The 9/11 Wars (19 page)

PART TWO

Escalation: 2003–4

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The War in Iraq I: Threats, Falsehoods and Dead Men

The fifteen months between January 2002 and March 2003, if something of a phoney war, had seen a series of visual elements emerging that would come to represent the 9/11 Wars. All conflicts have their iconic images. These are often based on newly introduced technology or newly evolved tactics. The helicopter in Vietnam is one example. The trenches of the First World War is another. The tank or possibly the nuclear bomb are icons of the Second World War. If the characteristic tactic of the 9/11 Wars was the suicide bomb, it was the defences erected to defend against such strikes which became the marker of this new conflict. Before 9/11, few had ever seen the inverted Ts of concrete from which the newly necessary blast walls were constructed. By the end of 2002, placed in long lines to form instant walls of astonishing ugliness, it was increasingly difficult to escape them.

After that first period of relative calm, the 9/11 Wars would escalate massively. That escalation was to bring many new elements to them as well as embedding, magnifying, amplifying and extending existing characteristics. Not only did the war in Iraq flow naturally out of the campaign in Afghanistan – the ease with which that conflict appeared to have been won bred a confidence in the White House and a more general sense of opportunity in America that greatly informed the decision to press ahead – but much of what had been seen in the earlier fighting would be repeated in this new theatre. There was the same chaotic, indefinite new form of warfare seen at Tora Bora, the lack of genuine comprehension on the part of Western militaries of the tactics necessary to successfully fulfil the tasks they had been assigned and their vision of the population as a battlefield across which the shadowy insurgents were to be fought. There was also the violence dealt to civilians by all parties, the brutalization of prisoners, the continuing importance of the image and of spectacular violence broadcast to as large an audience as possible, the critical interplay between the local identities and global narratives and ideologies, and the systematic use of misinformation. All have been seen in previous chapters and were to feature, often on a far greater scale, in Iraq.

‘TWO IRAQIS, THREE SECTS’

One key quality that the Iraq conflict shared with that in Afghanistan was the long roots of the various sub-conflicts of which it was composed. Few states, even in the rough neighbourhood of the central Middle East, could claim as turbulent and brutal a history, recent or otherwise, as Iraq. From its early origins as three frontier provinces established by the Ottoman Turks on the rich lands along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on their frontier with Persia, through its forced birth as a nation under the British, through the turbulent years that followed the end of the Hashemite monarchy in 1958 and on through the early years of Ba’athist rule and the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, Iraq had been racked by violence, competition and instability. It had also, however, been relatively wealthy – in the 1970s Iraq was one of the most developed of all Arab states – and the drastic retreat from affluence was arguably more damaging to social fabric and attitudes than poverty alone ever could have been. There had also been the quarter of a million casualties in the war against Iran,
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the huge financial cost of that conflict and then the economic and military catastrophe that had followed the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The Iraq that Western forces and civilians found in the aftermath of the invasion of 2003 was thus bitter, disillusioned and brutalized. A national identity that was stronger than many believed bred a sense of wounded pride and a xenophobia that complemented rather than countered strong sectarian or ethnic identities.

The 1990s had seen a low-intensity war between Saddam Hussein and the West and a higher-intensity if unwitting war between the West and the Iraqi people in the shape of the United Nations sanctions imposed in 1991. These brutally punished ordinary Iraqis without harming the regime. In Baghdad expensive restaurants were full while over half the country’s children were malnourished, many critically.
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The wounds of the country were hidden, not least because no one risked speaking frankly to reporters. Almost everyone in Iraq lived in fear.

The country was divided into three. In the mountainous north were the 4 million Kurds, semi-autonomous under the umbrella of the northern no-fly zone patrolled by US and British aircraft since 1991 and set on defending their precarious liberty not just from Baghdad but from Ankara too. Below Mosul and the contested, mixed city of Kirkuk with its surrounding oil fields, the majority of the population across the central belt of the country was Sunni Arab. These were the four provinces that had remained loyal to Saddam during the bloodily suppressed revolts that had followed the Gulf War. Overall the Sunnis made up another 4 or 5 million. Then came the Shia south, scarred by war, violent repression and deep poverty.

