“In their search for hidden Iraqi arms, U.N. inspectors have so far faced little conflict, have found little evidence and have received little outside intelligence to guide them”—thus the Los Angeles Times from Dec. 31.
Stories about not finding evidence of weapons of mass destruction suggest, however, that they are there but have yet to be found. The other day, U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte called on Iraq to admit to weapons programs “it maintains, even today. … Anything less is not co-operation and will constitute further material breach.’’ As it is logically impossible to prove one is not doing something, absence of evidence becomes proof of duplicity and therefore of guilt.
Of course, weapons are only part of the story: there is also Saddam’s export of terror. No one has any real evidence for this; it is pure speculation, a campaign of demonization driven by the need to supply bogus reasons for an unprovoked attack. The same ploy was used again and again in the Balkans in the 1990s. Back then it was Serbia that had to be bombed, so a similar campaign was waged against it. The Serbs, we were told, were intent on creating a “Greater Serbia,” they ran death camps, carried out mass rapes, and engaged in genocide. It is worth recalling how baseless these claims were and how ready the West is to manipulate facts to justify imperialism.
Remember the 100,000 Kosovo Albanians supposedly missing and suspected killed by the Serbs during the 1999 NATO bombing? Defense Secretary William Cohen, State Department spokesman James Rubin, and Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes David Scheffer all cited the 100,000 figure. The State Department at one point even speculated that it was 500,000. There were the reports of satellite pictures of “mass graves pointing in the direction of Mecca.” Then just as NATO was about to march into Kosovo, the numbers were drastically revised downwards.
The new estimate for dead Albanians was 10,000. But where were the bodies? After months and months of relentless digging, Hague Tribunal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte announced that NATO had exhumed 2,108 bodies. Quite a bit less than the official estimate, particularly as del Ponte was unable to say to whom these bodies belonged, what their ethnicity was, how they died, or when they died. The tribunal sniffed, “genocide is not a numbers game” and gave up on the tedious business of forensics altogether.
Numbers are only a game when they do not come out the way you want. A report published in October 2002 by the Office of the Commissioner of Human Rights for the Council of Europe, “Kosovo: The Human Rights Situation and the Fate of Persons Displaced From Their Homes,” reveals some fascinating numbers. According to the report, “some 3,700 persons … have gone missing in Kosovo, of which approximately 2,750 are ethnic Albanian and 850 Serb.” In addition, the report stated, “since 1999, some 4,600 bodies have been exhumed, of which only 2,100 have been identified. 2,500 remain, therefore, to be DNA tested.” The report, interestingly, omits any ethnic breakdown of the exhumed bodies. Let us assume that every one of the 3,700 missing is dead. That would make the total number dead 5,800 (3,700 plus 2,100). Let us also assume that the ethnic breakdown of the 2,100 exhumed bodies is the same as that for the missing. That would make 1,561 dead Albanians and 482 dead Serbs, making a grand total of 4,311 Albanians and 1,332 Serbs dead. Now, a fairly substantial proportion of those Albanians will have been murdered by the KLA for alleged collaboration with the erstwhile Serb authorities or for their general refusal to play ball with terrorists and gangsters.
This is scarcely a secret. A recent article in Der Spiegel, citing as its source Kosovo Albanian leader Bujar Bukoshi, stated, “[T]he cruelest cleansings took place among the Albanians. Under the pretext that they were ‘Serbian collaborators,’ the leaders of the KLA liquidated their political opponents….The number of the victims is estimated to be more than a thousand.” That is likely to be an extremely conservative estimate. So that leaves us with something like just over 3,000 Albanians dead. But that number includes all of the Albanians killed by NATO bombs, those killed in combat, in crossfire between the Yugoslav army and the KLA or by accident, not to mention anyone who may have been killed for whatever reason before 1999. So the numbers game has now taken us not only far from the original 100,000, but even quite a long way from the 10,000 of recent propaganda efforts. More significant, no explanation has been offered as to how satellite photos were interpreted as proof for something that never in fact happened.
So it is that facts become the first casualty of war, and as the Iraqi build-up begins, truth falls victim once again. Is Saddam Hussein the worst mass-murderer in the world today? It scarcely matters. Once Iraq is conquered and occupied, no one will be much interested in the truth. By then a new enemy will have been targeted. 
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George Szamuely is a writer in New York City.
