The Reasons the US Govt gave for the invasion of Iraq

2006-08-16T13:58:00.000-07:00

Win the Hearts and Minds of Iraqis…
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” Mark Twain

In good faith, and in perplexed naivety, Iraqis (who have been under years of brutal dictatorship) may have thought at first that the Americans were indeed coming to rescue them from the brutality of Saddam and instill democracy and freedom[iii]. This argument has a number of challenges to consider:

Ten years of sanctions by the US were seen by the Iraqis as a most spiteful and inhumane crime towards them, and given that, they would not have believed that the intentions of the US in Iraq were as noble as the US government had claimed. Though to give the benefit of the doubt, this may have been seen as caused by the presence of Saddam, so in effect the Iraqi people were being punished twice. First by Saddam, then by the American government and the international community for having Saddam as their leader. Indeed a very unfavorable position to be in. Though maybe with Saddam gone, some thought that things would get better.

Iraqis in particular and Arabs in general having experienced an extremely unjust and biased US policy in the middle east with regards to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict and therefore from past experience would have been equally cynical of the US interests in Iraq.

Iraq’s valuable oil reserves would be the obvious de facto motivator, even to the most naïf, of US interests in Iraq, and that is the perception in the Arab world, in Iraq, and in the rest of the world in general. US government administrators are often cited as mentioning in open ended statements their need to protect their “national interests” in Iraq. Most Arabs recognize the tight relationship between the US government and the Saudi’s– a very corrupt and suppressive regime one should add - extending way back in the past, and at its crux is the oil. The one “crime” that Saddam committed which mattered to the US had been to nationalize the oil of Iraq. This was definitely not in the geopolitical interest of the US government.

Americas handling of the war, the descent into anarchy of Iraq’s civil society. The lack of concern for rebuilding the roads, providing sanitation and clean water, electricity and the reestablishment of the infrastructure that the US had so eloquently destroyed in the “shock and awe” operation. The death of civilians, the displacement of hundreds of thousands from their homes, but most notoriously the torture and humiliation and inhumane treatment of prisoners and the rape incidents by American military personnel.

There is further lack of credibility if not simply outright hypocrisy in the fact that the while the US claims that it wants to rid the world of a brutal dictator and spread democracy and freedom in the Middle East, it goes on the other hand and supports some of the most brutal suppressive dictatorship regimes in the world just around the corner:

The US supports Saudi Arabia, a most brutal suppressive dictatorship regime where women cannot even drive or seek employment or walk the streets without being covered in veil, where the vast majority of the population suffers extreme poverty while the ruling family enjoys most exuberant wealth.

Supports Egypt’s regime (the second biggest recipient of US foreign aid after Israel) which is also notoriously suppressive and kills any chance of freedom of speech or expression or democracy

Staunchly supports Israel, an apartheid state and a violator of international law and UN resolutions, an illegal occupier of Palestinian territories – the longest occupation in modern history, and engages in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

Supported Turkey, also on the human rights watch list for suppressing the Kurdish population

Friends with Pakistan and supports Musharaf, a military dictator who seized power in a military coup. Upon a recent visit, Condalesa Rice called Pakistan “a model country for the middle east”.

In the past helped install and then supported Pinochet in Chile and the Contras in Nicaragua – both condemned by the International community and the International Court of Justice for terrorizing their populations.

Heavily condemned and cut all aid to the government of Hamas, regardless of its stance, nevertheless a democratically elected government with elections conducted under international observers including Jimmy Carter

The intent of the US government has nothing to do with the spread of democracy. The reality of the matter is that if democratically elected governments were allowed in the Middle East, for the most part their positions will be against the US government, and that would be a problem for American “national” interests in the region.

Given all the above factors, for an average Iraqi, the US war in Iraq is an act of aggression, an invasion and occupation that has, at its core, nothing to do with the improvement of the condition of the Iraqi people but completely the opposite.

For Every Action There is a Reaction

Let us take that simple concept which applies not only in physics – forces - but also psychology (example abuse and trauma during childhood – action - causing neurosis or psychosis later in life - reaction), sociology (repression leads to unrest and revolution), geography (earth quakes due to movement of plates in one area – action - may trigger a volcano in another area) and other disciplines. Consider an individual’s psychological action-reaction state, and then extrapolate that to a group of people, to a community, to a country. Naturally the extrapolation in such a case from individual to group psychology is not a linear, straight forward, predicable relation since the nature of emotion is anything but.

If a person is wronged or harmed – action – he will feel the injustice and the physical or psychological pain, and could react in various ways. If we would follow a logical progression of events, first he would want to put an end to the harmful action inflicted upon him – to stop it (unless the person was a true masochist). Further, he could take it upon himself to put a corrective action so that the harmful action and the injustice not be repeated nor inflicted on some other party. He or she may go further, and depending upon the depth and severity of the psychological damage, to attempt to settle the score, to get even, to retaliate, or to use other words, to take revenge (provoked attack). This is part of the natural condition of being human. Studies have shown that humans are first emotional then rational. Other psychological tests have shown that when faced with a situation where people in an experiment were knowingly being cheated, and given a choice of different available actions to select from, each action with a given consequence, people tended to choose the action that would get them most even with the cheater, even when it meant that the consequence of the action knowingly left them in a worse condition than would have other actions[15].

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior”.

