DREAMERS AND IDIOTS - Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and Afghanistan

by George Monbiot

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Guardian

Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public

imagination.

They must convince us that there is no other means of preventing

invasion,

or conquering terrorism, or even defending human rights. When

information is

scarce, imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and

diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover - until it

is too late

- how plausible the alternatives may be.

So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and

Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our

governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were

immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies,

what would we

do, the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the clanking

rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were

"indulging... in

a cosmic whinge". To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama

bin Laden's

useful idiots".

Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards

suggested, this might have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the

time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to

have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to

suggest that, as

President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed...

al-Qaeda". Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president

of Uzbekistan

reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of

foreigners.

But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now

beginning to come to

light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and

their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and

just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we

discovered

last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they

wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have

withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us

about the

possibilities for diplomacy.

Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam's

government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United

States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent

Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer to

prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11 attacks, and to permit

several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for

weapons of mass

destruction. If the object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents

claimed, was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored

elections within two years. According to Mr. Cannistraro, these proposals

reached the White House, but were "turned down by the president and

vice-president".

By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the US

government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of

mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position

on Israel

and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil. Among the people

they contacted

was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been

urging a war

with Iraq. He passed their offers to the CIA. Last week he told

the New York

Times that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them in

Baghdad".

Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything

possible to

find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government

appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the

opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On

March 6, 13

days before the war began, Bush said to journalists: "I want to

remind you

that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's

Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war

and peace.

Thus far, he's made the wrong choice."

Ten days later, Blair told a press conference: "We have provided

the right

diplomatic way through this, which is to lay down a clear ultimatum to

Saddam: cooperate or face disarmament by force... all the way through we

have tried to provide a diplomatic solution." On March 17, Bush

claimed that

"should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know

that every measure has been taken to avoid war". All these statements are

false.

The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan. On September 20,

2001, the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic

country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was

responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. The US

rejected the

offer. On October 1, six days before the bombing began, they repeated it,

and their representative in Pakistan told reporters: "We are ready for

negotiations. It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only

negotiation

will solve our problems." Bush was asked about this offer at a press

conference the following day. He replied: "There's no

negotiations. There's

no calendar. We'll act on [sic] our time."

On the same day, Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour party

conference,

ridiculed the idea that we could "look for a diplomatic

solution". "There is

no diplomacy with Bin Laden or the Taliban regime... I say to

the Taliban:

surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice."

Well, they

had just tried to exercise that choice, but George Bush had rejected it.

Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to trust the Taliban or

Saddam - these people were, after all, negotiating under duress.

But neither

did they have any need to trust them. In both cases they could have

presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting the

concessions they

had offered. Nor could the allies argue that the offers were not worth

considering because they were inadequate: both the Taliban and

Saddam were

attempting to open negotiations, not to close them - there appeared to be

plenty of scope for bargaining. In other words, peaceful resolutions were

rejected before they were attempted. What this means is that

even if all the

other legal tests for these wars had been met (they had not), both would

still have been waged in defiance of international law. The

charter of the

United Nations specifies that "the parties to any

dispute...shall, first of

all, seek a solution by negotiation".

None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these

conflicts were

unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of

civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks

should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been

attempted, Bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a pliant and

largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and

the prevailing

sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the

United States,

rather than anger and resentment.

Now who are the dreamers and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists?