4. WAR STORIES

WMD and Noble Half-Truths

Years after the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, the world remains polarized over the war. Supporters thought it necessary, while many opponents believe a false case was deliberately manufactured for it.[20]

This allegation has been reinforced by the discovery of a putative intellectual justification for such deceit, the idea of the “noble lie” propagated by the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, one of the strongest intellectual influences on the neo-conservatives. According to Strauss, élites in liberal societies must sometimes create “myths” to hold those societies together, for fear that they would otherwise collapse through selfishness and individualism.

One such myth is the enemy, the threat, the identification and combating of which forces society to cohere and unite. Once that enemy was the Soviet Union and communism; today it is Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

This is a big allegation and it is a toxic dispute, poisonous to both domestic and international reputations, the cause of both angry accusation and equally bitter rebuttal. But perhaps the story of sanctions policymaking in the Security Council can help throw light on the argument.

While the two “sides” in the Security Council composed incompatible narratives of what was going on with sanctions against Iraq, both comprised and reinforced by partial selections of facts, something similar was going on in the story of Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. This neither confirms nor fully refutes the “noble lie” thesis of deliberate deceit. It suggests, rather, a more complex and subtle, and if anything more disturbing, story.

Here the basis of evidence was not the UN, NGO or other reports on sanctions or sanctions-busting, many of which suffered their own peculiar biases and flaws, but a resource that is unavoidably unreliable, namely secret intelligence. Particularly after inspectors were withdrawn in late 1998, the available intelligence on Iraq was severely limited. Whatever Saddam had or did, he concealed under roofs or underground, and there is no aircraft or satellite camera yet invented that can penetrate there.

Both the United States and Britain were thus forced to rely on that most unreliable reporter of facts — human beings (or “humint” as it is known). In addition, there was the expert knowledge of the many inspectors who had visited Iraq’s WMD sites and spoken with Iraqi officials and scientists. Despite these difficulties, the picture that emerged in the late 1990s and into 2002 was reasonably consistent.

This was that Iraq was not rearming to any great extent, that there were still questions about its disposal of past stocks of weapons, but in summary that the policy of containment was working. Inevitably, there were unanswered questions — unconfirmed reports of attempted imports of dual-use materials that might be used to produce WMD and possibilities that the unaccounted-for dozen or so Scud missiles might still exist and be reassembled (not one was found postwar). But there was nothing that would suggest significant rearmament or intent to attack Iraq’s neighbors, let alone Britain. The Butler Report[21] gives a similar account.

Yet, by September 2002, both the US and UK governments were claiming that Iraq was a significant threat, citing clear and authoritative intelligence evidence of rearmament and attempts to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The US government went further, suggesting that Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda and 9/11 were somehow connected. Bush began to juxtapose Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in adjacent sentences, never quite claiming a proven connection, but deliberately implying some kind of link. The implication, still repeated to this day by members of the Bush administration, was refuted by the 9/11 Commission. Even at the time of the war, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) let it be known publicly that this suggestion had no foundation.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn cites a number of studies where scientists with different paradigmatic views observe different patterns in the same data — what he calls a switch in the visual Gestalt. For example, looking at a contour map, a student sees lines on a paper, a cartographer a picture of terrain. Only once trained will the student see the same as the cartographer, even though the data he is observing have not changed.

Both the British Prime Minister, to the Butler Review, and the former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have admitted publicly (long after the war) that what changed before the war was not the evidence of Iraqi weapons but, in the new post-9/11 light, the appraisal of that evidence. The Prime Minister told the Butler Review: “after September 11^th it took on a completely different aspect...what changed for me with September 11^th was that I thought then you have to change your mindset...you have to go out and get after the different aspects of this threat...you have to deal with this because otherwise the threat will grow...”.

This rings true and is understandable. An event of the horror and magnitude of 9/11 should have changed our appreciation of the dangers of WMD and noncompliance with international law. It represented, for good or ill, a paradigm shift in the way our leaders saw the world. But it appears that not only did the appraisal change but so, crucially, did the presentation of that appraisal, and the evidence justifying it to the public.

No doubt other factors were at play. There is a tendency in government to see intelligence material as being at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of information. Unlike the voluminous flow of diplomatic telegrams, memos and open-source information that hits computers on desks across government every day, intelligence arrives in slim folders, adorned with colorful stickers announcing not only the secrecy of the information therein but the restricted circulation it enjoys. The impression thus given, a product of these esthetics, is of access to the real thing, the secret core denied to all but the elite few.

History gives an interesting example of this phenomenon, namely the case of the Zinoviev letter. In 1924 Britain’s Foreign Office was sent a copy of a letter, purporting to come from Grigori Zinoviev, the president of the Soviet Comintern, addressed to the central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The letter urged the party to stir up the British proletariat in preparation for class war. The letter then appeared in the press, causing immense political and diplomatic repercussions. It was a major embarrassment for the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and the governing Labor Party. The opposition Conservatives won the general election four days later. Relations between Britain and the Soviet Union soured, and Anglo-Soviet treaties were abandoned.