Statistics and numbers give us on a macro level a measure of the degree of damage or atrocities in a war. Whereby they remain objective and scientific and hence valuable, they are very limited when it comes to getting an actual sense of what it feels like to be tortured. What it is like to lose a child during war, a sister or a mother, let alone a pregnant sister (as reported in a recent story in Iraq). To see one’s own home destroyed. The fear of being next in a line of a house to house search in the dead of night and seeing your husband taken away never to be seen again. To be dispossessed and be left as a refugee. To feel humiliated. To live in fear, in anarchy.

Life’s meaning and significance is very much dependent on one’s relationships with others and especially in the Middle East where family ties and bonds are quite strong, and where emotions run high. When one loses that which is most dear to him/her, there is little left to life, especially in an impoverished, desperate country.

The psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Henkel asserts in his book In Search of Meaning after observing and analyzing severely abused people, that “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior”. He characterized such survivors after being released from the death camps as being apathetic with lack of sympathy or empathy towards other persons and in some cases lacking in emotion as well ruthless.

Is it religion? Is it Us versus Them? Or is it possible that if we were faced with a similar circumstance, that we could behave as “Them”? Faced with an extreme situation endured for such a long time, it can be expected of Iraqis to go extreme.

Spreading Democracy in Iraq and Middle East

"The only thing we need to kill is the thought of killing" -BUDDHA ...

Democracy should not be confused with morality: In theory a democratic system by design is intended to implement decisions to a binding group of people or to a whole country based on a majority vote by the members of the group so that collectively, members of that democratic group would achieve the biggest benefit from such a process along the principles of equality and fairness regarding the members of the group. The problem is that this can be self-centric and the benefit gained by the democratic group might be at the expense of another group. Say we are a group of ten people sitting at a table in a restaurant. We all regard each other as equal. We decide on a democratic vote to take food from the group sitting at the table next to us and share it equally amongst ourselves thus we each end up with more food. A majority vote supports the plan and it gets executed. That would have been a democratic process. Furthermore, we have enough leverage to bypass the restaurant’s rules.

Similarly, one can make the case that whereas capitalism as a system can prove itself economically advantageous, at heart it is amoral. It fosters competition which arguably pushes people and communities to do their best. It admires and rewards winners, overachievers, those who can play the game better, the rich, the affluent but often with little or no regard to the underlying value system of the entities involved.

Especially with regards to foreign policy, democracy without respect for international law, sovereignty of other nations, and universal human rights is not guaranteed to take a moral disposition.

So many of the discussions in the mainstream media around the war in Iraq were around how much the war would cost, how many casualties the US might incur, the different strategies and tactics that could be employed, the capability of the enemy (an enemy who in reality never attacked the US, incidentally.) Very rarely did we hear discussions about how many Iraqi civilians would be killed by a war of our making, what it would mean for a people to have their infrastructure and country destroyed. Even talk about Iraqi civilian casualties is significant to the extent of its negative effect on US public image. The arguments are very much self centered on the US. The notion of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is completely missing. The public debates revolving around the Iraq war have been morally bankrupt and shameless.

“Now that we found love what are we gonna do?”
(So you don’t support our troops, huh…)

The mutually exclusive technique is a very effective and manipulative method to shift the attention away from the people in the driver seat that made the decision and took the country to war in the first place. It relieves the Bush Administration of any responsibility or accountability for the decision to go to war. The table below shows how the media, with underlying arguments brought out in very subtle ways, takes care of any position that opposes the Administration’s:

Context
If your position was: Before the invasion: Against the war in Iraq

Media flip over

-->That means that you support Saddam
-->That means that you do not support the war on terror. Have we already forgotten about 9/11?
-->That means that you are unpatriotic and do not stand behind our leadership at a time when we cannot be divided
-->That means that you are pro dictatorship and anti democracy

If your position was: After the invasion: Against the war in Iraq
Media flip over
-->That means that you don’t support the troops, our service men and women in uniform risking their lives and serving our country.

Before one has time to give their argument against the war, they are flooded and muted by the above arguments. With the support of overwhelming evidence, one is not given the chance to say “I am against the Iraq war because”:
- Iraq does not pose a threat to the US. Iraq does not have any WMDs as confirmed by the experts on the matter
- There is no link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Iraq has never attacked the US or conducted terrorist threats on the US, so it is misleading to say that our war on Iraq is part of our war on terror
- We are not doing the Iraqi people a favor by destroying their infrastructure and enforcing a regime change externally. An internal grass roots dissident group(s) existed (still exists?) and we should have supported those in overthrowing Saddam so as to more effectively form a replacement government without the risk of political vacuum (as is currently the case) which leads to chaos and sectarian violence.
- The war in Iraq is antagonizing Arabs and Muslims and increasing the support and the flow of new recruits to Al-Qaeda and other would-be terrorist organizations. A fact also confirmed by Pentagon reports. Thus in the long run, the war is not improving the safety of Americans but doing the exact opposite.
- The war in Iraq is engaging/depleting resources that would have otherwise been used to address vulnerabilities outlined in the 9/11 Commission report (such as nuclear plants, subways and trains, etc…)
- The cost of the war in Iraq increases national debt and constitutes money that could have been used to improve the soft infrastructure in the US (health and education)
- The war in Iraq has tarnished the image of the US in the world, especially with some of our European allies.
- If the reason for the invasion is to secure energy sources, the money wasted on the war would have been money well spent on research and development on alternate sources of energy. The depletion of this non-renewable source of energy is a reality that is incumbent upon us. In the long term (post oil era), economies that are less dependent on oil will be better prepared and more immune.
- A major source of the frustration, anger and fury in the Middle East, the Arab and Islamic world in general (arguably often used as an excuse for shortfalls due to other reasons) is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and this has not only been more neglected than ever under the current administration, but allowed to deteriorate and sink deeper into the abyss.

