Blair still fibbing about "thrown out" inspectors
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Spencer Fitz-Gibbon
Green Party national executive
On BBC2's Newsnight Special last night - Blair On Iraq - Jeremy Paxman tried to get Tony Blair to acknowledge that the UN inspectors weren't "thrown out" by Iraq in 1998, but withdrawn. Unfortunately Paxman must have been having an off-day, because he let Blair get away with reasserting one of the lies that's serving as "justification" for an attack on Iraq.
The exchange began well enough, when Paxman corrected Blair that Unscom arms inspectors were not "put out" of Iraq in 1998, as Blair had suggested, but were withdrawn. Blair responded:
"I'm sorry, that is simply not right. What happened is that the inspectors told us that they were unable to carry out their work, they couldn't do their work because they weren't being allowed access to the sites.
"They detailed that in the reports to the security council. On that basis, we said they should come out because they couldn't do their job properly."
It's abundantly clear from this that Blair knows the truth - that the repeated claims from US and British politicians that the inspectors were "thrown out" is a distortion. But in the process of acknowledging the truth, Blair somehow managed to contradict it. He admitted they were withdrawn, but told Paxman he was wrong to say they weren't expelled.
Paxman sought to press him on the point, and Blair said: "No, I'm sorry Jeremy, I'm not allowing you away with that, that is completely wrong. Let me just explain to you what happened. They were effectively thrown out for the reason that I will give you. Prior to them leaving Iraq they had come back to the security council, again and again, and said we are not being given access to sites. For example, things were being designated as presidential palaces, they weren't being allowed to go in there.
"As a result of that, they came back to the United Nations and said we can't carry out the work as inspectors; therefore we said you must leave because we will have to try and enforce this action a different way. So when you say the inspectors, when you imply the inspectors were in there doing their work, that is simply not the case."
Paxman evidently hasn't read the Green Party's briefing Come Clean on Inspections, Tony because he then not only failed to press the point, but allowed Blair to give the impression that he (Paxman) was the one trying to "get away with it."
It's worth remembering that the 1991-98 inspections ended in almost complete success. Scott Ritter, who was the UN's chief arms inspector at the time, says Iraq was "fundamentally disarmed" by December 1998, with 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction having been eliminated. Of the missing 5-10%, Ritter has said: "It doesn't even constitute a weapons programme. It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons programme which in its totality doesn't amount to much, but which is still prohibited."
Of Iraq's potential nuclear weapons capability, Ritter has said: "When I left Iraq in 1998... the infrastructure and facilities had been 100% eliminated. There's no doubt about that. All of their instruments and facilities had been destroyed. The weapons design facility had been destroyed. The production equipment had been hunted down and destroyed. And we had in place means to monitor - both from vehicles and from the air - the gamma rays that accompany attempts to enrich uranium or plutonium. We never found anything."
It's people like Scott Ritter that Blair refers to when he says "they came back to the United Nations and said we can't carry out the work as inspectors."
But Ritter himself has actually said: "Iraq has in fact demonstrated over and over a willingness to cooperate with weapons inspectors."
And of the sabotage of the inspectors' mission, not by Iraq but by the US, Ritter has asserted:
"Inspectors were sent in to carry out sensitive inspections that had nothing to do with disarmament but had everything to do with provoking the Iraqis."
The inspection team had been infiltrated by CIA operatives who were collecting intelligence for the USA - that is, not only spying, but abusing the status of the United Nations to do so. Some of the information they gleaned may have been used for targeting purposes in the US bombing which began immediately the inspectors left - having been withdrawn because the US was about to start bombing and it wouldn't have been safe for them to remain.
On the second day of that bombing in December 1998, Scott Ritter wrote in a report: "What [head of Unscom] Richard Butler did last week with the inspections was a set-up. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing."
In support of the assertion that Richard Butler, on behalf of the USA, had deliberately distorted facts in order to provide a "justification" for war, a UN diplomat said at the time: "Based on the same facts he [Butler] could have said, 'There were something like 300 inspections and we encountered difficulties in five.'"
That is, there were difficulties in about 1.66% of the inspections. And Blair described this to Newsnight viewers like this: "Prior to them leaving Iraq they had come back to the security council, again and again, and said we are not being given access to sites. For example, things were being designated as presidential palaces, they weren't being allowed to go in there. As a result of that, they came back to the United Nations and said we can't carry out the work as inspectors."
This is just one aspect of the dishonesty around Blair's determination to get Britain involved in a war of aggression on behalf of the US government. I wonder what could motivate a man to be so determined to portray black as white in order to help make a war happen.
