WMD : mackenzian

On a deep black field, a brilliant blue Earth with swirly clouds criss-crossing the continent of Africa. — Photo credits: International Space Station and NASA

I remember reading about Agent Orange in accounts of Vietnam. Zyklon B appeared in reports on Nazi Germany’s concentation camps, and Scud missiles dominated Cold War headlines. When I later studied the lead-up to the 2002 invasion of Iraq, it was WMDs all day: biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons governed by treaties, held illicitly, and responsible for trauma to thousands and thousands of people across the Middle East and North Africa.

Today, while I ate a high-hipster fried chicken sandwich (premium sub roll, fresh dill mayo, provolone cheese, and spicy pickled cucumber slices), the United States Army dropped a Massive Ordnance Air Blast missile on Achin, a small province in eastern Afghanistan. Reports are that this miserable missile cost just under $16 million, and the US bought twenty of them six years ago. Yes, that’s right: someone else was president at the time.

The United States has now been conducting military campaigns in Afghanistan for sixteen consecutive years. I’m old enough to remember when the war was framed as recompense for the September 11 attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. But these days, with no more frontpage counts of US deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or any other warzone, the war isn’t a common topic.

Three years before 9/11, a little further southeast of the area that the United States decimated today, India and Pakistan were playing nuclear chicken.

India tested its nuclear capability in May 1998 by exploding devices underground. Western nations quickly closed ranks and sanctioned India, but that only deepened its government’s resolve to use its weapons as symbols of nationalistic power and global significance.

They went so far as to call it Operation Shakti!

Arundhati Roy wrote about the futility of those tests that same year, and I thought of her comments in the aftermath of today’s non-nuclear blast:

If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements — the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water — will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible…

Though we are separate countries, we share skies, we share winds, we share water. Where radioactive fallout will land on any given day depends on the direction of the wind and rain. Lahore and Amritsar are thirty miles apart. If we bomb Lahore, Punjab will burn. If we bom Karachi, then Gujarat and Rajasthan, perhaps even Bombay, will burn. Any nuclear war with Pakistan will be a war against ourselves.” — Arundhati Roy, The End of Imagination

Today’s bombing is the latest gambit of one nation against a decentralized non-state actor and the two have been trading death and crossing borders for a decade and a half now.

If both Roy and I are right that our destinies are tied, then no matter who claims post-skirmish victory, there will be no winners.

Cartoon of open newspaper with "Correction" advertisement: "The Downing St memo seems to be at odds with pretty much anything you remember seeing and hearing in the media in the runup to the Iraq war. Your memory is in error. We regret your mistake. — Tom Toles’ “The first draft of the rewrite of history” (July 2005)

Tom Toles has drawn editorial cartoons for the Washington Post since 2002. The Post published “The first rewrite of the draft of history” in 2005 after British papers broke news about “highly sensitive” meetings of British intelligence officers, Cabinet members, political strategists, and communications specialists, and representatives of the United States.

At these meetings, later minuted in the aforementioned “memo,” US officials reportedly outlined their commitment to pursuing war in Iraq. July 2002 was long before the US government had secured Congressional approval for a military intervention.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.” —Matthew Rycroft, July 23, 2002

Within three years of this memo, the British parliament convened two inquiries into how the government talked about weapons of mass destruction and managed intelligence data-collection. The country had to wait 14 more years to get reports from a third inquiry that focused on the war itself and required key members of the Blair administration to answer for their decisions about it.

In those 14 years, I moved to the US, completed one degree, started another, studied and published on the government’s mash-up of rhetoric and the “science” of secret intelligence, and moved across country again.

Over that same period, people involved in designing the Iraq invasion kept busy rewriting conventional wisdom about it.

So I wasn’t altogether surprised this week to see US Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi make claims about the US intelligence community that didn’t match the history or government inquiry findings or my own memory. It reminded me of Toles’ cartoon, which so pointedly pokes at the stories administrations weave for themselves—and then expect us all to believe.