Only in 1999, when the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook ordered an investigation of Britain’s official archives, was it confirmed that the Zinoviev letter was a fake. The fake was believed as genuine by the Foreign Office, the archives revealed, because it came from the Secret Intelligence Service (this an observation from the Foreign Office’s own archival investigation).

An additional factor in Iraq was also that many of the human sources of intelligence had an understandable interest in exaggerating what they were reporting, not least because they wanted to encourage the overthrow of a regime they hated. The role of the Iraqi National Congress, the key Iraqi opposition group before the war, in providing “humint” is now well-known. But, interestingly, the Butler Review discounts this factor, pointing instead to the SIS’s failure to validate its sources properly, the long reporting chains and the sources’ lack of expertize on what they were reporting.

Back in the capitals, there is meanwhile an invisible undertow at work on the civil servants who collate and analyze this information. If ministers want a particular story to emerge, it has a way of emerging: the facts are made to fit the policy. It takes a brave if not foolhardy civil servant to resist this tide. This is not to claim that there was some secret cubicle in Whitehall (or Washington) where evidence of Iraq’s weapons was deliberately fabricated, but something more subtle: evidence is selected from the available mass, contradictions are excised, and the selected data are repeated, rephrased, polished (and spun, if you prefer), until it seems neat, coherent and convincing, to the extent that those presenting it may believe it fully themselves.

All of these reasons will have contributed to a considerable bias in the information that the government received and the analyzes then produced on Iraq’s WMD. All of these reasons should have inspired caution; any assessment based on such information should have been heavily caveated. But, as the Butler Report relates, instead of transmitting these caveats in its public presentations, such as the infamous Number 10 dossier, the government left them out. What was broadcast to the public was in effect not the summit of a hierarchy of information but a selection from a spectrum of information, a spectrum that ranged from the well-established to the highly speculative, and the selection came from the wrong end. Just as I once produced one-sided arguments to justify sanctions by ignoring all contrary evidence, the government produced a highly one-sided account of inherently unreliable information.

Of course governments in all democracies put forward one-sided accounts of policy. Economic statistics are always presented with the positive numbers in the forefront, the negative sidelined to footnotes or ignored. Civil servants are highly skilled in slanting information in this way. But there should be limits. When seeking to justify military action, the government has a duty to tell the whole truth, not just a partial account of it.

Something else was going on too. As the drums of war beat louder in Washington, both the US and UK governments became more strident in dismissing containment or other alternatives to all-out invasion. Bush declared sanctions to be as full of holes as a Swiss cheese; the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, even once, bizarrely, argued that military action was preferable to the distress caused by sanctions. Sanctions were crumbling, the public was told (as it still is today). These governments gave the impression that all alternatives had been exhausted; war was the only option.

This was not in fact the case. There was a viable alternative. Effective action to seize Saddam Hussein’s illegal financial assets and block oil smuggling would have denied him the resources which sustained his power: sanctions on the regime, and not its long-suffering people. For many years before the war this alternative was unfortunately never pursued with the necessary energy or commitment. The reasons for this are not immediately obvious.

Such a policy would have required consistent pressure across the region, applied to all of Iraq’s neighbors. And, for different reasons in each case, it wasn’t pursued with sufficient vigor. Senior envoys and ministers only rarely or half-heartedly mentioned smuggling in bilateral contacts, thereby implying toleration. Gradually it came to be understood that certain of Iraq’s neighbors were “allowed” to import illegal oil, undermining attempts to deal with even the most egregious sanctions-busters.

Meanwhile, back in the Security Council, any attempt we made to propose collective action against smuggling was invariably blocked by France or Russia, on the alleged grounds that there was insufficient proof of the smuggling, or that such action might further harm Iraq’s people. I lost count of the number of times we inserted provisions for sanctions-monitoring units, or other exhortations for action, into draft Council resolutions, only to have diplomats from these countries strike them out in negotiation (as veto-wielding permanent members, their acquiescence was essential for every dot and comma). The US and UK governments now like to claim that this was the reason sanctions failed (when in doubt, blame the French); some even claim that the UN itself connived at corruption to benefit Saddam Hussein (an allegation for which there is scant evidence).[22] But, in truth, we too exerted precious little energy to enforce controls. While in New York we argued ourselves hoarse in negotiation, Washington and London rarely lifted a finger to pressure Iraq’s neighbors to stem the illegal flows.

An effective anti-smuggling policy would have required an over-arching and long-term strategy, addressing problems in a variety of different areas ranging from illegal bank accounts to cross-border oil smuggling. Such a strategy was never implemented. Instead there were piecemeal and ineffective efforts.

