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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28923 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I think that for once the CIA was being honest, or at least the various intelligence services involved. There's a large step from "We think he probably does have something" to "He definitely has weapons of mass destruction". It seems to have been the politicians who were pushing for "tell us that yes it's true so we can stand up in parliament and declare war".

So I think the push for war came from the politicians and certain parties within the intelligence services, who wanted something to back them up, and once they got the go-ahead for war and the subsequent invasion/liberation (delete as applicable) of Iraq, actually finding the weapons was no longer a priority. They could now move on to claims of removing a tyrant and nation building and so forth.

The 'sources' relied upon for intel seem to have been sketchy, to say the least, and this was probably embarrassing to the agencies involved. Going ahead with planting fake weapons would have meant a public (amongst themselves and their political masters) admission that they had been fooled, and left them open to rebuke by the governments involved that "But you told us there really were WMD, what do you mean there aren't any?". It would also have meant that, intentional or not, they would have been demonstrating that their bosses in the government were liars. More trouble than it was worth to start up fakery. If, on the other hand, the intelligence agencies had been the ones pushing, then I think it would have been worth their while to fake WMDs, but not when the push came from the other way round.

Take the Dodgy Dossier:

Iraq – Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation (more commonly known as the Iraq Dossier, the February Dossier[2] or the Dodgy Dossier) was a 2003 briefing document for the British prime minister Tony Blair's Labour Party government. It was issued to journalists on 3 February 2003 by Alastair Campbell, Blair's Director of Communications and Strategy, and concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. Along with the earlier September Dossier, these documents were ultimately used by the British government to justify its involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The term Dodgy Dossier was first coined by online polemical magazine Spiked in relation to the September Dossier. The term was later employed by Channel 4 News when its reporter, Julian Rush, was made aware of Glen Rangwala's discovery that much of the work in the Iraq Dossier had been plagiarised from various unattributed sources including a thesis produced by a student at California State University. The most notable source was an article by then graduate student Ibrahim al-Marashi, entitled Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis.

Not everybody was on board with the alleged intel even within the intelligence services, so I think this is why there was no united effort to fake up WMD. The Chilcot Report was scathing of pretty much everyone and everything involved, but stopped short of saying anyone was deliberately lying:

The report does not question Blair's personal belief that there was a case for war, only the way he presented the evidence that he had. The report cleared the Prime Minister's Office of influencing the Iraq Dossier (the "Dodgy Dossier"), which contained the claim that Iraq possessed the ability to launch WMD within 45 minutes, and instead laid the blame for the weaknesses in its evidence on the Joint Intelligence Committee.

More specifically, the report blamed Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI6) head Richard Dearlove who presented so-called "hot" intelligence about alleged weapons of mass destruction provided by an Iraqi with "phenomenal access" to high levels in the Iraqi government directly to Blair, without first confirming its accuracy. The investigators found that references to this intelligence in government reports were over-certain and did not adequately stress uncertainties and nuance. The informant was later found to have been lying. The Chilcot report states that "personal intervention [by Dearlove] and its urgency gave added weight to a report that had not been properly evaluated and would have coloured the perception of ministers and senior officials". The day after the report was published, Blair conceded that he should have challenged such intelligence reports before relying on them to justify military action in Iraq.

Some MI6 staff had also expressed concerns about the quality of its source – in particular, noting that an inaccurate detail about storing chemical weapons in glass containers appeared to have been taken from Michael Bay's film The Rock – and expressed doubts about its reliability. Nonetheless, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw asked MI6 to use the source to provide "silver bullet intelligence".

It's difficult enough to disagree with the minister about the rationale for war, it's even worse if afterwards you have to tell him "So the intel was all lies, you're a fool for believing it, and now you have to give us permission to create fake WMDs we can show to the press, even though this is likely to create a trail that can be discovered by any investigative journalists willing to put the work in, and if discovered will convince everyone that we're a bunch of incompetent lying fools".

It's difficult enough to disagree with the minister about the rationale for war, it's even worse if afterwards you have to tell him "So the intel was all lies, you're a fool for believing it, and now you have to give us permission to create fake WMDs we can show to the press, even though this is likely to create a trail that can be discovered by any investigative journalists willing to put the work in, and if discovered will convince everyone that we're a bunch of incompetent lying fools".

This sounds ridiculous, but given politicians arguably paid the most substantial price for the Iraq-was-a-disaster narrative, it seems less likely they’d be the brake on that kind of scheme from Dearlove types.

By the way (as is hopefully obvious), I don’t believe any of this, I just think that as a logical exercise it suggests Western intelligence agencies are much less competent than most people on the political extremes often suggest.

There's always "If Minister Jones ignored your advice and rushed to war on fake or dubious intel, why should you dig him out of the hole later (by faking up WMDs)? Let him be scapegoated in public, and his successor - hopefully - will listen more closely to you".

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