In this episode of International Horizons, journalist and UN director of Human Rights Watch Louis Charbonneau describes the US government misinformation campaign to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its aftermath. Charbonneau also discusses the role of the media in the lack of questioning of the information they were spreading and contrasts it with the right practices journalists should conduct in their reporting. Finally, the interviewee talks about the consequences of lies from an official source in the spread of fake news, and how the government’s actions in 2002 are being used by Russia to respond to the US’s criticisms of its invasion of Ukraine. 

Transcript: 

John Torpey  00:02

It has been 20 years since the United States invaded Iraq in a bid to locate and destroy “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). The war led to thousands of Iraqi and American casualties, and… no weapons of mass destruction. The theory of Saddam Hussein’s WMD was promoted by Secretary of State Colin Powell and disseminated by a media that failed to successfully determine the quality of the intelligence on which the case for war was made. 

John Torpey  00:33

In the interim, in addition to the enormous Iraqi casualties, many American war veterans have suffered trauma, major injuries, and even suicide in consequences of their involvement in the war. Some even think the war set the stage for Donald Trump. In short, the consequences of the Iraq war have been momentous. 

John Torpey  00:53

Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues. My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. We are fortunate to have with us today Louis Charbonneau, who is the United Nations unit director at Human Rights Watch (HRW). 

John Torpey  01:19

Prior to joining HRW, he was a journalist for more than two decades, most recently UN bureau chief for Reuters. His first posting with Reuters was in Vienna, where he focused on the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency) and other UN agencies from 2001 to 2005. He covered the UN weapons’ inspections in Iraq in 2002-03 and the IAEA’s attempts to resolve the nuclear crises in North Korea and Iran. Starting in early 2008, he was based at Reuters’ bureau inside UN headquarters in New York, where he followed the Security Council, General Assembly and other UN bodies. He is a two-time winner of the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Award for his UN reporting (2009 and 2011), as well as of the United Nations Foundation Prize for his coverage of negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty (2013). In New York, he expanded his UN coverage to include human rights and other topics. He has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and Master’s degrees from Columbia University and the City College of New York; he is now working on a PhD in Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center. Thank you for joining us today, Lou Charbonneau.

Louis Charbonneau  02:47

Thanks for having me.

John Torpey  02:49

Great to have you with us. So the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war has received an enormous amount of attention during the past week. And as a journalist who covered some of the central events leading up to the war, we are curious to have you tell us how exactly you’ve experienced this coverage, this sort of retrospective view of what happened.

Louis Charbonneau  03:15

Yeah, thanks. And it’s good to be here to talk about it. This 20th anniversary seems to have come so quickly; I can barely remember the 10th anniversary. And in some ways, it feels like it was just a few months ago that it happened. But it does also feel distant. As I was preparing to write a guest column for Reuters, looking back at the time in which I was covering the UN weapons inspections, which was probably the most intense single period of reporting in my entire life, I was basically asked to drop everything I was doing. I used to focus at that time mostly on financial reporting. But I had begun covering the UN agencies in Vienna, particularly after 9/11, because of the concern that terrorists could hijack a plane and slam it into a nuclear power plant.

Louis Charbonneau  04:18

Where some militant groups could get hold of highly radioactive material, some hospital or something and make a dirty bomb. So it was something that we were looking at closely. But when Iraq announced that it would let the UN weapons inspectors back into the country, which was something that I’d been thinking about. I’ve been interviewing UN officials, they kept saying they wanted to go back, finish the job, because they had to leave in 1998. So there was this period between 1998 and 2002 where no UN inspectors were on the ground and nobody knew what was happening.

Louis Charbonneau  04:58

Then it became increasingly clear that the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, was looking in the post 9/11 period, it may be going into Iraq. And in September of 2002, the Iraqi [government] said, “Okay, you can come back,” and that’s when my life changed and I dropped everything. And so for the next six months, I didn’t turn off my cell phone. I was flying constantly. It didn’t matter whether it was a business or first class, I had to try and sit next to people like Hans Blix, who was the head of UNMOVIC, the UN Monitoring Inspection Verification Commission that was charged with looking at chemical, biological and ballistic missile technology. Or with Mohamed ElBaradei, then the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the IAEA).

Louis Charbonneau  06:08

So wherever they went, I had to go with them. And I would ask them, when we were going to deploy, what are you looking at, what do you think you’ll find? Plus all of the junior people [such as] the inspectors who were training (I went to some of the training sessions where Hans Blix would give pep-talks to the inspectors. Some of them look to me like they were backpackers who’d been rounded up at a bus stop or train station). So I was a little skeptical of what the UN would be able to accomplish. But the saying goes: “You can’t judge a book by its cover”; these people were all pretty impressive. I went and looked at the UN’s Special Investigation laboratory outside Vienna in Seibersdorf, Austria, where they showed me how they would do environmental sampling and basically take like sort of dried wipes and glorified Q-tips and people would go in, and then basically swab buildings and wires and things like that. [They would] take them back to that lab where they would analyze and process them for traces of radioactive isotopes and other things that would indicate the presence of a revived nuclear weapons program.

