Truthout Published 1 January 2012: Also at Common Dreams,
Transnational.org, Peace and Justice Post and ZNetwork
The formal withdrawal of US troops from Iraq this month has led to a whole series of retrospectives on the invasion and the eight and a half years of occupation that followed as well as a host of unanswered questions.. of critical importance at this juncture is that we not allow the narratives on the war to understate its tragic consequences or those responsible for the war — both Republicans and Democrats — to escape their responsibility.
Category: George W. Bush
Five Years Later, We Can’t Forgive or Forget
This week marks the fifth anniversary of the congressional vote granting President George W. Bush unprecedented war-making authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing. Had a majority of either the Republican-controlled House or the Democratic-controlled Senate voted against the resolution or had they passed an alternative resolution conditioning such authority on an authorization from the United Nations Security Council, all the tragic events that have unfolded as a consequence of the March 2003 invasion would have never occurred.
The responsibility for the deaths of nearly 4,000 American soldiers, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the waste of over a half trillion dollars of our national treasury, and the rise of terrorism and Islamist extremism that has come as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq rests as much in the hands of the members in Congress who authorized the invasion as it does with the administration that requested the lawmakers’ approval.
Those who express surprise at the refusal of today’s Democratic majority in Congress to stop funding the war should remember this: the October 2002 resolution authorizing the invasion had the support of the majority of Democratic senators as well as the support of the Democratic Party leadership in both the House and the Senate.
Seven Senators
Seven of the 77 senators who voted to authorize the invasion – Fred Thompson (R-TN), John McCain (R-AZ), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Joseph Biden (D-DE), and John Edwards (D-NC) are now running for president. While the Republicans candidates remain unapologetic, the Democratic candidates have sought to distance themselves from their vote, arguing that what is important in choosing a president is not how they voted in the past, but what she or he would do now.
Such efforts to avoid responsibility should be rejected out of hand. While I personally support a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq as soon as logistically feasible, there is considerable debate among knowledgeable, ethical, and intelligent people – including those who also opposed the invasion – as to what to do now. No reasonable person, however, could have supported the resolution authorizing the invasion five years ago.
On this and other web sites – as well as in many scores of policy reports, newspaper articles, academic journals and other sources – the tragic consequences of a U.S. invasion of Iraq and a refutation of falsehoods being put forward by the Bush administration to justify it were made available to every member of the House and Senate (see, for example, The Case Against a War with Iraq). The 2003 vote authorizing the invasion was not like the vote on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution on the use of force against North Vietnam, for which Congress had no time for hearings or debate and for which most of those supporting it (mistakenly) thought they were simply authorizing limited short-term retaliatory strikes in response to a specific series of alleged incidents. By contrast, in regard to the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Congress had many months to investigate and debate the administration’s claims that Iraq was a threat as well as the likely implications of a U.S. invasion; members of Congress also fully recognized that the resolution authorized a full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation and a subsequent military occupation of an indefinite period.
Violating International Legal Conventions
Those who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq did so despite the fact that it violated international legal conventions to which the U.S. government is legally bound to uphold. The resolution constituted a clear violation of the United Nations Charter that, like other ratified international treaties, should be treated as supreme law according to Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. According to articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter, no member state has the right to enforce any resolution militarily unless the UN Security Council determines that there has been a material breach of its resolution, decides that all nonmilitary means of enforcement have been exhausted, and then specifically authorizes the use of military force.
This is what the Security Council did in November 1990 with Resolution 678 in response to Iraq’s ongoing violations of UN Security Council resolutions demanding its withdrawal from Kuwait, but the Security Council did not do so for any subsequent lesser Iraqi violations. The only other exception for the use of force authorized by the charter is in self-defense against armed attack, which even the Bush administration admitted had not taken place.
This effective renunciation of the UN Charter’s prohibition against such wars of aggression constituted an effective repudiation of the post-WWII international legal order. Alternative resolutions, such as one authorizing force against Iraq if authorized by the UN Security Council, were voted down by a bipartisan majority.
Some of those who voted for the war resolution and their supporters have since tried to rewrite history by claiming the resolution had a stronger legal basis. For example, in a recent interview with The Progressive magazine, Elizabeth Edwards claimed that the resolution supported by her husband, then-Senator John Edwards, involved “forcing Bush to go to the U.N. first.” In reality, not only was no such provision included in the resolution that passed, Edwards voted against the resolution amendment that would have required such a precondition, arguing that “our national security requires” that “we must not tie our own hands by requiring Security Council action.”
Concerned Scholars
Members of Congress were also alerted by large numbers of scholars of the Middle East, Middle Eastern political leaders, former State Department and intelligence officials and others who recognized that a U.S. invasion would likely result in a bloody insurgency, a rise in Islamist extremism and terrorism, increased sectarian and ethnic conflict, and related problems. Few people I know who are familiar with Iraq have been at all surprised that the U.S. invasion has become such a tragedy. Indeed, most of us were in communication with congressional offices and often with individual members of Congress themselves in the months leading up to the vote warning of the likely consequences of an invasion and occupation. Therefore, claims by Senator Clinton and other leading Democratic supporters of the war that they were unaware of the likely consequences of the invasion are completely false.
The resolution also contained accusations that were known or widely assumed to be false at that time, such as claims of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States. A definitive report by the Department of Defense noted that not only did no such link exist, but that no such link could have even been reasonably suggested based on the evidence available at that time.
The resolution also falsely claimed that Iraq was “actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.” In reality, Iraq had long eliminated its nuclear program, a fact that was confirmed in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1998, four years prior to the resolution.
The resolution also falsely claimed that Iraq at that time continued “to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability.” In reality, as the U.S. government now admits, Iraq had rid itself of its chemical and biological weapons nearly a decade earlier and no longer had any active chemical and biological weapons programs. This likelihood that Iraq no longer had operational chemical or biological weapons was brought to the attention of members of Congress by a number of top arms control specialists, as well as Scott Ritter, the American who headed UNSCOM’s efforts to locate Iraq’s possible hidden caches of chemical and biological weapons, hidden supplies or secret production facilities.
No Evidence
Virtually all of Iraq’s known stockpiles of chemical and biological agents had been accounted for and the shelf life of the small amount of materiel that had not been accounted for – which, as it ends up, had also been destroyed – had long since expired and was therefore no longer of weapons grade. There was no evidence that Iraq have any delivery systems for such weapons, either. In addition, the strict embargo, in effect since 1990, against imports of any additional materials needed for the manufacture of WMDs, combined with Iraq’s inability to manufacture such weapons or delivery systems themselves without detection, made any claims that Iraq constituted any “significant chemical and biological weapons capability” transparently false to anyone who cared to investigate the matter at that time. Indeed, even the classified full version of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, while grossly overestimating Iraq’s military capability, was filled with extensive disagreements, doubts, and caveats regarding President Bush’s assertions regarding Iraq’s WMDs, WMD programs, and delivery systems.
The House and Senate members who now claim they were “misled” about Iraq’s alleged military threat fail to explain why they found the administration’s claims so much more convincing than the many other reports made available to them from more objective sources that presumably made a much stronger case that Iraq no longer had offensive WMD capability. Curiously, except for one excerpt from a 2002 National Security Estimate released in July 2003 – widely ridiculed at the time for its transparently manipulated content – not a single member of Congress has agreed to allow me any access to any documents they claim convinced them of the alleged Iraqi threat. In effect, they are using the infamous Nixon defense from the Watergate scandal that claims that, while they have evidence to vindicate themselves, making it public would somehow damage national security. In reality, if such reports actually exist, they are clearly inaccurate and outdated and would therefore be of no threat to national security if made public.
Democrats’ Responsibility
The Democrats who voted to support the war and rationalized for it by making false claims about Iraq’s WMD programs are responsible for allowing the Bush administration to get away with lying about Iraq’s alleged threat. For example, Bush has noted how “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senate – who had access to the same intelligence – voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” In a speech attacking anti-war activists, Bush noted how “Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: ‘When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security.’”
Indeed, the fact that 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry voted in favor of the resolution likely cost the Democrats the White House and, should Senator Clinton – who claimed, in justification of her vote to authorize the invasion, that Iraq’s possession of such weapons was “not in doubt” and was “undisputed” – get the nomination, it could also threaten the Democrats’ hopes for victory in 2008. Similarly, should Senator Dodd, Senator Biden, or former Senator Edwards – who also made false claims about Iraqi WMDs – get the nomination, it could have a similarly deleterious impact to the Democrats’ chances.
It’s also important to recognize that not everyone in Congress voted to authorize the invasion. There were the 21 Senate Democrats — along with one Republican and one Independent — who voted against the war resolution. And 126 of 207 House Democrats — including presidential contender Dennis Kucinich — voted against the resolution as well. In total, then, a majority of Democrats in Congress defied their leadership by saying no to war. This means that the Democrats who did support the war, despite being over-represented in leadership positions and among presidential contenders, were part of a right-wing minority and did not represent the mainstream of their party.
The resolution also claimed that “the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States . . . or provide them to international terrorists who would do so… combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself.” In other words, those members of the House and Senate who supported this resolution believed, or claimed to believe, that an impoverished country, which had eliminated its stockpiles of banned weapons, destroyed its medium and long-range missiles, and eliminated its WMD programs more than a decade earlier, and had been suffering under the strictest international sanctions in world history for more than a dozen years, somehow threatened the national security of a superpower located more than 6,000 miles away. Furthermore, these members of Congress believed, or claimed to believe, that this supposed threat was so great that the United States had no choice but to launch an invasion of that country, overthrow its government, and place its people under military occupation in the name of “self-defense,” regardless of whether Iraq allowed inspectors back into the county to engage in unfettered inspections to prove that the WMDs, WMD programs and weapons systems no longer existed.
International Opposition
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was opposed by virtually the entire international community, including Iraq’s closest neighbors, who presumably had the most to be concerned about in terms of any possible Iraqi military threat. However, the members of Congress who voted to authorize the invasion were determined to make the case that the United States – with the strongest military the world has ever known and thousands of miles beyond the range of Iraq’s alleged weapons and delivery systems – was so threatened by Iraq that the United States had to launch an invasion, overthrow its government and occupy that country for an indefinite period.
This shows a frighteningly low threshold for effectively declaring war, especially given that in most cases these members of Congress had been informed by knowledgeable sources of the widespread human and material costs which would result from a U.S. invasion. It also indicates that they would likely be just as willing to send American forces off to another disastrous war again, also under false pretenses. Indeed, those who voted for the war demonstrated their belief that:
* the United States need not abide by its international legal obligations, including those prohibiting wars of aggression;
* claims by right-wing U.S. government officials and unreliable foreign exiles regarding a foreign government’s military capabilities are more trustworthy than independent arms control analysts and United Nations inspectors;
* concerns expressed by scholars and others knowledgeable of the likely reaction by the subjected population to a foreign conquest and the likely complications that would result should be ignored; and, faith should instead be placed on the occupation policies forcibly imposed on the population by a corrupt right-wing Republican administration.
As a result, support for the 2002 Iraq War resolution is not something that can simply be forgiven and forgotten.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/five_years_later_we_cant_forgive_or_forget
My Meeting with Ahmadinejad
[Foreign Policy In Focus, September 28, 2007] This past Wednesday, I was among a group of American religious leaders and scholars who met with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York. In what was billed as an inter-faith dialogue, we frankly shared our strong opposition to certain Iranian government policies and provocative statements made by the Iranian president. At the same time, we avoided the insulting language employed by Columbia University president Lee Bollinger before a public audience two days earlier. The Iranian president was quite unimpressive. Indeed, with his ramblings and the superficiality of his analysis, he came across as more pathetic than evil. [Full Link]
Iraq Three Years after “Liberation”
Three years after U.S. forces captured Baghdad, Iraqis are suffering from unprecedented violence and misery. Although Saddam Hussein was indeed one of the world’s most brutal tyrants, the no-fly zones and arms embargo in place for more than a dozen years prior to his ouster had severely weakened his capacity to do violence against his own people. Today, the level of violent deaths is not only far higher than during his final years in power, but the sheer randomness of the violence has left millions of Iraqis in a state of perpetual terror. At least 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died, most of them at the hands of U.S. forces but increasingly from terrorist groups and Iraqi government death squads. Thousands more soldiers and police have also been killed. Violent crime, including kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery, is at record levels. There is a proliferation of small arms, and private militias are growing rapidly. A Lebanon-type multifaceted civil war, only on a much wider and deadlier scale, grows more likely with time.
Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by U.S. forces since the invasion, but only 1.5% of them have been convicted of any crime. Currently, U.S. forces hold 15,000 to 18,000 Iraqi prisoners, more than were imprisoned under Saddam Hussein. Amnesty International and other human rights groups have cited U.S. forces with widespread violations of international humanitarian law, including torture and other abuses of prisoners.
It is not just the fear of arrest and torture that have worsened since the U.S. conquest of Iraq three years ago. Although the destruction of the civilian infrastructure during the heavy U.S.-led bombing campaign in 1991 combined with the subsequent economic sanctions led to enormous suffering among ordinary Iraqis, the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food program, despite the abuses, did substantially improve the quality of life in the years preceding the U.S. invasion. Now, deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly among children, are again on the increase. The supply of drinking water, reliability of electricity, and effectiveness of sewage disposal are all worse than before the invasion.
As much as half of the labor force is unemployed, and the cost of living has skyrocketed. The median income of Iraqis has declined by more than half. The UN’s World Food Program (WFP) reports that the Iraqi people suffer from “significant countrywide shortages of rice, sugar, milk, and infant formula,” and the WFP documents approximately 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from “dangerous deficiencies of protein.” Oil production, the country’s chief source of revenue, is less than half of what it was before the invasion. And despite Bush administration promises to infuse billions of dollars worth of foreign aid to rebuild the country’s civilian infrastructure, only a small fraction of these ventures have been completed, and most projects have been cancelled. Close to one million Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class, have left the country to avoid the violence and hardship brought on as a result of the U.S. invasion.
Despite all this, a Harris poll at the end of December showed that a majority of Americans believe the Bush administration’s claims that Iraqis are better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein. Most Iraqis polled say just the opposite.
President Bush and his supporters still insist that Iraq is supposed to be a model for democracy that other countries in the region should try to emulate. In reality, the U.S. conquest and occupation of Iraq have, in the eyes of many Muslims worldwide, given democracy a bad name in the same way that the Soviets gave socialism a bad name through their conquest and occupation of Afghanistan. Democracy has become synonymous with war, chaos, domination by a foreign power, and massive human suffering. As a result, anti-American sentiment in Iraq is growing.
Amazingly, supporters of Bush policy cannot quite understand why this is the case. For example, Bush administration adviser Daniel Pipes, a leading proponent of the invasion, expressed his disappointment at “the ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them” by invading and occupying their country.
The Costs to the United States
One of the major sources of growing anti-American sentiment has been the Pentagon’s counter-insurgency offensives, which have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians. Though small-unit operations have been curtailed, air strikes have been increasing. From the use of heavy weaponry and phosphorous bombs against population centers in Fallujah to massive sweeps rounding up thousands of innocent men, many of which have been subjected to torture at the hands of U.S. forces, the United States is increasingly seen as an occupier, not a liberator. In Iraq’s tribal society, where the ethic of vengeance is still widespread, every civilian casualty at the hands of U.S. soldiers potentially adds to the recruitment pool of the insurgency, whose highly mobile cadres can easily slip away and resume operations in another locale or after American troops move on.
That the war has led to a growth of anti-American extremism throughout the Arab and Islamic world is no longer seriously questioned, as reports by U.S. intelligence agencies and the State Department have confirmed. Resentment also seethes from the disruption of Iraq’s economy, primarily through policies that have resulted in record unemployment, leaving nearly half the population without jobs. This economic devastation is a result not only of the commercial chaos stemming from the invasion but also of Washington’s decisions to eliminate tens of thousands of Iraqi government jobs, privatize public enterprises, give preference to foreign nationals for reconstruction efforts, and open Iraq to foreign multinationals against which local enterprises cannot compete.
The Iraq War has already cost the United States $500 billion, which is more in current dollars than the entire Vietnam War. Ongoing costs are close to $10 billion per month. With the vast majority of this money going to support the war, little is left to nurture civil society institutions, to train legislators, or to help build democracy. Despite this, there is still a clear bipartisan consensus to keep robbing the treasury to support President Bush’s desperate effort to control that oil-rich country. Not a single senator voted against the president’s most recent request to keep funding the war, and there were only 71 negative votes in the 435-member House of Representatives. Democrats, like Republicans, appear determined to force American taxpayers to keep paying for the death and destruction being wrought upon Iraq.
The Nature of the Iraqi Government
In recent months, Washington has begun to realize that several ruling officials retrieved from exile by U.S. forces—including Iraq’s prime minister—are incompetent religious fanatics closely allied with hard-line Iranian clerics. The Iraqi government is isolated within the U.S.-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and is so weak and divided that it can barely be considered functional. Corruption is rampant.
Three years after the invasion, the Pentagon acknowledges that Iraqi forces are still “largely dependent” on American combat troops for logistics, supplies, and support. Indeed, not a single Iraqi unit is yet capable of fully independent operations.
Washington’s goal may be reasonable, but U.S. pressure on Iraqi leaders to form a more inclusive government and to replace Ibrahim al-Jaafari has created enormous resentment and is widely viewed as arrogant neocolonial interference. Furthermore, there is little to suggest that any of Jaafari’s likely replacements would be any better.
Human rights abuses are increasing, as hundreds of civilians, mostly Sunni Arab males, are killed every month by government death squads. Murders from these death squads rival even the violence perpetrated by terrorist insurgents, who have primarily targeted Shiite Arab civilians. Last month, Amnesty International reported that “not only has the Iraqi government failed to provide minimal protection for its citizens, it has pursued a policy of rounding up and torturing innocent men and women. Its failure to punish those who have committed torture has added to the breakdown of the rule of law.”
In the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, the ruling U.S.-backed coalition of two nationalist parties with sizable armed militias is not much better. Corruption is widespread, and opposition activists are routinely beaten, tortured, and killed. Kurdish-born Austrian lawyer and professor Kamal Sayid Qadir has reported that “Kurdish parties transformed Iraqi Kurdistan into a fortress for oppression, theft of public funds, and serious abuses of human rights like murder, torture, amputation of ears and noses, and rape.” These “privileges and gains achieved since 1991 by the Kurdish parties were impossible without direct American backing and support,” he added. For his efforts to alert the international community about abuses by the U.S.-backed Kurdish government, he was sentence to a year and a half in prison.
Given the dismal post-Saddam record of human rights abuses, it is questionable whether Americans should be dying to prop up either the central government in Baghdad or the Kurdish government in the North. Continued U.S. training and funding of Iraqi police and military forces will likely encourage even more anti-Americanism both in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats seem bothered by the death squads and torture. For example, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has further sullied her previous reputation as a defender of human rights by supporting billions of dollars in additional funding for Iraqi and U.S. forces, enabling them to continue engaging in human rights abuses.
