At the RSA today to argue with Nick Davies in person about (follow the link to buy a copy) Flat Earth News. One of Nick’s claims — not central to his book, but articulated in his stump speech — is that the British media gullibly accepted the Blair government’s case for war in Iraq, based on WMD — in particular the 45 minute claim in the infamous dossier.
The evidence is a little different. If you go back to media coverage on September 25, 2002 you will find some withering commentaries on the dossier.
Take for example the Daily Mail, the biggest middle market paper in Britain.
A Jane Corbin op-ed says of the dossier claims:
…as someone who has spent months in the grim industrial gulags of Russia, chasing down rumours of uranium for sale, I know that there are many conmen among the mafia and rogue scientists. I wonder how much Saddam has paid for material that proved worthless or was intercepted.
In the same paper, Corelli Barnett is more dismissive:
Tony Blair’s dossier is larded with the customary weasel words that Saddam ‘may have’ or ‘almost certainly’ does or ‘will have’ this or that capability.The words glide over the cold truth that, in the absence of UN inspectors on the ground, much of the dossier remains merely hopeful conjecture. This especially applies to the guesses as to how long it would take Iraq to develop an operational nuclear weapon.
The Mail’s own op-ed runs under the heading ‘The Dossier That Answers Nothing.’
The FT leader:
the 50-page document offers no compelling evidence that immediate military action is needed. Nor does it present a strong argument against a policy of enhanced containment.
The Daily Telegraph, the UK’s best-selling quality paper, headlines its analysis: ‘Still no answer to the question: why now?’
Whatever the vocabulary, there is little in the dossier to suggest that Iraq poses a new and imminent military threat.It does not argue that Saddam is preparing to attack either his neighbours or the West, or that he is about to obtain a nuclear bomb.
Its leader — ‘An Inconsistent Statement’ — concludes:
Downing Street is attempting to act as transatlantic broker. Three years ago, Mr Blair was drawing America into involvement. Today, he is being drawn by it.
In The Times, Simon Jenkins writes:
The dossier’s attempt to present Saddam as an incipient nuclear power is worse than half-hearted. He has no factory to treat enriched uranium even if he found it “somewhere in Africa.” Had he such a factory, it could be bombed.His biological weapons are hard to deliver, least of all with his ageing Scuds. They were not used even in the Gulf War. Saddam has had these weapons for 20 years. So have many highly unstable Central Asian states.
Nor does the dossier explain why these weapons could not be eliminated “surgically,” as their predecessors were by the Israelis in 1981 and allegedly by American missiles ever since.
In the same paper, here is Bronwen Maddox:
The 55 pages entitled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction do not, in fact, say that he has a more terrifying arsenal than in the 1991 Gulf War or the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War.In a headline-grabbing claim, the dossier says he could deploy some chemical and biological weapons at 45 minutes notice, but this is not entirely new, if rarely presented so bluntly.
Nor does the dossier present itself as a case for ousting Saddam. Blair says the report sets out the case for trying to get UN inspectors back in, and only if they are frustrated, for military action.
Even the war-crazed Star (MAD SADDAM SET TO ATTACK; 45 MINUTES FROM A CHEMICAL WAR) informs its readers:
Tony Blair’s dossier of death does not appear to justify attacking Iraq, said military experts.Major Charles Heyman, editor of Jane’s World Armies, said it had no “killer fact” showing Saddam had to be taken out.
Show me the isolated enthusiasm of the Express that day, and I’ll raise you the skepticism of the Mirror, the Guardian and the Independent.
Whatever else happened, newspaper readers were given a healthy dose of realism in the interpretation of the dossier. Of course, MPs don’t always read newspapers…
Adrian, The fact that journalists are still arguing over WMD’s and pointing fingers about it only adds to the public’s frustration with them, at least here in America. The war in Iraq is being won, a dictator who ran his subjects through shredding machines is dead, fewer lives have been lost since he has been deposed than would’ve if he stayed in power, and none of the paranoid fears about America expanding its empire or a few rich white guys somehow making obscene oil profits from this whole mess have come to pass. Whoops, correction — a few rich, anti-war white guys like Jacques Chirac and possibly George Galloway did make ill-gotten oil profits in the Oil for Food scam. If there is properly placed anger, it should be at the incompetence of bureaucrats in government to collect good info on security threats, but even still there is little question that the world is a better place without a dictator who used WMD’s in the form of gas to kill his own people and who invaded a free country. Hitler didn’t have WMD’s either — seems like a strange thing to quibble over, and a tiresome dead horse to keep whipping.
Even the existance of the shredder is pretty doubtful, Steve.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/feb/25/iraq.iraqandthemedia
“MPs don’t always read newspapers…”
Probably for the best!
Have you read Borkowski article? very good, and made things a little clearer for me..
http://www.markborkowski.com/?p=7345
Steve’s comments above are a perfect example of what Nick Davies speaks to — a complete lack of fact-checking! Or, at best, a selective cherry-picking and spinning of “facts” to prop up one’s preferred version of reality.
1 — Is the war in Iraq being won? I wonder whether Steve reads any “analysis” of the situation in Iraq written not by Americans thousands of miles from the conflict, but by Iraqi citizens living each day in a country devastated by our noble efforts to “win” in their country?
“Perhaps the most accurate description of the security situation for Iraqi civilians in the past year is that it was less bad than if the worst of the late 2006 levels had been sustained throughout 2007. To herald ‘security improvements’ in 2007 is to overlook not only that security remains at an abysmally low level, but that for some 24,000 Iraqi civilians, and their families and friends, the year was one of devastating and irreparable tragedy. One hopeful sign that does distinguish the most recent six-month period from earlier post-invasion periods is that civilian deaths per month continue to trend downwards, particularly in Baghdad. If some of this reduction in violence has been obtained through the US-led security initiative,6 then this has also been at the price of an increase, compared to 2006, in the number of non-combatants killed directly and solely by US fire, most often from the air.
Given that Iraq’s continuing paroxysm of violence began with a massive exercise of US firepower, the sooner the US régime learns to employ means other than violence to solve the problem of violence in Iraq, the sooner there will be genuine cause for optimism.” http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007/
2 –Have fewer lives been lost since Saddam was deposed? This is, at best, an optimistic guess on Steve’s part. General Tommy Franks boldly pronounced at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq that “we don’t do body counts.” So who knows how many Iraqi civilians have been killed by the US since our invasion? Does Steve have access to a secret “body count” database? The truth might be somewhere between the Lancet figures and the Iraq Body Count figures. But we don’t know. We do know how many US and Coalition forces have been killed in Iraq though. We do count those bodies.
3 — Is America expanding its empire? The US has been building permanent bases in Iraq. The Bush administration is entering into “agreements” with the current Iraqi government to enable the continued presence of US troops on Iraqi soil after we “win” the war.
4 — Have “rich white guys” made obscene profits in the oil business? $40 billion for ExxonMobil alone…yeah, I’d call that obscene.
5 — Did Saddam use WMD to kill his own people? Yes, he did. But we always leave out the other clause in this particular “truth.” He gassed his own people with the blessing and overt assistance of the US and certain European countries — back when Saddam was “our guy.”
What scares me most is the number of “Steves” who will vote for McCain this year. And the possibility that neither Obama nor Clinton are committed to ending the war in Iraq.