The US case for war in Iraq is clouded with propaganda and misinformation

The rush to war, the momentum for an invasion of Iraq that most us feel powerless to stop, seems to have killed our caution. We are in danger of failing to think for ourselves, failing to ask the right questions and falling prey to the barrage of propaganda and disinformation that is constantly pumped at us. So let's begin at the beginning. Why is the United States so obsessed with weapons of mass destruction?

At the end of the Second World War, the United States came under strong domestic pressure to end the draft. But the Soviet Union still had the world's largest land forces. So Washington decided to rely on the atom bomb - and an air force to deliver it - to assert its military superiority.

Then in 1949, the Soviet Union developed an atom bomb too. With its nuclear monopoly ended, the United States was reduced to trying to prevent other countries that might be future enemies from acquiring nuclear weapons, a policy that, as Immanuel Wallerstein of Yale University points out, can hardly be termed a resounding success.

However, it was one thing for the major western powers to develop their own nuclear weapons - a war between, say Britain and America, was so remote as to be unthinkable - and hopefully India and Pakistan will follow the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the nuclear peace between America and the Soviet Union for nearly 50 years. But what about Iraq?

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has been trying for years to build an atom bomb. There is also no doubt that he has failed. One project was levelled by Israeli bombers. One programme was too complex for Iraqi science or technology. Another was destroyed by the International Atomic Energy Agency before it left Iraq in 1998. Norman Dombey, who teaches theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, says that as far as nuclear weapons are concerned, Iraq is much less of a threat now than it was in 1991.

The International Institute of Strategic Studies agrees with this assessment and so, to a lesser extent, does Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee. Sir Andrew Green, former British ambassador to Syria and Saudi Arabia, says "Talk of the Saddam threat to the West is, frankly, largely manufactured".

George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard do not want us to believe this and their black propagandists and spin doctors have put a lot of effort into trying to convince us that Iraq is only months away from getting a bomb which it will itself use against the West or will make available to al Qa'ida.

It is instructive to trace the origins of such worrying stories. The main source is Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi defector. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations he said that Iraq would have nuclear weapons by 2005. Elsewhere he reduced the time to a matter of months. (The Times, 16 September 2002).

How does Hamza know this, and if he does not know it, why is he saying it? He has not been in Iraq for eight years, so he cannot have any first-hand information. He says that when he was there he was a "nuclear engineer", but his CV - which is on the web - reveals him to be a specialist in scientific computation and modelling. Dombey describes him as "a glorified computer scientist".

The point about all defectors is that they tend to say what they feel their new hosts want them to say. When they first defect, their residence visa may depend on doing this. When they are established in their new country, their well-being and prospects are linked to their public performance.

For instance, Hamza defected in 1995 after the CIA planted a story in the London Sunday Times while he was visiting Libya. The story claimed Hamza had admitted that Iraq had a secret weapons programme and that he possessed documents which confirmed this. Realising that the story was a death sentence if he returned to Baghdad, Hamza managed to persuade the CIA to take him and his family to the US. Hamza knew that the documents were CIA forgeries but he said nothing when Madeline Albright quoted them to the UN Security Council in order to prevent any relaxation of the sanctions on Iraq.

What about the story that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa? Dombey answers this succinctly: "So what? The IAEA has told me that Iraq already has hundreds of tons of uranium at its disposal. Without enrichment facilities this material is useless for nuclear weapons, though it could conceivably be used in conventional weapons in the same way that depleted uranium is used by the UK and the US."

Dombey points out that more than 50 countries would be able to build an atom bomb given sufficient fissile material. All it would require would be a research institution with a good physics department and an army familiar with explosives. "Every major Arab country and every EU country, except perhaps Luxembourg, can call on these assets." But how do you deliver it? A gun-type bomb is too big to fit into a missile and a compact bomb for a missile has to be tested to see if it will work. The Iraqis may have been working on these problems for years but there is not the slightest indication that they have solved them.

Meanwhile, the disinformation war and the dirty tricks campaigns to convince us that we are about to be nuked by Saddam Hussein go on. It is quite possible that the African uranium story was another CIA operation along the lines of the capacitors "destined for Iraq" found at Heathrow airport in 1990. It turned out these had been planted by the FBI.

Or take the case of the website called Asia Times Online. Last November 14 Asia Times Online ran a feature quoting, it claimed, from an interview on the Arab TV channel al-Jazeera. In the interview, one Mohamed al-Asuquf, "third in command of al-Qaeda", said there were terrorist plans for a nuclear attack on the US.

But there was no such interview on al-Jazeera and the name Mohamed al-Asuquf appears to have been made up. Yet the story not only appeared on Asia Times Online but was also picked up and reproduced around the world. Owning up to having been duped, Asia Times Online said the story had come from "a usually reliable source" in Singapore but did not reveal his or her identity. I suggest that source was almost certainly a Western intelligence officer.

There are other compelling reasons not to allow ourselves to be stampeded by disinformation into a war with Iraq, and many questions which the Australian government cannot or does not want to answer. What, for instance, are our war aims? Britain and the United States have announced what they want to achieve. What is Australia after? All military manuals emphasise that war aims must be achievable and should be related to the degree of risk the aggressor is prepared to accept.

History suggests that the decisive aims Britain and America have set out - the invasion of Iraq, the subjugation of its armed forces, and the overthrow of its government - have often resulted in a strategy of annihilation, heavy casualties and prolonged conflict. Annihilation is the American way of war with which it has an historical - some say psychological - affinity: Gettysburg, the Indian wars, the weight of superior fire power in the two World Wars and Korea, the body counts in Vietnam and the events in Somalia. (see The American Way of War, by R. F. Weigley, Macmillan, New York, 1973.)

And once the Iraqi forces are destroyed, what then? Occupation forces require one soldier or police officer for each 500 locals, plus one supervisor for each ten policemen. To control the 23 million Iraqis, that would mean a force of about 50,000. How many would Australia contribute? How many years would they have to stay there? How long would the domestic electorate tolerate a protracted occupation of another, far away country.

If our war aim is to ingratiate ourselves with Washington, then we should be told and the risks spelt out. The main one is, of course, that foreign policy imperatives of super powers change. If we hope that by leaping to do America's bidding now, America will be there for us if, God forbid, we ever need her, then we may end up being terribly disappointed - betrayed and abandoned as Britain abandoned us when it suited her in 1942.

Then there's the moral issue. Tying Australia to America's war aims without reservation could well tie us to a strategy of annihilation and the merciless destruction of Iraq's armed forces, no doubt with weapons that include depleted uranium that will poison the country and usher in another round of 'Gulf War syndrome'.

And what about Iraq's civilians? Iraq is a nation of kids - nearly half its population being children and teenagers. Is waging war on them when they had no say in bringing Saddam Hussein to power, and no chance to get rid of him, really the way for a great nation like Australia to behave?