It is sadly ironic that while the government commission investigating the terrorist attacks against the US on 9/11 asserts that lack of scrutiny by journalists and watch dog organizations led to oversight in the realization and disruption of 9/11, that the congress itself blindly supported Bush’s war with complete oversight of the invalidity of the reasons given, ignoring various reports and calls by credible groups against the war;

“Secrecy, while necessary, can also harm oversight. The overall budget of the intelligence community is classified, as are most of its activities. Thus, the intelligence committees cannot take advantage of democracy’s best oversight mechanism: public disclosure. This makes them significantly different from other congressional oversight committees, which are often spurred into action by the work of investigative journalists and watchdog organizations… In addition, denial and deception became more effective as targets learned from public sources what our intelligence agencies were doing… That said, Congress still took too little action to address institutional weaknesses.” [16]

Isn’t this exactly what the Bush Administration did in its war with Iraq – deception of the American public? And isn’t it laughable that Clinton received much more scrutiny for his Lewinsky affair than an Administration that lied to a whole country and sent more than 2500 Americans to their deaths for no valid reason (let alone destroying another country and killing over 100,000 of its people “collateral damage”?). While this is not intended in the slightest to be insensitive to the families of the deceased, it should be a wake up call for the American public to hold the Administration accountable for its actions.

The Iraq war is a stark example of the failure of democracy in America as congress and the mainstream media blindly acquiesce to the administration’s scheme. It is also a failure in the upholding of any principle of morality.

And now for the most alarming of all. When Americans were asked in a Harris Poll published in July 21, 2006 the question: “Did Saddam Hussein’s government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?”
Half of the United States answered yes (up from 36 percent last year).

“Experts see a raft of reasons: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, occasional surprise headlines, a rallying around a partisan flag and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become “independent of reality” in these circumstances, opinion analyst Steven Kull says.
The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900 million plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under UN oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of UN inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.”[17]

The propaganda machine has penetrated so deep in its brain washing of Americans. When it comes to the Middle East, the majority of Americans does not seem to engage in any critical, independent thinking and readily digests without questioning the news, analysis and portrayal of the world by the mainstream media as god given facts. Such news is de-contextualized. Repeated lies have become truths. To think for oneself requires some effort. An average American spends four hours per day on TV. It is convenient to accept what is being said than to question and go against the stream. This blind complacency will only end up hurting more innocent people on all sides. As Socrates said about 500 BC, ignorance of ignorance is much more dangerous than ignorance of knowledge. Awareness and the spread of awareness is a most necessary pre-requisite in the fight for justice for all. A big part of the blame rests with the Arab communities who have exerted little effort in explaining their side of the story.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be . . . The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe." Thomas Jefferson

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] “In November 2002 the United States Congress and President George W. Bush established by law the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission. This independent, bipartisan panel was directed to examine the facts and circumstances surrounding the September 11 attacks, identify lessons learned, and provide recommendations to safeguard against future acts of terrorism.”
[ii] The lancet medical journal published a report in August 2004, putting the Iraqi civilian death toll because of the conflict at 100,000. Since then, the bloodshed and casualties have considerably increased making the death toll of civilians as we stand today (August 2006) easily over 200,000. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/29/iraq.deaths/
[iii] Indeed, many of my Iraqi friends in the US, mainly Christian, refused to join the demonstrations that were taking place in the US against the war. They remained hopeful that despite what ulterior motives the US government may have had in Iraq, that whatever will come to replace Saddam will be at least better.

[1] Curl, J. (Sept 27, 2002). Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms. Washington Times. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0927-08.htm

[2] Calabresi, M. (Sept 14, 2002). Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words. Time magazine. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,351165,00.html

[3] Kaiser, R. (June 3, 2004). “Instant Analysis: Tenet Resigns”. Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12440-2004Jun3.html

[4] Chomsky, N. (2006). Failed States. 25
[5] Connelly, J. (Sept. 29, 2004). In the Northwest: Bush-Cheney flip-flops cost America in blood. Seattle Post-Intellgiencer. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/192828_joel29.html
[6] Kean, T., Hamilton, L., Ben-Veniste, R., Kerrey, B., Fielding, F., Lehman, J., Gorelick, J., Roemer, T., & Gorton, S., Thompson, J. The 9/11 Commission Report. First (Authorized) Edition. 61

[7] Kean, T., Hamilton, L., Ben-Veniste, R., Kerrey, B., Fielding, F., Lehman, J., Gorelick, J., Roemer, T., & Gorton, S., Thompson, J. (2003). The 9/11 Commission Report. First (Authorized) Edition. 66

[8] Von Sponeck, H. (July 22, 2002). The Guardian

[9] Clarke, R. (Sept 14, 2004). Against all enemies. 31

[10] Battle, J. (February 25, 2003). From National Security Archive Electronic Briefing. Book No. 82.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq24.pdf

[11] Singer, M. (February 1 2000). Jerusalem Letter / Viewpoints. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, No. 423 25 Shevat 5760.

