Another of the BBC’s failures I would say. 20 years on and the Corporation feels it must repeat a lie.
The intelligence argument is an argument that reinforces the belief among many that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. The BBC is actually reinforces a lie.
It is an argument to justify past and present British involvements in wars and conflicts: “our intention has always been the intention of a good player that supports ‘democracy’ and ‘freedoms’ all over the world.”
Removing geopolitics, the political economy and American hegemony and ‘imperial’ functioning, help provide a narrow picture that reinforces the belief in the government and the ideology behind interventions, ‘regime change’, aid, etc. The fact is that Britain is a junior player and has material and geopolitical interests with the US, the decisive power.
A criminal needs an alibi. That is what happened prior the invasion of Iraq. Previous criminal actions also required alibis. Think of British support of Saddam in Thatcher’s time, think of Pinochet, Indonesia, North Yemen after 1962, Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah, Egypt …
Scholar Fred Halliday considered the claim that the invasion was because of ‘intelligence failure’ as one of the myths about the Middle East:
“The claim that Iraq had significant stockpiles of WMD in early 2003, or that Washington or London seriously believed they did, was unfounded. The claim about WMD was made not because of ‘faulty’ intelligence, nor from any belief that Iraq still had major WMD potential, but as part of a policy of ‘threat inflation’ – common during the Cold War – used to justify actions that had quite different motives which Washington and London found it hard to articulate specifically – namely, a wish to reimpose strategic control on West Asia as a whole.
The attack on Iraq was not driven by any specifically economic interests, but more by a set of intermixed ideological concerns that had been promoted in Washington before Bush was elected in 2000 and which came to take hold in the upper leadership of his neoconservative administration. These included the wish to demonstrate American power to allies and foes alike, and the fantasy, fuelled by dogma and ignorance at the highest level and encouraged by the Israeli government, that the destruction of the Ba‘thist “regime in Baghdad would have wider and beneficial consequences in the region. Ironically, the Bush administration’s decision-making process, secretive and elitist, was that normally associated with the dictatorial regimes of the Middle East; while the latter, for all their authoritarian powers and character, had always to take note of what their public opinion would and would not accept.” (Fred Halliday, 100 Myths About the Middle East, myth 28)
“Immediately after the September 11 atrocities, President Bush announced that his purpose was to rid the world of evil-doers. At that moment, the ‘war against terrorism’ was being called ‘Operation Infinite Justice’. Some time later, Prime Minister Blair told the Labour Party Conference that the present campaign should be part of a larger project of ‘reordering our world’.
In her 2005 book Empire of Capital, Ellen Meiksins Wood has a good section I recommend you read. See pp. 143-68.
Woodrow Wilson, October 1900:
We did not of deliberate choice undertake these new tasks which shall transform us . . . All the world knows the surprising circumstances which thrust them upon us came . . . as if part of a great preconceived plan . . . The whole world had already become a single vicinage; each part had become neighbor to all the rest. No nation could live any longer to itself . . . [It has become] the duty of the United States to play a part, and a leading part at that, in the opening and transformation of the East . . . The East is to be opened and transformed whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through . . . [will be] made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas . . . It is our peculiar duty . . . to moderate the process in the interests of liberty . . . This we shall do . . . by giving them, in the spirit of service, a govern- ment and rule which shall moralize them by being itself moral.
Madeleine Albright, February 1998:
If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation.
The quotes above are from the Preface of Andrew J. Bacevich’s American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy, 2003 ed.
Back then Peter Gowan wrote an excellent review of Bacevich’s book.
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