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21/01/2005 | Final word on Iraq's WMD sounds very familiar

Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- So now it's official and we can all breathe a little easier. This week, we finally know about the weapons of mass destruction. They weren't there, certainly not when we rushed to implausible war nearly two long years ago.

 

When the Iraq Survey Group announced this week that it was officially ending its search for WMD, it was a little like facing the announcement of the death of a person who had, in fact, died some years back. How can one mourn an event already gone so stale?

The White House seemed hardly to mourn at all, despite the fact that its little "mistake" has cost some 1,300 American lives, not to speak of those Iraqi lives (probably upward of 100,000) they simply don't acknowledge. President Bush noted this new marker only by saying, isn't the world better without Saddam Hussein?

Well, as a harsh and cold-bloodedly realistic judgment, one can argue that neither Iraq nor we are better without Saddam Hussein, despite the president's sleepwalking words.

On top of that, this week, the National Intelligence Council, which is the CIA director's personal think tank, released a stunning report saying that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists. Not only has Iraq provided terrorists with a "training ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills and a recruitment ground," CIA officers said in a briefing, but there is the likelihood that the "jihadists" not killed there will in time "go home," thus "dispersing to other countries."

In the rampant violence and insecurity that followed the fall of Saddam, hundreds of foreign terrorists flocked to the open and uncontrolled Iraq, garnering and using unprotected weapons caches that the American invasion was supposed to have obliterated. This type of violence -- expanded -- will be at its height in 2020, the report said.

A personal note to those of my good readers who persist in believing that Iraq is not a mess: This report took a year to produce and is the result of the analysis of 1,000 U.S. and foreign experts.

What's more, pessimism about the war and what we have wrought is prevalent across virtually all sectors in Washington -- except, of course, the president and his cynical neocon fanatics who still dream of reconfiguring the Middle East by getting American troops on the ground alongside Israeli troops. The Financial Times reported this week from a leading diplomatic source that outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell last week told the president of the war, "We're losing."

But if the old WMD story that was the basis for this foolish and wasted war was not true of pre-war Iraq, what of it was true?

The man who headed the Iraq Survey Group and did much of the original research in Iraq, Charles Duelfer -- the CIA's special adviser and a man of unusual integrity -- already has given us some insight into the answers to that question in his initial report that was released in October.

After research that included interviews in Baghdad with many top Saddam aides and with access to the ongoing interrogations of Saddam himself, Duelfer wrote a brilliant initial report that rivals the best historical, political and psychiatric literature on leaders and their psychoses.

Saddam, he found, was as autocratic, cruel, grandiose, isolated and dominating as the world thought, but there was little mystery about his love affair with horrible weaponry. He kept it and used it in the Iran-Iraq war against the Iranians, in which a million people died on both sides.

After the '91 Gulf War, it appears that the Machiavellian Iraqi leader deliberately kept the appearance of having WMD in order to deter and strike fear in his neighbors while, on another power level, getting rid of them in order to convince the United Nations weapons inspectors that he had none.

When one thinks about it, taking into consideration the fearful and hate-ridden psychologies of that part of the world, why would he NOT take these two related steps?

But there was at least one other crucial part of Duelfer's first analytical report. Saddam, he said, liked American movies and literature, his favorite being Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." Even more amazing, as late as the 1990s, he was sending emissaries to Washington to try to open a dialogue.

While Saddam "derived prestige from being an enemy of the United States," Duelfer wrote, he also recognized that "it would have been equally prestigious for him" to be a U.S. ally. In fact, Saddam's men approached Duelfer and other U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq in the mid-'90s, saying that "if Iraq had a security relationship with the United States, it might be inclined to dispense with WMD programs and/or ambitions."

You may say these acts were cynically self-interested -- surely, they were. But you can also say, with unfortunately even greater assurance, that the picture painted of Iraq and Saddam and WMD from the very beginning of this war by American leaders would be farcical, were it not so deadly serious.

COPYRIGHT 2005 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE

UExpress (Estados Unidos)

 


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