[12] Mylroie, L. (April 2001). “The United States and the Iraqi National Congress”. Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, , Vol3, No 4 http://www.meib.org/articles/0104_ir1.htm

[13] Harper’s Editor Lewis Lapham in the magazine’s November issue
[14] Pope, C. (Sept 29, 2004). “Cheney changed his view on Iraq”. Seattle Post Intelligencer.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/192908_cheney29.html

[15] Winston, R. (October 1, 2002). Human Instinct

[16] Kean, T., Hamilton, L., Ben-Veniste, R., Kerrey, B., Fielding, F., Lehman, J., Gorelick, J., Roemer, T., & Gorton, S., Thompson, J. (2003). The 9/11 Commission Report. First (Authorized) Edition. 103

[17] “Half of Americans believe in WMD”, The Gazette, Montreal, Monday , August 17, 2006, page A2

2006-08-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

Reasons for Invasion of Iraq

At a time when Pentagon officials declare Iraq at the brink of a civil war, this essay intends to tackle the main reasons the US gave for the invasion of Iraq, the methods and arguments it has used and still uses to make the case, and touch briefly on the effects of the war. It is also shallow to categorize the “US” as one entity when discussing this issue. Rather it should be considered at three levels: the Bush Administration, Congress, the American people. These can be looked at as a pyramid with highest levels of influence and control at the top being the Bush Administration, then Congress, followed by the general populace. (Technically though, it is to be appreciated that Congress is the entity that is the closer representation of the people and is designed to keep the Administration in check. Moreover, for all intents and purposes regarding this topic, it is of little merit to analyze congress further in terms of Republican and Democratic party positions since both parties took the same position on this issue at the time.) Nevertheless, the drivers and the driven. Those who decide and those who do the fighting, kill others and die based on the decision of the elected and therefore privileged to decide.

Reasons
The stated reasons by the Bush Administration for the invasion of Iraq were:

Firstly, weapons of mass destruction. This was the strongest argument given by the Administration to the American public, to the UN and to the international community to go to war. The Wall Street Journal and the mainstream media tirelessly regurgitated the message for one whole year, inducing fear and drumming up support leading into the actual invasion. One could hear WMD on the news several times during a given day, everyday during that time. It appeared as though the reporters and news cast members were fed the same lines to repeat as often as possible. Furthermore, the impression given was that such weapons could reach the US, and more so the UK. Other stories depicted the scenario of such weapons being carried in suitcases by terrorists and delivered to their intended targets. It is important to keep in mind that this happened following 9-11 whereby the American population at large was emotional, angry and feeling under threat. In addition, nationalism was at a peak.

Along with this was the claim that the Iraqi regime was not cooperating with the weapons inspectors, that the US was frustrated, that time was running out, that the UN was being too sluggish, too ineffective. At one point Bush boldly stated that the US did not need the approval of the UN to attack Iraq.

Second, the case was made that Iraq was harboring terrorists and a connection was made between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, by the group Ansr Al Islam and Al-Qaeda in fact several times by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Third, ridding the world of Saddam. This reason became the more dominant after it was determined that no weapons of mass destruction were found. Along with this was the case for the liberation of the people, women and children of Iraq, to give them freedom and democracy, for once Saddam was out, Iraq, the region, even the world would be a better place. When President Bush was asked on some occasions about the non-existence of WMDs in Iraq, his answer was mostly along the lines that we got rid of Saddam, that the world and the people of Iraq are better off without Saddam.

Analysis

I. Weapons of Mass Destruction
With regards to this, all inspection reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) throughout the late nineties stated that Iraq did not have nuclear material to produce nuclear weapons nor did the agency find evidence of programs to produce such weapons. The agency was very clear on this and did not even leave room for speculation.[1] Similarly, regarding biological and chemical weapons, the UN inspection program ensured WMDs which existed before the first Gulf war in 1991 were either destroyed or dismantled, and that no new programs to create such weapons were allowed to take place (as we shall see).

Towards the end, the UN weapons inspectors actually became more frustrated with the US rather than with Iraq. Scott Ritter who served in the US Marines for twelve years and who describes himself as a patriotic American, headed the weapons inspection program for seven years until his resignation in protest in 1998. Below is an excerpt from an interview with him Sep. 14, 2002

You told the Iraqi parliament that Saddam had legitimate complaints about the prior inspection regime. What did you mean?

The U.S. had a track record of putting pressure on the weapons inspectors program during my entire seven years there. It's ironic that everyone has focused on the struggle of the inspectors vs. Iraq. Not too many people speak of the struggle between the weapons inspectors and the U.S. to beat back the forces of U.S. intelligence which were seeking to infiltrate the weapons inspectors program and use the unique access the inspectors enjoyed in Iraq for purposes other than disarmament. Iraq has a clear case that under this past inspection regime unfortunately it was misused for purposes other than set out by the Security Council resolution. [2]

The CIA, as was purported, had its own evidence of the presence of WMDs in Iraq and the Bush Administration wasn’t going to wait for the UN to tell it what it already knew. This was the impression given at the time leading up to the invasion. Conversely, the chief of weapons inspection, Scott Ritter, had the following to say:

“I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it. Deterrence has been adequate in the absence of inspectors but this is not a situation that can succeed in the long term. In the long term you have to get inspectors back in.”

