Editorial

The Unravelling of a Gigantic Deception

The armed forces of the United States and Britain have now been in control of Iraq for almost two months. Yet not a shred of evidence has been found of the "weapons of mass destruction" which the U.S. and British governments assured the world were to be found in copious quantities in the Iraqi arsenals. During the past few days the American and British media have reported that senior officials in both countries were well aware that such weapons probably did not exist and that they deliberately distorted and exaggerated such claims in order to conceal their real motives for invading Iraq.

The May 31, 2003 edition of the British newspaper The Guardian reports that it has received a leaked transcript of a meeting between British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. During the meeting, which took place shortly before Powell's February 5 speech to the United Nations Security Council, both men are reported to have expressed serious doubts about the validity of intelligence reports concerning Iraqi weapons programs. Despite these concerns, Powell spent 75 minutes assuring the Security Council that Iraq not only possessed chemical and biological weapons in massive quantities, but that it was also importing tons of unprocessed uranium to produce a "dirty bomb". For his part, Jack Straw continues to such claims on a daily basis to justify Britain's role in the war.

Shortly after Powell made his presentation to the Security Council the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the evidence of Iraqi uranium imports to be a crude forgery. Similarly, following claims by British Prime Minister Tony Blair that "new intelligence" conclusively proved that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, researchers found that the "new intelligence" consisted almost entirely of a ten-year old thesis by an American student. Other documents claiming links between Iraq and Al-Qaida and alleged payments to a British anti-war activist and Member of Parliament, which were purportedly "discovered" by reporters in a Baghdad building that had been thoroughly searched by American intelligence teams, have also been demonstrated to be crude forgeries.

With the failure to find a single example of banned weapons and growing demands at home and abroad to admit the true reasons for the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, the Anglo-American deception is starting to unravel. In response, the Americans now seem to be trying to downplay their original pretext for invading Iraq. In an interview conducted by the American magazine Vanity Fair, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz is reported to have minimized the significance of weapons of mass destruction in the war plans of the Bush administration and to have stated that: "A huge reason for the conflict was to enable the U.S. to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia." He went on to explain that the presence of these troops on Saudi Arabian soil was a problem for the Saudi regime and a rallying cry for terrorists. Wolfowitz claimed that the overthrow of the Iraqi regime was the only way in which the U.S. military could leave Saudi Arabia and still maintain a large military presence in the region.

While Mr. Wolfowitz appears oblivious to the fact that this does not constitute much of a justification for the wholesale violation of international law and the United Nations Charter, others are not so obtuse. Danish Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen commented: "It leaves the world with one question: What should we believe?" In Germany, the newspaper Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung stated that the United States was losing the battle for credibility, concluding that: "The charge of deception is inescapable."