheridan reported from Hong Kong that ex-President Jiang Zemin had admitted in an unpublished memoir that the US had very good grounds for the bombing.
Why? The Chinese president says he acceded to a plea from Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic to shelter key military personnel in the embassy during US raids on strategic targets.
He hoped to get leverage in ex-Yugoslavia after Russia had refused to back the Serb president as well as, Sheridan speculates, to get whatever bits of high-tech US military kit the Serbs shot down. China was secretly sending Milosevic surface-to-air missiles.
It was all a mistake, Jiang’s memoir concedes, and destroyed his relationship with President Bill Clinton. Why? Because the Serbian officials used the Chinese embassy to carry out their military business, and Washington privately provided Beijing with evidence of electronic transmissions.
The US apologised for its “mistake” and China called off its domestic rioters, but it was a face-saving exercise for Chinese benefit. Interesting, huh? And I’d have expected wider media interest.
Perhaps we haven’t had that because too many of us are still hooked on the “Americans as global imperialists” narrative, while China enjoys a free pass as an emerging east Asian economy.
Tell that to the Japanese. This week, China’s economy overtook them.
The Guardian
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