Later after about one year going into the invasion, when no WMDs were found, the CIA was blamed by the Administration and George Tenet resigned on June 2nd, 2004[3]. Some in the public excused the Administration with the impression that it was mislead by the CIA. More recent reports showed that the information regarding WMDs was pushed by the Administration onto the CIA to constitute intelligence. In other words it was fabricated by the Bush Administration.

From the Associated Press (April 6, 2006)
Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors President Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

Before his indictment, I. Lewis Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on information and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

But the disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The authorization came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

There was also the tautological and basically illogical and irresolvable argument that the burden was on Saddam to prove that he did not possess WMDs. If somebody believes that you possess something and are hiding it, how could you possibly – from a rational perspective - prove that you don’t have it besides allowing the other person to search you? Later, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld noted that ``the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.''

To take an obsessively paranoid direction, one may argue that Saddam could have hidden his WMDs outside Iraq, but since 1991, Iraq was under heavy surveillance and no evidence was found to indicate that such weapons were relocated. In addition, because of natural degradation, such weapons need maintenance to remain effective so it would not have been of value to retain those in some neighboring country for future use.

In the sincere search for the truth, it is important to note what took place with the weapons inspectors and the UN missions in Iraq during the period from 1991 till 2003 (the beginning of the second Iraq war).

Hans von Sponeck, the UN assistant secretary general and the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq from 1998 till the year 2000 published the following article in The Guardian on Monday July 22, 2002

“The US and the international public are being sedated daily with increasing doses of propaganda about the threat Iraq poses to the world in 2002. In the forefront of those advocating war against Iraq has been the US deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, who sees a military solution as the only option. On July 14 he stated in Istanbul: "President Bush has made it clear how dangerous the current Iraqi regime is to the United States and that it represents a danger we cannot live with indefinitely."
To make such statements without offering supporting evidence is irresponsible. It promotes government-induced mass hysteria in the US and is meant to garner bipartisan support for military action. A war on Iraq justified by conjecture is politically foolish and morally repugnant."

WMDs are chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Several countries in the world actually (as opposed to fictitiously) possess those. Furthermore, some of these countries do not have a harmonious relationship with the US.

Moreover, a report on September 27, 2002 published by the Washington Times states that
“The International Atomic Energy Agency says that a report cited by President Bush as evidence that Iraq in 1998 was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon does not exist.
"There's never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's chief spokesman, said”

One of the articles published by Scott Ritter appeared in the Boston Globe July 20, 2002 “Is Iraq a True Threat to the US?”

Does Iraq truly threaten the existence of our nation? If one takes at face value the rhetoric emanating from the Bush administration, it would seem so. According to President Bush and his advisers, Iraq is known to possess weapons of mass destruction and is actively seeking to reconstitute the weapons production capabilities that had been eliminated by UN weapons inspectors from 1991 to 1998, while at the same time barring the resumption of such inspections.

I bear personal witness through seven years as a chief weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations to both the scope of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and the effectiveness of the UN weapons inspectors in ultimately eliminating them.
While we were never able to provide 100 percent certainty regarding the disposition of Iraq's proscribed weaponry, we did ascertain a 90-95 percent level of verified disarmament. This figure takes into account the destruction or dismantling of every major factory associated with prohibited weapons manufacture, all significant items of production equipment, and the majority of the weapons and agent produced by Iraq.
With the exception of mustard agent, all chemical agent produced by Iraq prior to 1990 would have degraded within five years (the jury is still out regarding Iraq's VX nerve agent program - while inspectors have accounted for the laboratories, production equipment and most of the agent produced from 1990-91, major discrepancies in the Iraqi accounting preclude any final disposition at this time.)
The same holds true for biological agent, which would have been neutralized through natural processes within three years of manufacture. Effective monitoring inspections, fully implemented from 1994-1998 without any significant obstruction from Iraq, never once detected any evidence of retained proscribed activity or effort by Iraq to reconstitute that capability which had been eliminated through inspections.
In direct contrast to these findings, the Bush administration provides only speculation, failing to detail any factually based information to bolster its claims concerning Iraq's continued possession of or ongoing efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. To date no one has held the Bush administration accountable for its unwillingness - or inability - to provide such evidence.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld notes that ``the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'' This only reinforces the fact that the case for war against Iraq fails to meet the litmus test for the defense of our national existence so eloquently phrased by President Lincoln.
War should never be undertaken lightly. Our nation's founders recognized this when they penned our Constitution, giving the authority to declare war to Congress and not to the president. Yet on the issue of war with Iraq, Congress remains disturbingly mute.
Critical hearings should be convened by Congress that will ask the Bush administration tough questions about the true nature of the threat posed to the United States by Iraq. Congress should reject speculation and demand substantive answers. The logical forum for such a hearing would be the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
The apparent unwillingness of Congress to exercise its constitutional mandate of oversight, especially with regard to matters of war, represents a serious blow to American democracy. By allowing the Bush administration, in its rush toward conflict with Iraq, to circumvent the concepts of democratic accountability, Congress is failing those to whom they are ultimately responsible - the American people.

When Ritter spoke his mind against what he saw was wrong, he was berated by the media, called a KGB spy, an Iraqi spy, an Israeli spy. If a person of a knowledgeable position challenges the position of government on matters of importance, if he/she is not regurgitating the same party line, he/she ends up being personally attacked, and the real issue that is being presented ends up being blurred and scrapped in the dust bin, if ever addressed. This is a classic cheap shot maneuver by politicians as well as by media to avoid the important questions – attack the person instead of tackle the issue presented.

