Ian Boyne, Contributor
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush was at it again in his State of the Union address last Tuesday - engaging in his favourite pastime of playing fast and loose with the truth.
Rather than coming clean with his people and the world and admitting his colossal miscalculation about the dangers Iraq posed to American and world security, he sought to use sleight of hand tactics to mask his shame.
"Some in this chamber did not support the liberation of Iraq." That's dishonest. None in that chamber would be against the liberation of Iraq from the clutches of that brutal and vicious dictator Saddam Hussein. But the justification for the war and the reason why the United States could not wait on United Nations inspections and the consensus of European allies was because of the supposed imminent threat of Iraq to American and world security. It was not about the liberation of the Iraqis in the first instance.
In his declaration of war on March 17, President Bush said, "Saddam Hussein must disarm himself or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him." It was not for the sake of liberating the oppressed Iraqi people. Were the Iraqis the only oppressed people in the world, or even in the Middle East? On the eve of war the U.S. President employed his scare tactics to justify his impending actions in Iraq: "The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological and one day nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfil their stated ambitions and kill thousands of innocent people in this country or any other."
NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Yet, 10 months after, no weapons of mass destruction have been found despite intense search. And President Bush was, to put it most charitably, incomplete in his use of information from his chief sleuth for weapons in Iraq, David Kay. He said, "Already the Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities..." Sleight of hand again. Programmes and weapons are not the same thing! But this born-again Christian President has been a master of deception. "Had we failed to act the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programmes would continue to this day."
But there was a viable and effective U.N. weapons inspection programme in place and it was quite successful, according to the same Kay report which he mentioned. It was not that the United Nations did not believe that there was never an intention on the part of Saddam Hussein to have a weapons development programme. The U.N. was obtaining his co-operation, aided significantly by the deterrence efforts and threats from the United States. The point is there was no need for invasion then when Saddam Hussein was convinced that the United States, Europe and the United Nations would together declare war on him if he did not co-operate with U.N. weapons inspections.
BUSH'S WORD
But President Bush conveniently left out some important parts of the report that David Kay made on October 2, 2003. He did not tell his country that Kay said that, "to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material." Now hear this important admission from David Kay: "Multiple sources with varied access and reliability have told ISG that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing centrally controlled CW (chemical weapons) programme after 1991(the first Gulf War). Information found to date suggests that Iraq's large-scale ability to develop, produce and fill new CW munitions was reduced if not entirely destroyed during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and weapons inspections. Our efforts to collect and exploit intelligence on Iraq's chemical weapons program have thus far yielded little reliable information on post-1991 CW stocks and CW agent production."
This is the same David Kay quoted by President Bush in his State of the Union address.
Besides, no less a person than Lt. Gen. James Conway, Commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told journalists in May that "it was a surprise to me then, as it is a surprise to me now, that we have not uncovered unconventional weapons. It's not for a lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between Kuwaiti border and Baghdad but they're simply not there."
The Commander was stunned because he had believed the words of his President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defence and National Security Advisor that there was no doubt that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He was a true believer.
Yet the U.S. President had the nerve to tell the world on Tuesday: "No one can now doubt the word of America."
Meaning he had been true to his word to "deal with" Afghanistan and Iraq. Now even Libya was quivering. But as one Democratic respondent to his address said eloquently on Tuesday night, America should not just show the world its strengths but its greatness, not just its missiles but its light.
In an article titled 'A Dishonest War' in the influential Washington Post last Sunday, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy said, "Of the many issues competing for attention in this new and defining year, one is of a unique order of magnitude: President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq. There was no imminent threat. Hussein had no nuclear weapons, no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons, no connection to September 11 and no plausible link to Al Qaeda. We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence."
THE CARNEGIE REPORT
No document or scholarly source has so amply and decisively demonstrated that the U.S. relied on incomplete and contested intelligence sources to go to war than the major report issued this month by the reputable Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in the United States. Anyone who wants to speak authoritatively on the issues surrounding the U.S.'s decision to go to war in Iraq has to read this eye-opening report which shows the intelligence bungling which took place.
The Carnegie report, titled WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, showed that the U.N. had been remarkably effective in destroying much of Iraq's WMD capability after the first Gulf War. And International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the United Nations Security on March 7 last year that there was "no indication of resumed nuclear activities nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities" in Iraq. And the lie about Iraq's importing uranium from Africa has been exposed and accepted now by even the U.S. and British administrations, which have been profoundly
embarrassed over that exposed misinformation.
