A Journey (66 page)

I understand entirely why people take this view. The stated purpose of the conflict was to enforce UN resolutions on Saddam’s WMD, and we found no WMD after taking control of the country. We thought there was an active WMD programme and there wasn’t. The aftermath, following Saddam’s removal in May 2003, was bloody, destructive and chaotic. If we had found actual WMD, the view would be different; and if we had ended the conflict in May 2003 and the aftermath had been like that in Kosovo, the debate would be rather distant and academic. But the former seemed to disintegrate the
casus belli
; and the latter has served to keep the fact and consequence of it constantly in our thoughts.

So that is one reason, and a perfectly comprehensible one, for the conventional wisdom; but there is another reason. Politics today works by reference to paradigms of opinion that are formed, harden fast and then become virtually unchallengeable. People have a short time to reflect and consider; issues are weighed quickly, little care is put into what goes on the scales and so judgements are made with a speed and severity that a more deliberative process would eschew. Once such judgements are made, stories are written that tend to reinforce the judgement. Stories to the contrary are ignored, until eventually to challenge the judgement is deemed almost delusional. Balance is an alien concept in today’s world. It wants opinions that are certain and are made fast.

For these purposes, therefore, my task is a modest one: not to persuade the reader of the rightness of the cause, but merely to persuade that such a cause can be made out. It is to open the mind. I have often reflected as to whether I was wrong. I ask you to reflect as to whether I may have been right.

The intelligence on Saddam and WMD turned out to be incorrect. It is said – even I have said – that how this came to be so remains a mystery. Why should Saddam keep the inspectors out for so long when he had nothing to hide? Even when he let them in, why did he obstruct them? Why bring war upon his country to protect a myth? Was it really, to paraphrase the former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, as paradoxical as this: that he thought the US and its allies were bluffing when we threatened force and actually we were sincere; and we thought he genuinely had WMD when actually he was bluffing?

When I went back over all the facts again for the purposes of the Chilcot Inquiry, I reread in full the final Iraq Survey Group Report from 2004, and had greater time to reflect on its purport. Compiled by the US/UK team headed by Dr David Kay and then Charles Duelfer to determine the truth about Saddam and WMD, the report was published in two stages. The first, while David Kay was heading the group, concluded in 2003 that Saddam had no active WMD programme. That took the news headlines, and unsurprisingly led to the view that therefore the intelligence was just plain false, that Saddam had evidently been in compliance with the UN resolutions and that the war was unjustified. The caveats entered by Dr Kay were largely overlooked, including his assertion that Saddam was possibly a greater threat than we had known, a remark seen at the time as inexplicable, given the primary finding.

The second report from Charles Duelfer was not published until September 2004. It received far less attention, yet this was the complete analysis. Under the pressure of the challenges of the time in Iraq, I didn’t digest it in full. Furthermore, it was only some years later that Charles Duelfer published his book describing in detail the compilation of the report. For the purposes of the Chilcot Inquiry, I studied both. What had been inexplicable was there explained.

The ISG team under Duelfer had managed to conduct interviews with the key personnel from the regime, the top associates of Saddam. In an extraordinary process lasting some months, an FBI agent, George Piro, also secured interviews with Saddam himself. The team uncovered tapes of meetings that Saddam had had with senior staff at which the WMD programme was discussed. The real story emerged. And it’s worth reading.

Essentially, after sanctions were imposed, Saddam’s regime became severely constrained. The constraint became even tougher when revelations from Saddam’s son-in-law about his continuing interest in development of WMD were broadcast to the world in 1996. (He was later lured back to Iraq and killed.)

Saddam made a tactical decision. From the mid-1990s onwards, Saddam’s policy became to remove sanctions at all costs. The active WMD programme was shut down. The material that had not been destroyed by the inspectors in 1991 was disposed of. He knew he could no longer risk producing WMD and trying to conceal them.

However, he retained completely his belief in the strategic importance of WMD to his regime and its survival. He believed that the use of chemical weapons had been vital in repelling the Iranian soldiers who, filled with religious zeal, had thrown themselves in waves against Iraqi forces in the Iran–Iraq War. Only their use had, he thought, compensated for the superior number of Iran’s forces. The gassing of the Kurds had delivered not just a military but a psychological blow to their hopes of challenging Saddam, so these weapons had played a pivotal role in suppressing internal dissent. Saddam knew that Iran was acquiring nuclear weapons capability, and believed Israel had that capability already. For him, the acquisition of such nuclear capability would serve his basic purpose: to be the dominant force in the Arab world.

He therefore did indeed conceal or remove any evidence of an active programme for nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. However, what the ISG discovered was that this was merely a tactical decision to put such a programme into abeyance, not a strategic decision to abandon it.

The ISG concluded:

Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s WMD capacity – which was essentially destroyed in 1991 – after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilised, but probably with a different mix of capabilities to that which previously existed. Saddam aspired to develop a nuclear capability – in an incremental fashion, irrespective of international pressure and the resulting economic risks – but he intended to focus on ballistic missile and tactical chemical warfare (CW) capabilities.

This conclusion on nuclear weapons was actually endorsed by the Butler Report of July 2004, though that was written prior to the full ISG Report of September 2004. The Butler Report concluded:

As a result of our Review, and taking into account the evidence which has been found by the ISG and debriefing of Iraqi personnel, we have reached the conclusion that prior to the war the Iraqi regime had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted.

In pursuit of this strategic ambition, Saddam kept together the scientists and technicians necessary to reconstitute such a programme; he imported dual-use goods in breach of the sanctions, and maintained laboratories undisclosed to the UN that could quickly be reactivated for WMD purposes. These activities were financed by illegal manipulation of the oil-for-food programme in which some oil revenues were allowed in order to buy food and medicine.

