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By 2006 alone, over 655,000 Iraqi civilians are estimated to have died in excess of normal death rates (Burnham et al. “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey”, Lancet vol 368, Oct 2006). One of the initial reasons given for the invasion involved members of the Bush administration associating Iraq with Al Qaeda (on board the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1 2003, Bush declared the war over and suggested that in Saddam, they had removed an ally of Al-Qaeda). This line was quickly discontinued in official circles, even though it stuck around in public minds (see below) and also in journalistic presentation (for example in continued reference to the Iraq invasion as part of the so-called “war on terror”).

It is, of course, unclear how the possible complicity of officials in Iraqi government in a terrorist attack could justify an invasion of a country, given that the invasion would foreseeably result in deaths of (at least) thousands of innocents and destruction of infrastructure and livelihood (just as much as it would be preposterous for a foreign government to justify aerial bombing of the US by citing the fact that key decision-makers in US governments have led unprovoked military assaults or supported murderous regimes or paramilitaries on their sovereign soil). As many have noted, a more appropriate response to a terrorist attack would have been investigative police work to find the perpetrators and addressing any legitimate grievances.

However, putting aside the point about whether the invasion could be morally justified, let us look at the factual accuracy of the reasons advanced by the Bush administration as necessitating invasion. My focus is on the poor performance of the US mass media. I highlight evidence from authoritative sources that was available before or around the time of the invasion that undercut the case put forward by the Bush Admin. While this material could be taken as building a case for the Bush administration having intentionally misled the public in making a case for war, it is not my intention here to argue this case. Rather I want to argue that, the US mass media failed to adequately question the pronouncements of the government and to give sufficient exposure to the contradictory evidence. Given that the mass media perhaps the primary institution responsible for furnishing the public with necessary information so they can discharge their democratic duties in an informed manner,

A preliminary issue is whether more accurate reporting and greater coverage of this material would have swayed public opinion against the war (this relates to proposition 6 in the outline above). There is reason to suppose that it would have. A PIPA poll released April 2004 (a year after the invasion of Iraq) included the following findings (”US public beliefs on Iraq and the presidential election” April 22 2004, www.pipa.org). Among those who believed that Iraq was providing support to Al-Qaeda, 70% said that going to war was the right decision and 54% said that it was the best thing to do. Among who did not have this belief, 35% said the invasion was the right thing to do and 22% said that it was the best thing to do. Among those who believed that Iraq had WMD just before the war, 87% said going to war was the right decision. This percentage dropped to 56% among those who thought that even though Iraq did not have WMD, it had a major WMD program (and only 35% of this group thought the invasion was the best thing to do); it dropped to 26% among those who thought Iraq had only a minor WMD program; and to 12% among those who said it had no WMD activities at all. As a testament to the poor performance of the US mass media, note that the poll found that, even a year after the invasion, a majority of those polled continue to believe that Iraq was giving substantial support to Al Qaeda and nearly half believe that evidence of this has been found. A majority also believe that Iraq either had WMD or a major program for manufacturing them. All of this suggests some reason to suppose that if the majority of the public were informed of the facts, the opposition to war may have been considerably greater. Let us review some relevant facts and the authoritative evidence available at the time of the invasion.

It was said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors. In late 2002, the Bush and Blair administrations claimed to have evidence that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. It turned out the documents that constituted this evidence were forgeries (and, apparently, very bad ones). After several months, the IAEA got hold of the documents, and on 7 March, Mohamed El-Baradei, the director general of the IAEA, reported that they were fake (Seymour Hersh “Who lied to whom?” The New Yorker, March 31 2003).

Also in late 2002, the Bush administration claimed that aluminium tubes seized in Iraq “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs” (Condoleezza Rice on CNN Sep 8 2002). Yet the IAEA, after investigating the claim, was highly sceptical. It seriously doubted the tubes were for nuclear weapons and believed they were likely intended for small artillery rockets instead (Joby Warrick, “U.S. Claim on Iraqi Nuclear Program Is Called Into Question” 24 Jan 2003, Washington Post).