Growing Questions at Home
Large segments of the American public still embrace many of the justifications for the invasion of Iraq that have long since been proven false. For example, according to a Harris Poll at the end of December 2005, 41% of adult Americans believe that Saddam Hussein had “strong links to Al-Qaida;” 22% believe that Saddam Hussein “helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11;” 26% believe that Iraq “had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded;” and 24% believe that “several of the hijackers who attacked the United States on September 11 were Iraqis.” Furthermore, a plurality of Americans still accept the contention that despite a dozen years of debilitating sanctions, a barely functional military, and the complete absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) or offensive delivery systems, “Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to the United States.”
Notwithstanding these misconceptions, criticism of the Bush administration has been growing, forcing the president to finally acknowledge the widespread citizen opposition to the Iraq War. Bush says that he is willing to “listen to honest criticism” and that he has heard those who disagree with his policies, but he continues to dismiss such critics as “defeatists” who advocate policies that threaten the “security of our people” and who would “give up on this fight for freedom.”
Though acknowledging that restoring order to Iraq has been “more difficult than we expected” and that “reconstruction efforts and the training of Iraqi security forces started more slowly than we hoped,” President Bush has blamed these failures solely on the insurgency, which he describes as “Saddam loyalists and foreign terrorists.” In reality, the majority of the insurgency consists not of supporters of the former Iraqi dictator nor of foreign terrorists but of Iraq nationalists and Islamists resentful of an invasion and occupation by what they see as a Western imperialist power intent on controlling their country’s rich natural resources.
Having provoked this resentment, the Bush administration now uses the insurgency to justify the continued U.S. military occupation of Iraq. Though the original rationale for the Iraq War was Saddam’s alleged WMD program, by redefining the U.S. incursion as a war on terrorism, Washington rationalizes an indefinite U.S. military presence and condones the ongoing American dominance of Iraq’s economy.
Combating terrorism cannot be done by a single nation, no matter how strong a military it maintains. For a counterterrorism strategy to be effective, a multilateral approach is essential, but the Bush administration continues to reject this reality and insists on acting alone. Moreover, combating terrorism must employ a variety of tactics, not just military action. But once again, President Bush has failed to examine the root causes behind the violence.
In the face of growing criticism over its Iraq policies, the current administration has acknowledged mistakes such as inaccurate prewar claims of Saddam’s military capability and inadequate policies to address post-invasion stabilization. However, these statements appear calculated to defend the ongoing U.S.-led war rather than to admit fault. Though Bush’s acceptance of ultimate responsibility for the failures of U.S. policy is a positive step, no one has yet been held accountable for these errors.
For example, the president says he was “responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.” Yet he defends that decision, even though the invasion was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter and was based upon false claims that Iraq—already disarmed of offensive military capabilities by the United Nations—constituted a threat to U.S. national security.
Regarding his prewar contention that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons, an active nuclear program, and offensive weapons delivery capabilities, President Bush admits inaccuracy but attributes it to mistakes in intelligence gathering. He excuses his misjudgment by arguing that members of Congress and the intelligence branches of allied governments reviewed the same information and came to similar conclusions.
In reality, prior to the U.S. invasion, foreign governments noted that Iraq had failed to properly account for all proscribed weapons programs, and some countries suspected that Saddam had residual weapons or components banned under UN Security Council mandates, but most nations were dubious of U.S. and British claims that Iraq still constituted a military threat. Similarly, most members of Congress simply believed the intelligence presented to them by the administration rather than studies in scholarly journals and United Nations reports. It now appears that errors did not come from problems within the CIA but that administration officials deliberately manipulated intelligence data in order to frighten Congress and the American people into supporting an invasion.
Acknowledging obvious problems is a positive step for a president often considered arrogant and unaware of the havoc resulting from his decision to invade and occupy Iraq. However, until there is a serious re-evaluation of administration policies, there is little hope that such acknowledgements will improve America’s standing in the world or ease the suffering of the Iraqi people. What neither the administration nor Congress has acknowledged is that the invasion of Iraq would have been wrong even if Saddam Hussein still had WMDs and even if the post-invasion situation had been handled more responsibly.
Recently, leading figures in the Democratic Party who had largely supported President Bush’s Iraq policies are finally starting to voice their opposition in response to pressure from their constituents. However, the Democrats have yet to present much of an alternative. Their recently released defense plan entitled “Real Security” fails to renounce Bush’s preventive war doctrine and simply urges Iraqis to assume “primary responsibility for securing and governing their country with the responsible redeployment of U.S. forces.” Democrats and their apologists claim that a more forceful statement for withdrawal would risk their being portrayed as weak, but even their moderate plan was branded “a strategic retreat” by Vice President Dick Cheney. Republican Senator Christopher Bond was more honest. He noted essentially no difference between the Democratic position and that of the administration, observing, “It’s taken them all this time to figure out what we’ve been doing for a long time.”
Dealing with the Insurgency
There are dozens of armed groups in Iraq battling U.S. occupation forces and the U.S.-backed government. This resistance includes supporters of Saddam Hussein, well-armed remnants of his armed forces, other Baathists, independent nationalists, various Shiite wings, tribal-based groupings, and several Sunni Arab offshoots. The al-Qaida-inspired jihadists and the foreign fighters upon whom the Bush administration focuses represent a minority of the insurgency. Opposition is growing and, despite many differences ideologically and tactically, the various factions have demonstrated an increasing ability to coordinate their operations.
Beyond the many similarities between the war in Iraq and the one in Vietnam years ago, one key difference is in the nature of the opposition. Although some anti-Vietnam War activists naively downplayed the autocratic tendencies of the communist-led National Liberation Front (NLF), these rebels and the North Vietnamese government eventually brought relative peace and stability to the country. Despite current repression and misguided economic policies, the South Vietnamese have arguably suffered less in a reunified country under the communists than during the U.S.-led war under the corrupt and brutal Thieu regime in Saigon. Belying dire warnings from Washington prior to the war’s end, the NLF/North Vietnamese victory has not harmed the national security of the United States, and—other than its misadventure in Cambodia to root out the genocidal Khmer Rouge and a brief border war with China—Vietnam has coexisted relatively well with its neighbors and is now a full member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
The same cannot be said of the armed opposition to the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad. Unlike in Vietnam, the Iraqi resistance is not unified. As a result, toppling the current leaders will not likely bring peace but rather continued violence and disorder. The insurgents also include some decidedly nasty elements that are genuinely fascistic in orientation. In the power struggle that would follow a hypothetical overthrow of Iraq’s central government, it is quite possible that the new rulers would include militant jihadists, Saddam’s wing of the Ba’ath party, or other elements far worse than those currently in power or likely to be elected next month. There is also a real risk of the instability spilling over into adjacent countries.
There are many scary scenarios that could result from the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. The country could plunge into full-scale civil war, it might split into three parts (accompanied by ethnic cleansing), fundamentalist Islamic rule may emerge, Iranian extremists could exert undue influence, or this war-torn nation could become a training and logistical base for international terrorism. All of these possibilities should be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, these scenarios may even more likely occur if U.S. forces remain than if they withdraw. Bush’s war in Iraq is creating insurgents, including terrorists, faster than the Pentagon can kill them. The U.S. and British military presence is exacerbating ethnic and sectarian divisions, not lessening them. The overwhelming U.S. domination of the Baghdad government is undermining its sovereignty, weakening its standing with the Iraqi people, and compromising its ability to govern.
Many observers, even among those who opposed the U.S. invasion, concede that—although the principle of self-determination must be respected and although Iraqis are more than capable of governing themselves once stability and basic services are restored—current circumstances in Iraq may require active leadership from the outside. The United States, however, simply does not have the credibility to fill that role. There are sound proposals for an international peacekeeping force led by other Arab or Islamic states that should be considered, but these options will not be possible as long as the United States insists on orchestrating military operations.
All but the most extreme jihadists in the opposition would likely be open to a negotiated settlement to the conflict, but only if there was a clear timetable or specific achievable benchmarks for a complete U.S. withdrawal. With the bulk of the insurgents then allied with the Baghdad government, Iraqis could likely deal with the jihadists and other radical elements themselves, since the jihadists’ extreme ideology and terrorist tactics have little popular following in the country.
The Bush administration has thus far refused to discuss withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq. The new bases under construction (under no-bid contracts with Vice President Dick Cheney’s firm Halliburton) are elaborate, self-contained towns that appear to be intended for permanence. One being built outside Baghdad is more than 15 square miles. The new U.S. embassy under construction in Iraq is designed to include 21 buildings comprising residences for 1,000 American officials, a school, a warehouse, and its own utilities. As long as such an overbearing, neocolonial lightning-rod presence remains, there will be armed resistance.
There have also been reasonable proposals for the United States to maintain an over-the-horizon military presence or to conduct more modest military operations. Such a plan, however, would require putting trust in the very same people who have proven themselves profoundly ignorant about Iraq and totally inept at managing the postwar situation. Perhaps U.S. forces could provide tactical air support to Iraqi soldiers if Jihadists seize Ramadi and start marching on the Green Zone. But absent such a crisis, the only responsible option is a withdrawal of U.S. forces as soon as possible.
Americans from across the political spectrum have a kind of optimism and “can do” attitude that has served us well on many occasions. There are some situations, however, where a series of tragic mistakes and unfortunate circumstances preclude a positive outcome. Iraq may be just such a case.
The War at Home
This is my third annual article analyzing the U.S. war in Iraq and its impact. Unless the American people more fully mobilize to change U.S. policy, I will have to write these articles for many years to come.
This year’s Democratic primaries and the general election will be key tests of whether the U.S. citizenry will be willing to challenge the bipartisan support for the Iraq War, the doctrine of preventive war, and the exaggerated claims of foreign strategic threats brandished to frighten the populace into supporting war. Scores of U.S. representatives and senators who voted in October 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq are up for re-election this year, and most of them still support funding the war. If the majority of these pro-war Republican and Democratic lawmakers are re-elected, it will signal Washington politicians that the growing grassroots opposition to the war will not threaten their political careers. Despite the message it would send, some leaders in the peace movement are insisting that progressives work to re-elect pro-war members of Congress, including those who lied about Iraq still having WMDs, simply because they are Democrats. Such a strategy will virtually guarantee many more years of death and destruction in Iraq, and—as the 2004 presidential election showed us—such Democrats will probably end up losing anyway.
But a determined citizenry is the decisive factor. The anti-Vietnam War movement, the anti-apartheid struggle, the nuclear freeze campaign, and Central America solidarity efforts demonstrated that the particular individuals or party that the American people elect are less important than the choices we give them. As the old adage goes, “If the people lead, the leaders will follow.”
The United States will eventually have to leave Iraq. The question is, how many Americans and Iraqis will have to die in the meantime? For the United States to pull out, Bush and his bipartisan group of supporters would have to recognize that they cannot Americanize Iraq, establish U.S. hegemony in the Persian Gulf region, control Iraq’s vast oil reserves, or intimidate other nations by subduing an intractable insurgency. In short, the leadership of the greatest military superpower the world has ever known would be forced to accept a humiliating retreat.
It may be unrealistic to believe that the Bush administration would simply pull out of Iraq even in the face of growing popular opposition. The Nixon administration was unwilling to simply pull out of Vietnam. However, the anti-war movement forced Washington to negotiate with the South Vietnamese resistance and their North Vietnamese allies, which eventually led to the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Demanding negotiations that include a timetable for a total U.S. withdrawal may be the most realistic strategy that today’s anti-war movement could advocate.
Otherwise, President Bush will likely hold firm and leave the painful decisions to a Democratic successor, who would then take the blame for not “finishing the job.” This is why it is so important for Democrats to stop funding the war and to insist that President Bush negotiate a settlement to withdraw U.S. forces before he leaves office, thereby accepting full responsibility for the consequences.
Another question is, what will the United States learn from all this? Will it be just a tactical, stylistic precept that—in the words of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry—the war against Iraq was not a mistake but rather that “the way the president went to war is a mistake”? The next time the United States invades and occupies another country, should it be done the “right way” by a Democratic administration?
Will our lesson be merely a strategic realization that, even if Washington had not made what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “thousands” of errors in Iraq, invading and occupying a large Arab Muslim state with a strong history of nationalism is fraught with disaster?
Or will Americans finally embrace what we thought had been learned at the end of World War II—with the ratification of the United Nations Charter—that invading another country is just plain wrong?
http://www.fpif.org/articles/iraq_three_years_after_liberation
The Democrats and Iraqi WMDs: Bush is Right, Sort of…
Now that some Democrats are finally speaking out against the administration’s phony claims about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” conservative talk show hosts, columnists and bloggers have been dredging up scores of pre-invasion quotes by Democratic leaders citing non-existent Iraqi WMDs.
These defenders of the administration keep asking the question, “If President Bush lied, does that mean that the Democrats lied too?” The answer, unfortunately, is a qualified “yes.” Based on my conversations with Democratic members of Congress and their staffs in the weeks and months leading up to the invasion, there is reason to believe that at least some in the leadership of the Democratic Party is also guilty of having misled the American public regarding the supposed threat emanating from Iraq. At minimum, it could be considered criminal negligence.
As a result, though the Republicans have undoubtedly been hurt by their false statements on the subject, the Democrats are not likely to reap much benefit.
It did not have to be that way. Indeed, given the number of academics, former arms inspectors, strategic analysts, and others (me included) who had warned these Capitol Hill Democrats well prior to the October 2002 vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration’s WMD claims were not to be taken seriously, they have no one to blame but themselves. As a result of the Democrats choosing to disingenuously repeat these false claims of a supposed Iraqi threat in order to justify their vote to give President George W. Bush unprecedented war powers, Republicans are now able to portray the administration’s lies simply as honest mistakes.
It is certainly true that the Bush administration pressured members of the intelligence community to come up with data that would support their claims that Iraq was somehow a military threat to the United States and that they presented highly-selective and exaggerated “evidence” to Democratic lawmakers. It is also true that Republicans in Congress have blocked demands by some Democrats that a serious investigation be undertaken regarding the manipulation of intelligence regarding Iraq’s military capability.
However, there was enough counter-evidence published in reputable journals, United Nations reports, policy briefs from independent think tanks, and even from within the State Department and CIA that should have made it possible for the Democrats to have seen through the Bush administration’s lies if they wanted to. And there is some evidence to suggest that they didn’t want to: for example, Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate International Relations Committee, teamed up with his Republican counterparts to prevent those challenging Bush administration WMD claims prior to the invasion from testifying.
It should also be remembered that it was the Clinton administration, not the current administration, which first insisted-despite the lack of evidence-that Iraq had successfully concealed or re-launched its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Clinton’s fear-mongering around Iraqi WMDs began in 1997, several years after they had been successfully destroyed or rendered inoperable. Based upon the alleged Iraqi threat, Clinton ordered a massive four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, forcing the evacuation of inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA.) As many of us had warned just prior to the bombing, this gave Saddam Hussein the opportunity to refuse to allow the inspectors to return. It also provided a “lesson” that unilateral military action, not nonviolent law-based processes through inter-governmental organizations, was the means to respond to the threat of WMD proliferation.
Clinton was egged on to take such unilateral military action by leading Senate Democratic leaders — including then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Carl Levin, and others who signed a letter in October 1998 — urging the president “to take necessary actions, including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspected Iraqi sites, to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” Meanwhile, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was repeatedly making false statements regarding Iraq’s supposed possession of WMDs, even justifying the enormous humanitarian toll from the U.S.-led economic sanctions on Iraq on the grounds that “Saddam Hussein has . . . chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction.”
Congressional Democrats continued their efforts to scare the American people into believing the Iraq was a threat to U.S. national security after President Bush came to office. Connecticut senator Joseph Leiberman sent a letter to President Bush in December 2001 declaring that “There is no doubt that … Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated his weapons programs” and that Iraq’s “biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status.” Eight months later, in order to frighten the American people into supporting a U.S. takeover of that oil-rich land, the 2000 Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee even claimed “Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.”
Even after the International Atomic Energy Agency declared, after more than one thousand unannounced inspections throughout Iraq during the 1990s, that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program and despite the 2001 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that confirmed there was no evidence that such work had resumed, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller declared “There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons.” President Bush has since used the irresponsible rhetoric of the junior senator from West Virginia — now the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — to discredit Congressional opponents of the war, citing this quote in his recent speech at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska.
During the fall of 2002, in an effort to counter the efforts of those of us questioning the Bush administration’s WMD claims, congressional Democrats redoubled their efforts to depict Saddam Hussein as a threat to America’s national security. Democrats controlled the Senate at that point and could have blocked President Bush’s request for the authority to invade Iraq. However, in October, the majority of Democratic senators, led by Majority Leader Daschle and assistant Majority leader Harry Reid, voted to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing on the grounds that Iraq “poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States by among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, [and] actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.”
In a Senate speech defending his vote to authorize Bush to launch an invasion, Senator Kerry categorically declared, despite the lack of any credible evidence, that “Iraq has chemical and biological weapons” and even alleged that most elements of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs were “larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.” Furthermore, Kerry asserted that Iraq was “attempting to develop nuclear weapons,” backing up this accusation by falsely claiming that “all U.S. intelligence experts agree” with that assessment. The Massachusetts junior senator also alleged that “Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents [that] could threaten Iraq’s neighbors as well as American forces in the Persian Gulf.” Though it soon became evident that none of Kerry’s allegations were true, the Democratic Party still decided to reward him in 2004 with its nomination for president.
Kerry supporters claim he was not being dishonest in making these false claims but that he had been fooled by “bad intelligence” passed on by the Bush administration. However, well before Kerry’s vote to authorize the invasion, former UN inspector Scott Ritter personally told the senator and his senior staff that claims about Iraq still having WMDs or WMD programs were not based on valid intelligence. According to Ritter, “Kerry knew that there was a verifiable case to be made to debunk the president’s statements regarding the threat posed by Iraq’s WMDs, but he chose not to act on it.”
Joining Kerry in voting to authorize the invasion was North Carolina Senator John Edwards, who-in the face of growing public skepticism of the Bush administration’s WMD claims-rushed to the president’s defense in an op-ed article published in the Washington Post. In his commentary, Edwards claimed that Iraq was “a grave and growing threat” and that Congress should therefore “endorse the use of all necessary means to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” The Bush administration was so impressed with Edwards’ arguments that they posted the article on the State Department website. Again, despite the fact that Edwards’ claims were completely groundless, the Democratic Party rewarded him less than two years later with its nomination for vice president.
By 2004, it was recognized that the administration’s WMD claims were bogus and the war was not going well. The incumbent president and vice president, who had misled the nation into a disastrous war through phony claims of an Iraqi military threat, were therefore quite vulnerable to losing the November election. But instead of nominating candidates who opposed the war and challenged these false WMD claims, the Democrats chose two men who had also misled the nation into war by frightening the American public into believing that a war-ravaged Third World country on the far side of the planet threatened our nation’s security and advocated continued prosecution of the bloody counter-insurgency campaign resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation. Though enormous sums of money and volunteer hours which could have gone into anti-war organizing instead went into the campaigns of these pro-invasion senators, many anti-war activists refused on principle to support them. Not surprisingly, the Democrats lost.
Kerry’s failure to tell the truth continues to hurt the anti-war movement, as President Bush to this day quotes Kerry’s false statements about Iraq’s pre-invasion military capability as a means of covering up for the lies of his administration. For example, in his recent Veteran’s Day speech in Pennsylvania in which he attacked the anti-war movement, President Bush was able to say, “Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: ‘When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security’.”