According to the senior officials they interviewed, the Iraqi Intelligence Services (IIS) maintained throughout 1991–2003 a set of undeclared covert laboratories to research and test various chemicals and poisons. They went on to say:

ISG has no evidence that IIS Directorate of Criminology (M16) scientists were producing CW or BW agents in these laboratories. However, sources indicate that M16 was planning to produce several CW agents including sulfur mustard, nitrogen mustard, and Sarin.

The existence, function, and purpose of the laboratories were never declared to the UN.

The IIS program included the use of human subjects for testing purposes.

All of this emerges in the interviews conducted by the ISG that were, of course, the sticking point in the Hans Blix inspections between November 2002 and March 2003. They are not evidence that supports the intelligence of an active WMD programme on which we relied. So the true facts are different from those we thought to be true as at March 2003. But the true facts do provide the clearest possible basis to assess that he was indeed a threat and, in particular, that the charge that he was in breach of the UN resolutions was fully correct.

The danger, had we backed off in 2003, is very clear; the UN inspectors led by Blix were never going to get those interviews; they may well have concluded (wrongly) that Saddam had given up his WMD ambitions; sanctions would have been dropped; and it would have been impossibly hard to reapply pressure to a regime that would have been ‘cleared’. Saddam would then have had the intent; the know-how; and, with a rising oil price, enormous purchasing power.

Now, you can dispute many parts of this thesis. Maybe he would have decided he didn’t need WMD after all; had he tried to develop them, maybe the international community would have acted; in any event, it could all have taken time. But if you read the ISG Report, the picture that emerges is of a regime whose only constraint was one externally imposed. The nature of it was utterly dark. For example, a small point: the descriptions of the experimentation they conducted on humans for research into biological poisons – admittedly for assassination purposes, not WMD – are indicative.

My point here is not to persuade that we were right to remove him, but only to make those who adhere to the conventional wisdom at least pause and reflect. I don’t claim that the thesis is an indisputable one, that had we failed to act in 2003 Saddam would have re-emerged stronger, a competitor to Iran both in respect of WMD and in support of terrorism in the region – the opposite case can be made – but it is surely at least as probable as the alternative thesis, namely that he would have sunk into comfortable, unmenacing obscurity and old age; and his sons, groomed to succeed him, would have reformed.

The same is also true for the moral case against what we did, which, in essence, comes down to the chaos and death that followed Saddam’s removal. There is no moral judgement that can or should be based on mathematics: here’s the number Saddam killed; here’s the number that died after his fall. Such a calculation is necessarily invidious. However, since so much is said about the numbers of Iraqis who died after March 2003, it is at least worth conducting the debate on the best evidence available, not the worst.

To the question ‘Is Iraq better now than in Saddam’s time?’, there is really only one sensible answer: of course. The best estimate of those who died under Saddam is as follows:

•  Iran–Iraq War, 1980–8: 600,000–1.1 million total fatalities from both countries (Anthony Cordesman,
The Lessons of Modern War
, Vol. II, p. 3)

•  Anfal Campaign against Kurds, 1988: up to 100,000 Kurdish fatalities; many more injuries and displaced persons (Human Rights Watch, ‘Genocide in Iraq’, 2003)

•  1991 Invasion of Kuwait/Gulf War: 75,000 fatalities (Milton Leitenberg, ‘Deaths in Wars and Conflicts in the 20th Century’, Cornell University, Peace Studies Program)

•  1991 campaigns/reprisals against Shia: 50,000 fatalities (Leitenberg)

•  Other political killings over the years: 100,000 or more (Human Rights Watch, ‘Justice Needed for Iraqi Government Crimes’, December 2002)

But this only tells a part of the story. As Saddam came to power in 1979, Iraq was richer than either Portugal or Malaysia. By 2003, 60 per cent of the population was dependent on food aid. Millions were malnourished, and millions were in exile. One statistic above all tells us what Saddam’s Iraq was like. According to the UN, by 2002 the number of deaths of children under the age of five was 130 per 1,000, a figure worse than that for the Congo. By 2007, as a result of the coalition and then the Iraqi government introducing proper immunisation and nutrition programmes, this figure had fallen to just over 40 per 1,000. The difference equates roughly to 50,000–60,000 children’s lives saved each and every year.

Before anyone says ‘Ah, but it was sanctions’, it should be remembered that Saddam was free to buy as much food and medicine as he wanted. He chose not to do so, in order falsely to claim it was the West causing the deaths of Iraqi children. In the Kurdish area, despite Saddam and despite sanctions covering them too, the death rate for children was half that of central and southern Iraq.

One third of all Iraqi children in the centre and south of Iraq suffered from chronic malnutrition by 2003. The deaths from diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections were easily preventable. Even in the midst of the war that followed, between 2005 and 2007 malnutrition for the population was reduced to under a quarter of what it was in the era of Saddam.

These were the deaths we never saw; the carnage we never witnessed; the grief that never appeared on our television screens. But they were every bit as real as the tragic loss of life after Saddam was removed.

What was that loss of life? Here, again, ‘facts’ were seized on and rapidly became unassailable. Frequently it will be said that 500,000 or 600,000 died between 2003 and 2009. Once claimed, it just passes into the cuttings and is then repeated.

The origins of this figure lie in the
Lancet
report published in October 2004 which purported to be a scientific analysis of deaths in Iraq. The figure they gave – 600,000 – led the news and became dominant, repeated as fact. Later the methodology on which this report was based was extensively challenged; its figures charged with being inaccurate and misleading; and the assessment made comprehensively questioned by other publications. This got practically zero publicity.