The Real Victims posted by Richard Seymour

Let's be honest. Bush and Blair are the real victims of this war. They were lied to by their intelligence services, maligned by the press, scorned by the public. All for trying to overthrow a rancorous dictator who GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE, YES HIS OWN PEOPLE.

Let's be a little bit more honest than that. The liberal defenders-cum-critics of the war on Iraq have a difficult job disguising pro-war assumptions behind tough prose that will look sufficiently like a critique. The latest method of doing it is to suggest that something went wrong for the Bush-Blair axis, that they were deceived by intelligence services and that they got carried away on their own moral righteousness, given the green light by shoddy information. Martin Woollacott tells us:

The most resounding intelligence failure of the whole intervention era has certainly been that of accurately assessing Saddam's holdings of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The US and British governments would not have gone to war if their intelligence chiefs had bluntly said there were no, or very few, such weapons or programmes. You cannot spin a No.

Apart from anything else, it isn't the intelligence services' job to "bluntly" announce "no". It is their job to describe the reality in all of its complexity. Secondly, what we now know appears to suggest that intelligence DID convey to the Prime Minister and President Bush that there were indeed "very few" WMD programmes in Iraq. The New York Times has made similar claims of 'faulty' intelligence, even as it pretends to obliterate Team Bush for its “reckless rush to invade Iraq,” and “obsession with the Iraqi dictator”.

Yet the claims made by the two administrations were the result of distortion of intelligence findings, not their purblind acceptance by idealistic politicians.

Take, for example, the claim that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes . The Hutton Inquiry has revealed that this was false, and that it was known that the actual claims were being distorted:

Geoff Hoon, the secretary of state for defence, admitted to the Hutton inquiry on 22 September that he knew the claim in the dossier referred to battlefield weapons only.

Andrew Caldecott QC, for the BBC, then asked, "A number of newspapers had banner headlines suggesting this claim related to strategic missiles. Why was no corrective statement issued for the benefit of the public?"

Hoon replied, "I don't know."

Even more importantly, there isn't at the moment a credible source for the 45-minute claim, even in the watered-down version admitted by Hoon. Iraqi officer Lieutenant Colonel Al Dabbagh made it publicly known that he was behind the claim, to great fanfare in the pro-war press. Unfortunately, it turns out that he was a spy working for the Iraqi National Accord, not a credible intelligence source.

Donald Rumsfeld claimed that 'there are al-Qaeda in Iraq', accusing Saddam of 'harbouring al-Qaeda operatives who fled the US military dragnet in Afghanistan' . It is not clear what the basis of his claims are, but no intelligence so far provided have pointed in this direction.

The British Government claimed in its official assessment of Iraq's weapons that 'Iraq has been trying to procure items that could be for use in the construction of centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium', and has attempted to 'purchase vacuum pumps which could be used to create and maintain pressures in a gas centrifuge cascade need to enrich uranium' .

This allegation was repeated by the Whitehouse on 12th September, 2002, and was stiffly challenged . The Bush administration was subsequently obliged to admit that this claim was false and was known to be false when it was included in Bush's speech in January 2003.

It was known to be false, because intelligence officials told them it was false.

Far from the story being one of shadowy intelligence elites duping elected politicians into a war which few wanted, this is a tale of deliberate government manipulation of intelligence. The Carnegie Endowment for Peace reports that intelligence officials became increasingly alienated by the encroachments of the Bush administration:

The authors say the intelligence reports of Iraq's capabilities grew more shrill in October 2002 with the publication of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which included an unusual number of dissenting views by intelligence officials.

The intelligence community, the report says, began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views "sometime in 2002". Repeated visits to the CIA by the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and demands by top officials to see unsubstantiated reports, created an atmosphere in which intelligence analysts were pressed to come to "more threatening" judgments of Iraq.

The report concludes that "administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes".

With the CIA doing the monitoring of Iraqi weapons programmes (following the withdrawal of UN weapons inspectors as Operation Desert Fox was about to begin), it shouldn't have been too hard for the Bush and Blair administrations to discover if Saddam Hussein really did have weapons programmes which he was sneaking about from place to place. Iraq was the most spied on country on earth from 1998 to 2003. So when in Cincinnati in October 2002, for example, shortly before Congress voted in favor of a blank-check resolution authorizing war, President Bush said, "The Iraqi regime ...possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism.... The danger is already significant, and it grows worse with time. If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today —and we do—does it make any sense for the world to wait...for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud?" I suppose the world would be forgiven for temporarily wondering if there wasn't something in this.

Yet, not a single word from intelligence findings justifies the extraordinary, loopy claims made by President Bush, and his simpering care attendant, Tony Blair. None of the claims made by Colin Powell on the basis of alleged 'intelligence' have been shown to be true. In fact, the findings of David Kay's Iraq Survey Group suggest they were always fraudulent. Some news reports say that Powell knew some days before presenting his case to the UN that the claims were "bullshit". Indeed, to suggest that they were victims of false or flawed intelligence is both to exculpate them and to insult them. They would be guiltless to some extent in genuinely beleiving there was a mortal threat to the territory and people of the United States and United Kingdom, yet they would also be downright fools. Noone in government takes intelligence services absolutely and directly at its word - it would be a devastating dereliction of duty to do so, worthy of impeachment, because every government official knows that intelligence services are highly ideological and fanatical (take a look at former CIA director James Woolsey for your archetypal intelligence kook). And if, as Martin Woollacott suggests, it takes an unequivocal "No" to persuade our leaders not to go to war, then we are obviously talking of governments desperate to spin, seeking any margin in which they can do so, in order to present a case for war they have already decided to embark on.

Only ideological fanatics could seriously consider the contention that Bush and Blair did not lie, or did not know they were lying, when they presented their fantastic claims through 2002 and early 2003. These ideological fanatics are typically called "realists" for not subscribing to "conspiracy theorists" and for maintaining a centrist outlook. Their status as 'independent' commentators is belied by the consistency with which they cover-up, distort and dissemble on behalf of power. And, guess what, you can find them in the pages of The Guardian and the New York Times - the voices of officially sanctioned dissent.