Louis Charbonneau  07:47

And with UNMOVIC, they were doing the same thing for biological, chemical, and other weapons. So the general view when you talk to these people is that they all thought there was something there. When I would ask these people “when you deploy, what are you going to find?” And they figured “well, yeah, there’s got to be something.” Saddam Hussein had had a nuclear weapons program that had been found and largely dismantled in the early 1990s. In the 1980s, Israel had bombed an Iraqi nuclear site that was producing, working, doing research aimed at developing a nuclear weapon. So it was pretty clear that this was a guy who was trying to do these things. He had used chemical weapons against the Kurds, most famously in Halabja; we don’t know to this day how many people were killed in the chemical weapon cocktail that was used there. So they had these programs; they’ve been developing these kinds of weapons for a long time. So everyone just assumed that all of this intelligence that started coming up after 9/11 was probably right. And if not all of it, there was most likely some reason to believe that there was some truth to it.

Louis Charbonneau  09:27

So in late November of 2002, the inspectors deployed. This came after a kind of long haggling period in which the UN and the Government of Iraq had to agree on terms of reference for the inspectors to come, and get what kind of access though they would have (they were supposed to have full access). The Iraqi government presented a declaration of the weapons’ programs [that] basically said that there were no weapons of mass destruction programs; that all of that was not true. So we found that the UN inspectors deployed at the very end of November (I believe it was November 27, 2002). And so then I followed them; the inspectors would come in and out, they had a kind of logistics base in Cyprus. So I would go and hang out in Cyprus, and wait for them to come back. And they made a list of sites to visit, which they’d gotten from the US that there were hundreds of sites. And it was very specific. And what I found in talking to people was that there was absolutely nothing. Every single site that they visited turned up nothing. Some of them weren’t even what they were supposed to be. I wish I had all of my notes, but I just remember [that] if there had been one thing that they would find, it would stick out in my mind, but they didn’t.

Louis Charbonneau  11:19

There were some ballistic missile issues that were much talked about at the time in early 2003, but these were all kinds of leftovers and there wasn’t anything to indicate a systematic rebuilding of the program. In that month, after they’re deployed in late November, and then the end of 2002 going into 2003, that’s when — in my discussions with the UN inspectors — there was a shift in tone. At the end of 2002, beginning of 2003, there was a kind of crisis with North Korea, because it announced that it would be withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and would be restarting nuclear facilities in Pyongyang that had been closed down during the Bill Clinton administration with the ban on nuclear weapons. And there was the deal called the “Agreed Framework” that had been negotiated in the early 90s.

Louis Charbonneau  12:35

So there was this huge crisis. And while that was going on, I talked to Mohamed ElBaradei at the UN and I asked him how the situation was in Iraq, and what they were finding. And he said, “Well, I’m glad you asked me that. Because we are not finding anything.” And [I asked] what about the smoking gun that we’ve been waiting to find? And he said, “there’s no smoking gun. We haven’t found evidence.” I’m paraphrasing what he said, I don’t remember the exact roof but “no smoking gun” that is verbatim what he said. And so I published an interview, and it caused a bit of a ruckus at the time. The Americans were angry; they’re like why is the UN sort of determining the outcome of a process that is underway. Then there was George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in January of 2003, in which he talked about the Iraqis attempting to get large quantities of uranium from Niger, presumably through a nuclear weapons program, or a revived nuclear weapons program. After this Bush State of the Union address, the UN tried to get a hold of the documentation to back up this allegation, which was a very serious allegation. And if there was anything that could have been close to a smoking gun, which might have been it. So they just kept asking us for the information. They didn’t get it.

John Torpey  14:23

So let me just jump in and say, there was lots of smoke, whether there was fire was obviously less clear. And the US government was unhappy about these findings on the part of the UN. And we have to recall, this is all in the post-9/11 context. And there was a kind of search on for culprits and how are we going to stop this threat to the United States. And so, Iraq became in a certain way, an epicenter of that search. And yet as you say, the UN found nothing, but the claims were made and the war was initiated. Right?

John Torpey  15:08

And I’m also remembering that there were massive demonstrations in Europe and in the United States. I was actually living in Canada at the time, but there were demonstrations in Canada. But there were the biggest demonstrations in Europe in the post war period. So this was a time of considerable tension between the United States and its European allies. So in any case, the point really that I want to make is that there was a certain amount of prevarication in the course of making this case that Iraq had to be attacked, and these weapons of mass destruction were found and destroyed. And that sat the United States on a path A, of warfare and B, of prevarication about what it was doing. That has had ramifications, arguably, in the subsequent 20 years. So I’m sort of curious how you would view that or how you wrote about that for Reuters?

