Rumsfeld by Andrew Cockburn

Author:Andrew Cockburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2007-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

A Game of War

Why the United States of America, the most powerful nation on earth, attacked Iraq and how it failed to occupy the country successfully once its military had routed Saddam Hussein will be a subject of argument for decades to come. Whether the fullest historical truth will ever be revealed remains to be seen, however, for there are many facts that the people who made the decision to go to war would rather not remember, or have actually forgotten, or were never told in the first place. Veterans of the prewar Pentagon and White House, for example, even those who lament the disaster of the war they launched, often remark that “the intelligence I saw on Saddam’s WMD at the time was convincing.” At this point in the conversation I ask if they knew, as did Dick Cheney et al., what Hussein Kamel had revealed in the summer of 1995. Too often they have answered no, they had not been briefed.

What should they have known? On the night of August 7, 1995, Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, fled Baghdad and sought asylum in Jordan. Two weeks later, he sat down in an Amman villa with senior U.N. inspectors who had spent years trying to ferret out details of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Now they had the ultimate source, one who had no reason to lie. Kamel had been the second most powerful man in Iraq until he fled in fear of Saddam’s psychopathic son Uday. More important, he had been directly in charge of all military industry. The key question, of course, for the U.N. as well as the American and allied intelligence agencies anxious to talk to Kamel, was the location and quantity of Saddam’s remaining stocks of the so-called weapons of mass destruction. There were none, he replied, none at all. In 1991, following some initial successes by the inspectors, on Saddam’s instructions he had “ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed” and the programs for producing them dismantled.1 He told exactly the same story to the CIA and Britain’s MI6.

In addition, Kamel disclosed details of the huge amount of lethal chemical and biological weapons his former organization had produced before his 1991 destruction order. These revelations were to be repeated and publicized by Western officials for years to come. Testifying to a Senate committee in September 1998, Richard Perle bemoaned Saddam’s supposed success in continuing to conceal his weapons, and alluded to “the intelligence supplied by Saddam’s defecting son-in-law [which] brought us briefly closer than we could have hoped.”2 In the buildup to the 2003 invasion, President Bush invoked the defection of “the head of Iraq’s military industries” as a crucial factor in forcing the Iraqi regime to admit to the production of a “massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions.”3 Vice President Cheney said Kamel’s story should serve as a reminder to all

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.