“In May 2005, a series of documents known as the Downing Street Memos were leaked to the Times in London. One memo revealed that two weeks before the war was launched, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, Blair’s chief legal advisor, counseled that “regime change cannot be the objective of military action.” Even if Britain were to limit itself to the announced objective of ending WMD programs, he wrote, “it is for the [UN Security] Council to assess whether any such breach of those obligations has occurred,” not individual states. Lord Goldsmith then added that the United States had “a rather different view: they maintain that the fact of whether Iraq is in breach is a matter of objective fact.

“Shortly after Lord Goldsmith’s comments were made public, the London Sunday Times published an official memo of a secret meeting between Blair and his top advisers in July 2002. The document showed that the Bush administration had already decided to attack Iraq, well before Congress was “hoodwinked” into authorizing force in October 2002 and also before the UN was invited to either endorse Washington’s plan or to become “irrelevant.”[4]

Before the war started, all credible sources confirmed that Iraq did not possess WMDs. Yet the Bush Administration and Congress ignored all such reports and people of authority on the matter, and went ahead with the war. Three years later, after tremendous death, destruction, suffering, radicalization and invoked resentment, no WMDs have been found.

It may have appeared that the administration was “mislead” about WMDs, but that can’t be the case either because there is evidence that the Administration pushed such “intelligence” onto the CIA to release to reporters, and moreover, from the release of that memo on a secret meeting between Bush and Blair, there is indication that Bush was bent on going to war with Iraq and he just needed to cook up reasons to convince Congress and the American public. In hindsight, the only rational conclusion that could be drawn is that WMDs were just a pretext given by the Bush Administration to attack Iraq.

II. The war on “terror” – the link between Iraq/Saddam and Al-Qaeda / Bin Laden
Two days following 9/11, President Bush declared: "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our No. 1 priority, and we will not rest until we find him."

Six months later, laying political groundwork for the Iraq war, the president said: "I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."”[5]

It should be well noted that historically, never has a terrorist attack against the US, weather on US soil or abroad, had any link to Iraq (save for an alleged plot by Saddam against Bush senior following the first Gulf war). Before the war started, Iraq was a strictly secular state. Furthermore, the US government was aware of that as clearly indicated in the official 9/11 Commission Report[i]

“Bin Laden was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda – save for his opportunistic pose as a defender of the faithful against “Crusaders” during the Gulf War of 1991. Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army.
“Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space [from Saddam] to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.”[6]

“…But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts (between Iraq and Bin Ladin) ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States”[7]

As Hans von Sponeck further asserted (July 22, 2002), “acts of terrorism against US facilities overseas and the anthrax menace at home could not be linked to Iraq. Evidence of al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam, a small fundamentalist group which allegedly harbors al-Qaeda elements and is trying to destabilize Iraqi Kurdistan.”[8]

Around the second day following 911, Richard Clarke, a veteran Washington insider and also known as the counterterrorism czar writes “I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002… [Wolfowitz] had rejected my assertion and CIA’s that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993… Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” Later in the day, Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan and that we should consider bombing Iraq, which, he said, had better targets. At first I thought Rumsfeld was joking. But he was serious and the President did not reject out of hand the idea of attacking Iraq.”[9]

Following the capture and killing of Al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Newsweek published a report on his capture and the events surrounding him. Again it indicates that the Administration had tried to manipulate facts to make the case to go to war with Iraq:

“The Bush administration wanted to exploit Zarqawi in a different way. When Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations to make the case for going to war against Saddam in February 2003, he charged that Saddam "harbors" a "deadly terrorist network" headed by Zarqawi, whom he described as a "collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants." U.S. intelligence at the time was saying that Zarqawi had gone to Baghdad to receive medical treatment—one report, widely credited in neocon circles, said that he was getting prosthesis for a leg lost in an American bombing attack. It does appear that Zarqawi went to Baghdad to be treated for wounds sometime in 2002, but there is no evidence that Saddam's government was even aware of his presence.”

III. Do it for the Iraqi people - the world is better without Saddam
The third reason for the invasion, as postulated by the Bush Administration, is for the betterment of the Iraqi people, ridding them and the world of a brutal regime. Few would have argued that Iraqis wouldn’t be better off without a brutal dictator. Moreover, given the totalitarian strangle on free expression and media control in Iraq, few Iraqi’s inside Iraq would have dared express that view to the outside without risk being killed. The analogy is to see a horrified person dumbed into petrified silence by his torturer and without explicitly hearing the person ask for our help, we go there, get rid of the torturer and rescue the helpless victim because we know what the right thing to do is.

This particular stated reason is similar to the attack on Yugoslavia to rescue the kosovars from ethnic cleansing by the Serbs. This morality argument was a high seller for the US troops in Iraq – seeing themselves as liberators. A brief chronological glance at events in the history of the relationship between the US and the Iraqis is worthy of consideration with regards to the point that we did it for the sake of Iraqis based on our morality.

