March 2010
Post by member – Adrian Johnson
There was perhaps some fundamental irony to sitting in the opulent surroundings of the Cavalry and Guards Club while watching the subversive thriller, WMD. Then again, perhaps it was entirely appropriate; the film’s lens was cast upon the very intelligence that sent the British Army to war in 2003, and with it, the Guards and cavalry themselves.
The film is low budget; indeed, it is unashamedly so. Based on research from a range of open source documents, the screenplay unfolds through a series of surveillance cameras. It is effective: the view feels simultaneously embedded in the scene through the unseen, covert lens, yet also strangely detached. This unsettling juxtaposition helps carry much of the tension throughout the film. As we watch the everyman intelligence agent (for the British Secret Intelligence Service – known also as MI6) through these hidden cameras, we see his envelopment into a murky world of distortion and mistrust.
There is artistic license; some may argue that some liberties with fact are taken. Your reviewer would certainly make the latter case. Yet there is no taking away from the fact that this gripping film raises a number of pertinent questions.
For there is little doubt that intelligence was misused in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. We know that both George Bush and Tony Blair saw Saddam Hussein’s regime as a threat to international peace and security. Indeed, Mr Blair was prime minister in 1998 when the US and UK bombed Iraq for non-compliance with the post-war inspections regime. And he was also on the record in 2000 as saying that Iraq was a great threat to global peace and security. As for President Bush, it became increasingly apparent that his strategic agenda for the Middle East was based upon ‘democracy promotion’; the idea that American interests could be ensured in a volatile yet vital region by setting up a ‘beacon of liberty’. Iraq would become this beacon, in theory, once the tyrant Saddam was overthrown. History has shown, at least so far, that this idea was sorely mistaken.
This background informs the film’s retelling of events. The main character is no James Bond. But he is a decent, honest man – perhaps naively so at times, which did grate on occasion – for an agency whose intelligence is being systematically twisted by government.
Contrary to common perception, intelligence gathering almost never delivers the ‘smoking gun’ – the definitive piece of information that seals the case. Rather, it works in probabilities; small pieces of the puzzle; murky details and possibilities. Intelligence is a million of bits of information that must be sifted through, assessed, and cross-examined. All of this, ultimately, by humans: over-worked, fallible people on a government salary.
Against this reality of intelligence, the case made for war dealt in grand certainties. We did not just know Saddam had some kind of weapons programme; we knew he was stockpiling quantities of devastating weapons. We did not just believe he was in violation of the inspections regime; we knew he was in ‘material breach’ of the resolutions that formed the 1991 ceasefire between Iraq and the coalition that liberated Kuwait.
And in the film, it is here we must – like the intelligence officer – piece together the bigger picture. We see directly the manipulation of data at only one level; the desk and field operatives, shifting uneasily as the protagonist quizzes them about what he has seen. But from this we can infer the small coterie at cabinet level in the US and UK. The small cabal so genuinely persuaded of Saddam’s threat to regional peace that the greatest enemy of good decision-making sets in: groupthink.
In many ways, the intelligence for the Iraq War was circular. We knew Saddam was a thoroughly unpleasant leader. We knew he had used chemical weaponry before and it was beyond doubt that, once, there had been an Iraqi nuclear weapons programme. We knew these things. So the facts had to be there, somewhere on the ground. Perhaps it was in the head of a defector. And if it was not there, look harder and look again. Or lower the degree of certainty required. The proof was sought on the basis of the assumption – and not the other way around.
Of course, this is to say nothing of the genuine problems Iraq posed in the international sphere. Containment – the swathe of policies from the sanctions to the no-fly zone over Kurdistan – was expensive, unpopular, and more to the point, hurting innocent Iraqis more than the regime. Yet to withdraw these policies would invite further regional instability from a regime with a track record of armed aggression. Ultimately, it was an unsustainable state of affairs. But the historical verdict will likely be that, regardless of this Mesopotamian dilemma, the manner in which the recourse to war took place was in violation of our own principles.
We can see the pendulum swinging the other way now as we try to deal with Iran – a state with a regime more brazen in its pursuit of nuclear weapons than any other. But for every assessment or report warning of Iran’s burgeoning nuclear capability, there remains that lingering doubt, that undermined credibility of the intelligence establishment; all of which perhaps conditions our more cautious response to the Iranian nuclear problem. Will the public ever trust the word ‘intelligence’ again? Probably not for a generation.