Despite the consequences of putting forth nominees who failed to tell the truth about Iraq’s WMD capabilities, current polls show that New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who also made false claims about the alleged Iraqi threat, is the front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2008. In defending her vote authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq, Ms. Clinton claimed that “if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”
In his Veteran’s Day speech, Bush was able to deny any wrongdoing by his administration by noting how “more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senatewho had access to the same intelligencevoted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.” If the Democrats had instead decided to be honest and take a critical look at the phony intelligence being put forward by the administration, they would have said what so many of us were saying at the time: it was highly unlikely that Iraq still had such weapons. Instead, by also making false claims about Iraqi WMD capability, it not only resulted in their failure to re-take the House and Senate in the 2004 elections, but they have effectively shielded the Bush administration from the consequences of its actions.
Even some prominent congressional Democrats who did not vote to authorize the invasion were willing to defend the Bush administration’s WMD claims. When House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press in December 2002, she claimed: “Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical and biological weapons. There is no question about that.” Despite repeated requests for information, made by me and other San Francisco constituents, her staff has been unwilling to reveal what led the Democratic leader to make such a groundless claim with such certitude.
The consequence of these Democrats’ actions go well beyond their losses in the 2004 election. If the Democrats had been honest and acknowledged that there was no proof to support Bush administration claims of a reconstituted Iraqi WMD program, the Republicans would have been exposed as deliberately misleading the country into war, thereby making it far more difficult for them to get away with the kind of fear-mongering which threaten further U.S. military interventions in the region and increased waste of our nation’s resources into paying for bloated military budgets at the expense of pressing human needs at home. Instead, the prospects of a less militaristic foreign policy and the promises of a post-Cold War “peace dividend” may have been lost for the foreseeable future.
Some Democrats have defended their pre-invasion claims by citing the public summary of the 2002 NIE which appeared to confirm some of the Bush administration’s claims. However, there were a number of reasons to have been skeptical: this NIE was compiled in a much shorter time frame than is normally provided for such documents and the report expressed far more certainty regarding Iraq’s WMD capabilities than all reports from the previous five years despite the lack of additional data to justify such a shift. When the report was released, there was much stronger dissent within the intelligence community than about any other NIE in history and the longer classified version, which was available to every member of Congress, included these dissenting voices from within the intelligence community
Others have defended the Democrats by saying that if they had insisted on hard evidence to support the administration’s WMD claims they would have been accused of being weak on national defense. This excuse has little merit, however, since Republicans accuse Democrats of being weak on defense whatever they do. For example, even though congressional Democrats voted nearly unanimously to grant President Bush extraordinary war powers immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks and strongly supported the bombing of Afghanistan, this did not prevent the White House from falsely accusing Democrats of calling for “moderation and restraint” towards the Al-Qaeda terrorists and offering “therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Similarly, even though 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Kerry defended America’s right to unilaterally invade foreign countries in violation of the United Nations Charter and basic international legal standards, President Bush still accused him of believing that “in order to defend ourselves, we’d have to get international approval.”
In reality, it appears that the Democrats were as enthusiastic about the United States invading and occupying Iraq as were the Republicans and that the WMD claims were largely a means of scaring the American public into accepting the right of the United States to effectively renounce 20th century international legal norms in favor of the right of conquest. Indeed, Senators Kerry, Edwards, and Clinton all subsequently stated that they would have voted to authorize the invasion even if they knew Iraq did not have WMDs (though, in response to popular pressure, they have begun to express some doubts in recent weeks.) Given their apparent eagerness for an excuse to go to war in order to take over that oil-rich nation, they seem to have been willing to believe virtually anything the Bush administration said and dismiss the concerns of independent strategic analysts who saw through the falsehoods.
This may help explain why congressional Democrats had been so reluctant, until faced with enormous pressure from their constituents following the Libby indictments, to push for a serious inquiry regarding the Bush administration misleading the American public on Iraqi WMDs: the Democrats are guilty as well. It may also explain why pro-Democratic newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post were so unwilling to publicize the Downing Street memos and so belittled efforts by the handful of conscientious Democrats, such as Michigan Representative John Conyers, to uncover WMD deceptions. Such failures have led both newspapers’ ombudsmen to issue rare rebukes.
Even after it has become apparent that the Bush administration had been dishonest regarding Iraq’s alleged threat, Democrats still seem unwilling to take a more skeptical view of administration claims regarding alleged WMD threats from overseas. For example, congressional Democrats have overwhelmingly voted in favor of legislation targeting Syria and Iran based primarily on dubious claims by the Bush administration of these countries’ military capabilities and alleged threats to American security interests. Given that the vast majority of Democrats who hyped false WMD claims regarding Iraq were re-elected in 2004 anyway, they apparently believe that they have little to lose by again reinforcing the administration’s alarmist claims of threats to U.S. national security.
Perhaps we need to prove them wrong. The United States will almost certainly find itself in another war based on phony claims that the targeted country possesses WMDs unless members of Congress know there will be political consequences to their actions. As a result, in order to advance the cause of peace and a responsible foreign policy, it may be necessary to target all members of Congress up for re-election next year who made false statements regarding Iraq’s WMD capabilities – both Republican and Democrat – for defeat.
Libby Indictment May Open Door to Broader Iraq War Deceptions
The details revealed thus far from the investigation that led to the five-count indictment against I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby seem to indicate that the efforts to expose the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson went far beyond the chief assistant to the assistant chief. Though no other White House officials were formally indicted, the investigation appears to implicate Vice President Richard Cheney and Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, in the conspiracy. More importantly, the probe underscores the extent of administration efforts to silence those who questioned its argument that Iraq constituted a serious threat to the national security of the United States. Even if no other White House officials ever have to face justice as a result of this investigation, it opens one of the best opportunities the American public may have to press the issue of how the Bush administration led us into war.
Spurred by the Libby indictment, the Downing Street memo, and related British documents leaked earlier this year, some mainstream pundits and Democratic Party lawmakers are finally raising the possibility that the Bush administration was determined to go to war regardless of any strategic or legal justification and that White House officials deliberately exaggerated the threats posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in order to gain congressional and popular support to invade that oil-rich country. Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid stated for the first time on October 28, the day of the indictment, that the charges raise questions about “misconduct at the White House? in the period leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that must be addressed by President Bush, including â??how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the president. 1
Indeed, even prior to the return of United Nations inspectors in December 2002 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq four months later, it is hard to understand how anyone could have taken seriously the administration’s claims that Iraq was somehow a grave national security threat to the United States. And, despite assertions by administration apologists that â??everybodyâ? thought Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and an advanced nuclear program immediately prior to the March 2003 invasion, the record shows that such claims were strongly contested, even within the U.S. government.
Pre-invasion Skepticism
In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were many published reports challenging Bush administration claims regarding Iraq’s WMD capabilities. Reputable journals like Arms Control Today, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Middle East Policy, and others published articles systematically debunking accusations that Iraq had somehow been able to preserve or reconstitute its chemical weapons arsenal, had developed deployable biological weapons, or had restarted its nuclear program. Among the disarmament experts challenging the administration was Scott Ritter, an American who had headed the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) division that looked for hidden WMD facilities in Iraq. Through articles, interviews in the broadcast media, and Capitol Hill appearances, Ritter joined scores of disarmament scholars and analysts in making a compelling andâ??in hindsightâ??accurate case that Iraq had been qualitatively disarmed quite a few years earlier. Think tanks such as the Fourth Freedom Foundation and the Institute for Policy Studies also published a series of reports challenging the administration’s claims.
And there were plenty of skeptics from within the U.S. government. For example, the State Department’s intelligence bureau noted how the National Intelligence Estimateâ??so widely cited by war supporters of both partiesâ??did not add up to â??a compelling caseâ? that Iraq had â??an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.â? 2 Even the pro-war New Republic observed that CIA reports in early 2002 demonstrated that â??U.S. intelligence showed precious little evidence to indicate a resumption of Iraq’s nuclear program.â? 3A story circulated nationally by the Knight-Ridder wire service just before the congressional vote authorizing the invasion noted that â??U.S. intelligence and military experts dispute the administration’s suggestions that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose an imminent threat to the United Statesâ? and that intelligence analysts in the CIA were accusing the administration of pressuring the agency to highlight information that would appear to support administration policy and to suppress contrary information. 4
Late in the Clinton administration, the Washington Post reported U.S. officials as saying there was absolutely no evidence that Iraq had resumed its chemical and biological weapons programs 5 and there was no reason to believe that this assessment had changed. Just five weeks before the congressional vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq, another nationally syndicated Knight-Ridder story revealed that there was â??no new intelligence that indicates significant advances in their nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons programs.â? The article went on to note, â??Senior U.S. officials with access to top-secret intelligence on Iraq say they have detected no alarming increase in the threat that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein poses to American security.? 6
In an August 2002 report published for Foreign Policy in Focus, I argued that â??there is no firm proof that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction. 7 In an article in Tikkun just before the outbreak of the war, I discounted claims that pro-Israeli interests were pushing the United States to invade by noting, â??there are reasons to believe that Iraq may not have any more capability to attack Tel Aviv than it does to attack Washington. 8 In the cover story I wrote for the September 30, 2002 issue of The Nation magazine, I reminded readers that the International Atomic Energy Agency had declared in 1998 that, after exhaustive inspections and oversight, it had found nothing to suggest that Iraq still had a nuclear program. I also observed how inspectors from UNSCOM had estimated that at least 95% of Iraq’s chemical weapons program had been similarly accounted for and destroyed. 9 The remaining 5%, I argued, could have already been destroyed, but the Iraqis did not maintain adequate records.
I furthermore noted that the shelf life for the weaponized lethality of any purported Iraqi chemical and biological agents had long since expired. And I pointed out that Saddam Hussein was able to develop his earlier WMD programs only through the import of technology and raw materials from advanced industrialized countries, a scenario no longer possible due to the UN embargo in effect since 1990.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent inspections regime, virtually any aggressive military potential by Iraq was destroyed. Before UNSCOM was withdrawn, its agents reportedly oversaw the destruction of 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of live chemical-weapons agents, 48 missiles, six missile launchers, 30 missile warheads modified to carry chemical or biological agents, and hundreds of pieces of related equipment capable of producing chemical weapons. In late 1997, UNSCOM head Richard Butler reported that his agency had made â??significant progressâ? in tracking Iraq’s chemical weapons program and that 817 of the 819 Soviet-supplied long-range missiles had been accounted for. There were believed to be a couple of dozen Iraqi-made ballistic missiles unaccounted for, but these were of questionable caliber. There was no evidence that Iraq’s Scud missiles had even survived the Gulf War, nor did Iraq seem to have any more rocket launchers or engines. 10 UNSCOM also reported no evidence that Iraq had been concealing prohibited weapons subsequent to October 1995. 11 Even if Iraq had been able to engage in the mass production and deployment of nuclear or chemical weaponry, these weapons would almost certainly have been detected by satellite and overflight reconnaissance and destroyed in air strikes.
??Though the development of potential biological weapons would have been much easier to conceal, there was no evidence to suggest that Iraq had the ability to disperse their alleged biological agents successfully in a manner that could harm troops or a civilian population, given the rather complicated technology required. For example, a vial of biological weapons on the tip of a missile would almost certainly be destroyed on impact or dispersed harmlessly. Israeli military analyst Meir Stieglitz, writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, noted: “??There is no such thing as a long-range Iraqi missile with an effective biological warhead. No one has found an Iraqi biological warhead. The chances of Iraq having succeeded in developing operative warheads without tests are zero.”12
Frightening scenarios regarding mass fatalities from a small amount of anthrax assumed that Baghdad possessed the highly sophisticated means of distributing such toxins by missile or aircraft. To become a lethal weapon, highly concentrated amounts of anthrax spores must be inhaled and then left untreated by antibiotics until the infection is too far advanced. The most realistic means of anthrax dispersal would be from an aircraft. For the attack to be successful, the winds would have to be just right, no rain could fall, the spray nozzles could not clog, the target population could not be vaccinated, and everyone would need to linger around the area chosen for the attack. Given this unlikely scenario, one can understand why in autumn 2001 unknown terrorists chose instead to send spores through the mail to indoor destinations in the eastern United States. This was found to be a relatively efficient means of distribution, even though it resulted in only a handful of deaths.
It is hard to imagine that an Iraqi aircraft, presumably some kind of drone, could somehow penetrate the air space of neighboring countries, much less far-off Israel, without being shot down. Most of Iraq’s neighbors have sophisticated anti-aircraft capability, and Israel has the most sophisticated regional missile defense system in the world. As one British scientist put it: “To say they have found enough weapons to kill the world several times over is equivalent to the statement that a man who produces a million sperm a day can thus produce a million babies a day. The problem in both cases is one of delivery systems.?” 13
In short, in the months and years leading up to the invasion, it should have been apparent that all of Iraq’s nuclear weapons-related material and nearly all of its chemical weapons were accounted for and destroyed; virtually all systems capable of delivering WMDs were also accounted for and destroyed; there were no apparent means by which key components for WMDs could have been produced domestically; and, a strict embargo on military hardware, raw materials, and WMD technology had been in place for more than a dozen years. No truly objective observer, therefore, could have come to any other conclusion than that it was highly unlikely that Iraq still had any offensive WMD capability and that it was quite possible that Iraq may have indeed completely rid itself of its proscribed weaponry, delivery systems, and weapons production facilities.
It also became apparent early on that at least some of the evidence of Iraqi WMDs offered by the Bush administration was highly questionable and was contradicted by independent sources. Furthermore, given that the United States supported Saddam Hussein’s government in the 1980s when it really did have chemical weapons, an advanced biological and nuclear weapons program, and hundreds of long-range missiles and other sophisticated delivery systems, one finds it hard to imagine how Iraq could be a threat after these dangerous weapons had been destroyed or otherwise rendered harmless. Indeed, virtually every U.S. military intervention in the last half century (from the alleged “??unprovoked attacks”? on U.S. vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin to the supposed “endangered American medical students”? in Grenada to the nonexistent “chemical weapons factory controlled by Osama bin Laden”? in Sudan) ??has been based upon purported evidence presented by various administrations that later proved to be false.
As a result, one would have thought that more people in Congress and the media would have approached the question of Iraq’s WMDs as would a public defender of an admittedly disreputable client in the face an overzealous prosecutor with a history of fudging the facts: look skeptically at the government’s case for holes in the evidence and unsubstantiated conclusions. They were not hard to find.
Killing the Messengers
The outing of Valerie Plame Wilson’s CIA affiliation was apparently a means of punishing Ambassador Joseph Wilson for going public with his charges that the Bush administration had misled the public with its claims regarding Iraq ‘s WMD programs. The leak served as a warning to any who would dare challenge administration efforts to frighten the American public into accepting an illegal and unnecessary war.
As first reported by the Washington Post, Scooter Libby and Vice President Dick Cheney made frequent trips to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to pressure analysts to come up with assessments that would “fit with the Bush administration’s policy objectives.” 14 CIA analysts who resisted such manipulation were “beaten down defending their assessments.”? 15
Indeed, virtually all of us who refused to buy into the bipartisan hysteria regarding the phony “Iraqi threatâ? were subjected to systematic efforts to undermine our credibility. New Republic publisher Martin Peretz accused me of â??supporting Saddam Hussein,” Sean Hannity of Fox News suggested that my research was funded by terrorists, and the National Review Online falsely accused me of anti-Semitic statements that I never made. Scott Ritter, a Marine veteran and registered Republican, was labeled a traitor, and administration supporters started spreading rumors that he was a pedophile. When International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Mohammed el Baradei reiterated that there was no evidence of Iraq attempting to restart its nuclear program, Cheney insisted that “Mr. El Baradei is frankly wrong.”? The vice president then falsely claimed that the IAEA had “consistently underestimated or missed what it was that Saddam Hussein was doing”? 16 and insisted that there was no validity to the IAEA’s assessments, despite their more than 1000 inspections (mostly without warning) ??in Iraq since the early 1990s. Later, the Bush administration had El Baradei’s phone wiretapped in an unsuccessful effort to find information to discredit him. 17
When administration skeptics weren’t being attacked, we were being ignored. In September 2002, a month before the vote to authorize the invasion, I contacted the chief foreign policy aide to one of my senators, Democrat Barbara Boxer of California, to let him know of my interest in appearing before an upcoming hearing on Capitol Hill regarding the alleged threat that Iraq posed to the United States. He acknowledged that he and other staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were familiar with my writing on the topic and that I would be a credible witness. He passed on my request to a staff member of the committee’s ranking Democrat, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware. I was never invited, however. Nor was Scott Ritter, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, or anyone else who expressed skepticism regarding the administration’s WMD claims. The bipartisan Senate committee only allowed those who were willing to come forward with an exaggerated view of Iraq ‘s military potential to testify.
The basis of the constitutional framework of checks and balances between the three branches of government rests in part upon the belief that Congress does not allow the executive branch to remain unquestioned on issues of national importance. Senator Biden, however, was apparently determined to give the Bush administration a free ride. In the words of Aldous Huxley, â??The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.â? 18 As he prepares for a likely presidential run in 2008, serious questions must be raised regarding Biden’s commitment to democracy.
Public opinion polls at the time showed that the only reason that a majority of Americans would support going to war was if Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the United States. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, ruled out other justifications for an invasion, stating, â??The president has not linked authority to go to war to any of those elements.â? 19 It is not surprising, then, that the administration was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who recognized that Iraq did not have the weapons programs and delivery systems that the administration claimed.
The Complicity of the Democrats
These bogus claims by the Bush administration regarding Iraq’s alleged military threat are now well-known and have been frequently cited. And Republicans in Congress have blocked demands by some Democrats that a serious investigation be undertaken regarding the manipulation of intelligence regarding Iraq’s military capability.
It is important to recognize, however, that the leadership of the Democratic Party was also guilty of misleading the American public regarding the supposed threat emanating from Iraq . It was the Clinton administration, not the current administration, which first insistedâ??despite the lack of evidenceâ??that Iraq had successfully concealed or relaunched its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Clinton’s fear-mongering around Iraqi WMDs began in 1997, several years after they had been successfully destroyed or rendered inoperable. Based upon the alleged Iraqi threat, Clinton ordered a massive four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, forcing the evacuation of UNSCOM and IAEA inspectors. As many of us had warned just prior to the bombing, this gave Saddam Hussein the opportunity to refuse to allow the inspectors to return.
Clinton was egged on by leading Senate Democratic leaders, including Minority Leader Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Carl Levin, and others who signed a letter in October 1998 urging the president â??to take necessary actions, including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspected Iraqi sites, to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.â? 20 Meanwhile, Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was repeatedly making false statements regarding Iraq’s supposed possession of WMDs.
During Fall 2002, in an effort to counter and discredit those of us questioning the Bush administration’s WMD claims, congressional Democrats redoubled their efforts to depict Saddam Hussein as a threat to America’s national security. Democrats controlled the Senate at that point and could have blocked President Bush’s request for the authority to invade Iraq. However, in October, the majority of Democratic senators, including Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Assistant Minority Leader Harry Reid, voted to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing on the grounds that Iraq â??poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States â?¦ by â?¦ among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, [and] actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.â? 21
In a Senate speech defending his vote to authorize Bush to launch an invasion, Senator Kerry categorically declared, despite the lack of any credible evidence, that â??Iraq has chemical and biological weaponsâ? and even alleged that most elements of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs were â??larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.â? Furthermore, Kerry asserted that Iraq was â??attempting to develop nuclear weapons,â? backing up this accusation by falsely claiming that â??all U.S. intelligence experts agreeâ? with that assessment. The Massachusetts junior senator also alleged that â??Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents [that] could threaten Iraq’s neighbors as well as American forces in the Persian Gulf.â? Though it soon became evident that none of Kerry’s allegations were true, the Democratic Party rewarded him in 2004 with its nomination for president.
Kerry supporters claim he was not being dishonest in making these false claims but that he had been fooled by â??bad intelligenceâ? passed on by the Bush administration. However, well before Kerry’s vote to authorize the invasion, former UN inspector Scott Ritter personally told the senator and his senior staff that claims about Iraq still having WMDs or WMD programs were not based on valid intelligence. According to Ritter, â??Kerry knew that there was a verifiable case to be made to debunk the president’s statements regarding the threat posed by Iraq’s WMDs, but he chose not to act on it.â? 22
Joining Kerry in voting to authorize the invasion was North Carolina Senator John Edwards, whoâ??in the face of growing public skepticism of the Bush administration’s WMD claimsâ??rushed to the president’s defense in an op-ed article published in the Washington Post . In his commentary, Edwards claimed that Iraq was â??a grave and growing threatâ? and that Congress should therefore â??endorse the use of all necessary means to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.â? 23 The Bush administration was so impressed with Edwards’ arguments that they posted the article on the State Department website. Again, despite the fact that Edwards’ claims were groundless, the Democratic Party rewarded him less than two years later with its nomination for vice president.
By 2004, it was recognized that the administration’s WMD claims were bogus and the war was not going well. The incumbent president and vice president, who had misled the nation into a disastrous war through false claims, were therefore quite vulnerable to losing the November election. But instead of nominating candidates who opposed the war and challenged these false WMD claims, the Democrats chose two men who had also misled the nation into war through the same false claims and who favored the continued prosecution of the war. Not surprisingly, the Democrats lost.
Kerry’s failure to tell the truth continues to hurt the anti-war movement, as President Bush to this day quotes Kerry’s false statements about Iraq’s pre-invasion military capability as a means of covering up for the lies of his administration. For example, in his recent Veteran’s Day speech in Pennsylvania in which he attacked the anti-war movement, President Bush was able to say, â??Many of these critics supported my opponent during the last election, who explained his position to support the resolution in the Congress this way: â??When I vote to give the President of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat, to our security’.â?
Despite the consequences of putting forth nominees who failed to tell the truth about Iraq’s WMD capabilities, current polls show that New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who also made false claims about the alleged Iraqi threat, is the front-runner for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2008. In defending her vote authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq, Mrs. Clinton said in October 2002, â??It is clear â?¦ that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.â? 24
In his Veteran’s Day speech, Bush was able to deny any wrongdoing by his administration by noting how â??more than a hundred Democrats in the House and the Senateâ??who had access to the same intelligenceâ??voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power.â? If the Democrats had instead decided to be honest and take a critical look at the phony intelligence being put forward by the administration, they would have said what so many of us were saying at the time: it was highly unlikely that Iraq still had such weapons. Instead, by also making false claims about Iraqi WMD capability, it not only resulted in their failure to re-take the House and Senate in the 2004 elections, but they have effectively shielded the Bush administration from the consequences of its actions.
Even some prominent congressional Democrats who did not vote to authorize the invasion were willing to defend the Bush administration’s WMD claims. When House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press in December 2002, she claimed: â??Saddam Hussein certainly has chemical and biological weapons. There is no question about that.â? 25 Despite repeated requests for information, her staff has been unwilling to reveal what led the Democratic leader to make such a groundless claim with such certitude.
Now that the Democrats are finally speaking out against the administration’s phony WMD claims, conservative talk show hosts, columnists, and bloggers have been dredging up scores of pre-invasion quotes by Democratic leaders citing non-existent Iraqi WMDs. As a result, though the Republicans have undoubtedly been hurt by their false statements on the subject, the Democrats are not likely to reap much benefit. Given the number of us that had warned them beforehand, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Some Democrats have defended their pre-invasion claims by citing the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction from the CIA, which appeared to confirm some of the Bush administration’s claims. However, there were a number of reasons to have been skeptical: For starters, this NIE was compiled in a much shorter time frame than is normally provided for such documents. Oddly, the report expressed far more certitude regarding Iraq’s WMD capabilities than all reports from the previous five years despite the lack of additional data to justify such a shift. When the report was released, there was much stronger dissent within the intelligence community than about any other declassified NIE.
Some have defended the Democrats by saying that if they had insisted on hard evidence to support the administration’s WMD claims, they would have been accused of being weak on national defense. This excuse has little merit, however, since Republicans accuse Democrats of being weak on defense whatever they do. For example, even though congressional Democrats voted nearly unanimously to grant President Bush extraordinary war powers immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks and strongly supported the bombing of Afghanistan, this patriotic exhibit did not prevent the White House from falsely accusing Democrats of calling for â??moderation and restraintâ? and offering â??therapy and understanding for our attackers.â? 26 Similarly, even though 2004 Democratic presidential nominee Kerry defended America’s right to unilaterally invade foreign countries in violation of the United Nations Charter and basic international legal standards, President Bush still accused him of believing that â??in order to defend ourselves, we’d have to get international approval.â? 27
In reality, it appears that the Democrats were as enthusiastic about the United States invading and occupying Iraq as were the Republicans and that the WMD claims were largely a means of scaring the American public into accepting the right of the United States to effectively renounce 20 th century international legal norms in favor of the right of conquest. Indeed, Senators Kerry, Edwards, and Clinton all subsequently stated that they would have voted to authorize the invasion even if they knew Iraq did not have WMDs. Given their apparent eagerness for an excuse to go to war in order to take over that oil-rich nation, they seem to have been willing to believe virtually anything the Bush administration said and dismiss the concerns of independent strategic analysts who saw through the falsehoods.
This may help explain why congressional Democrats had been so reluctant, until faced with enormous pressure from their constituents following the Libby indictments, to push for a serious inquiry regarding the Bush administration’s misleading the American public on Iraqi WMDs: the Democrats were guilty as well. It may also explain why pro-Democratic newspapers such as the New York Times and Washington Post were so unwilling to publicize the Downing Street memos and so belittled efforts by the handful of conscientious Democrats such as John Conyers to uncover WMD deceptions. Such failures have led both newspapers’ ombudsmen to issue rare rebukes.
Even after it has become apparent that the Bush administration had been dishonest regarding Iraq’s alleged threat, Democrats still seem unwilling to take a more skeptical view of administration claims regarding alleged WMD threats from overseas. For example, congressional Democrats have overwhelmingly voted in favor of legislation targeting Syria and Iran based primarily on dubious claims by the Bush administration of these countries’ military capabilities and alleged threats to American security interests. Given that the vast majority of Democrats who hyped false WMD claims regarding Iraq were re-elected in 2004 anyway, they apparently believe that they have little to lose by again reinforcing the administration’s alarmist claims of threats to U.S. national security.
Current Ramifications
There is growing awareness that the American people were lied to by their government and needlessly drawn into war. How does this deception impact what the United States should do regarding Iraq today?
Three years ago politicians in both parties successfully scared the American people into believing that the national security of the United States would somehow be threatened if we did not invade Iraq. These same politicians now expect us to believe that U.S. national security will be jeopardized unless we continue to prosecute the war.
Some thoughtful activists and intellectuals who opposed the invasion of Iraq have since concluded that because the elected Iraqi government is reasonably representative of the majority of the Iraqi people, because much of the insurgent movement is dominated by fascistic Islamists and Baathists, and because the Iraqi government is too weak to defend itself, U.S. armed forces should remain. These activists argue that even though the premise of the invasion was a lie and the occupation was tragically mishandled, the consequences of a precipitous U.S. military withdrawal would result in a far worse situation than exists now.
Such a case might be worth consideration if the Bush administration and congressional leaders had demonstrated that they had the integrity, knowledge, foresight, and competence to successfully lead a counterinsurgency war in a complex, fractured society on the far side of the planet. To support the continued prosecution of the Iraq War, however, would require trusting the same politicians who hoodwinked the country into that war in the first place. A growing number of Americans, therefore, have come to recognize that any administration dishonest enough to make the ludicrous pre-war claims of an Iraqi military threat and any Congress thatâ??through whatever combination of dishonesty or stupidityâ??chose to reinforce these false assertions simply cannot be trusted to successfully control the insurgency, extricate the United States from further military involvement, and successfully facilitate Iraq’s development as a peaceful, secure, democratic country.
End Notes
1. Senator Harry Reid, remarks before the floor of the U.S. Senate, Oct. 28, 2005.
2. Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, Simon & Schuster, 2004.
3. John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman, â??The First Casualty: The Selling of the Iraq War,â? The New Republic, June 30, 2003.
4. Jonathan Landay, â??CIA Report Reveals Analysts Split over Extent of Iraqi Nuclear Threat,â? Knight-Ridder Newspapers, October 4, 2002.
5. Karen DeYoung, â??Baghdad Weapons Programs Dormant: Iraq’s Inactivity Puzzles U.S. Officials,â? Washington Post, p A 19, July 15, 1999.
6. Jonathan Landay, â??Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials,â? Knight-Ridder Newspapers, September 6, 2002.
7. Stephen Zunes, â??Why Not to Wage War with Iraq,â? Foreign Policy in Focus Talking Points, Aug. 27, 2002.
8. Stephen Zunes, â?? Iraq, the United States, and the Jews,â? Tikkun, March 2003.
9. Stephen Zunes, â??The Case Against War,â? The Nation, September 30, 2002.
10. Institute for Policy Studies, â?? Iraq ‘s Current Military Capability,â? February 1998.
11. Barton Gellman, â??Iraq Cooperating on Inspections: Failure to Find Weapons May Diminish Support for UNSCOM,â? p A27, March 20, 1998.
12. Cited by Rep Cynthia McKinney, on PBS â??Newshour,â? February 10, 1998.
13. Dr. Julian Perry Robinson, The Independent, March 7, 1998.
14. Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, â??Some Iraq Analysts Felt Pressure from Cheney Visits,â? Washington Post, p A1, June 5, 2003.
15. Seymour Hersch, â??The Stovepipe: How Conflicts Between the Bush Administration and the Intelligence Community Marred the Reporting on 16. 16. Iraq’s Weapons,â? New Yorker, October 27, 2003.
17. NBC, Meet the Press, March 16, 2003.
18. Dafna Linzer, â??IAEA Leader’s Phone Tapped: U.S. Pores Over Transcripts to Try to Oust Nuclear Chief, Washington Post, December 12, 2004, p. A01.
19. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, ch. 6.
20. Cited in Jonathan Schell, â??The Empire Backfires,â? The Nation, March 11, 2004.
21. Letter to President Bill Clinton, Oct. 9, 1998.
22. Senate Joint Resolution 45 authorizing the use of United States armed forces against Iraq, October 11, 2002.
23. Scott Ritter, â??Challenging Kerry on His Iraq Vote,â? Boston Globe, August 5, 2004.
24. John Edwards, â??Congress Must Be Clear,â? Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2002.
25. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), October 10, 2002.
26. NBC, Meet the Press, December 15, 2002.
27. Karl Rove from a July 22, 2005 speech in New York. White House spokesperson Scott McClelland defended his remarks, claiming that President Bush’s chief political adviser was â??simply pointing out the different philosophies and different approaches when it comes to winning the war on terrorism.â? See Jim Abrams, â??Dems Say Rove Should Apologize or Resign,â? Associated Press, June 23, 2005.
Third Bush-Kerry debate, in Tempe, Arizona, October 13, 2004.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/libby_indictment_may_open_door_to_broader_iraq_war_deceptions
Karen Hughes’ Indonesia Visit Underscores Bush Administration’s PR Problems
It is doubtful that the Bush administration will be very successful advancing America’s image in the Islamic world as long as its representatives have such trouble telling the truth.
A case in point took place on October 21, when U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes was talking before a group of university students in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country. As she has found elsewhere in her visits in the Islamic world, there is enormous popular opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ongoing U.S. counter-insurgency war.
To justify the U.S. takeover of that oil-rich country, recognized in most of the world as a flagrant violation of international law, Ms. Hughes falsely claimed that “The consensus of the world intelligence community was that Saddam was a very dangerous threat.” In reality, however, the vast majority of the world’s intelligence community recognized that the government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had been severely weakened and successfully contained through the UN-supervised destruction of its weapons of mass destruction and offensive delivery systems during the 1990s and the UN-imposed sanctions which prevented Iraq from rebuilding such an arsenal.
Ms. Hughes also noted that Saddam Hussein “had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people,” neglecting to mention that the Iraqi regime’s use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq took place back in 1988, before the UN disarmament program eliminated these weapons and a full fifteen years prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
She continued by claiming Saddam Hussein “murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people using poison gas,” and, when later asked by foreign journalists about that claim, she stated that the figure was “close to 300,000.” While the use of chemical agents to massacre civilians is a serious war crime in any case, this is about sixty times the figure most observers give for the civilian death toll from such attacks by Saddam’s regime.
The total number of violent deaths inflicted on behalf of Saddam Hussein over his quarter century in power may indeed come close to 300,000. Virtually all those killings, however, took place more than a dozen years prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003. Thanks to unprecedented restrictions imposed by the United Nations Security Council which prevented the Baghdad government from deploying its armed forces over most of the country, combined with the UN-supervised disarmament program, Saddam Hussein’s ability to inflict such terror on the Iraqi population subsequent to 1991 was severely limited.
While a strong case could have been made for military intervention in Iraq under the genocide convention during Saddam’s Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, this is no justification for an invasion fifteen years after the fact. Ironically, the United States was actively supporting Saddam Hussein’s government during this period, supplying his regime with military aid and generous loans.
As a result, the Bush administration’s justification of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on humanitarian grounds is as disingenuous as the claims that it was an act of self-defense. Indeed, the number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq in the two and a half years since the U.S. invasion is much greater than in the two and a half years prior to the invasion and is a major source of anti-American sentiment in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world.
It is ironic that Ms. Hughes attempted to justify the invasion on the brutality of the Iraqi regime while she was in Indonesia, a country which suffered for more than three decades under an even more brutal dictatorship. General Suharto, who was ousted in a largely nonviolent popular uprising in 1998, was responsible for a far greater number of civilian deaths than was Saddam Hussein.
Soon after seizing power in 1965, Suharto slaughtered over half a million alleged supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party. His invasion of East Timor in 1975 resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 civilians, nearly one-third of that island nation’s population. Many hundreds more died in massacres in Tanjung Priok in Jakarta’s port area in 1984, in Lampung on the southern tip of Sumatra in 1989, and in Dili, East Timor in 1991.
Throughout this period, rather than threatening an invasion or even sanctions, both Republican and Democratic administrations sent billions of dollars worth of U.S. taxpayer-funded armaments to prop up this bloody dictatorship.
Unlike Saddam, who went on trial the same week of Hughes’ visit to Indonesia, Suharto lives comfortably in retirement and remains active behind the scenes. Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has visited the ex-dictator at his Jakarta residence to pay his respects and Suharto continues to appear at major functions. The Bush administration has never expressed any objections to Suharto’s impunity nor have they called for bringing this mass murderer to justice.
As long as the U.S. government continues to display such a lack of integrity, no amount of public relations spin by Karen Hughes or anyone else can improve America’s image in Indonesia or anywhere else in the Islamic world.
Bush Again Resorts to Fear-Mongering to Justify Iraq Policy
President George W. Bush’s October 6 address at the National Endowment for Democracy illustrated his administration’s increasingly desperate effort to justify the increasingly unpopular U.S. war in Iraq. The speech focused upon the Bush administration’s claim that the Iraqi insurgency against U.S. occupation forces somehow constituted a grave threat to the security of the United States and the entire civilized world.
The speech focused almost entirely the Iraq War. Yet it began with an eloquent remembrance of the horror of September 11, 2001, despite the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, which was committed by the Saudi-led terrorist group al-Qaeda then based in Afghanistan. President Bush then listed a series of terrorist attacks by radical Islamists elsewhere in the world in subsequent years, which again had no connection to Iraq, other than the possibility that some of these attacks might have been prevented had the United States instead chosen to put its resources into fighting al-Qaeda rather than invading Iraq.
On a positive note, Bush reiterated the fact that terrorism in the name of Islam is contrary to the Islamic faith. He acknowledged to a degree he had not yet done so publicly that many of these movements are part of a loose network of local cells rather than a centrally controlled armed force.
Yet much of his speech contained the same misleading rhetoric regarding U.S. policy toward Iraq and the nature of the radical Islamists that has led the United States into its disastrous confrontation in Iraq and has served to weaken America’s defenses against the real threat al-Qaeda poses.
Some Samples of President Bush’s Misleading Statements
“These extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace.”
While these extremist groups indeed want to limit American and other Western influence in the region and their ideology certainly does not support democratic institutions or peaceful means to advance their goals, the problems that radical Islamists have with the American role in the Middle East is not related to America’s stand in support for democracy and peace. As made clear by their manifestoes and by interviews with individual leaders, the radical Islamist opposition to the United States stems primarily from U.S. support for autocratic Arab governments, the invasion of Iraq, the ongoing U.S. military presence in the region, U.S. backing for the Israeli occupation, and related concerns which have nothing to do with democracy and peace.
“Al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their ‘resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands.’ Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993–only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.”
Al-Qaeda has existed for barely a dozen years. The network didn’t exist a quarter century ago. Nor is there any indication that they “expect us to run” when hit. If anything, their hope and expectation is that the U.S. will continue to overreact through disproportionate and misapplied military force that will further contribute to the dramatic increase in anti-Americanism throughout the Islamic world and thereby increase their ranks.
The “sad history of Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993” was not the belated withdrawal of U.S. forces but that the U.S. intervened militarily in those countries in the first place. The resistance that fought U.S. Marines in Lebanon was composed of primarily Shiite and Druze militiamen who have never had any affiliation with al-Qaeda, which is a Salafi Sunni organization. In Somalia, U.S. forces battled militiamen affiliated with a number of Somali clans, none of which had any connection with al-Qaeda. Had President Reagan and President Clinton instead decided to keep American forces engaged in the factionalized civil wars in Lebanon and Somalia, it would have likely increased the numbers and influence of Islamic extremists in those countries and elsewhere, just as the failure to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq has done.
“The militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they have set their sight on Iraq….We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.”
While small groups of radical Islamists have engaged in a series of terrorist bombings and assassinations in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Jordan in recent years, they never had much of a popular following and were never a serious threat to the survival of any of those regimes.
They succeeded in Afghanistan in large part due to the U.S. government sending as much as $5 billion in military aid to radical Islamic groups back in the 1980s during their fight with Afghanistan’s Communist government and its Soviet backers.
The “vacuum” that would allow radical Islamists to pose a challenge to the Iraqi government has already taken place as a direct result of the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power by U.S. forces. Prior to the U.S. invasion, the only major base of operations for such radical Islamists was Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi’s encampment in the far northeastern corner of Iraq, located within the autonomous Kurdish areas where Saddam’s government had no control. Now, as a result of the U.S. invasion, Al-Zarqawi’s militants operate throughout the Sunni heartland of central Iraq and their numbers have dramatically increased.
“The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.”
It is quite possible that these Salafi Sunni revivalists indeed harbor such fantasies, but they are just that–fantasies. The United States has more than a dozen allied governments in the region that have the motivation and ability to resist these fanatics, who have relatively few adherents within these or any other county in the Islamic world outside Iraq.
There are dozens of armed groups in Iraq battling U.S. occupation forces and the U.S.-backed government, which include supporters of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, other Baathists, independent nationalists, various Shiite factions, tribal-based groupings, and a number of Sunni Arab factions. The al-Qaeda inspired jihadists whom Bush focused upon in his speech are probably responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks against Iraqi civilians, but they represent only a small minority of the insurgency.
Even in the unlikely event of the overthrow of the Iraqi government, it is extremely doubtful that these more extreme elements would end up in control.
“Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, ‘We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.’ And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history.”
The idea that Al-Zarqawi could somehow obtain the power of Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin is utterly ludicrous. He lacks the resources, the state apparatus, the popular support, the propaganda machinery, the disciplined political party, the armed force, the industrial base, or any other attribute that could conceivably give him that kind of power. Bush is cynically playing on the fears of American people and shows a callous disrespect to the millions who died under these totalitarian rulers.
“Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others . . .”
What Bush fails to note is that much of the suffering and frustration felt by the Iraqi people is a direct result of U.S. policy. Not only did the Iraqi people suffer under decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship (which was backed by the United States during the peak of his repression in the 1980s), the U.S. led one of most intense bombing campaigns in world history against Iraq in 1991, resulting in severe damage to the civilian infrastructure. This was followed by a dozen years of crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions that resulted in the deaths hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children, from malnutrition and preventable diseases. As a result of the U.S. invasion, at least 20,000 civilians have died violent deaths, the country is facing a low-level civil war and an unprecedented crime wave, basic utilities have yet to be restored on a regular basis, unemployment is at an all-time high, there are mounting ethnic tensions which threaten to tear the country apart, priceless national artifacts have been stolen or destroyed from museums and archeological sites, and infant mortality is way up.
“The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and enablers. They have been sheltered by authoritarian regimes, allies of convenience like Syria and Iran…”
The Bush administration has failed to present any credible evidence that either Syria or Iran is backing the radical Islamists.
On the contrary, Iran is actively supporting the Iraqi government, which is dominated by pro-Iranian Shiite parties and whose leadership spent years of exile in Iran. The Iranian government supports the proposed constitution and backed last January’s elections. In fact, Iran has provided security assistance and training to the Iranian government in their counter-insurgency efforts. The Iranian regime has long opposed al-Qaeda and nearly went to war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan several years ago.
Similarly, the Syrian government is a secular nationalist regime dominated by members of the Alawite branch of Islam, which is far closer to the Shiites than the Sunnis. Syria has provided the United States with valuable intelligence against al-Qaeda and has tracked down, jailed, tortured, and killed al-Qaeda suspects.
“Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001–and al-Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.”
No one has claimed that the Islamist radicals responsible for the massacre in Beslan were in any way motivated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Those terrorists were Chechen nationalists fighting against the Russian occupation of their homeland. Even the CIA, top Pentagon officials and other U.S. government agencies have acknowledged that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the bloody counter-insurgency operations that followed has greatly enhanced the appeal of radical Islamist groups and enhanced their recruitment.
“Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence–the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago… No act of ours invited the rage of the killers–and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.”
No major opponent of the U.S. war in Iraq and other U.S. policies in the Middle East is calling for concessions, bribes or appeasement as a means of influencing the behavior of al-Qaeda and like-minded extremists. A strong case can be made, however, that many U.S. policies have strengthened these movements by encouraging the growth of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world, thereby increasing the appeal in the Islamic world of extremist ideologies.
The U.S. should cease its unconditional military, diplomatic and economic support for autocratic Middle Eastern regimes and Israeli occupation forces, not for the sake of appeasing terrorists, but because no country that espouses freedom and the rule of law should support governments that engage in gross and systematic human rights violations.
“The United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them, because they’re equally as guilty of murder. Any government that chooses to be an ally of terror has also chosen to be an enemy of civilization. And the civilized world must hold those regimes to account.”
If Bush really believes this, it would behoove him to start with the government over which he has the most control: that of the United States. Some known terrorists have sought sanctuary in the U.S. and the Bush administration has refused to bring them to justice through extradition or trial. A recent high-profile case involves the exiled Cuban terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, whom the U.S. refuses to extradite to Venezuela to faces charges for masterminding the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner which resulted in the deaths of all 73 passengers and crew.
“Some observers also claim that America would be better off by cutting our losses and leaving Iraq now. This is a dangerous illusion, refuted with a simple question: Would the United States and other free nations be more safe, or less safe, with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people, and its resources? Having removed a dictator who hated free peoples, we will not stand by as a new set of killers, dedicated to the destruction of our own country, seizes control of Iraq by violence.”
This is totally spurious argument. By virtually all accounts of scholars and journalists familiar with the various constituent elements of the Iraqi insurgency, the vast majority of the insurgents are not dedicated to the destruction of the United States. They merely want foreign occupation forces out of their country. Radical Islamist elements led by Al-Zarqawi and other supporters of bin Laden had virtually no presence in Iraq until after the United States invaded the country and grew in subsequent months as a reaction to the large-scale civilian casualties from U.S. counter-insurgency tactics. As a result, a strong case can be made that the continued prosecution of the war actually increases the chances that Al-Zarqawi and likeminded radicals could take over the country.
“If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.”
In reality, the United States is doing very little to advance the cause of self-determination, the rule of law, religious freedom and equal rights for women in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. For example, the U.S. trains Saudi Arabia’s repressive internal security apparatus and sells billions of dollars worth of weapons annually to the family dictatorship that rules that country. Saudi Arabia has no constitution and no legislature. It bans the practice of any faith besides Islam, practices torture on an administrative basis, and is perhaps the most misogynist country in the world.
Similarly, the Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak remains the second largest recipient of U.S. economic and military assistance despite ongoing repression of pro-democracy movements and their leaders.
The United States also continues to maintain close military and political ties to autocratic regimes in Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Tunisia, and Morocco, among others. The U.S. is the world’s number one supplier of military and police training to autocratic regimes and occupation armies in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.
It is also utterly false to claim that the United States supports the right of self-determination in the Middle East, since the Bush administration continues to support the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and the Golan Heights of Syria, as well as Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. These occupations are maintained in violation through ongoing violations of international humanitarian law, the UN Charter, and a series of UN Security Council resolutions.
In Iraq, the United States continues to deny the Iraqi government full sovereignty through its continued control of important areas of fiscal, security and economic policy. In addition, the proposed constitution being pushed by the Bush administration actually allows for fewer rights for women and less religious freedom than that under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
Conclusion
Given the large number of misleading statements in this key foreign policy address, it is profoundly disappointing that the mainstream media appears to have taken it so seriously. There has been little critical analysis of the president’s remarks and headlines have instead focused upon the unsubstantiated claim in the speech that the United States had in recent years foiled 10 planned al-Qaeda attacks.
It is similarly disappointing that leading Democrats in Congress have not attempted to expose the fallacious arguments in this address either. Doing so could advance their party’s chances to win back the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. Since the Democratic Congressional leadership and the vast majority of Democratic Senators and Representatives have chosen to continue their support of the Iraq War, however, it is perhaps not surprising that they remain unwilling to challenge the myths that perpetuate it.
As a result, it is up to American people to not only challenge the Bush administration’s falsehoods and misleading statements, but to challenge those in the media and in Congress who allow them to get away with such dangerous and illegitimate policies.
Missing Explosives Cache Emblematic of Bush Administration Failures in Iraq
Whether news about the 380 tons of powerful explosives found missing from a major weapons depot in Iraq will have any impact on the presidential election remains to be seen. Democrats hope that these disclosures have given a last-minute boost to John Kerry’s presidential campaign, which is depicting this debacle as illustrative of President Bush’s failure of leadership.
Since the Democratic Party decided to nominate presidential and vice-presidential candidates who, like the incumbent president, falsely claimed that Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and who authorized and supported the U.S. invasion, they are unable to challenge Bush on the illegality and immorality of the war. However, the level of negligence and incompetence shown by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the initial invasion has indeed been extraordinary by any measure, and the missing explosives are emblematic of the failures of Bush’s Iraq policy.
These missing explosives are particularly dangerous, since they include plastic explosives like PETN and RDX, which are a favorite of terrorists. Just one pound of a similar material blew up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. These explosives were also used in the bombing of the housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and the blasts in a series of Moscow apartment complexes in September 1999, which killed hundreds.
The Bush administration was quite familiar with the Al-Qaqaa facility, as was the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had overseen the destruction of parts of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program there in the early 1990s. Though primarily used for conventional weapons, the explosives at the site included HMX, which could be used for detonating a nuclear weapon. As a result, the IAEA had carefully monitored the site prior to their departure in December 1998 and resumed their monitoring activities when they returned in November 2002, When the United States forced the IAEA from Iraq immediately prior to the March 2003 invasion, the IAEA publicly warned about the dangers of such explosives. Soon after the invasion was launched, the IAEA specifically told the Bush administration about this particular store of explosives and the need to keep them secured, advice which was apparently ignored.
Despite this, the Bush administration denies any responsibility for the missing explosives. Vice-president Dick Cheney insisted that ‘it is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad.’ President Bush went further, dismissing Kerry’s assertions that the Bush administration should have secured the site as ‘wild charges,’ accusing the Democratic nominee of ‘denigrating the action of our troops.’
The Ministry of Science and Technology and others within Iraq’s interim government, however, have explicitly told the IAEA that the explosives disappeared some time after U.S. forces took control of Baghdad.
Furthermore, Minneapolis television station KSTP showed footage last week of a whole series of bunkers at Al-Qaqaa that were filled with explosives taken by journalists who were embedded with advancing U.S. forces which bivouacked near the site on their way to reinforce units already occupying Baghdad. The footage also shows an IAEA seal on a bunker, which was used at that site only for the HMX explosives, being broken by these U.S. forces before entering. Furthermore, this footage and other photographs of the explosives stockpiles ‘ which were taken on April 18, nine days after the U.S. overthrew the Iraqi government ‘ appear identical to those last taken by the IAEA just before their departure the previous month.
David Kay, President Bush’s former top weapons inspector in Iraq, observed that, due to the intense aerial surveillance of the area in which the facility was located ‘ right on the main road to Baghdad from the south ‘ ‘I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war and we didn’t spot it on satellite or UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle].’
Kay also emphasized that, ‘When you break into it, you own it. It’s your responsibility to secure it.’ None of the reporters there at the time noted any effort by U.S. forces to secure the facility, however.
While the Al-Qaqaa site contained some particularly lethal explosives, this phenomenon of leaving ammunition stores and other stockpiles of weapons and explosives unguarded for the taking has not been uncommon since the United States took control of the country in early April 2003.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported that it ‘repeatedly gave U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq detailed information about massive stockpiles of unsecured explosives and munitions located throughout the country, but coalition forces took little or no action to secure the stockpiles.’ HRW is particularly concerned about the circulation of such weaponry in the general population: It has been explosives looted from such facilities from around Iraq which are believed to be the primary source for bombs used by terrorists over the past year and half which have killed many hundreds of Iraqi civilians and others. An October 28 HRW report includes the following telling example:
On May 9, 2003, a Human Rights Watch researcher encountered a massive stockpile of warheads, anti-tank mines, anti-personnel mines, and other weaponry at the unsecured Second Military College, located on the main road between Baghdad and Baquba.
Concerned about the safety of the displaced persons at the military college, the researcher immediately went to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and reported the weapons stockpile, showing U.S. military officials photographs of the weaponry, giving the exact GPS coordinates of the site, and showing the location of the site on a military map’ The researcher repeatedly returned to the ‘Green Zone’ over the next days to report continuing looting at the site, but U.S. coalition forces did not move to secure the site.
The road between Baghdad and Baquba is now one of the main locations for attacks using ‘improvised explosive devices’ (IEDs) against passing coalition troops and Iraqi security forces. Typically, suicide bombers and IEDs involve between 25 to 200 kilograms of high explosives.
Under the highly-centralized rule of Saddam Hussein, who trusted no one he could not control, such weapons stockpiles, including the particularly dangerous cache at Al-Qaqaa, were carefully controlled. This was no longer the case after the government collapsed as American troops entered Baghdad. When it became clear that the United States did not place a priority on securing such sites and widespread looting erupted, an internal IAEA memo warned that terrorists could be helping themselves to ‘the biggest explosives bonanza in history.’
Prior to the U.S. takeover, President Bush argued that the best way to prevent weapons in Iraq from being used against Americans was to invade the country and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, as subsequent events have demonstrated, having dangerous explosives under the firm control of a weakened and contained dictatorship subjected to close international supervision was a lot safer than having them scattered among groups of armed extremists accountable to no one. Indeed, there were plenty of reasons to have suspected that this would be the very result of a U.S. invasion: For example, in an article I wrote for The Nation magazine in September 2002, just prior to the bipartisan Congressional vote authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq, I predicted that in ‘the chaos of a US invasion and its aftermath’ the chances of weapons finding their way ‘into the hands of terrorists would greatly increase.’
Thankfully, as many of us suspected, Iraq had already eliminated its chemical and biological weapons long before the U.S. invasion. Otherwise, these weapons would probably now be in the hands of terrorists as well.
Or would they? One has to wonder why the Bush administration seemed to have so little concern about securing weapons caches during the initial invasion. Focusing instead on the drive toward Baghdad may indicate that the Bush Administration had already realized some time before the war that there actually were no ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that needed to be secured after all. Their real goal, therefore, may not have been to protect the region and the world from possible chemical, biological or nuclear attack as they claimed, but simply to seize the center of Iraq’s government in order to take control over this oil-rich country in the heart of the Middle East.
Either way, John Kerry has every right to be critical of the Bush Administration.
Of course, since he, John Edwards and most other Democratic Senators granted President Bush license to invade Iraq in the first place, the Democrats must share responsibility for what has transpired as well. In voting to authorize force, they naively trusted that Bush would be a competent commander-in chief, which even back then should have been obvious was an erroneous assumption. This decision, along with his gross exaggerations of Iraq’s alleged military threat prior to the invasion, raises serious questions regarding Kerry’s own competence to serve as commander-in-chief.
Whether George W. Bush or John Kerry serves as president over the new four years, however, the ongoing war in Iraq ‘ made worse by the Al-Qaqaa fiasco and similar blunders ‘ is likely to be what will most define his administration.
Despite the Lies about Iraq and the Resulting Disaster, Bush Still Maintains Strong Support
Even putting aside the many important legal and moral questions about the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq, it has been a disaster even on practical terms. Mainstream to conservative strategic analysts and retired generals ‘ along with the majority of career professionals in the State Department, Defense Department, and CIA ‘ recognize that the invasion and occupation has made America less secure rather than more secure.
Still, the Bush Administration continues to defend its actions and public opinion polls still show that a majority of Americans trust George W. Bush more than John Kerry to defend America. This is in large part because, throughout this fall’s campaign, President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney have been making demonstrably false and misleading claims about what motivated administration decisions as well as the results of their actions.
Ironically, a number of these claims have been supported in a series of resolutions supported by a majority of Congressional Democrats ‘ including Senators John Kerry and John Edwards ‘ thereby giving the Bush campaign immunity from much of the scrutiny it deserves. In doing so, these Congressional Democrats have significantly increased the chances of a Bush victory next Tuesday. President Bush rarely fails to note in his stump speeches that Congressional Democrats, including Senators John Kerry and John Edwards, also saw Saddam Hussein as a threat and voted to authorize force. Indeed, not only have the Democrats missed a number of crucial opportunities to expose the disingenuous nature of Bush administration policy, they have at times repeated the lies themselves.
Below is a sampling of the claims being made by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney in recent weeks leading up to the election, followed by a critique:
‘ I went to the United Nations in the hopes that diplomacy would work. I hoped that Saddam Hussein would listen to the demands of the free world. The United Nations debated the issue. They voted 15 to nothing to say to Saddam Hussein: disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences. I believe when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says, in order to keep this world peaceful. When you say something, you better mean it. But Saddam Hussein didn’t believe the United Nations. After all, he’d ignored 16 other resolutions. And so at this point in time, I realized diplomacy wasn’t working.’
–George W. Bush, October 1
Saddam Hussein did disclose, in the fall of 2002, detailed documentation regarding the destruction of his WMDs, WMD programs, and offensive delivery systems as required. In addition, the U.S. government now admits that he had in fact disarmed as much as a decade earlier. So, at the time of the invasion, the Iraqi government had already disclosed and disarmed, and was thereby in compliance with the major provisions of UN Security Council resolution 1441, to which Bush refers in this quote. Diplomacy had, in fact, worked.
Unfortunately, when Bush launched the invasion anyway, every Democrat in the Senate ‘ including Kerry and Edwards ‘ voted in support of a Republican-sponsored resolution endorsing the invasion based upon the claim that Iraq was still in violation of these Security Council resolutions. Similarly, that same week, the House of Representatives voted on a resolution, with only ten of the 205 Democrats dissenting, declaring that ‘reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.’ As a result, the Democrats lost an opportunity to challenge President Bush’s assertion that Iraq was still in violation of those resolutions and that force was the only alternative.
‘ The last option for the Commander-in-Chief is to commit troops, and so I went to the United Nations. See, I believe we ought to try diplomacy before we commit troops. When the U.N. sent inspectors in, he systematically deceived the inspectors. We gave Saddam Hussein a final chance to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. And when he refused, I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office, a decision no President would ask for, but must be prepared to make. Do I trust the word of a madman and forget the lessons of September the 11th, or take action to defend America? Given that choice, I will defend America every time.’
–George W. Bush, September 3
First of all, it is now well-known that President Bush had decided to go ahead with the invasion well prior to going before the United Nations.
Secondly, the UN was successful in the fall of 2002 in getting Iraq to allow inspectors to return and have unfettered and immediate access to anywhere they wanted to go. The Iraqi regime did, on numerous occasions, hide things from UN inspectors, but that was under UNSCOM in the 1990s. Under UNMOVIC, beginning in late 2002 until the United States forced them out in anticipation of the invasion, there were no reports of systematic deception by the Iraqis of UN inspectors.
Thirdly, no one was advocating trusting Saddam Hussein. That is why the United Nations demanded that the inspectors return.
Fourthly, while Saddam Hussein was certainly a brutal tyrant, there is no evidence that he was a ‘madman.’
Finally, having completely disarmed its WMD capabilities, Iraq was not any threat to the United States so there was no need to ‘defend America’ from Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, despite evidence to the contrary, both Kerry and Edwards also declared Saddam Hussein ‘a threat’ and thereby helped give Bush and Cheney the excuse they were looking for to take over that oil-rich country. Though Kerry promised, when he voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, that he could be ‘the first to speak out’ if President Bush did not first allow the United Nations to attempt to disarm Iraq through non-military means, when President Bush pressed forward with plans for the invasion while UN inspectors were on the verge of completing their mission and determining that no such weapons existed, Kerry remained silent. When Bush launched the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kerry joined his fellow Democrats in supporting a resolution declaring that the action was ‘lawful’ and that he ‘commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President.’
‘Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction. And had the world turned its head, he would have made those weapons. He could have passed that capability or those weapons on to terrorists that hate us.’
–George W. Bush, October 1
Since eliminating his WMD programs, Saddam Hussein no longer had such capability. In addition, there was no indication that the world was about to ‘turn its head’ and allow such programs to be reconstituted. While the economic sanctions on Iraq were increasingly controversial, the international community was united in maintaining military sanctions, including a strict embargo on the technology and raw materials necessary to rebuild such a program. There is also no evidence to suggest that, even when Saddam Hussein had WMDs and WMD capability, that he had any inclination to pass them on to any terrorist groups.
Unfortunately, Kerry and Edwards were among the majority of Democratic Senators who ‘ in authorizing the invasion of Iraq and ignoring analyses of independent strategic analysts ‘ went on record saying that Iraq was ‘continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability . . . [and] actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, thereby continuing to threaten the national security interests of the United States and international peace and security.’ The Democratic-supported resolution also emphasized the ‘gravity of the threat that Iraq will transfer weapons of mass destruction to international terrorist organizations.’
‘We knew Saddam Hussein’s record of aggression. We knew his support for terror. Remember, Saddam harbored Abu Nidal, the leader of a terrorist organization that carried out attacks in Europe and Asia.’
–George W. Bush, October 1
Everyone knew about Iraq’s record of aggression, but thanks to mandatory disarmament initiatives by the United Nations and a strict military embargo, Iraq no longer had a serious offensive military capability.
Secondly, the State Department’s own annual report on international terrorism had failed to note any act of international terrorism by the Iraqi regime since early 1993, a full decade before the U.S. invasion.
Thirdly, while Abu Nidal ‘ who had been in declining health for years ‘ was living in Baghdad, his terrorist group had been moribund for more than a decade prior to the U.S. invasion. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein had him executed in 2002, the year before the U.S. invasion.
Unfortunately, Kerry and Edwards supported a resolution ‘ along with the majority of their Democratic Senate colleagues ‘ declaring that ‘Iraq continues to aid and harbor . . . international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens.’
‘ Saddam Hussein subsidized the families of suicide bombers. And he invaded his neighbors; he was shooting missiles at our pilots. That guy was a threat.’
–George W. Bush, September 7
First of all, the money Saddam Hussein transferred to the Arab Liberation Front ‘ the tiny Palestinian faction that passed some funds on to families of suicide bombers ‘ was relatively insignificant: it went to only a small minority of the families, it was less than what they generally received from U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, and it didn’t come close to covering the costs of these families’ homes, which are routinely destroyed by Israeli occupation forces in retaliation.
Secondly, Iraq did invade neighboring countries, but that was back in 1980 (Iran) and 1990 (Kuwait) and Iraqi forces had long since returned to within their internationally-recognized borders (unlike some U.S. allies such as Morocco and Israel, which invaded their neighbors and still occupy them.) There was no realistic threat that Iraq would be able to do so again.
Thirdly, the only time Iraq shot at U.S. pilots was when U.S. military planes violated Iraqi airspace. Since there was no UN mandate for military enforcement of the Kurdish safe areas or the establishment of ‘No Fly Zones,’ the Iraqis had as much right to shoot at them as would any country when enemy warplanes infringe on their territory. Unfortunately, the vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq supported by Kerry and Edwards and a majority of their Democratic colleagues justified the invasion in part on the grounds that ‘the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States. . . by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.’
Iraq was a threat back in the 1980s when the U.S. was quietly supporting him, but certainly not in the years leading up to the invasion.
Unfortunately, Bush has been able to correctly point out that most Democrats in Congress ‘ including Senators Kerry and Edwards ‘ also claimed that Saddam Hussein was a threat, thereby giving such outrageous claims a degree of credibility they otherwise would not deserve.
‘ Zarqawi . . .fled to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where he received medical care and set up operations with some two dozen terrorist associates. He operated in Baghdad and worked with associates in northern Iraq, who ran camps to train terrorists, and conducted chemical and biological experiments, until coalition forces arrived and ended those operations. With nowhere to operate openly, Zarqawi has gone underground and is making a stand in Iraq. ‘ If Zarqawi and his associates were not busy fighting American forces in Iraq, . . .these killers would be plotting and acting to murder innocent civilians in free nations, including our own.’
–George W. Bush, October 18
First of all, investigations by the CIA and others have shown no evidence that Saddam’s regime ever supported the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, since they saw this radical Islamist as a threat to the secular Iraqi regime. All indications are that his very brief visits to Baghdad were clandestine and that he did not have any major operations there prior to the U.S. invasion. Zarqawi’s camp in northern Iraq was in the Kurdish safe area well beyond the control of Saddam’s government. Journalists who visited the camp where U.S. officials claimed he was conducting ongoing ‘chemical and biological experiments’ prior to the U.S. invasion found nothing remotely resembling such activity, a fact confirmed by U.S. Special Forces which seized the area a few weeks later.
Unfortunately, despite all this evidence to the contrary, all but fifteen of the 210 House Democrats supported a resolution this September declaring that during Saddam Hussein’s rule, ‘the al-Zarqawi terror network used Baghdad as a base of operations to coordinate the movement of people, money, and supplies.’
Secondly, Zarqawi’s forces have grown dramatically only as a result of the U.S. occupation, with cells now operating throughout northern and central Iraq. All indications are that his goal is to rid Iraq of foreign occupation and establish his version of an Islamic state, just as like-minded jihadists did when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. These jihadists came to power in Afghanistan only as a result of the Soviet invasion and occupation; they were not a threat beforehand. Similarly, jihadists were never a threat in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion and occupation. In any case, there is no evidence that Zarqawi and his followers have ever plotted or planned to attack the United States and, in any case, they do not have such a global reach in terms of operational capability.
‘ We’ll succeed in Iraq because we’ve got a plan. And here’s the plan: We’ll train Iraqis so they can do the hard work in defending themselves; 100,000 troops are trained today, 125,000 by the end of the year. We’ll continue to work with them, to give them the equipment, the training they need to defend themselves against the attacks of these terrorists.’
–George W. Bush, October 1
In reality, less than 40,000 Iraqi troops are trained and their ranks have been significantly infiltrated by insurgents. In addition, the bigger threat to the survival of the regime are not the terrorists, but the majority of insurgents who do not target civilians, but focus their guerrilla attacks on military and government installations. By claiming that the insurgency is simply composed of terrorists, outsiders and holdouts of the former regime, the administration is able to depict current operations in Iraq as part of the ‘war on terror’ rather than the bloody urban counter-insurgency war that it is, where the primary victims are civilians.
Unfortunately, the House of Representatives ‘ with only 56 of the 210 Democrats voting against it ‘ passed a resolution this past June claiming that the attacks against U.S. forces have come not from a popular nationalist insurgency against a foreign occupation, but ‘former regime elements, foreign and Iraqi terrorists, and other criminals who are attempting to undermine the interests of the Iraqi people and thwart their evident desire to live in peace,’ thereby giving credibility to the Bush Administration’s insistence that the U.S. military occupation of Iraq be maintained in order to fight terrorism.
‘ Because of President Bush’s determination in the war on terror, leaders around the world are getting the message. Just five days after Saddam Hussein was captured, Moammar Ghadafi in Libya agreed to abandon his nuclear weapons program and turn the materials over to the United States.’
–Vice-President Dick Cheney, September 1
Saddam Hussein’s capture had nothing to do with Ghadafi’s decision to abandon its nuclear weapons programs, which was the culmination of a two-year diplomatic effort led by Great Britain. Furthermore, having seen that Saddam eliminated his nuclear weapons program nearly a decade earlier and got invaded anyway, the U.S. invasion of Iraq could hardly be seen as a motivator for unilateral disarmament.
Unfortunately, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi led a majority of her Democratic colleagues in voting in favor of a Republican-sponsored amendment which claimed that the elimination of Libya’s nuclear program ‘would not have been possible if not for . . . the liberation of Iraq by United States and Coalition Forces,’ thereby giving credence to this dubious Republican claim that they are now using to enhance Bush’s credibility.
In conclusion, the only reason this election is even close is that Bush and Cheney have gotten away with putting their misleading interpretations of events before, during and subsequent to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as fact, thereby avoiding the criticism their policies deserve. It is nothing short of scandalous that the Democrats ‘ who should be coasting towards a decisive victory at this point ‘ have made it so difficult for themselves by perpetuating the Bush administration’s lies.
If Kerry loses on Tuesday, the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1029-31.htm
Bush Administration Disasters Depicted as Triumphs
Even putting aside the many important legal and moral questions about the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, it has been a disaster even on practical terms. Mainstream to conservative strategic analysts and retired generals–along with the majority of career professionals in the State Department, Defense Department, and CIA–recognize that the invasion and occupation has made America less secure rather than more secure.
Still, the Bush administration continues to defend its actions and public opinion polls still show that a majority of Americans trust George W. Bush more than John Kerry to defend America. This is in large part because, throughout this fall’s campaign, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been making demonstrably false and misleading claims about what motivated administration decisions as well as the results of their actions.
Ironically, a number of these claims have been supported in a series of resolutions backed by a majority of congressional Democrats–including Senators John Kerry and John Edwards–thereby giving the Bush campaign immunity from much of the scrutiny it deserves. In doing so, these congressional Democrats have significantly increased the chances of a Bush victory next Tuesday. President Bush rarely fails to note in his stump speeches that congressional Democrats, including Kerry and Edwards, also saw Saddam Hussein as a threat and voted to authorize force. Indeed, not only have the Democrats missed a number of crucial opportunities to expose the disingenuous nature of Bush administration policy, they have at times repeated the lies themselves.
Below is a sampling of the claims being made by President Bush and Vice President Cheney in recent weeks leading up to the election, followed by a critique:
“I went to the United Nations in the hopes that diplomacy would work. I hoped that Saddam Hussein would listen to the demands of the free world. The United Nations debated the issue. They voted 15 to nothing to say to Saddam Hussein: disclose, disarm, or face serious consequences. I believe when an international body speaks, it must mean what it says, in order to keep this world peaceful. When you say something, you better mean it. But Saddam Hussein didn’t believe the United Nations. After all, he’d ignored 16 other resolutions. And so at this point in time, I realized diplomacy wasn’t working.”
–George W. Bush, October 1
Saddam Hussein did disclose, in the fall of 2002, detailed documentation regarding the destruction of his WMDs, WMD programs, and offensive delivery systems as required. In addition, the U.S. government now admits that he had in fact disarmed as much as a decade earlier. So, at the time of the invasion, the Iraqi government had already disclosed and disarmed, and was thereby in compliance with the major provisions of UN Security Council resolution 1441, to which Bush refers in this quote. Diplomacy had, in fact, worked.
Unfortunately, when Bush launched the invasion anyway, every Democrat in the Senate–including Kerry and Edwards–voted in support of a Republican-sponsored resolution endorsing the invasion based upon the claim that Iraq was still in violation of these Security Council resolutions. Similarly, that same week, the House of Representatives voted on a resolution, with only ten of the 205 Democrats dissenting, declaring that “reliance by the United States on further diplomatic and other peaceful means alone will neither adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq nor likely lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.” As a result, the Democrats lost an opportunity to challenge President Bush’s assertion that Iraq was still in violation of those resolutions and that force was the only alternative.
“The last option for the Commander-in-Chief is to commit troops, and so I went to the United Nations. See, I believe we ought to try diplomacy before we commit troops. When the UN sent inspectors in, he systematically deceived the inspectors. We gave Saddam Hussein a final chance to meet his responsibilities to the civilized world. And when he refused, I faced the kind of decision that comes only to the Oval Office, a decision no president would ask for, but must be prepared to make. Do I trust the word of a madman and forget the lessons of September the 11th, or take action to defend America? Given that choice, I will defend America every time.”
–George W. Bush, September 3
First of all, it is now well-known that President Bush had decided to go ahead with the invasion well prior to going before the United Nations.
Secondly, the UN was successful in the fall of 2002 in getting Iraq to allow inspectors to return and have unfettered and immediate access to anywhere they wanted to go. The Iraqi regime did, on numerous occasions, hide things from UN inspectors, but that was under UNSCOM in the 1990s. Under UNMOVIC, beginning in late 2002 until the United States forced them out in anticipation of the invasion, there were no reports of systematic deception of UN inspectors by the Iraqis.
Thirdly, no one was advocating trusting Saddam Hussein. That is why the United Nations demanded that the inspectors return.
Fourthly, while Saddam Hussein was certainly a brutal tyrant, there is no evidence that he was a “madman.”
Finally, having completely disarmed its WMD capabilities, Iraq was not any threat to the United States, so there was no need to “defend America” from Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, despite evidence to the contrary, both Kerry and Edwards also declared Saddam Hussein “a threat” and thereby helped give Bush and Cheney the excuse they were looking for to take over that oil-rich country. Though Kerry promised, when he voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, that he could be “the first to speak out” if President Bush did not first allow the United Nations to attempt to disarm Iraq through non-military means, when President Bush pressed forward with plans for the invasion while UN inspectors were on the verge of completing their mission and determining that no such weapons existed, Kerry remained silent. When Bush launched the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kerry joined his fellow Democrats in supporting a resolution declaring that the action was “lawful” and that he “commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President.”
“Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction. And had the world turned its head, he would have made those weapons. He could have passed that capability or those weapons on to terrorists that hate us.”
–George W. Bush, October 1
Since eliminating his WMD programs, Saddam Hussein no longer had such capability. In addition, there was no indication that the world was about to “turn its head” and allow such programs to be reconstituted. While the economic sanctions on Iraq were increasingly controversial, the international community was united in maintaining military sanctions, including a strict embargo on the technology and raw materials necessary to rebuild such a program. There is also no evidence to suggest that, even when Saddam Hussein had WMDs and WMD capability, that he had any inclination to pass them on to any terrorist groups.
Unfortunately, Kerry and Edwards were among the majority of Democratic Senators who–in authorizing the invasion of Iraq and ignoring independent strategic analyses–went on record saying that Iraq was “continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability … [and] actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, thereby continuing to threaten the national security interests of the United States and international peace and security.” The Democratic-supported resolution also emphasized the “gravity of the threat that Iraq will transfer weapons of mass destruction to international terrorist organizations.”
“We knew Saddam Hussein’s record of aggression. We knew his support for terror. Remember, Saddam harbored Abu Nidal, the leader of a terrorist organization that carried out attacks in Europe and Asia .”
–George W. Bush, October 1
Everyone knew about Iraq ’s record of aggression, but thanks to mandatory disarmament initiatives by the United Nations and a strict military embargo, Iraq no longer had a serious offensive military capability.
Secondly, the State Department’s own annual report on international terrorism had failed to note any act of international terrorism by the Iraqi regime since early 1993, a full decade before the U.S. invasion.
Thirdly, while Abu Nidal–who had been in declining health for years–was living in Baghdad, his terrorist group had been moribund for more than a decade prior to the U.S. invasion. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein had him executed in 2002, the year before the U.S. invasion.
Unfortunately, Kerry and Edwards supported a resolution–along with the majority of their Democratic Senate colleagues–declaring that “ Iraq continues to aid and harbor … international terrorist organizations, including organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American citizens.”
“Saddam Hussein subsidized the families of suicide bombers. And he invaded his neighbors; he was shooting missiles at our pilots. That guy was a threat.”
–George W. Bush, September 7
First of all, the money Saddam Hussein transferred to the Arab Liberation Front–the tiny Palestinian faction that passed some funds on to families of suicide bombers–was relatively insignificant: it went to only a small minority of the families, it was less than what they generally received from U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, and it didn’t come close to covering the costs of these families’ homes, which are routinely destroyed by Israeli occupation forces in retaliation.
Secondly, Iraq did invade neighboring countries, but that was back in 1980 ( Iran ) and 1990 ( Kuwait ) and Iraqi forces had long since returned to within their internationally recognized borders (unlike some U.S. allies–such as Morocco and Israel , which invaded their neighbors and still occupy them). There was no realistic threat that Iraq would be able to do so again.
Thirdly, the only time Iraq shot at U.S. pilots was when U.S. military planes violated Iraqi airspace. Since there was no UN mandate for military enforcement of the Kurdish safe areas or the establishment of “No Fly Zones,” the Iraqis had as much right to shoot at them as would any country when enemy warplanes infringe on their territory. Unfortunately, the vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq–supported by Kerry and Edwards and a majority of their Democratic colleagues–justified the invasion in part on the grounds that “the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States … by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.”
Iraq was a threat back in the 1980s when the U.S. was quietly supporting Saddam, but certainly not in the years leading up to the invasion.
Unfortunately, Bush has been able to correctly point out that most Democrats in Congress–including Senators Kerry and Edwards–also claimed that Saddam Hussein was a threat, thereby giving such outrageous claims a degree of credibility they otherwise would not deserve.
“Zarqawi … fled to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where he received medical care and set up operations with some two dozen terrorist associates. He operated in Baghdad and worked with associates in northern Iraq , who ran camps to train terrorists, and conducted chemical and biological experiments, until coalition forces arrived and ended those operations. With nowhere to operate openly, Zarqawi has gone underground and is making a stand in Iraq . … If Zarqawi and his associates were not busy fighting American forces in Iraq … these killers would be plotting and acting to murder innocent civilians in free nations, including our own.”
–George W. Bush, October 18
First of all, investigations by the CIA and others have shown no evidence that Saddam’s regime ever supported the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, since they saw this radical Islamist as a threat to the secular Iraqi regime. All indications are that his very brief visits to Baghdad were clandestine and that he did not have any major operations there prior to the U.S. invasion. Zarqawi’s camp in northern Iraq was in the Kurdish safe area well beyond the control of Saddam’s government. Journalists who visited the camp where U.S. officials claimed he was conducting ongoing “chemical and biological experiments” prior to the U.S. invasion found nothing remotely resembling such activity, a fact confirmed by U.S. Special Forces, which seized the area a few weeks later.
Unfortunately, despite all this evidence to the contrary, all but fifteen of the 210 House Democrats supported a resolution this September declaring that during Saddam Hussein’s rule, “the al-Zarqawi terror network used Baghdad as a base of operations to coordinate the movement of people, money, and supplies.”
Secondly, Zarqawi’s forces have grown dramatically only as a result of the U.S. occupation, with cells now operating throughout northern and central Iraq . All indications are that his goal is to rid Iraq of foreign occupation and establish his version of an Islamic state, just as like-minded jihadists did when the Soviets occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. These jihadists came to power in Afghanistan only as a result of the Soviet invasion and occupation; they were not a threat beforehand. Similarly, jihadists were never a threat in Iraq until after the U.S. invasion and occupation. In any case, there is no evidence that Zarqawi and his followers have ever plotted or planned to attack the United States and, in any case, they do not have such a global reach in terms of operational capability.