In fact, Scott Ritter, chief United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector at the time (from 1991-98) said that by the time he left (1998), 90-95% of Iraqi WMD had been verifiably disarmed. The rest was not enough to constitute a weapons program and would anyway turn to useless sludge by the time of invasion given the limited shelf life of the types of biological and chemical agents that Iraq possessed (p23, 29 in Scott Ritter and William Rivers Pitt “War on Iraq” 2002 Profile Books). Infrastructure and facilities had been completely destroyed and mechanisms were in place to detect from ground and air the gamma rays that accompany attempts to enrich uranium or plutonium (Ritter and Rivers Pitt 2002 p26). Attempts to start a chemical or biological weapons program from scratch (since all infrastructure had been verifiably destroyed by 1998) would require purchasing equipment and technology that could be detected. manufacture of chemical weapons would emit gases that could also be detected (Ritter and Rivers Pitt pp32-3).

It was reported that in any case, Saddam had kicked out weapons inspectors in 1998 and that this was at least suspicious. In fact, as chairman of UNSCOM in 1998 Richard Butler attests, the inspectors were pulled out in 1998 by UNSCOM when informed by the US that the latter was about to undertake aerial bombing of Iraq (Operation Desert Fox) (Richard Butler, “Saddam Defiant” 2000, p224, Weidenfeld & Nicolson). The bombing was purportedly in response to Saddam’s sudden failure to cooperate as fully with UNSCOM. However, the context for this is that CIA spies had begun to operate with the arms inspectors and were gathering information to target Saddam (this was among the main reasons Ritter cited for his resignation from his post) (Tim Weinar, “US spied on Iraq under UN cover, officials now say” 7 Jan 1999 New York Times). Saddam’s substantial cooperation with UNSCOM, as attested by Ritter, froze with the revelations of the US using the inspectors for spying purposes.

The administration has said that Saddam refused to allow weapons inspectors back into the country as the threat of invasion loomed, thus forcing the hand of the US. This is false. UN inspectors searched from November 2002 to March 2003, when the invasion was launched. The inspectors requested more time to continue their work (prominent voices were Mohamed El-Baradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) but were denied this by the US government.

Another reason cited for the invasion was that Saddam was a cruel despot and so needed to be deposed for the benefit of inhabitants of Iraq. It is certainly true that Saddam had conducted horrific acts of repression against the Kurdish North and the Shi’a South. This much is not a matter of dispute. However, at the very least, we must weigh the benefits of deposing Saddam against the cost of removing him by war. The cost includes the deaths of at least 655,000 people by 2006 alone, as well as many foreseeable repercussions of a country’s being in a state of war, such as increasing malnutrition, morbidity and destruction of vital infrastructure. The war unquestionably made things significantly worse for the majority of the population.

Also, compare US treatment to friendly regimes that also repress marginalised communities in equally horrific manner. Despite Turkey’s ethnic cleansing of its Kurdish population over the 1990s, for example, the US has maintained friendly ties with the regime and remained its major supplier of arms.

Moreover, the US government (under the elder Bush administration) maintained friendly ties with Saddam as well as a flow of aid to him throughout the 1980s even though it was clear that he was using chemical weapons against the Kurdish population (see Phythian 1997 ‘Arming Iraq: How the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam’s War Machine’ and Miron Rezun ‘Saddam Hussein’s Gulf Wars: Ambivalent Stakes in the Middle East’ 1992.

If the concern was for the welfare of the inhabitants of Iraq, a far easier humanitarian act, without the obvious costs of invasion, would have been to end the economic sanctions imposed by the US and UK. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, in 1989, Iraq had one of the most modern infrastructures and highest standards of living in the Middle East (ICRC, Iraq: A decade of sanctions, December 1999). The economic sanctions followed the immense destruction visited upon Iraq by US aerial bombing in 1991, which wrecked the majority of its electricity generation, as well as many dams, water pumping stations, telephone exchanges, civilian hospitals, community health centres and schools (Edwards and Cromwell, “Guardians of Power”, Pluto Books 2006: 16). In the absence of an inflow of income, the Iraqi government was unable to rebuild the vital infrastructure. A 1999 UNICEF survey found that infant mortality in most of Iraq more than doubled in the nine years since UN sanctions were imposed (Reference number CF/DOC/PR/1999/29). While the Oil for Food program was established to enable some flow of necessary funds to the Iraqi population, an expert ‘Humanitarian Panel’ established by the UN Security Council concluded in 1999 that the program could not meet the needs of the population regardless of improvements in its implementation. In order to meet the human needs of the population, much of the destroyed essential infrastructure needed to be re-built. However, the sanctions, even with the Oil for Food program did not allow the country anywhere near enough income for this reconstruction (Edwards and Cromwell, p16).

The British and US governments maintained that the mass death in Iraq during the sanctions were the result not of the sanctions themselves but of the Iraqi regime withholding food and medicine from its population. Denis Halliday, UN Humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq from 1997 to 1998 (when he resigned, calling the sanctions genocidal), said that there was no basis for this assertion. He pointed out that Secretary-general had repeatedly reported that there is no evidence of food being diverted by the Iraqi government, based on the reports of UN observers who follow the flow of food from imported shipment, right through to retail sale. Halliday also noted the external Sanctions Committee’s complicity as it approved some medicines and not others, knowing full well that some of the ordered medicines would be useless if not used in conjunction with the unapproved ones (Denis Halliday interview with David Edwards in March 2000, www.medialens.org). This then allowed accusations that much medicine sat undistributed in government stockpiles.

All of this information, from authoritative sources, was published and publicly available before the invasion. Yet this information was dismally under-reported in the US mass media. The poor performance of under-reporting has also continued throughout the occupation as new evidence has surfaced on the deliberation of the executive branches in the US and UK.

An Aug 17 2003 publication in the British paper Independent on Sunday noted that the British government’s Sep 2002 dossier on Iraq had been changed at the last minute in a way that made the Iraq WMD situation seem worse and that this was not accepted as valid by some of the most senior experts involved. The draft of the dossier even two weeks before the release said that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs. The thrust of drafts of the dossier was about the existence of programs, and not about the existence of actual weapons. In the last minute changes (and without any additional supporting evidence), the claims are revised to say that Iraq has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons since the 1991 Gulf War. This change was crucial to the case for war, as such weapons produced before 1991 would have become useless due to their limited shelf life (Glen Rangwala, ”New evidence shows crucial dossier changes”, accessed at http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/News/tabid/76/newsid393/1997/Default.aspx).

The Sunday Times (London) published on 1 May 2005 a memo written by a British national security aide summarising the discussion of a July 2002 meeting of Prime Minister Blair and various advisers including teh head of Britain’s MI-6 intelligence service. The authenticity of the memo (dubbed the Downing Street memo) has not been disputed by Blair’s office. Reporting back on recent conversations with the Bush administration, the MI-6 head said that Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military means and this was to be justified by a combination of terrorism and WMD, but that the case was thin and the facts and intelligence were to be fixed around the policy (www.timesonline.co.uk). Yet the US mass media was slow to report on this development and even then, gave it relatively little emphasis (Hollar and Hart, “When “Old News” has never been told”, July/August issue of Extra (accessed at www.fair.org)).

Former General Wesley Clark talked to Tim Russert on the 15 June 2003 edition of NBC’s Meet the Press and revealed that right from the day of eth September attacks on the World Trade Center, he was pressured by the White House to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein. When he asked for evidence to this effect, he received none (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1842). ]x

The US media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) conducted a study of the major television news shows’ coverage of the Iraq war in the first three weeks of US bombing (which began March 19 2003). The study focused on the 1617 on-camera sources in news stories about Iraq on the evening newscasts on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS and Fox. Roughly two thirds of the sources were pro-war. Anti-war sources composed only 10% of the total (the rest being classified as having no discernible position for or against the war) and only 3% of US sources. These anti-war voices were almost universally allowed only one-sentence sound-bites from interviews conducted on the street. There was not a single instance of a sit-down interview with a person identified as against the war.

By contrast, many interviews with pro-war on-camera sources were sit-down interviews. Over half of the total number of sources (840 out of 1617) were current or former officials of the US government or military. Of those only four were identified as holding anti-war positions.

The over-reliance on government sources and a failure to seek out critiques of these or to fact-check them is made even more problematic when the government sources engage in what is (euphemistically) called psychological warfare operations or PSYOPS. In an article on 19th Feb 2002, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence was “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations”, the goal being to ”influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries” (FAIR report http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3546 “Pentagon disinformation should be no surprise” Feb 2005). Amidst public outrage, the Pentagon closed the office, but Defence Secretary Rumsfeld admitted that all of its tasks would simply be carried out by other agencies. A memorable example of PSYOPS was the photo-op of the toppling of a statue of Saddam in Baghdad on 9 Apr 2003. As an L.A.Times scoop revealed on 3 Jun 2004, the decision to topple it was made by a US Marine colonel, and it was a PSYOPS operation to package the event as a spontaneous action by jubilant Iraqi civilians.