Re: "smoked salmon socialists"

Dreamers & Idiots
Britain And The US Did Everything To Avoid A
Peaceful Solution In Iraq And Afghanistan
By George Monbiot
The Guardian - UK
11-11-3

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 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?
www.monbiot.com