Two roads led south from Baghdad to the southern port city of Basra. One took you down the Tigris, through rough towns like Amarah, across the old battlefields of the Iran–Iraq war and past the famous marshes that Saddam had drained to deny shelter to insurgent bands fighting his rule. The other followed the Euphrates past the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, the holiest sites in Shia Islam, and through seething cities like Nasariyah. Both skirted the vast oil fields and entered Basra through slums composed of row after row of decrepit single-storey brick and concrete homes with scant electricity, limited sanitation and borderline starvation. Largely purged from the Ba’ath Party, particularly after Saddam Hussein and his fellow Tikritis took power in 1979, one element that all Iraqi Shia shared was a desire to see the end of centuries of Sunni monopoly of central power.
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These apparently homogeneous communities – Kurd, Shia Arab and Sunni Arab – were, however, internally deeply divided. Though the northern zone was increasingly prosperous and stable, the Kurds had ended a vicious civil war only a few years previously. The Sunni community itself was split between those who benefited from a direct collaboration with the regime – these, of course, included Saddam’s own tribesmen from his hometown of Tikrit but other major tribes too as well as others co-opted into the state military, security or bureaucratic establishments – and those who did not. The Sunnis were also split along class lines between urban and rural populations and between the educated middle class that had seen their wealth and status destroyed by war and sanctions and the newly enriched businessmen who had made money from smuggling. The Shia majority – 65 per cent of the population by some estimates – were far from a homogeneous body either. They too were fragmented along tribal lines, culturally between urban and rural or previously rural communities and divided religiously too. Baghdad itself condensed all these various fractures.
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Iraq also lay at the centre of an extraordinarily complex regional picture. Around its borders lay six states – Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and Syria – which each had its own distinctive governmental system, popular culture, worldview and history and which each had its own interests to pursue in Iraq. To the old local proverb ‘two Iraqis, three sects’ could be added four classes, five regional backers and six different strands of religious observance. The author, working in Iraq from 1999 to 2002, found as in Afghanistan, the sense of a multiplicity of interwoven, overlaid conflicts almost overwhelming.