Louis Charbonneau  16:09

Yeah. It’s a really good point and question that you raise. The reason I mentioned the Niger uranium claim is because it’s unlike some of the others. So the aluminum tubes were a famous New York Times story, where the Americans sent a team of people to the UN to explain how they were for nuclear centrifuges to enrich uranium for weapons. And nuclear scientists took one look at the aluminum tubes and said “these aren’t any good for nuclear uranium enrichment.” But you know, they would be very good for what Iraq said they were going to be used for, which was for rocket launchers. But the Niger uranium claim was based on forged documents; they had run letterhead of a government that no longer existed, the foreign minister’s name was wrong, etc. There were all kinds of things that the head of the US-Iraq action team, a French nuclear scientist — just [by] using Google — figured out that it was all wrong within a couple of hours. And yet the US was paddling these things around as if they were pieces of something very dramatic.

Louis Charbonneau  17:36

So the brazenness of the bogus claim that was in the State of the Union address, I think was quite shocking for people. The UN went public with it. The US didn’t care. But there was one US official at the US mission in New York — who’s actually still quite senior in the Republican world close to the Trump administration — who actually complained to a colleague of mine at Reuters that [it] was outrageous that Reuters had a French person covering the UN weapons inspections, because everyone knew how biased the French were against the invasion of a Iraq. And then my colleague said, Louis is not French; he’s from Detroit, Michigan, and I don’t even think he speaks French, which is true. My French is not very good at all, embarrassingly, given my name. (I have spoken German or some other languages at home, but my French is pretty bad.)

Louis Charbonneau  18:46

So that was the atmosphere that we were living in. And then sort of fast forward to now, where bizarre conspiracy theory claims just about anything are so routine. Back then, we were all quite shocked to learn that the US government could just so openly lie about things like [that]. Maybe a case could be made that set the stage for people questioning, not just the US government –because governments are always questioned, always should be questioned– but also the mainstream media because some media did not do proper due diligence when they were reporting like the aluminum tubes, or others who covered the uranium. Because I was covering the UN weapons inspectors and on some level partially embedded with them, I was there to hear what they said..

Louis Charbonneau  19:46

And they had a very compelling case. I knew those people and trusted them. So I was reporting on what they said. And the people who were writing some of the other things were using Iraqi defectors or US government officials [that] were confirming what Iraqi defectors had said. They weren’t calling the UN and asking for their opinion or assessment of the information that they were getting from the US government. I mean, that’s journalism 101. But in the rush to war, the atmosphere that you described post 9/11, I think the people felt that you could do that. There was a kind of confirmation bias for a lot of people. So I think we’re still dealing with it daily. I reread The New York Times mea culpa about some of their reporting. They did some very good reporting during the Iraq War. But they definitely had some stories that got a lot of traction that, for example, was able to knock it down very quickly.

Louis Charbonneau  21:13

When talking with people to follow-up, for example the aluminum tubes, I made a few calls to people who had listened to the presentation of the US team of experts who were sent to Vienna to make the case about these aluminum tubes. And they said that it was not compelling at all. So there were definitely some lapses. I would like to think that we all learned our lessons, but I’m not sure about that. And the seeds of doubt were put in everyone’s mind. Maybe it would have happened anyway with the explosion of the internet and social media; those are definitely fertile ground for spreading misinformation. But I do feel that probably the Iraq War had a role in giving, the kind of questioning everything, questioning the mainstream media, giving that legitimacy or more legitimacy than it would otherwise have had.

John Torpey  22:25

Right. So do you think it did have consequences for the way people went about doing journalism?

Louis Charbonneau  22:30

Definitely. I think that we’ve had cases of high profile cases of journalists making things up and we read about it. Good news organizations will hold those individuals accountable, they will remove the stories, they will issue corrections and apologies and all of that, when these things are always going to happen. You know, everyone makes mistakes. If you make a mistake in an article, you correct it; you issue a formal correction, we’ll have to do that. Whether we’ve learned about the bias? I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like the media landscape is increasingly polarized. This idea of objectivity and neutrality when reporting is really important when it’s difficult to hear. We can talk for hours about what is objectivity when you’re doing this kind of work, but the bottom line of it is that if someone tells you something, you ask yourself, why are they telling me this? Why is this US government official telling me that this country has tried to do something that might enable them to develop weapons of mass destruction? So you might ask yourself, why are they telling you this? You will look into whether the information has any credibility. You try to figure out, are the people I’m looking to for confirmation talking to the people who told me about this originally? And it’s really just one source telling me everything?

