1 Boring Old Man

^{Johnathan Powell, Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff}

MR JONATHAN POWELL: That’s why I really disagree with you, because he could have cooperated actively, had he wanted to demonstrate there were no weapons of mass destruction. Again, on 22 November 2002, Blix said to the Prime Minister the Iraqis were co-operating on practical arrangements, but there was no real change of approach to giving up weapons of mass destruction. He could have cooperated, if he had wanted to.
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: That, no doubt, was his mistake, but we are trying to understand the quality of the evidence with which very large decisions of war and peace were being taken. There is a difference between hard intelligence that confirms this and a perfectly plausible but still no more than a working hypothesis which suggests it.
MR JONATHAN POWELL: I have difficulty with this notion of hard intelligence as opposed to soft intelligence. I mean, if you find him in flagrante with something, then you have the evidence. Throughout the period of October through March, once the inspectors were back in, we were constantly giving them intelligence of where particular bits of equipment might be, and they were chasing after it to try and find it, only to find a mob to beat them when they got there and attempts to stop them finding what we believed to be there. So we were confident that he had weapons of mass destruction, and, once our forces went in, we were absolutely amazed to discover there weren’t any weapons of mass destruction. It leaps out of the pages of the files that you have been reading.

SIR JEREMY GREENSTOCK: There are all sorts of areas, Chairman, in which we haven’t had a conversation and you haven’t yet had with your other witnesses. The role of Israel in this whole saga, the role of Iran in this whole saga, the psychology of Saddam Hussein, not particularly for this witness to get into, but the complexity of the picture: why did Saddam continue to pretend he had WMD when he didn’t, when it was going to mean the collapse of his regime, these are questions you are going to examine. But it was behind the thinking of much of the things that we did in the Security Council and in the discussions that I was having with my fellow permanent members. We were covering the whole area of discussion about what all this meant in its various aspects. Within all those discussions, there wasn’t a single member of the Security Council, or indeed of the United Nations, that I had could identify, besides Iraq, that was speaking up for the Government of Iraq. Everybody felt that Iraq was contravening the resolutions of the United Nations.

MR JONATHAN POWELL: I think by the time we got to 16 March, we had faced a binary choice; we no longer could keep on down the UN route.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: I mean, Sir David Manning and Sir Jeremy Greenstock both said, but differently, that they would have liked to have had more time, but you don’t agree with that?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: No, we asked for more time repeatedly from January onwards of the President, and we got more time in each case. Eventually, by the time we got to mid-March, he wasn’t going to give us more time and the French veto knocked any chance —
SIR RODERIC LYNE: He wasn’t going to give us more time. If we had had more time, if the inspectors had had longer, there had been longer to build up the picture and you had continued these extraordinary diplomatic efforts that you described, would there not have been a chance, at that stage, of actually gathering the international support that we had not managed to gather by then?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: No. I mean, if you think about it, Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. We were wrong. The intelligence was wrong. So, no matter how long you had carried the inspections on, they weren’t going to find anything, and, from what we know of Saddam, it is extremely unlikely that he would have cooperated. So we would have been in exactly the same situation for months and months and months. There would have been no discovery of weapons of mass destruction, but —
SIR RODERIC LYNE: But one way or the other they might have built up a more convincing picture, if they had had more time.
MR JONATHAN POWELL: A convincing picture of what?
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Well, a picture to convince the people who weren’t not convinced by our arguments in March.
MR JONATHAN POWELL: But if there weren’t weapons of mass destruction, we wouldn’t have been able — you are asking me in retrospect, "Would we have had more time?" The answer is more time would have achieved nothing.
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Thank you very much.

"He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the ’90s. And those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq," Piro says. "So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?" Pelley asks. "It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq," Piro says. Before his wars with America, Saddam had fought a ruinous eight year war with Iran and it was Iran he still feared the most. "He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?" Pelley asks. "Absolutely," Piro says.

"As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass destruction.’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?" Pelley asks. "He didn’t. But he told me he initially miscalculated President Bush. And President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 under Operation Desert Fox. Which was a four-day aerial attack. So you expected that initially," Piro says.

Piro says Saddam expected some kind of an air campaign and that he could he survive that. "He survived that once. And then he was willing to accept that type of attack. That type of damage," he says. "Saddam didn’t believe that the United States would invade," Pelley remarks. "Not initially, no," Piro says. "Once it was clear to him that there was going to be an invasion of the country. I mean, did he actually believe that his armies could win?" Pelley asks. "No," Piro says…

We are told by Blair, Bush, Cheney, etc. that they stand behind the invasion, that the world is a better place with Hussein gone, that the Iraqi people are in better shape with Hussein gone. In my view, that is an impossible position to defend. We spent a trillion dollars, lost 4000+ Americans, countless thousands of Iraqis dead, created a training ground for Terrorists, alienated the UN, stiffed our best ally [the UK], looked and acted like international bullies, etc. What is it about all of that they think is so exemplary? Winning a pissing contest with a bullshit artist by having him executed?