THE USE AND ABUSE OF INFORMATION BEFORE THE WAR

The process of preparing public opinion for the conflict which had started with the selective leaks of raw intelligence to newspapers such as the
New York Times
towards the end of 2001 reached its climax with the United Nations presentation made in February 2003 by Colin Powell. The only member of the Bush administration to have sufficient broad credibility to convince those doubtful of the White House’s case for war, Powell, who had spent days closeted at CIA headquarters before his speech going over the intelligence, claimed that Saddam Hussein’s regime was trying to acquire nuclear weapons capability and that there was ‘no doubt’ that Iraq both possessed and was prepared to use biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
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None of these statements proved correct.
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David Kay, the man charged by the Bush administration with running the Iraq Survey Group to find the evidence of WMD after the invasion, later said bluntly: ‘We were almost all wrong.’ Kay’s successor, Charles Duelfer, concurred. The resulting ISG report said ‘with high confidence’ that there were no chemical weapons on Iraq soil.
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None has ever been found, and President Bush himself has admitted that this failure gives him ‘a sickening feeling’ whenever he thinks about it.
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The key problem for any analyst was that, particularly following the departure of United Nations inspectors from Iraq in December 1998, reliable information was very thin on the ground. In the absence of any alternative sources, the reports of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had provided the basis for almost all intelligence estimations of Saddam’s capacity and intentions. But their data were swiftly out of date. In 1999 the CIA had acknowledged it was receiving very little that was new and was forced to hedge its bets over whether Iraqi stocks of components for WMD had been reconstituted from the enormous WMD programme developed by Saddam before the first Gulf War. This lack of certainty continued through 2000 and 2001, with American agencies raising the possibility that some ‘non-weaponized’ components for weapons might exist but admitting that there was no real evidence that this was the case.
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By late 2002, however, the qualifications had disappeared. In the USA, and in virtually every Western nation, intelligence agencies, undoubtedly aware of the importance of avoiding another grotesque failure such as that which had resulted in 9/11 and unwilling to risk a damaging row with political masters, began to issue much more alarming analyses of the potential threat that Saddam posed. What had been speculation rapidly became fact, buttressed by a stream of falsehoods transmitted by defectors close to the Iraqi exiles lobbying for the invasion. Material that had once been discarded as unreliable was re-examined and, often after have been laundered through a series of different agencies across the world, became the basis for new and more aggressive threat assessments. Not only was information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the opposition group led by Iraqi dissident and former banker Ahmed Chalabi, the source for over 100 individual news stories in major publications ranging from
Vanity Fair
to
The Sunday Times
(and subsequently syndicated to, or reproduced in, thousands more) but it was also fed directly to senior officials at the Department of Defense and in the office of the vice president.
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Beyond recounting Saddam’s debauchery, many of these stories reported that Iraq had mobile biological warfare facilities disguised as yogurt and milk trucks or hid banned weapons production and storage facilities beneath hospitals, fake lead-lined wells and Saddam’s palaces. Others revealed that Iraq had the capacity to launch toxin-armed Scud missiles at Israel. Several such tales, often embellished with convincing detail, came from an Iraqi refugee in Germany codenamed Curveball, who later confessed to trying ‘to fabricate something to topple the regime’.
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The truth, however, appears to have been that, though he may well have still harboured a strong desire to possess such arms, Saddam had halted production and destroyed almost all WMD stocks in stages between 1991 and 1999. In a fatal miscalculation, he continued to obfuscate out of fear of being seen as vulnerable by regional enemies, in particular Iran. His failure to fully cooperate with the returning United Nations inspectors as the war drew closer was therefore due to a misreading of where the true threat to his regime lay. The last weeks before the Iraq war thus saw a miasma of untruth, myth and miscalculation on all sides.
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Further sources for the erroneous claims about Iraq’s WMD was testimony from detainees. These included Abu Zubaydah, the detainee who had been waterboarded after capture in Pakistan, and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, another senior al-Qaeda detainee who in early 2002 was tortured in Egypt at the CIA’s request.
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These two men appeared to corroborate the INC’s defectors’ allegations that al-Qaeda had received assistance for a WMD programme from Saddam Hussein’s regime. Information also came from a smuggler imprisoned in a Kurdish jail who told interrogators (and journalists) stories of phials of chemicals being transferred from Baghdad to Kandahar. However, the smuggler, whose claims were widely disseminated in the American press, was a fantasist, unable to even accurately describe Kandahar to the author when interviewed in northern Iraq in August 2002 and al-Libi later retracted his own statement as having been procured under duress.
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Such claims naturally played into the question of far broader links between bin Laden’s organization and Saddam Hussein’s regime. In his speech to the United Nations Powell had described a close and longstanding relationship between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. His claims were conservative in comparison with many of those made by senior White House figures who had repeatedly suggested that the 9/11 attacks had depended on Iraqi assistance or even been an Iraqi plan from the beginning. These ideas were based on a highly selective mix of unverified, false or misinterpreted intelligence stripped of all context.
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The picture built up from these various scraps of information was only convincing if, either through genuine ‘cognitive dissonance’ or deliberate mendacity, any contradictory evidence or contextual analysis was screened out. So when Powell told the UN that there had been contacts between representatives of bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence agents, he was not actually lying. There had indeed been around a dozen such meetings, and though most dated largely from the early and mid 1990s, when bin Laden had been based in Sudan, at least one had occurred more recently, in 1998 in Afghanistan.
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But, as classified CIA assessments in June 2002 had already concluded, none of these meetings had succeeded in doing anything other than confirming the profound differences between the two parties concerned. This crucial qualification did not feature in the secretary of state’s speech.
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