Louis Charbonneau  24:25

You really need to look into these things and question everything. Does everyone do that all of the time? I don’t know. It was certainly shocking for the media to see how much airplay some of these allegations got. But at the organization –I was working for Reuters– they just had me doing my job and one more training that I got about following-up and questioning sources never have more than one source, always try to get someone on the record, if you can. If you can’t discuss with your editors who these unnamed sources are. Try and figure out where they’re coming from. Make a reasonable decision. Get the lawyers involved, if necessary. That was how we did it. And it was fine from my perspective. I feel pretty proud of the work I did at the time prior to the Iraq War. It has withstood the test of time. And I guess that there are other reporters out there who don’t feel as good about what they did in the run up to the US invasion.

John Torpey  25:49

Right. So how do you think this has affected the sort of practices of lying in government? It’s always true that politicians lie about certain things–this just kind of goes without saying– but we have seen in recent years, a president who’s prepared to take that level of lying — it seems by The Washington Post‘s count — to a whole new level. And I wonder to what extent did the path to Trump begin in the justifications of the Iraq War by the US government?

Louis Charbonneau  26:26

Well, certainly the idea that the US government lied, but we can’t take them seriously or things like that, that President Trump said “Do you think we’re a bunch of angels?” (or however he said it) when he was asked why he was defending Vladimir Putin. And he basically took the position that the US government has a lot of skeletons in its closet, it’s done a lot of bad things, which of course is true, like we all know that. But this idea that somehow everything is in doubt, and you just dismiss everything, [hence] giving sort of legitimacy to conspiracy theories. Certainly, I think it got a few legs up thanks to Donald Trump. There were a lot of things that were said during that time. If we think about COVID, and kind of strange things that came out of the White House at that time [such as] that people should use bleach. But at the same time, we’re still discussing things like we talked about COVID. The origins of the pandemic, and after initially being dismissed, because President Trump was promoting it, but the laboratory theory has kind of gotten a new lease on life, and people are taking it more seriously than they did before.

Louis Charbonneau  28:20

I’m not a scientist in that world, so I can’t speak with any authority about it. I know what I read. And I do know that it’s no longer being dismissed on both sides of the aisle in Congress. So lots of conspiracy theories today could get some traction later on. But the point is [that] I haven’t done an empirical study on it, but it does seem like there’s more of them. And I’ll give another example. President Trump, who was famous for throwing out all of the lies, one of the things when we talk about the Iraq War, and now that we have the 20th anniversary, in my entire reporting career covering the United Nations–particularly over the last sort of 12 years–I would say, the Russians have been very keen on bringing up the lies in Iraq anytime the US made an allegation about Russia, or China or some other country. They’d say, “Why should we believe you? Remember what you said about Iraq.”

Louis Charbonneau  29:40

The Russians still do that to this day. The Russian ambassador at the United Nations, if there’s a meeting of the UN Security Council about the invasion of Ukraine, based on the flimsiest of pretext that they were supposedly going to go in and “de-nazify” Ukraine, one of the things that they say when they get criticized is “How dare you in the United States, criticize us? When you look what you did in Iraq, you say that we invaded sovereign territory?” Well, that’s what you did in 2003 with Iraq, and you lied about the weapons of mass destruction. Of course, there’s a huge problem there. We know the US invaded Iraq on the basis of a false pretext and lies about weapons of mass destruction. That doesn’t make it right for Russia on February 24, 2022, to also then lie about supposedly Nazis running wild in Ukraine, and then to go and invade and supposedly save the country and subject them to relentless bombing raids, bombing attacks against civilians and things that the United States and Britain did in Iraq. The United States and Britain used thousands of clustering munitions. Yeah, Russia has done that in Ukraine too. I don’t want to talk like they’re equivalent. But certainly, the United States continues to have to defend the indefensible regarding what it did in 2003 in Iraq, and it’s a stain on this sort of “US legacy” that I don’t think they’re ever going to get rid of. The Russians are always going to question everything the US says, every allegation and say, “Remember Iraq, and you know…”

John Torpey  32:03

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but the first one opens the door to “you too” when they commit the second one.

Louis Charbonneau  32:10

Exactly. That’s where we’re at. And I guess we’ll always be there.

John Torpey  32:15

Yeah. Well, this was a terrific conversation and sort of review of the period since the Iraq war started in 2003. And the run up to it in 2002. But that’s it for today’s episode. I want to thank Louis Charbonneau of Human Rights Watch and the CUNY Graduate Center for sharing his insights on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Remember to subscribe and rate International Horizons on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance and to thank Duncan Mackay for sharing his song “International Horizons” as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey, saying thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us for the next episode of International Horizons.