The juggernaut files

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-Qaida". 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

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".