Post Facto rationalisation in Iraq

Post Facto Rationalisation in Iraq

By

Sharad Bailur

There were deep suspicions that the war in Iraq came about because Iraq had opted to have its oil exports valued in Euros rather than American dollars. The euro which had started smartly well above the dollar in value progressively fell to about 80 cents and then started its slow painful climb upwards. It gathered momentum the moment Saddam announced his decision, and today trades at about a dollar and a few cents.

All along both Mr. George W. Bush and his partner in this entire ugly business Mr. Tony Blair had maintained that it was necessary to bring Iraq to heel because it possessed weapons of mass destruction. None were found. None have been found to date despite the best unfettered efforts of American weapons specialists. I am deliberately using the word unfettered because the earlier complaint was that Saddam’s minders prevented UN weapons inspectors from doing their job.

Then George W. Bush and Colin Powell “proved” that Saddam has accumulated WMDs. It turns out that the report was plagiarised from a PhD paper written by a university student. It was not based on hard intelligence at all. Then the story leaked out that the British Secret Service had “sexed up” the report to “prove” that Saddam had WMDs. Tony Blair denied it.

Next Tony Blair came out with a House of Commons speech saying that Saddam could start a WMD attack in 45 minutes. And after the war is over and Saddam is ousted, he backed down. Then Dr. Kelly was summoned to give evidence before the House of Commons Committee of Inquiry. He was heckled and harassed by some harsh questioning right in front of the TV cameras of the world. We saw the whole thing here in India. Four days later Dr. Kelly is found dead in dubious circumstances. For good measure there was also a report blaming the Italian Intelligence Service of having originated the story. Apparently the SIS and the CIA can never make mistakes, and, if they do, never admit them either to their masters or to the world, when caught out.

Then there is the story about Iraq trying to get uranium from Niger. What exactly could Niger have given Saddam even if he had sought uranium from it? Niger is such a backward nation that it can, at best, sell uranium ore and nothing else, provided it identifies the rock it digs out as uranium ore in the first place. Let us suppose Saddam does get hold of uranium ore from Niger. Purifying it to get yellowcake is a huge task for which the ore needs to be transported to Iraq. Did Saddam have the means to do this, in the face of all those international sanctions? Next a ton of ore yields yellow cake which can fit under a single finger nail. How many thousands of tons did Saddam import to make enough yellowcake? Did all this go unnoticed?

Let us go a step further. Even if he did, he had to put this yellowcake through centrifuges to get fissile uranium, that is to separate the U238 from the U235. This again is a tiny proportion of the yellow cake. How much ore would Saddam need to make a single suitcase sized bomb using a mere 35 kilos of U235? And they were talking of weapons of mass destruction in the plural. This does not mean that Saddam’s scientists and engineers did not know how to do it. Just that if the sanctions were effective it would not have been possible for him. Yes. If the sanctions were lifted he might still have made the bombs. But that is another story. Would all this activity not have been detected by all those spy satellites, or by the UN inspectors who were let in just before the invasion? What does Hans Blix who incidentally is a world authority on nuclear bomb making in his own right, have to say about all this?

George Bush says now that he is willing to take full responsibility for all his actions including misleading the American public into a war it did not know if it needed in the first place. What is this supposed to imply? A mere acceptance of responsibility means very little unless it is accompanied by self inflicted pain of some sort. What sort of penitance is Bush willing to perform for having willingly and deliberately misled his people?

It is in these circumstances that we must reconsider the reasons for the opposition from Germany, France and Russia, France in particular. If there is one country that understands and probably has much better assets in Africa than either the CIA or the SIS it is the French Secret Service. Should the French have not been consulted in this matter? What are they members of NATO for? Or were French interests regarding the valuation of Iraqi oil in Euros of such importance, considering what it was doing to the almighty dollar that they could not be taken into confidence regarding Saddam’s nuclear ambitions and efforts?

Writing from an Indian perspective, India decided to avoid sending troops to Iraq for a number of reasons, chief among which was the fact that there was no explicit UN mandate for peace keeping. India is the only non-Muslim country to be rated by the Iraqis as among its better friends. This is a perception that goes deep in the minds of the ordinary man in the street in Baghdad. Helping them to keep the peace should therefore have been a good enough reason to send troops. But if sent at the request of the United States, the Indians would go in and be perceived as substitute occupiers. They don’t need that. Hence the decision to stay away, at least till the UN clears the way.