“We’ll succeed in Iraq because we’ve got a plan. And here’s the plan: We’ll train Iraqis so they can do the hard work in defending themselves; 100,000 troops are trained today, 125,000 by the end of the year. We’ll continue to work with them, to give them the equipment, the training they need to defend themselves against the attacks of these terrorists.”
–George W. Bush, October 1
In reality, less than 40,000 Iraqi troops are trained and their ranks have been significantly infiltrated by insurgents. In addition, the bigger threat to the survival of the regime is not the terrorists, but the majority of insurgents who do not target civilians, but focus their guerrilla attacks on military and government installations. By claiming that the insurgency is simply composed of terrorists, outsiders and holdouts of the former regime, the administration is able to depict current operations in Iraq as part of the “war on terror” rather than the bloody urban counter-insurgency war that it is, where the primary victims are civilians.
Unfortunately, the House of Representatives–with only 56 of the 210 Democrats voting against it–passed a resolution this past June claiming that the attacks against U.S. forces have come not from a popular nationalist insurgency against a foreign occupation, but “former regime elements, foreign and Iraqi terrorists, and other criminals who are attempting to undermine the interests of the Iraqi people and thwart their evident desire to live in peace,” thereby giving credibility to the Bush administration’s insistence that the U.S. military occupation of Iraq be maintained in order to fight terrorism.
“Because of President Bush’s determination in the war on terror, leaders around the world are getting the message. Just five days after Saddam Hussein was captured, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya agreed to abandon his nuclear weapons program and turn the materials over to the United States.”
–Vice President Dick Cheney, September 1
Saddam Hussein’s capture had nothing to do with Gadhafi’s decision to abandon Libya ’s nuclear weapons programs. In fact, the decision was the culmination of a two-year diplomatic effort led by Great Britain . Furthermore, having seen Saddam’s elimination of his nuclear weapons program nearly a decade earlier as well as Iraq’a subsequent invasion, it is unlikely Gadhafi took that example as a motivator for unilateral disarmament.
Unfortunately, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi led a majority of her Democratic colleagues in voting in favor of a Republican-sponsored amendment that claimed that the elimination of Libya’s nuclear program “would not have been possible if not for … the liberation of Iraq by United States and Coalition Forces,” thereby giving credence to this dubious Republican claim that the GOP is now using to enhance Bush’s credibility.
In conclusion, the only reason this election is even close is that the Bush administration has been successful at positioning its misleading interpretations of events before, during, and subsequent to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as fact, thereby avoiding the criticism Bush’s policies deserve. It is nothing short of scandalous that the Democrats–who should be coasting toward a decisive victory at this point–have made it so difficult for themselves by perpetuating the Bush administration’s misrepresentations.
If Kerry loses on Tuesday, the Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.
http://www.fpif.org/articles/bush_administration_disasters_depicted_as_triumphs
The U.S. Invasion of Iraq: The Military Side of Globalization?
The major justifications for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to the terrorist al-Qaida network—are now widely discredited, and Washington’s claims that its efforts are creating a democratic Iraq are also highly dubious. Although economic factors did play an important role in prompting a U.S. invasion, the simplistic notion that Iraq’s makeover was undertaken simply for the sake of oil company profits ignores the fact that even optimistic projections of the financial costs of the invasion and occupation far exceeded anticipated financial benefits. Furthermore, Saddam Hussein was already selling his oil at a level satisfactory to Western buyers, and his standing among fellow OPEC members was low, so he could not have persuaded the cartel to adopt policies detrimental to U.S. interests. So what actually motivated the United States to take on the problematic task of conquering and rebuilding Iraq?
A Return to Direct Military Interventionism
Until the buildup to the U.S. invasion, many had projected that efforts by the United States to overthrow sovereign governments—either through covert action, direct military intervention, or the use of proxy armies—was a thing of the past. However, this apparent behavior change was not a result of greater respect for international law. In fact, as the world’s sole remaining superpower, the United States has stretched international legal norms further than ever. Nor was this transformation a result of the end of the “Soviet threat,” since many governments that had fallen victim to U.S. intervention were simply nationalist and nonaligned, not communist, and superpower rivalry was less the reason than it was the excuse for Washington’s aggressive behavior.
Rather, this shift in domination style was a reflection that with the neoliberal model dominating the global economy—enforced through international financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank—such crude forms of hegemonic supremacy were no longer necessary. For example, if the FMLN in El Salvador or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua had won their debt-ridden countries’ most recent elections, there is little doubt that they would have been unable to restructure their economies in the socialist direction to which they had aspired 20 years earlier.
And such limitations on the economic autonomy of contemporary national governments are not restricted to small agrarian states. Today’s socialist-led government of Ricardo Lagos in Chile bears little resemblance to the socialist-led government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, and the electoral triumphs of the Workers Party in Brazil and the African National Congress in South Africa have been disappointing to those who had hoped for a significant reduction in the staggering levels of poverty, social stratification, and economic injustice afflicting those countries.
The IMF—through its Structural Adjustment Programs—has been able to impose legally and openly what in previous decades had to be accomplished by the CIA, the Marines, or hired mercenaries. The hegemony of American capitalism and its industrialized allies has reached unprecedented levels without the messiness of direct military intervention.
Neoliberal global economics can also explain the end of the left-leaning nationalism that was once common in the Arab world, with Egypt, Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, and—to a lesser extent—Syria and Libya abandoning their semi-socialist policies to embrace what are euphemistically referred to as “free market reforms.” These Arab states also exhibit a significant reduction in their anti-Western rhetoric, support for terrorists and radical insurgents, and other behaviors disturbing to Washington.
Baathist Iraq was the only Arab state to largely resist such trends. Combining a sizable educated population, large oil resources, and adequate water supplies, Iraq was able to maintain a truly independent foreign and domestic policy. Even 12 years of draconian sanctions could not overthrow the government or make it more cooperative with Washington’s strategic and economic agenda, prompting the United States to revert to cruder forms of intervention.
This is not to imply that Saddam Hussein’s rule was anything close to being a progressive model for Third World development. Indeed, his brand of Baathism was arguably closer to true fascism than any regime in the world in recent decades. Whatever his style, however, Saddam was clearly failing to adhere to Washington’s global script.
As a result, the Bush administration was determined to impose a new order whereby this important Middle Eastern country would have no choice but to play by U.S. rules. Since simply appending a conquered nation to its conqueror’s territory is not considered acceptable behavior anymore (U.S. allies Morocco and Israel notwithstanding), a less formal system of control needed to be established. So Washington adopted a plan for Iraq that bore a striking resemblance to the British strategy in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than formally annexing Iraq, Britain occupied the country just long enough to establish a kind of suzerainty. Iraq was made nominally independent within a few years, but Britain could effectively veto the establishment of any unfriendly government and could dominate the economy.
The United States followed a similar pattern with Cuba in 1898 heralding the process as “liberation” from the Spaniards. After several years of occupation, Washington granted formal independence to the island, retaining it as a de facto protectorate. This governing system lasted for more than five decades until it was overthrown in Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, less than a year after nationalist military officers in Baghdad ousted the monarchy established by the British. Even 45 years after the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Havana, Washington still cannot accept a truly independent Cuba and still withholds diplomatic recognition.
A Crusade for Neoliberalism?
Under Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chairman Paul Bremer, radical changes were imposed upon the Iraqi economy closely mimicking the infamous structural adjustment programs shackled to indebted nations by the International Monetary Fund. These include:
• the widespread privatization of public enterprises, which—combined with allowing for 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi companies—renders key sectors of the Iraqi economy prime targets of burgeoning American corporations,
• the imposition of a 15% flat tax, which primarily benefits the wealthy and places a disproportionate burden on the poor,
• the virtual elimination of import tariffs, resulting in a flood of foreign goods into the country; since smaller Iraqi companies—weakened by over a dozen years of sanctions—are unable to compete, hundreds of factories have recently shut down, adding to already-severe unemployment,
• 100% repatriation of profits, which severely limits reinvestment in the Iraqi economy,
• a lowering of the minimum wage, increasing already widespread poverty, and
• leases on contracts for as long as 40 years, making it impossible for even a truly sovereign government to legally make alternative arrangements.
It is noteworthy that there was one Saddam-era law that U.S. authorities did not overturn: the ban on public sector unions. In fact, U.S. occupation forces have violently broken up peaceful demonstrations by trade union activists.
It is also important to note that the supposedly sovereign government of Iraq, which formally took the reins of power on June 28, does not have the authority to overturn these laws. But simply attributing the U.S. invasion of Iraq to imposing militarily what the IMF could not impose itself, is an overstatement and constitutes only a partial explanation.
A New Mercantilism
Skeptics of claims that the Bush administration invaded Iraq simply for its oil correctly observe that the United States is less dependent on Persian Gulf oil than are European or East Asian countries. However, controlling Iraq—which is the largest Arab country in the gulf region, contains the world’s second-largest oil reserves, and borders three of the world’s five largest oil producers—gives the United States enormous leverage. In the coming decades, in the event of a trade war with the European Union or a military rivalry with an ascendant China, effective control over Persian Gulf oil is a trump card that Washington can play to its advantage. The invasion of Iraq, then, may represent not just a frightening repudiation of the post-World War II international system embodied in the United Nations Charter but also a return to the 19th century great-power politics of imperial conquest undertaken to control key economic resources.
In direct contravention of WTO regulations—which Washington insists upon rigorously enforcing against other nations—U.S. occupation forces have restricted investment and reconstruction efforts almost exclusively to countries that supported the U.S. invasion. Similarly, following the U.S. conquest in March 2003, American contractors and their employees were given preference over Iraqi companies and Iraqi nationals in procuring lucrative reconstruction assignments. From power stations to telecommunications, U.S. infrastructure designs are replacing Iraqi and European systems.
In the transition from the CPA to interim Iraqi control, Paul Bremer’s replacement, U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, is not—contrary to Bush administration claims—just like any other ambassador. Washington has assigned many of the more than 1,500 Americans attached to his “embassy” to prominent positions spanning virtually every Iraqi ministry, and his office controls much of the Iraqi government’s budget. (In the 1980s, Negroponte played a similar role: as the U.S. ambassador in Tegucigalpa he was widely considered to be the second-most powerful man in Honduras as a result of the large numbers of U.S. troops in the country and the dependence of the military-dominated Honduran government on Washington’s military and economic backing.)
The U.S. conquest of Iraq can perhaps be seen as a rather blatant example of the subtle shifts in U.S. policy noted in recent international economic forums. Unlike the Clinton administration’s ambitious efforts to rewrite global trade rules in order to impose a kind of free market fundamentalism on the world, the Bush administration has been more inclined to advance the parochial interests of U.S.-based corporations.
Conclusion
If the invasion of Iraq was indeed a last-resort effort to impose U.S. hegemonic interests upon that oil-rich country, it may portend even more serious conflicts in the future. At least two other Third World countries—Iran and Venezuela—share with Iraq the combination of a large educated population, enormous oil reserves, and adequate water resources, thereby enabling their governments to embrace an independent foreign and domestic policy. Not surprisingly, these countries have also been on the receiving end of increasingly hostile rhetoric emanating from Washington. Fortunately, it is unlikely that either country has to fear a U.S. invasion any time soon, because Iraq is turning into a total disaster.
After years of state control under Saddam’s dictatorship, there is little question that some liberalization and restructuring of Iraq’s economy is necessary, but Iraqis resent such important issues being decided by an occupying power that clearly has a strong commercial interest in their country. Indeed, besides the continuing violence and a lack of basic services, the primary grievance of Iraqis toward the U.S. occupation is that the Americans are seemingly trying to rip them off.
Like many Arab governments, Iraq under Saddam Hussein squandered billions of dollars of the nation’s wealth through corruption and wasteful military spending. Nevertheless, prior to Saddam’s ill-fated invasion of Kuwait and the resulting war and sanctions, Iraqis ranked near the top of Third World countries according to the Human Development Index, which measures nutrition, health care, housing, education, and other human needs.
Not only has the U.S. occupation failed to restore Iraqis to their pre-1991 standard of living, but most of them are poorer now than they were during more than a decade of sanctions following the devastating U.S.-led bombing campaign of the Gulf War. After all the enormous suffering that the United States and its allies inflicted upon the Iraqi people during the final dozen years of Saddam’s rule, the failure to improve conditions since his ouster has understandably led to widespread resentment. Since Iraq’s highly skilled work force is more than 50% unemployed, it is no surprise that overpaid foreign contractors—most of them performing jobs that Iraqis could do—have become targets of the resistance.
Saddam Hussein may have been to Baathism what Josef Stalin was to Marxism. But that does not mean that most Iraqis reject the anti-imperialist and semi-socialist orientation embraced by every Iraqi government between the 1958 overthrow of the British-installed Hashemite monarchy and the 2003 U.S. invasion. A poll this past spring revealed that 65% of Iraqis preferred a largely state-controlled economy featuring government subsidies of basic services, while only 6.6% supported a free-market system where private entrepreneurs have unrestricted access to the economy.
Tragically, the widespread feeling that the United States is after Iraq’s wealth and is putting the profits of well-connected American companies ahead of the livelihoods of ordinary Iraqis has fueled the very armed resistance that has rendered attempts at rebuilding—by any economic model—virtually impossible. As a result, Washington may have no more success in imposing its free market utopia on the Iraqis than Moscow had in imposing its socialist utopia on the Afghans.
Attacks Against World Court by Bush, Kerry and Congress Reveal Growing Bipartisan Hostility to International Law
On July 9, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined that the Israeli government’s construction of a separation wall running through the occupied Palestinian West Bank was illegal. Among other things, the ICJ noted that the construction of the first 125 miles of the proposed 450-mile barrier “has involved the confiscation and destruction of Palestinian land and resources, the disruption of the lives of the thousands of protected civilians and the de facto annexation of large areas of territory.” The court called on Israel to cease construction of the wall, to dismantle what has already been built in areas beyond Israel’s internationally recognized border, and to compensate Palestinians who have suffered losses as a result of the wall’s construction.
The vote was 14-1, a not-unexpected margin, given the overwhelming consensus of international legal experts regarding the responsibilities of occupying powers. The majority included the highly respected conservative British jurist, Rosalyn Higgins; the sole dissenter was the American judge, Thomas Buergenthal. The 57-page decision examined in detail the various arguments raised by the interested parties and was consistent with strictures set by the United Nations Charter, a series of UN Security Council resolutions, previous ICJ rulings, and relevant international treaties.
Despite the seemingly clear-cut nature of the ruling however, the Bush administration, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, and an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress have all gone on record denouncing the verdict. Never before has there been such a unified negative response by America’s political leadership to a decision by the world’s highest court.
This unprecedented reaction to an ICJ ruling is neither a moral commitment to the security of Israel nor an example of the power of the “Jewish lobby.” It appears instead to be yet another indication of the growing bipartisan hostility to any legal restraints on the conduct of the United States and its allies beyond their borders, particularly in the Middle East. Both Republicans and Democrats have determined that any effort to raise legal questions regarding the actions of occupying powers must be forcefully challenged.
The United States and the World Court
The International Court of Justice has its origins in the Permanent International Court, established in The Hague in 1899. Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, the ICJ—also known as the “World Court”—has functioned essentially as the judicial arm of the UN system. Designed to better enable nations to settle their disputes nonviolently based upon the rule of law, the ICJ has been used by Washington on a number of occasions over the years to advance U.S. foreign policy interests ranging from fishing disputes with Canada to the seizure of American hostages by Iran.
(The ICJ is a separate body from the International Criminal Court (ICC), also located in The Hague, which was established in 2002 to prosecute individuals for war crimes when national courts are unable or unwilling to do so. The United States has refused to ratify the ICC treaty, has pressured other nations to reject it as well, and has demanded special exemption from the ICC’s authority.)
Despite America’s strong legal tradition and its key role in the development of international humanitarian law and related international legal constructs, and despite the fact that the ICJ has more often than not ruled in favor of the United States and its allies, recent decades have seen increasing American hostility toward any legal constraints upon U.S. foreign policy. For example, in 1986, the ICJ—also in a 14-1 vote isolating the U.S. judge—called for the United States to cease its attacks against Nicaragua, both directly and through its proxy army of Nicaraguan exiles known as the FDN or Contras, who were notorious for their attacks against civilian targets. Moreover, the court ruled that the United States had to pay the Nicaraguan government over $2 billion in compensation for the damage inflicted upon the country’s civilian infrastructure. The Reagan administration refused to comply with either directive.
The Democrats’ response to the ICJ verdict on Nicaragua was not much better: the Democratic-controlled Congress voted to continue to provide military and economic aid to the Contras. Even Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who held hearings that uncovered the Contras’ involvement in drug trafficking, voted to send the group $20 million of additional aid following the World Court’s decision. President Clinton, just like preceding and subsequent Republican presidents, also refused to compensate Nicaragua’s debt-ridden government as ordered by the ICJ.
Similarly, in 1999, the World Court voted that the United States and other existing nuclear powers were legally bound by provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—signed and ratified by the United States and all but a handful of the world’s nations—to take serious steps to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Continuing Clinton’s recalcitrance, the current administration has refused to comply, and Congress continues to approve White House requests for funding the development and procurement of new and dangerous nuclear weapons systems.
The Barrier and the Court Decision
The idea of a physical barrier between Israel and the new Palestinian state that would emerge from the occupied territories was originally promoted by Israeli moderates as a means of securing Israelis from attack after the withdrawal of Israel’s occupation forces. What the right-wing government of Ariel Sharon has done, however, is to build most of the barrier not along Israel’s recognized border, as originally proposed, but in a lengthy serpentine pattern through the occupied West Bank in order to incorporate illegal settlement blocs of Jewish colonists—along with large areas of Palestinian farmland—into Israel.
According to the Fourth Geneva Convention—which is binding upon its signatories—an occupying power is forbidden from transferring any parts of its civilian population into territories seized by military force. Furthermore, a series of UN Security Council resolutions (446, 452, 465, and 471) specifically call on Israel to withdraw from these settlements. Successive Israeli governments have refused to comply with these resolutions, however, and the United States has blocked the UN Security Council from enforcing them.
Within the next few years, depending on the final route chosen for the incomplete sections, the wall could reduce Palestinian areas in the West Bank by half. The remaining Palestinian areas would be subdivided into a series of noncontiguous cantons, each of which would be surrounded by the barrier and land that would be unilaterally annexed to Israel. (Already, the Palestinian city of Qalqilya is surrounded on all sides by the wall.) At that point, Israel and the United States have indicated that they may be ready to recognize what’s left of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as “an independent Palestinian state.” This “state”—bearing a striking resemblance to the infamous Bantustans of apartheid South Africa—would amount to barely 10% of historical Palestine. Thus, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall’s construction violates the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.
Bush Administration and Senator Kerry Both Criticize World Court
The Bush administration quickly challenged the World Court’s authority by questioning whether international law should even be applied to Israeli-occupied territories. White House spokesman Scott McClellan stated, “We do not believe that it is the appropriate forum to resolve what is a political issue.” Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry concurred, arguing: “It is not a matter for the ICJ. … I do not believe that the ICJ should [have] even been considering this issue, given that they do not have jurisdiction.”