The IAEA head told the Security Council in March, the month of the unjustified war against Iraq, that, "During the past four years at the majority of Iraqi sites, industry capacity has deteriorated substantially due to the departure of foreign support that was present in the late 1980s, the departure of large numbers of skilled Iraqi personnel in the past decade and the lack of consistent maintenance by Iraq of sophisticated equipment."
The scholars in the report for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are balanced and admit that "Iraq's WMD programmes represented a long-term security threat to the United States and to the region. These constituted a long-term danger that could not be ignored or allowed to fester unaddressed." But the scholars say, "They did not, however, pose an immediate threat to the United States, the region or global security."
How do we know that? Because no evidence has been found and we cannot conduct global affairs on the basis of people's surmises, hunches, intuitions or special pipeline to God. There must be verifiable and falsifiable evidence. President Bush is entitled to his private Evangelical, Fundamentalist faith that is between him and his God but when it comes to global leadership he must operate on evidence that we mere sinful mortals can assess rationally.
FABRICATING THE TRUTH
The U.S. administration has used fabrication after fabrication to build its case for war against Iraq and each time the fabrication has been exposed it simply moves on to the next one or simply engage in blindsiding.
In a September 12, 2002 address before the U.N. General Assembly President Bush said, "Iraq also possesses a force of scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometres permitted by the United Nations." The same David Kay whom he quoted approvingly in the State of the Union address on Tuesday reported that "We have not discovered evidence to corroborate these claims (of scuds)."
And the UN and IAEA inspections carried out between November 2002 and March 2003 also revealed no evidence of scuds. None of the captured scientists or political officials has given any information on these weapons or WMDs.
In his State of the Union address on January 28 last year President Bush said "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly and without fingerprints he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own."National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice also told newsman Jim Lehrer, "There are clearly contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq."
Of the dozens of Al Qaeda members captured, none has revealed a link with Iraq (Oh, yes, captured prisoners do give information to captors to make deals). And the U.N. Monitoring Group on Al Qaeda released a draft report in June last year. The head of that group has said, "Nothing has come to our notice that would indicate links that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But from what we've seen the answer is no." Of course, mermaids, fairies and ghosts can exist, but until we have evidence that they do, we have no justification for believing in them. At least rational people do not.
LIBERATING IRAQ?
It used to be said and constantly implied that Saddam Hussein had links with September 11 bombings. Yet Bush himself was forced last September 17, after he had already vanquished Saddam to admit that there was no evidence of that. But that truth was not uttered until after the war was won.
Stripped so decisively of its justification for war that the Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to U.S. security the U.S. has cleverly shifted the discourse to rhetoric about liberating the Iraqi people and paving the way for peace and democracy in the Middle East as a whole. The problem is some wooly-headed people are believing that propaganda line.
"Had we failed to act, Iraq's torture chambers would still be filled with victims, terrified and innocent. The killing fields of Iraq where hundreds of thousands of men and women vanished into the sands would still be known only to the killers. For all who love freedom and peace, the world without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place."
He got a thunderous applause, expectedly. People react more to emotion than to reason. Reason should point to the number of countries in the world where dictators still reign, where democracy is absent and where people are oppressed. Why doesn't the U.S. go there and liberate them? Why love the Iraqi oppressed more than other oppressed people?
As the Professor of Anthropology and International Relations at Boston University, Augustus Norton, says in the January 2004 issue of the scholarly journal, Current History, "In Iraq the United States appears to have checkmated itself, manoeuvred into the calamitous position of being unable to exit easily or stay safely. The administration won public support for invading Iraq by pressing the alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In retrospect, it is amply clear that the intelligence assessments of Iraqi capabilities and programmes were faulty and that leading administration officials exaggerated the intelligence estimates and drew unsupported conclusions ..."
And the American people are paying for that with hundreds of their children's lives and $120 billion already of their hard-earned money. And reports emerging in the Press on Wednesday suggested that if Bush wins the election he would have to ask for an additional $40 billion for his reconstruction plans.A heavy price to pay for folly and arrogance.
Ian Boyne is a veteran
journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
