Tom Chatfield
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Five years after the invasion of Iraq, what do we know about those weapons of mass destruction whose shadowy existence played such a large role in the justification for war and such a controversial role in its aftermath? It is a story that remains significant largely because the reconstruction of Iraq has been so much bloodier, more chaotic and politically damaging—both in the middle east and the west—than was dreamt of in 2003. “There were no WMDs” seems likely to be the enduring epitaph of both a two-term president and a three-term prime minister. Their absence is, for many, emblematic of the gulf between the realities of the middle east and the ill-planned optimism with which western powers entered Iraq in March 2003. Yet the story of the search for WMD is more than simply a catalogue of intelligence errors and political manipulation; it has also become a story of competing narratives about middle eastern power politics, and the deepest global security concerns we face today.
On 20th March 2003, Iraq was invaded by a US-led coalition of forces, which included British, Australian, Polish and Danish troops. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” intended, in the words of President George W Bush, “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” In Britain, particular emphasis was put on the first of these aims. The British government’s infamous Iraq dossier was published on 24th September 2002, and opened with a personal statement by Tony Blair which claimed that “Saddam Hussein attaches great importance to possessing weapons of mass destruction, which he regards as the basis for Iraq’s regional power… He is ready to use them, including against his own population, and is determined to retain them, in breach of UN security council resolutions… As a result of the intelligence, we judge that Iraq has: continued to produce chemical and biological agents; military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” These claims lie at the heart of one of the greatest continuing intelligence controversies in modern history.
Official investigations
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Conor Gearty
In the darkest days of the Northern Ireland conflict, when British and Irish officials barely spoke to each other and politicians in the province paraded their enmity to the world as part of their vote-catching appeal, a group of academics, journalists and businesspeople created a parallel universe in which genuine debate was possible. Protected from the noise outside by rules of confidentiality, the British-Irish Association’s annual conference in an Oxford or Cambridge college may even have helped to change the political tone in Northern Ireland.
With a new terrorism risk arising from political Islam, many of the factors which distorted debate over Northern Ireland have re-emerged. Government and civil liberties groups often speak past each other, the first declaring we are on the verge of terrorist chaos, the second that we are about to become a police state. What would happen if people on all sides of the argument got a chance to speak to each other under conditions of confidentiality? Could the British-Irish Association magic work here too?
The LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights (with the support of the Economic and Social Research Council) decided to give it a try. The organisers fixed upon six seminars spread over two years. The participants came from the senior ranks of government, the judiciary and the media, as well as politics, law, academia and civil liberties groups.
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Thomas de Waal
Like many others who knew her, I was devastated by the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, Russia’s bravest human rights journalist. Now my dismay is compounded by the way her death has been subsumed in the disturbing but much murkier story of the death of Alexander Litvinenko. They are two very different stories—even if they suggest similar truths about today’s Russia.
The boyish features of Litvinenko were a fixture in London meetings and events about Russia over the last few years. He was undoubtedly a brave man, but I tended to avoid him because he was the protégé of a man who for me embodied the worst of Russia in the 1990s: the exiled businessman-turned-politician Boris Berezovsky.
Litvinenko’s allegations fed Berezovsky’s political vendetta against Vladimir Putin. Many of them seemed rehashed or politically skewed. Like others, Litvinenko suggested that the FSB, domestic successor to the KGB, might have been involved in the mysterious bombings of apartment blocks in Moscow in 1999, which killed some 200 people. If true, this was a terrifying prospect—but Litvinenko’s version ignored the role of his own patron. In 1999, Berezovsky was one of three or four people in charge of what the Kremlin called “Operation Successor,” the desperate search for an heir to Boris Yeltsin. Putin, then a relatively obscure official nominated to that role, was a political nobody compared to Berezovsky. It was the tough response to the Moscow bombings that helped propel him to the presidency. If there was indeed official collusion in the 1999 Moscow bombings, Berezovsky would most likely have known about it.