Leading up to 1975, the Iraqi Kurds in northern Iraq were given military support by the US, encouraged to revolt and prompted to attack the Iraqi regime to “sap the resources of our ally’s neighboring country [Iraq]”. The US at the time was on the side of the Shah of Iran. On their side, the Kurds were hoping to gain independence and thought that the US was supporting their cause. In 1975, after Iran and Iraq reached an agreement, US aid was cut off from the Kurds who were left in a practically defenseless condition to be wiped out by the Iraqi regime at the time. According to the Pike report, 200,000 refugees fled to Iran but were given no humanitarian assistance, neither by Iran nor by the US. The US did not admit even a single refugee by way of political asylum. Henry Kissinger was quoted as saying “covert action should not be confused with missionary work”. Basically the Kurds were used and then dumped without a shred of regard to the humanitarian catastrophe in which they were left alone to face.

After the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, Iraq became a US ally with the US restoring formal relations with Iraq in November 1984. Rumsfeld, then special envoy to President Reagan, was sent on friendly delegation to Saddam in December 1983 during a time when Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iran with US confirmed knowledge.[10]

When Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988 in Halabja, killing five thousand, 75% of which women and children, neither the US nor Britain raised an eyebrow. In fact, Saddam was again on good terms with the US and UK then. (Incidentally, Halabja was one of several brutal attacks by the Iraqi regime on the Kurds during the eighties).

Moving on in time, “in 1991 a widely broadcast message from President Bush [Sr] called on Iraqis to replace Saddam. A popular uprising followed in Iraq that was gaining control of 11 of Iraq's 18 provinces until the U.S. allowed Iraq to use its armed helicopters to put down the uprising. Some 250,000 Iraqis were killed by Saddam in suppressing the uprising. Certainly this is likely to have made them more cautious about rising against the regime in reliance on the U.S.”[11]

A similar activity took place in 1995 when the Iraqi National Congress, an Iraqi resistance movement against Saddam agreed with the CIA a plan to overthrow Saddam and rid the Iraqis of the brutal regime. They had advanced and took control of numerous provinces and were closing in on Baghdad and were waiting to get support from the CIA and air coverage from the US air force which incidentally never showed up. The - what would have been - grass roots dissident group was left to be massacred by Saddam’s Republican Guard.[12]

Thus so far, from the perspective of the Iraqis and arguably any objective observer, the US betrayed them at least thrice: in 1975, in 1991, and in 1995.

Next, we need to consider sanctions and the Oil for Food program. Sanctions were placed on Iraq since 1991 by the UN spearheaded by the US. As a result, not enough basic food and medicine were allowed in resulting in an average of 5000 preventable Iraqi deaths per month, mainly of vulnerable children due to malnutrition and lack of basic medicine. That is 60,000 per year, 600,000 lives in ten years (conservative estimate). If one keeps in mind that Iraq is a very rich country resting on top of a vast wealth of energy resources, one would logically deduce that this suffocation is directly caused by the sanctions and constitutes crimes against a civilian population. In terms of loss of human life and the ensuing emotional devastation haunting families of lost loved ones, this is equivalent to having a 9-11 every three weeks for a period of ten years on a country of less than twenty eight million, albeit the drama of the event is not nearly as pronounced or prolific. Here is slow decaying death in the back alley of the world receiving no attention, no sympathy, but worse off, no accountability.

Specifically with regards to Iraqi children, according to UNICEF, "If the substantial reduction in the under-five mortality rate during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year [sanctions] period 1991 to 1998." While we cannot draw conclusively that the sanctions were the sole factor causing the deaths of half a million children in Iraq (as some on the other side of the camp argue), they were the main factor in creating an environment of sub-standard health conditions taking its toll on the most vulnerable (i.e. children). Furthermore, Iraq has the highest increase in child mortality during the period 1990-99 of 188 countries surveyed. [UNICEF, December 2000]

The argument used by officials to absolve the US and the UN from responsibility for these deaths was that enough resources were allocated to cover for what was needed by the Iraqi people, but Saddam re-routed the money to his own end. Thus the US intent was to provide the civilian population with their sufficient nutritional and medicinal needs while preventing Saddam from building his weaponry system. Any adverse effect because of the sanctions was clearly unintentional.

It is clear that the problem was not caused by Saddam diverting resources, but rather in the oil-for-food program itself if we consider the following: “all of Iraqi's oil revenue earned through the above relief mechanism was controlled by the Security Council. After allocations are taken out to pay billions of dollars for Gulf War reparations and UN administrative expenses, the amount of money which reaches the average person in Iraq is a mere 25 cents per person per day which is hardly enough for survival.” [Halliday]

To get a most qualified perspective regarding sanctions and the Oil-for-Food program we should hear from the people who were most immersed in and in charge of the program - the UN personnel heading the humanitarian effort in Iraq during that time. Incidentally the program witnessed successive resignations in protest against the inhumanity of the program.

Hans von Sponeck from Germany (referenced earlier), the UN assistant secretary general, was appointed the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq in 1998. At the time he was a 36-year veteran of the United Nations who had worked for the UN Development Program in Ghana, Turkey, Botswana, Pakistan and India. On February 14th 2000, he announced his resignation after strongly condemning the economic sanctions for unjustly punishing the innocent Iraqi people. He called for an end to the sanctions, saying his conscience cannot be silent over a 'true human tragedy' that had no end in sight. Two days after von Sponeck's resignation, on February 16, Ms Jutta Burghardt, the head of the UN World Food Programme in Baghdad, also offered her resignation to protest how the economic sanctions against Iraq are eroding its society.

Mr. von Sponeck's predecessor, Mr. Dennis Halliday, who left the same position after 13 months in September 1998, also cited similar concerns for his resignation, calling the sanctions a 'totally bankrupt concept'.