I suspect that the reason for this perhaps lies in the universal human truth that what can be left until later usually is, until it is too late. The policy was difficult, complex and unfashionable, demanding extensive study to master and discuss, a luxury that busy ministers and senior officials do not enjoy. It was never the first or most glamourous priority, so it was allowed to slide.

In the end, when contrasted with the complexity and uncertainty of the alternatives, war may have seemed simpler. In the strange way that governments are swept along by events without properly stopping to think, war came to be seen as the only viable course, a current no doubt strengthened in Britain by the clear determination in Washington, now amply chronicled (in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, among others), to pursue conflict.

It would undoubtedly have taken considerable political and diplomatic effort to corral Iraq’s neighbors and other states into this alternate course. It would not have had the binary clarity of winning or losing a war. But this effort would certainly have been less than that of going to war, and it had the real potential to remove the regime by cutting away the funds that sustained it. Above all, this approach would not have incurred the sacrifice of Iraqi, British, American and other lives.

If Iraq was not a threat and not collaborating with terrorists, why did the Bush and Blair governments go to war with it? Several plausible explanations have been offered by others: the US administration’s need after 9/11 to demonstrate its power — anywhere, anyhow; a mission civilisatrice to democratize the world by force, an impulse given strength by the vigorous and forceful lobby of the Iraqi opposition. But less credible, given the record on sanctions, is the claim that the welfare of the Iraqi people was the primary concern.

Another possible explanation lies in the more sinister motives of oil and its control. The prospect of Iraq’s huge reserves (the second largest in the world) hung in the air throughout the policy deliberations in the years before the war. It was well-known that Saddam Hussein had allocated all the massively lucrative post-sanctions exploration contracts to French, Chinese, Russian and other non-US and non-British companies (and it bothered the companies a lot, as they would tell us). It is hard to believe that the immense potential for money-making and energy security did not exert some pull in the decision to invade, but the evidence for some sort of conspiracy led by Big Oil is hard to come by. But again, we do not know, because we have not been told. Instead we were given not the “noble lie”, but the somewhat less-than-noble half-truth. The full answer will perhaps be revealed by the chief protagonists in years to come. For now, all we can know for sure is that the empirical reasons these governments have given so far simply do not add up.

Perhaps, therefore, a non-empirical reason is at the heart of this. They did it because they thought it was right. Saddam Hussein was a bad man, a potential danger in the future, not today. And this, if true, is a legitimate reason, or at least arguable. Unfortunately, it is neither the primary reason both governments gave the UN or their peoples for going to war (though both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair allude to it with ever greater frequency), nor is it justifiable in any canon of international law (although perhaps it should be).

And here we return to Leo Strauss: not to the “noble lie”, but to his belief in “natural law”, a fundamental, sometimes religious (though Strauss, I read, was an atheist) sense of right and wrong, a right and wrong superior to all other laws — including, it seems in this case, international law. Both leaders have said in the past that they believe in such rules, as I suspect most of us do in some way. And it is perhaps the readiness of voters, especially in the US, to accept this reasoning that lies behind the curious phenomenon that, although the evidence that these governments misled their peoples was soon clear, neither Bush nor Blair paid any immediate political price for it.

In the 2004 presidential elections the allegation of lying, noble or otherwise, and the decidedly ambiguous course of the resulting war did not turn the people against their chosen president. His “natural law” argument — that it was right to remove the Iraqi dictator — sufficed, even when the empirical evidence did not. Tony Blair likewise was comfortably reelected in Britain in 2005.

Political theorists of the twenty-first century have much to feed on in this analysis: it is a story rich in paradox and contradiction, from which it is hard to divine rational inferences or laws. The governments did not manufacture lies, but neither did they tell the truth, even when they thought they did. These half-truths, moreover, bore no relation whatever to the real truth of what was actually going on in Iraq (no terrorists, no WMD). And in the end, the electors, in the name of whose security and safety the whole exercise was undertaken, do not seem to care much either way. In this picture it seems that neither Strauss nor Plato (who in fact originated the “noble lie”) nor anyone else is much of a guide. Things seem altogether less ordered and coherent than any logical analysis would have it. The key actors claim to have agency, to make rational decisions, but in fact are swept along by forces they cannot grasp. Laws of democracy and morality give way: the law of chaos instead must hold sway.

Here may be the biggest misperception of all, though not a lie, since it is hardly conscious. This is a misperception — a fiction, if you like — in which governments and governed collaborate, for to believe otherwise is too uncomfortable. And this is that governments, politicians and civil servants are able to observe the world without bias and disinterestedly interpret its myriad signs into facts and judgments (indeed, in the Foreign Office, telegrams are divided into these two very categories: “Detail” and “Comment”) with an objective, almost scientific rigor. The story of what these two governments observed, believed and then told their populations about Iraq suggests an altogether more imperfect reality.