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David Omand
The latest report on counter-terrorism strategy, from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and Democratic Audit, “The Rules of the Game,” rehearses much of the familiar liberal left discourse on the importance of human rights and the failings of the Bush/Blair axis. But the reader will also find compelling insights into where we risk going wrong in fighting terrorism—and I say that as a hardened British “securocrat” and former director of GCHQ.
The authors—Andrew Blick, Tufyal Choudhury and Stuart Weir—do not ignore the reality of the threat from jihadist terrorism, nor do they argue that the government’s strategy is misguided—indeed, they describe it as balanced and sensible. But they warn that it could fail through the unintended consequences of some of its short-term measures and by trimming too far to the prevailing populist wind. Tough talking, rushed legislation and hastily contrived security measures will, the report concludes, alienate precisely those groups from which the extremists hope to recruit. Means as well as ends matter in fighting terrorism.
Such criticisms are not new, and no one can seriously argue that the government is not aware of the importance of working with Britain’s Muslim communities to isolate the terrorists, even if it struggles at times to find the right tone and interlocutors (see John Ware, Prospect online, on the Muslim Council of Britain’s fall from favour). Nevertheless, the charge of inconsistency between the government’s strategy and some of the security measures it adopts deserves to be taken seriously, since it raises dilemmas for civil libertarians as well as for the security establishment.
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Dean Godson
Alastair Crooke’s conversation with the Hamas official Osama Hamdan in last month’s Prospect, brought to mind Robert Maxwell’s “interview” with Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania—”Tell me, Mr President: why are you so popular with your people?” Hamas, at least as refracted through Crooke, is little more than an Islamist form of Lib Dem pavement politics. If only the west would stop making unreasonable demands such as halting terrorism and recognising Israel, Hamas might transform the middle east for the better.
Should we take Crooke’s depiction of the democratic potential of Islamism seriously? The stated purpose of the organisation he runs, Conflicts Forum, is to end the isolation and demonisation of Islamist movements. Certainly, the hallmark of Crooke’s approach is an extraordinary willingness to take Islamists such as Hamdan at their own estimation. And it is an attitude that Crooke has demonstrated ever since his days as a senior MI6 officer both in the middle east and Latin America.
So we learn from Crooke that the Hamas leaders are uncorrupt devotees of good governance who want to reduce the bloated state sector in the Palestinian Authority; that they are scrupulously observing a unilateral de-escalation (or tadiya); and that they don’t want a top-down imposition of Shari’a on Muslims or anyone else.
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Steve Crawshaw
The subtitle of the recently published Human Rights Watch volume of essays on Torture asks “Does it make us safer? Is it ever OK?” Michael Ignatieff’s essay for that volume, excerpted in April’s Prospect, seems to answer those questions with, respectively, a “yes, probably” and an “in the circumstances, many might think so.”
Ignatieff personally rejects torture as a solution. None the less, he opens the door for those with fewer scruples, arguing that “moral prohibition comes at a price” and that those of us who oppose torture should “also be honest enough to admit that we may have a price to pay for our own convictions.” The practical implications of this reasoning mean that his argument deserves a considered response.
Clearly, torture may sometimes persuade people to reveal information they would not otherwise have divulged. But that does not mean that permitting torture might keep us safe.
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Dean Godson
“Set a thief to catch a thief” has been one of the guiding principles of American and British efforts to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. Far from being pariahs in the new democratic Iraq, ex-Ba’athists constitute the backbone of the reformed Iraqi intelligence service’s efforts to face down “FREs”—”Former Regime Elements,” to use US military jargon. Some 9,000 servants of the ancien régime have been recalled to the various intelligence branches since the US pro-consul, Paul Bremer, reversed course last April 2004 and announced that the policy of “de-Ba’athification” had been “poorly implemented.” In other words, the good FREs were supposed to carry the fight to the bad ones.
