After Iraq was bombed in the first Gulf War, impoverished by a decade of sanctions and rigorously inspected for eight years, most thinking people knew there were no weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell himself said in 2001 that Saddam "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction [and] is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours" (i). Leaked documents now show that plans were being made in the early weeks of the Bush administration for the carve-up of Iraq's oil assets (ii). The Green Party was the only main political party to argue there were other ways than war with Iraq. Now we know that was true. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We also never heard about the possibilities for diplomacy, including Saddam's offer of internationally monitored elections, free access for the FBI and US rights over Iraqi oil (iii). Peaceful resolutions were rejected before they were attempted. This war, that has killed and maimed tens of thousands of civilians, was about serving narrow economic interests. Had a peaceful resolution been attempted, Iraq might be a friendly and largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and the prevailing sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the U.S, rather than anger and resentment.

Martin Whiteside Hillside, Claypits Lane, Lypiatt, Stroud, Glos. GL6 7LU Stroud Parliamentary Candidate for the Green Party

Notes for the Editor (i) February 24, 2001, cit John Pilger, Daily Mirror, 22 September 2003. Greg Thielmann, an expert on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and formerly a senior foreign service officer with 25 years' experience, told CBS in October 2003: "The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community, and most of the blame to the senior administration officials": "The man who knew", 15 October, 2003, www.cbsnews.com. In a similar vein Ray McGovern, a former high-ranking CIA analyst, said in 2003 that the Bush administration demanded intelligence be shaped to comply with politicalobjectives: "It was 95 per cent charade." See John Pilger, "Blair's Mass Deception", Daily Mirror, 3 February 2004. Lastly Brian Jones, a senior analyst in British intelligence, told the Hutton inquiry: "My concerns were that Iraq's chemical weapons and biological weapons capabilities were not being accurately represented in all regards in relation to the available evidence. In particular ... on the advice of my staff, I was told that there was no evidence that significant production had taken place either of chemical warfare agent or chemical weapons." ("The whistleblower", Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd, The Guardian, 4 September 2003.) He wrote in the Independent, 4 February 2004, that "expert intelligence analysts ... were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002 resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities." See also Gallery News, 4 February 2004. (ii) See MediaLens, 4 February 2004, "Go Find Me a Way To Do This: How Bush And Blair Chose War And Then Chose The Justification". (iii) George Monbiot in The Guardian - "Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us about the possibilities for diplomacy. Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam's government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer to prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11 attacks, and to permit several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for weapons of mass destruction. If the object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents claimed, was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored elections within two years. According to Mr Cannistraro, these proposals reached the White House, but were "turned down by the president and vice-president". By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the US government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position on Israel and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil. Among the people they contacted was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been urging a war with Iraq. He passed their offers to the CIA. Last week he told the New York Times that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad". Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything possible to find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On March 6, 13 days before the war began, Bush said to journalists: "I want to remind you that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war and peace. Thus far, he's made the wrong choice.""