Iraq: The Great Deception

The three reasons given by Bush to attack Baghdad were unfounded. There were no weapons of mass destruction; Iraq was not in the process of acquiring uranium and had no links to al-Qaida.

The author of one of the key lies that led to war against Iraq in 2003 has confessed. Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, known by the nickname of “Curveball,” was the Iraqi informant who invented the stories about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Eight years after the conflagration, he has acknowledged that the secret factories, as well as the trucks loaded with biological and chemical weapons, were merely his own inventions. Why did he promote such lies? In an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, he anwered, “They gave me the opportunity to concoct something that would overthrow the regime. My children and I are proud of it, and we are proud that we are one of the reasons that provided Iraq with a margin of democracy.”

Janabi, a chemical engineer, left Iraq in 1995. In 2002, he made contact with the BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst], the German intelligence agency, and the agents to whom he told his fantasies. According to him, he made an agreement that his statements would not be transmitted to third countries.

Nevertheless, the BND wasted no time in sharing the information with the CIA. The data provided by Janabi was tailor-made for the George W. Bush administration, which was already prepared to attack Iraq. This was the perfected justification, to offset public opinion, to invade the Arabic nation.

It has been known for a while that Iraq never had the weapons of mass destruction that had been described. It was officially established in the United States in 2005, by an investigative commission. What is unknown is to what extent the BND cooperated in the charade.

According to Jenabi, he called his BND contact and reproached him for having broken the agreement not to disclose his information. The protest led to his being confined for three months, the length of time that elapsed before the invasion of Iraq.

In fact, all three reasons given for attacking Baghdad were unfounded. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and Iraq was not in the process of acquiring uranium and had no links to al-Qaida.

In the U.S., defenders of the Bush regime claim they were intoxicated or misled, as they say in intelligence jargon, by Curveball alias Janabi. It is now clear that Washington saw what it wanted to see.

It is the second time the U.S. entered a major war for an ultimately non-existent reason. The previous conflict was Vietnam. There, they used an alleged attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on a couple of U.S. destroyers as an excuse to start bombing North Vietnam. Eventually it was established that the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which precipitated the war, never really took place.