After Bremer’s volte face, insurgent attacks shot up. It was perhaps coincidental—or perhaps not. But since the election, there has been a sharp fall in bombings and murders: the latest figures indicate that attacks on US forces have dropped from 140 to 30 a day. There are a number of reasons for this, including improved coalition tactics on the ground and the demoralising effects on the rebels of a successful poll.
But even if these successes are maintained, the political orientation and nature of the new Iraq will be profoundly affected by the composition of its security services. Already, many Iraqi democrats fear that there will be a reprise of the state of affairs under the monarchy: over-representation of Sunnis in the upper reaches of the armed services, which made that polity desperately vulnerable to coups.
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Nick Pearce
Few Labour home secretaries keep their liberal credentials intact for very long, and Charles Clarke has turned out to be no exception. He has ridden into a barrage of criticism over plans for the house arrest of potential terrorists.
Clarke’s proposals are designed to overcome the law lords’ December ruling that the detention provisions of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 discriminate against foreign nationals. By applying control orders to everybody, regardless of nationality, Clarke hopes to overcome that legal hurdle.
In the face of such opposition, it is surprising that Clarke has chosen to rule out the obvious alternative: allowing intercept intelligence to be placed in front of the courts, so that proper criminal trials of accused terrorists can be held. It’s a policy that now unites the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and left-wing Labour MPs. The new Metropolitan Police commissioner, Ian Blair, supports it, and so do most of the civil liberties groups who have spent years opposing phone-tapping powers. It is backed by the director of public prosecutions, Ken McDonald, and even by Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief. So why won’t Clarke do it?
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Jonathan Kaplan
Baghdad in April 2003 was a difficult place to do effective humanitarian work, and things have become more awkward since. I was in the city as a surgeon with an international medical organisation. US forces had declared the Iraqi capital conquered, but buildings continued to burn and not an hour was free of gunfire.
The city’s hospitals had treated many casualties during the bombing, emptying emergency stores of medical supplies. After the arrival of the Americans, much of the remainder was looted, with the pillage continuing even as staff tried to deal with arriving casualties. Operating rooms looked like charnel houses, caked underfoot with discarded surgeons’ gloves, dressings and bloody clothes cut from the wounded. In the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq had boasted the most advanced healthcare in the middle east, but now limited electricity and water made cleaning difficult. Instruments could not be sterilised. Because of the risk of sepsis, Iraqi surgeons were operating only when it was unavoidable. There seemed little use for my surgical skills.
Doctors working in the emergency rooms made me welcome, but as the afternoons advanced, staff steadily deserted the treatment areas, until by nightfall the hospitals were abandoned to gangs of armed looters. Gun-wielding relatives of patients defended the wards, trying to stop the theft of the beds themselves. In the mornings, doctors would return, patching the casualties that had been dumped at the entrance in the night, while the local mosque saw to the bodies of those that had bled to death where they lay.
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Peter Lilley
Dramatic events often bring long submerged problems to the surface. The Iraq war and subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction highlight several issues about scrutiny, accountability and the use of intelligence. They can be summarised in three questions. Who is to be held responsible for bad advice? How can parliament better scrutinise complex material such as intelligence reports? And should law officers be more accountable?
The key question post-Iraq is: who misled whom about the existence of WMD? Did the government mislead the public, or was the government misled by intelligence assessments? The doctrine of accountability has always stated that ministers are responsible for everything they do, including the advice they take. Even before Iraq this government was developing a new doctrine, which involves fingering officials – as in the Byers/Sixsmith affair. Now the joint intelligence committee (JIC), having been invoked to justify the war, is left to carry the can for failure to find the casus belli. In effect the new approach says that if advice proves flawed the adviser is to blame: if all goes well ministers will take the credit.
At first sight the traditional doctrine seems pretty unrealistic. If ministers are being fed duff advice or erroneous information by civil servants, what is gained by changing the minister and leaving unreliable officials in place?
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