Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice Weblog

Revelations in Ron Suskind's Book: "The Way of the World"

Pulitzer prize winning author Ron Suskind recently came out with a book called "The Way of the World". The book is a hodge podge of several stories with some connection to the "war on terror". There are several new revelations in the book which are very important and should be receiving more attention in the mainstream. The revelations are (in no particular order):

The British foreign intelligence agency MI-6 made contact with the head of Iraqi Intelligence Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti before the war and learned from him that Iraq had no WMDs. He also explained Saddam's motivation for wanting to trick Iran into thinking that he did. Given the importance of Iraq's chemical weapons in avoiding defeat in the Iran-Iraq war this is understandable.

This information was passed on to the Bush administration months before the start of the war. It also corroborates the information given to the CIA by the Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri saying the same thing. The Sabri case and many other facts relating to this are described on the previous post on this blog The Bush Administration's WMD Case for the Iraq War: Intelligence Sought to Justify a Decision Already Made. This further information from Suskind reinforces the conclusion of that post, that Weapons of Mass Destruction were not the primary motivation on the part of the Bush administration for wanting to invade Iraq.
Suskind goes on to recount how the letter revealed in 2003 (purported to have been written in 2001) from Habbush to Saddam describing Iraqi involvement with the 9/11 hijackers was a forgery ordered by either the White House or the Vice President's office.

This claim is most important for possible legal action against either Cheney or Bush because there is a law saying that the CIA cannot be used to propagandize the population of the US itself.
Iran contacted the United States in 2003 through the British offering to work against Al Qaeda working out of Iran. The US ended up snubbing these efforts. In an interview on Democracy Now, Ron Suskind describes the relevance of this and how it sheds light on the Iraq war for being a behavior modifying example for rogue states:
Here, we have an extraordinary moment in 2003. You know, you talk about why did we go into Iraq. Clearly, when you talk to neocons, what they do come up with is that it was a great experiment in behaviorism. The view was Saddam Hussein was actually an easy mark, that he was captive and toothless. That was the view. And we'll make an example of him to show other rogue dictators not to express similar temerity in challenging America. That was the concept, especially in terms of the fact that WMD are now carried on civil technology. You can't stop these dictators from getting weapons of mass destruction. There wasn't a way essentially to stop that from happening, so the word in the White House documents is, how do we dissuade them, other people? Saddam would have been--that's the idea--the example.

Now, interestingly, what happens at this point is, you know, as we are moving to war in this period, this snubbing of Saddam Hussein, rather, this making an example of Saddam, actually has a yield, Amy. The Iranians, once we have 150,000 troops in Iraq, are like, my goodness, well, their behavior is actually getting shaped. They say to the British, who they still have relationships with, they say, "You know, maybe it's time for us to meet with the Americans." And they all but crawl across broken glass to say, "Can we help, at this point? You know, we get it, alright?" Interestingly, they were ready to help with al-Qaeda, which had a group inside of Iran under house arrest. The Shura Council at that point was talking to a group of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia about buying Russian suitcase nukes. All of that, of course, got people very agitated. Iran also said, "We can help with Iraq. We can help with Afghanistan. We know these countries."

What happened is, at this point, a CIA chief flies over there. He's not used to doing these sorts of missions. He's late in the flight. He gets the wrong hotel...

...Ultimately, we end up snubbing the Iranians and all but creating--at this moment, remember, this is the "real men go to Tehran" moment for the administration. We've snubbed the Iranians and all but create the oppositional Iran that has caused such havoc in the years since.
This adds further evidence to the willingness to cooperate demonstrated by the pre-Ahmedinajad Khatami regime which was snubbed and ignored by the Bush administration. Another example is described in the following post outlining the grand bargain deal offered by the Iranians to the Americans through the Swiss.
Joe Wippl, who was the CIA chief of station in Germany advised the German intelligence agency not to allow the CIA to have access to the now infamous Iraqi informer Curveball. He was the former taxi driver who gave the bogus information about the mobile biological weapons labs. More is said about him in the HIPJ Iraq WMD post.

Ron Suskind conjectures, albeit without conclusive evidence, that Wippl told the Germans this at the behest of Vice President's office and the Defense Intelligence Agency who wanted to cover up how shoddy of a source curveball was. The Vice President's office later recommended Wippl for congressional liaison from the CIA, a "plum job". Unnamed sources in Suskind's book speculate that this was a reward for telling the Germans not to hand over curveball to the CIA.

There are two long interviews with Suskind about the book on Democracy Now.

Posted September 07, 2008 | Comments? (0)

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