Mr Halliday who had had a distinguished UN career spanning 34 years and a who was nominated for the Nobel peace prize in 2000, said that the economic sanctions violated the UN charter and UN conventions on human rights and that he 'could not continue to take part in a policy that was deliberately causing grave and widespread suffering throughout Iraq, while failing to address the root causes of the humanitarian crisis.'
Since his resignation, Mr. Halliday has been committed to his work on behalf of the Iraqi people as he continues to publicly campaign against the US-led UN economic sanctions in Iraq.
The main heads of UN humanitarian activities in Iraq resigned in vehement protest during the oil-for-food program. The mainstream media coverage in the US of the humanitarian tragedy was for the most part non-existent.

"When Madeleine Albright, then the American secretary of state [sic], was asked in an interview on 60 Minutes whether she had considered the resulting death of 500,000 Iraqi children (of malnutrition and disease), she said, ‘We think the price is worth it.’"[13]

It could not have been out of innocent negligence or lack of attention to have missed the en masse continuous Iraqi civilian deaths by sanctions. Firstly, there were several prominent voices from the very same institutions implementing those programs that were protesting against them. Secondly, this was not happening in some odd month that witnessed some irregularity, maybe one year that went unnoticed, but ten years. And during those ten years Iraq was under the attentively watchful eyes of close US surveillance and intelligence gathering.

So how come the US did not come to the aid of the poor Iraqi and Kurdish people throughout the eighties and nineties? One may say that well, we did not care much then, we did not know any better, perhaps we made mistakes (though no official ever had the decency to be apologetic), and now we do care about the Iraqi people, the Iraqi women and children. We had a shift of heart. The administration changed, congress changed, and with it our policies …

The sanctions were only lifted to be replaced by a “shock and awe” war and occupation. The argument that the war is to save the Iraqi women and children from a brutal dictatorship is a hoax.

Underlying all this is an important appreciation of the fact that the US is the de-facto self appointed legal authority in the world, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That manifested itself in the war against Yugoslavia and on a bigger scale the war in Iraq, both cases being in flagrant violation of the United Nations and International Law. The US also has basis in every corner of the world (120 countries) as well as in space. It takes law within its own hands side-stepping the UN, international law, the Geneva convention and the High Court of justice, the real international community calling against the war in Iraq, and its own American citizens.

The continuing punishment of the Iraqi people, of civilians following the invasion is ever so reaching new peaks. An estimated 6,000 Iraqis were killed in the months of May and June of 2006 alone. As we stand now in August 2006, the Iraqi death toll as a result of the US invasion is over 200,000[ii]. The US death toll is over 2,500.

The argument in defense of the US is that most of the casualties and bloodshed are due to sectarian violence, that is, clashes between Sunnis and Shiites with civilians caught in the middle, with terrorists like Zarqawi behind the massive killings, the disruption of law and order and functioning of a normal civil society.

Let us give the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt and go along with the argument that the Administration’s intentions were good but the atrocities that befell the Iraqi people, the civilians, and the mounting US casualties were out of lack of knowledge that such violence would transpire following the war.

Evidence indicates that at least some of the prominent members of the US administration knew before hand that a war in Iraq and the removal of Saddam would result in a political vacuum and in chaos, and the installation of a replacement government would not be an easy task, thus sectarian violence would have been expected given the composition of the population and its history.

Dick Cheney, who has been the pillar advocate and main driver for this war indicated clearly in a past interview that he was aware of what would befall Iraq following the removal of Saddam.
“In an assessment that differs sharply with his view today, Dick Cheney more than a decade ago defended the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the first Gulf War, telling a Seattle audience that capturing Saddam wouldn't be worth additional U.S. casualties or the risk of getting "bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."

Cheney, who was secretary of defense at the time, made the observations answering audience questions after a speech to the Discovery Institute in August 1992, nearly 18 months after U.S. forces routed the Iraqi army and liberated Kuwait.

"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney said then in response to a question.

"And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."[14]

Going to Baghdad, Cheney said in 1992, would require a much different approach militarily than fighting in the open desert outside the capital, a type of warfare that U.S. troops were not familiar, or comfortable fighting.

"All of a sudden you've got a battle you're fighting in a major built-up city, a lot of civilians are around, significant limitations on our ability to use our most effective technologies and techniques," Cheney said.

"Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq."

"Now what kind of government are you going to establish? Is it going to be a Kurdish government, or a Shi'ia government, or a Sunni government, or maybe a government based on the old Baathist Party, or some mixture thereof? You will have, I think by that time, lost the support of the Arab coalition that was so crucial to our operations over there," he said.

The reader would gather from the above that Cheney had sufficient foreknowledge that an invasion of Iraq would result in considerable casualties for the Americans and for Iraqi civilians given that it would not be easy to form a replacement government and henceforth, in the absence of a viable government sectarian violence would follow.

If you destroy the foundations and infrastructure of any civilian society, chaos, lawlessness and crime would be the order of the day. Let’s not go too far. Take Katrina and New Orleans as a micro example and recall the spread of violence and chaos. Now extrapolate that to the scale of a whole country that had its infrastructure and government utterly destroyed, hundreds of thousands displaced, that has many of its people in possession of arms, being x-members of the Iraqi army, and that has an invader implanted in its midst.

And even if pleading ignorance, who gives the leaders of this administration a god given right to play adventure with other people’s lives – two hundred thousand of them?