Posted on 02/08/2004 4:59:33 PM PST by Eurotwit
The lessons of 2002 to 2004 must never be forgotten, warns Timothy Garton Ash.
At last, we have the inquiry we need: a full, independent inquiry into the Paris bombing of 2009. As we all know, in that appalling attack a large area between the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the River Seine was devastated by a small nuclear bomb, detonated by suicide bombers linked to the Algerian-based Islamic Armed Group (GIA). Some 60,000 people were killed. The supremely cultured heart of one of the most beautiful cities in the world was reduced to smouldering ruins. None of us will ever forget the photograph of Rodin's statue of Balzac, looming as if in tortured grief above the half-dismembered but still recognisable corpses of a young couple on the Boulevard Raspail.
The inquiry of the Annan Commission must be rigorous, impartial and international. It must have the full co-operation of all the intelligence services involved, especially since their own earlier failure to co-operate with each other seems to have been one reason the attack was not prevented. President Hillary Clinton of the US and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France were right to say, in their joint statement, that history will not forgive us if we leave any stone unturned.
Of course we must await the findings of the Annan Commission, but now is the time to suggest some places it should look. The former UN secretary-general and his colleagues should not confine themselves to recent developments. On closer examination, we will surely find that the roots of the catastrophe of 2009 are to be found in mistakes made in the years 2002 to 2004.
For a start, it already seems clear the Belhadj sisters, who detonated the bomb in the Jardin du Luxembourg, were initially radicalised by their expulsion from school for wearing the Muslim headscarf, under the law introduced by the Chirac administration in 2004. There were, to be sure, good as well as dubious reasons for the ban on the headscarf. The dubious reasons had to do with the political opportunism so characteristic of the late president Chirac, who rightly calculated that by introducing this law he could pick up votes both on the secular left and on the anti-Muslim right. The good reasons had to do with the emancipation of women, and with the attempt by teachers to defend a spirit of free inquiry and instruction which was under creeping attack from Islamist pressure groups in France.
Far from hyping the intelligence evidence, as they had in 2003, political leaders in all Western capitals tended to discount it. Nonetheless, with benefit of hindsight, the headscarf ban can be seen as a fateful mistake. The expulsion of headscarf-wearers from schools proved to be a recruiting sergeant for radical Islamist groups in the suburbs of Paris. In a recorded message sent to the media, the Belhadj sisters compared their action to that of Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber. This was objectively absurd, but it is what the sisters had been brought to believe, during intensive indoctrination sessions in apartments in the so-called "city of four thousand" - a miserable high-rise development in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve, where the unemployment rate was around 30 per cent. In these mindwashing meetings, they were told again and again that "the atheist Jews" of the Quartier Latin were responsible for their misery.
However, the tragedy of August 17, 2009, cannot simply be laid at the door of France's political elite and their failure to cope adequately with an extraordinarily difficult problem that was challenging every society in Europe. The other half of the story has to do with failures in intelligence and the political use of intelligence.
The Annan Commission will investigate exactly how the "city of four thousand" obtained a small, portable weapon of mass destruction. However it appears from press reports that highly relevant pieces of the intelligence jigsaw were already in the hands of three agencies: a Pentagon-led special group tracking the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Britain's MI6, and France's own foreign intelligence service. The trouble was, they didn't put the pieces together; nor did the politicians act on what they were told. Why? Again we must go back to the years 2002 to 2004 for the answers.
The British and US intelligence agencies had always distrusted their French counterparts - "they leak like a sieve", said one senior British spook - but this distrust was exacerbated by the polemics over Iraq. According to a leaked note of an internal meeting, the neo-conservative head of the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans" reportedly observed that the Pentagon would share WMD intelligence with "those cheese-eating surrender monkeys" only "over my dead body". The British and the Americans still worked closely together, but the credibility of British intelligence had been impaired by what was seen as its unreliable peddling of claims about Saddam Hussein's WMDs.
The White House had not forgotten the bruising experience of 2003, when president George Bush roundly asserted in his State of the Union address that "the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa". US sources later concluded this high-grade intelligence was based on forged documents. As a result, while MI6 did obtain, in early 2009, one crucial tip-off about a nuclear device being prepared by a Middle Eastern group that was, it subsequently emerged, working with the Islamist cell in La Courneuve, this intelligence was neither believed in Washington nor shared with Paris.
Yet the fault lay only partly with the intelligence services. As Britain's recently elected Conservative Prime Minister half-acknowledged in September 2009, all leading Western governments had been scarred by the reports of the Butler inquiry in Britain and the Silberman commission in Washington. As we know, their findings, though couched in cautious, diplomatic terms, led most people to conclude that president Bush and prime minister Tony Blair had made mountains out of intelligence molehills relating to Saddam's alleged WMD program, as it existed - or did not exist - in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war.
Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation of intelligence evidence to the UN Security Council, complete with aerial slides, had become a byword for what every political leader wished to avoid. "I won't do a Powell," they told their officials. As a result, far from hyping the intelligence evidence, as they had in 2003, political leaders in all Western capitals tended to discount it. And so, amid the constant stream of alarming but unreliable reports coming up through the intelligence chain, the warning that could have saved more than 60,000 lives was not acted upon.
Predictably enough, the familiar, balding figure of Sir Tony Blair, former British PM, rose from his regular place just to the side of the first gangway in the House of Commons to say, in effect, "I told you so". Well, he would say that, wouldn't he? The task of the Annan Commission is now to determine, rigorously and impartially, how far he was right.
MAXIMUM BARF!
Sure. Makes sense to me, totally. What kind of a fruitcake would, even as fiction, rationalize such a disgusting fall into irrational primitive savagery? What a disgusting piece of delusional self-righteousness and PC run amok.
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