Neither the incumbent administration nor its electoral challenger mentioned that the General Assembly voted to send the issue to the World Court only after the United States vetoed an otherwise-unanimous UN Security Council draft resolution last fall, declaring “that the construction by Israel, the occupying power, of a wall in the Occupied Territories departing from the armistice line of 1949 is illegal under relevant provisions of international law and must be ceased and reversed.” In fact, Senator Kerry defended President Bush’s decision “to oppose the resolution in the General Assembly and to convey this opinion to the ICJ.”
The ICJ claimed jurisdiction partly because the United States had frustrated the Security Council from exercising its authority to address actions by Israel that it deemed constituted a “threat to international peace and security.” The court reasserted the authority of the General Assembly to seek such an advisory opinion to rectify Washington’s abuse of its veto power. Over the past 35 years, the United States has used its veto 79 times, almost half of them to block resolutions critical of Israeli violations of international law.
Reiterating the Bush administration’s longstanding insistence that the occupier’s interests have as much legitimacy as the welfare of those under occupation, John Danforth, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, argued that addressing such legal issues as the wall “points away from a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” since “the claims of each side must be accommodated.” (As a U.S. senator in 1990, during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, Danforth took just the opposite position, insisting that to address Iraqi land claims would be rewarding aggression, and arguing that international law should be strictly enforced “by all necessary means.”)
Both Kerry and Bush stated that they were “deeply disappointed” by the World Court’s ruling, but Kerry went on to claim that “Israel’s fence is a legitimate response to terror that only exists in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israel. The fence is an important tool in Israel’s fight against terrorism.” At least President Bush was able to say: “I think the wall is a problem. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and the Israelis with a wall snaking through the West Bank.”
Further cementing his position, Kerry joined 78 senators—including his running mate, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina—in signing a strongly worded letter to Kofi Annan criticizing the UN secretary general for backing the General Assembly’s decision to ask the ICJ to consider the legal questions involved. In the letter, Kerry, Edwards, and their Senate colleagues declared that the wall was a justifiable and necessary defensive measure by Israel and that questioning Israel’s policy cast doubt on the chief UN official’s opposition to terrorism.
The Congressional Reaction
On July 15, the House of Representatives—by an overwhelming 361-45 majority—voted to deplore the World Court’s decision. Underscoring bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for the White House challenge to the UN system, a large majority of congressional Democrats joined their Republican colleagues in commending President Bush for “his leadership in marshalling opposition to the misuse of the ICJ…”
On July 20, an even stronger Senate resolution was introduced by Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon, “supporting the construction by Israel of a security fence to prevent Palestinian terrorist attacks, condemning the decision of the International Court of Justice on the legality of the security fence, and urging no further action by the United Nations to delay or prevent the construction of the security fence.” This bipartisan Senate resolution, effectively endorsing Israel’s colonization drive in the occupied territories, quickly collected 34 co-sponsors, including Republicans Trent Lott of Mississippi, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, and George Voinovich of Ohio as well as Democrats Hilary Rodham Clinton of New York, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Patty Murray of Washington, Barbara Boxer of California, and Ron Wyden of Oregon.
One of the leading co-sponsors of the House resolution was California Congressman Tom Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, who called the ICJ ruling “a perversion of justice.” (As an indicator of the cynical view with which members of Congress treat human rights issues, Lantos has been repeatedly elected chair of the House of Representative’s “Human Rights Caucus.”)
Congressional opposition to the World Court decision centered on several dubious assertions:
An Allegation that the Ruling Interferes with Israel’s Right to Self-Defense:
In its ruling, the International Court of Justice acknowledged the tragic realities that “Israel has to face numerous indiscriminate and deadly acts of violence against its civilian population” and that the Jewish state “has the right, indeed the duty, to respond in order to protect the lives of its citizens.” The court recognized, however, that such security measures “are bound nonetheless to remain in conformity with applicable international law.”
In other words, Israel—like any country—has the right to build a wall, a fence, a moat, or anything else along its borders to protect itself. The World Court even recognized a number of UN resolutions specifically reiterating Israel’s right to defend its borders. The basis of the court’s ruling against the Israeli policy is that the jurists were “not convinced that the specific course Israel has chosen for the wall was necessary to attain its security objectives…” Since the barrier was not following Israel’s borders, the court simply confirmed the widespread assumption in Israel and elsewhere that the wall was being built for political reasons rather than security reasons and was therefore illegal.
The proposed Senate resolution cites the successful precedent of a security fence “in Gaza [which] has proved effective at reducing the number of terrorist attacks.” However, senators are ignoring the fact that the Gaza barrier—unlike the wall in the West Bank—is built along the recognized border between Israel and the Gaza Strip and therefore is not considered illegal by the World Court ruling.
Despite the ICJ’s clear distinction between a government’s legal right to build a protective barrier along its border for self-defense and the construction of a barrier within the occupied territory of another nation in a manner that effectively expands the boundaries of the occupying power, the bipartisan House resolution called the court’s decision an “attempt to infringe upon Israel’s right to self-defense.” Typical of remarks by leading House Democrats, New York Congressman Eliot Engel, a senior member of the House International Relations Committee Subcommittee on the Middle East, falsely claimed that the ruling totally ignored Israel’s right to defend its citizens. Similarly, Nevada Democrat Shelley Berkley asserted that the advisory opinion was done “solely for the narrow purpose of condemning the State of Israel for its effort to protect its innocent citizens from suicide bombers.” Democratic Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton declared, “It makes no sense for the United Nations to vehemently oppose a fence which is a nonviolent response to terrorism rather than opposing terrorism itself.”
Indiana Republican Mark Souder went further, charging that “the ruling declares that Israel has no right whatsoever to defend itself, protect its people, or to live at peace.” Souder added: “The International Court of Justice has ruled that they would prefer a Middle East without Israel. They would rather see a democratic state… disappear from the face of the Earth.”
Many Israelis, however, argue that constructing the wall inside occupied territory actually decreases Israel’s safety. For example, several prominent military and security officers have spoken out against Sharon’s policy, forming groups like the Council for Peace and Security to challenge the barrier’s route, which is projected to be at least three and a half times as long as Israel’s internationally recognized border with the West Bank. Avraham Shalom, former head of Israel’s security division, Shin Bet, said that the wall “creates hatred, it expropriates land and annexes hundred of thousands of Palestinians to the state of Israel. The result is that the fence achieves the exact opposite of what was intended.”
Similarly, as Aharon Barak, the Israeli Supreme Court chief justice, wrote regarding a recent case brought before him: “Only a separation fence built on a base of law will grant security to the state and its citizens. Only a separation route based on the path of law will lead to the security so yearned for.”
The Charge that the ICJ has an Ideological Bias Against Israel:
Members of Congress from both parties have claimed that the World Court ruling was not based on well-recognized legal precedents but was instead an ideological attack on the state of Israel. For example, the Senate resolution expresses the concern that “the International Court of Justice is politicized and critical of Israel.” It notes, “The United States, Korea, and India have constructed security fences to separate such countries from territories or other countries for the security of their citizens.” On the House floor, Representative Engel claimed that the International Court of Justice was demanding “one standard for Israel and one standard for everybody else,” since the court had not ruled on security fences erected by Saudi Arabia, India, and Turkey.
Such comparisons fail to note that the other barriers, unlike Israel’s, were placed along internationally recognized borders and were therefore not the subject of legal challenge. Rather than displaying a bias against Israel, the World Court has actually been quite consistent: In the only other two advisory opinions issued by the ICJ involving occupied territories (South African-occupied Namibia in 1972 and Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara in 1975), the court also decided against the occupying powers.
The Discrediting of Human Rights Reports:
In a recent document, Amnesty International noted, “This fence/wall is having devastating economic and social consequences on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, separating families and communities from each other and from their land and water—their most crucial assets.” Reports from the World Bank, the United Nations, the Red Cross, and local human rights groups have documented in detail the barrier’s harmful impact on local populations, such as separating farmers from their fields, children from their schools, workers from their jobs, patients from medical care, and families from each other. Last fall, Human Rights Watch unsuccessfully lobbied President Bush to deduct the cost of the wall’s construction inside occupied territories from the recently approved $9 billion U.S. loan guarantee to Israel, observing that as the barrier’s route snakes through the West Bank, it “is having a profound impact on the ability of the Palestinian residents to exercise fundamental human rights.”
In an effort to discredit these reputable human rights groups, the Senate resolution contests their assertions that the route chosen for the wall has a negative impact on the civilian population under Israeli occupation, declaring that “the Government of Israel takes into account the need to minimize the confiscation of Palestinian land and the imposition of hardship on the Palestinian people.” The ICJ, however, confirmed the findings of the human rights groups, determining that Israel was indeed violating the Geneva Conventions’ proscription against occupying powers unnecessarily interfering with the subjected population’s rights to property, access to education and health care, and normal economic activity.
The Senate’s resolution also claims that Israel’s barrier is a “proportional response to the campaign of terrorism by Palestinian militants.” This contrasts, ironically, with a recent decision by Israel’s Supreme Court ordering the Israeli government to re-route a section of the wall bisecting some Palestinian towns, because the “relationship between the injury to the local inhabitants and the security benefit from the contraction of the Separation Fence along the route, as determined by the military officer, is not proportionate.”
A Denial that the West Bank Is Occupied Territory:
Questions regarding the legality of Israel’s practices in the West Bank fall under United Nations jurisdiction, because the West Bank—seized by the Israeli military in the 1967 war—constitutes occupied territory and is therefore covered by certain international legal conventions that do not apply to domestic matters. This helps explain why various UN bodies have been more critical of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law than of comparable human rights abuses by autocratic Arab governments. The operable legal distinction is that Israel is an occupying power, while neighboring Arab states are not. The only way to claim—as Senator Kerry and others have—that the UN does not have jurisdiction is to deny that Israel’s incursion and territorial control constitute an occupation.
Indeed, if approved, the Senate resolution against the World Court decision will be the first time either house of Congress has passed a resolution that refers to the West Bank not as occupied territories but as “disputed” territories. This distinction is important for two reasons: the word “disputed” implies that the claims of the West Bank’s Israeli conquerors are as legitimate as the claims of Palestinians who have lived on the land for centuries, and disputed territories—unlike occupied territories—are not covered by the Fourth Geneva Convention and many other international legal statutes.
The Senate resolution contends that the request by the UN General Assembly for a legal opinion by the ICJ referred to “the security fence being constructed by Israel to prevent Palestinian terrorists from entering Israel.” In reality, the UN request said nothing regarding security measures preventing terrorists from entering Israel. Instead, the document refers only to the legal consequences arising from “the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory…” Moreover, the UN statement refers to the secretary-general’s most recent report on the occupation, which reiterates the longstanding international consensus that Occupied Palestinian Territory refers only to the parts of Palestine seized by Israel in the 1967 War, not to any part of Israel itself.
Congressional leaders insist, however, that to refer to the West Bank as occupied territory is somehow blasphemous. In describing a recent trip to the West Bank, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay remarked, “I did not see occupied territory; I saw Israel.” Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma simply stated his conviction that Israel alone “has a right to the land… because God said so.” Mike Pence, house deputy assistant majority leader, declared that when the World Court “described Israel as an occupying power in Occupied Palestinian Territory, it was most assuredly a dark day and a day of disgrace for the International Court of Justice.”
If the West Bank is seen as part of Israel and not as occupied territory, then any legal dispute there should simply be a matter for the Israeli courts, not the World Court. Senator Kerry, for example, has argued that any legal challenges to the route of the wall should go through the Israeli judiciary, “and we should respect that process” rather than referring the issue to international forums.
However, the World Court went on record in its recent 14-1 decision that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is indeed occupied territory. Even Thomas Buergenthal, the American judge who cast the lone negative vote (largely on procedural grounds), acknowledged that the Palestinians were under occupation and had the right to self-determination, that Israel was obligated to adhere to international humanitarian law, and that he had “serious doubt” that routing a wall to protect West Bank settlements would qualify as “legitimate self-defense.” Furthermore, the Israeli Supreme Court has acknowledged that Israel holds the West Bank “in belligerent occupation” and that “the law of belligerent occupation… imposes conditions” on the authority of the military, even in areas related to security.
Why the Anti-ICJ Reaction?
It is not new for the American right-wing, in an effort to discredit the UN system, to fabricate outlandish charges against the world body, such as the popular conspiracy theory floated in the 1990s that the UN was on the verge of taking over the United States with its fleet of black helicopters in order to impose a world government. What is new is the willingness of Democrats to similarly fabricate claims of malfeasance.
It appears that both congressional Republicans and Democrats deliberately misrepresented the position of the International Court of Justice in order to so discredit the United Nations system in the public consciousness that Americans will no longer object to the United States or its allies violating UN rulings. Israeli professor and human rights leader Jeff Halper, while celebrating the World Court verdict, expressed his concerns that “delegitimizing the ICJ, human rights, and international law has fundamental implications for other struggles as well.” But what prompted this unprecedented bipartisan hostility toward the World Court?
The Desire to Maintain U.S. Control of the Israeli-Palestinian “Peace Process”
One explanation for the anti-ICJ reaction is that the World Court seems to threaten the U.S. role as the sole arbiter of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The White House insists that the U.S.-led peace process should be the appropriate venue to discuss the Israeli wall, stating that “this is an issue that should be resolved through the process that has been put in place.” The Bush administration, in essence, is arguing that even the most blatant violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention by an occupying power should not be subjected to any independent legal review but can only be addressed through the voluntary cooperation of the occupying power.
The ICJ did recognize—and spoke positively about—the existence of a U.S.-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process based upon the “Road Map.” But the court emphasized that any peace agreement had to be made “on the basis of international law.”
So far, the Road Map does not appear to include any consideration of international law. For example, during a decade of U.S.-brokered peace process, Palestinians have watched the number of settlers in the West Bank more than double. Understandably, they are skeptical that their international right to freedom from colonization will ever be enforced.
The expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and of the special highways—reserved for Jews only—connecting them has resulted in the confiscation of large tracts of Palestinian property, dividing the West Bank into a patchwork arrangement whereby settler holdings encircle Palestinian population centers. The security barrier being built by Israel in the occupied West Bank is designed so that it incorporates most of these settlement blocs and divides Palestinian communities from one another.
And now, using logic that also employs an encirclement strategy, both President Bush and Senator Kerry have gone on record as saying that Israel should not have to withdraw from most of the West Bank lands taken to support illegal Israeli settlements, since there are new “demographic realities on the ground”—namely, the construction of these selfsame illegal settlements. In June, the House of Representatives passed a resolution defending Sharon’s refusal to withdraw from most of the occupied territories using similar logic. Manifesting a bipartisan consensus, there were only nine dissenting votes in the 435-member body. The 2004 Democratic Party platform, approved by an overwhelming majority in July at the convention in Boston, contains similar language.
The anti-ICJ House resolution warns other countries not to try to encourage the application of international law in arenas that the United States considers under its purview. Indeed, the resolution “cautions members of the international community that they risk a strongly negative impact on their relationship with the people and Government of the United States should they use the ICJ’s advisory judgment as an excuse to interfere” with the U.S.-managed peace process.
Similarly, the Senate’s resolution insists that, on matters such as the legality of the barrier, the Oslo Accords—signed between Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States in 1993—insist that “all disputes between the parties be settled by direct negotiations or agreed-upon methods.” Taking this issue to the World Court, according to the Senate resolution, violates the Oslo Accords requirement that none of the parties take any unilateral initiatives that would prejudice the outcome of the peace process.
The Senate resolution fails to note, however, that successive Israeli governments—with U.S. backing—have repeatedly prejudiced the outcome of the peace process through their ongoing construction of illegal settlements in the occupied territories and other unilateral initiatives. Moreover, the Sharon government has long declared that it no longer feels bound by any of the provisions of the Oslo Accords.
Furthermore, Israel—again, with U.S. support—has refused to return to the negotiating table to meet with the Palestinians on any substantive issues for nearly three and a half years. Indeed, construction of the wall began after Israel broke off negotiations, so the Palestinians have not even had a chance to negotiate about it. In addition, most of the settlements that the wall is built to separate from the local Palestinian population have been established since the start of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resulting from the 1993 Oslo Accords.
What is upsetting to Bush, Kerry, and Congress is that the ICJ ruled that all nations “are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation arising from the construction of the wall, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation.” Unchallenged, this ruling would prevent the United States from recognizing Israel’s planned annexation of West Bank lands and could even threaten U.S. financial and military support for the occupation.
The Palestinians recognize that they have very little leverage regarding the occupation. Having expelled most Palestinians from their homeland more than 50 years ago, Israel occupies most of what remains of Palestine, has placed Palestinian towns and cities under siege, and launches periodic air strikes and armed incursions into populated Palestinian areas at will. This power imbalance is further exacerbated by the fact that the occupying authorities continue to receive unconditional, large-scale military, economic, and diplomatic support from the world’s sole remaining superpower.
In desperation, frustration, and anger, some Palestinians have responded by launching terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, a course of action that is both morally reprehensible and politically counterproductive. Other Palestinians contend that their cause is advanced more successfully by taking a legal and nonviolent route by going to the International Court of Justice.
Sadly, this internationally backed effort by moderate Palestinians to advance their struggle for self-determination nonviolently through the rule of law has been met by an overwhelmingly negative bipartisan reaction from the United States, which controls the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” As a result, the appeal of Palestinian extremists advocating violence is likely to grow.
Challenging the Threat of International Law
Speaking broadly, the attacks on the integrity of the World Court ruling by the Bush administration, the Democratic contender for the White House, and an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Congress, appear to be part of an ongoing effort—further exemplified by the overwhelming bipartisan vote in support of the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq—to undermine and discredit the United Nations system. International law and intergovernmental organizations are seen by both Republicans and Democrats as interfering with the prerogatives of the U.S. government and its allies in strategically important areas like the Middle East. Given the overwhelming military dominance of the United States globally (and allies such as Israel regionally), international legal institutions are among the few potential restraints on the unfettered exertion of American power.
As a result, the bipartisan attacks against the ICJ should not be seen simply as “pro-Israel” sentiment, particularly in light of the long-term detrimental impact on Israeli security if Israel continues its current policies. Instead, Washington’s unified hostility must be viewed as part of a broader effort to undermine international law in order to give the United States freer rein in pursuing its policy objectives overseas.
For example, Democratic Congressman Gene Green of Texas claimed that the ICJ ruling “sets dangerous precedents in international law that hinder and impede United States anti-terrorism efforts.” In reality, the ruling has no bearing on legitimate anti-terrorism efforts, but it may have implications regarding the legality of certain U.S. actions committed in the name of anti-terrorism. For example, a nearly unanimous congressional vote last year declared that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a legitimate part of the ongoing “war on terrorism.”
In its far-reaching decision, the World Court made a definitive ruling that member states of binding treaties, conventions, and charters—such as the Fourth Geneva Convention and the United Nations charter—are obliged to ensure that other member states live up to their legal obligations under those agreements. Specifically, the court insisted that every country that is party to the Fourth Geneva Convention must “ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law as embodied in that Convention.”
This is what the Bush administration, the Kerry-Edwards ticket, and an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress, are so upset about: any such strict and uniform application of international law would interfere with U.S. policy objectives in the region, which rely heavily on the use of military force, including conquest and occupation. This is why any attempt to enforce international humanitarian law must be met by slander, condemnation, and other attacks against the credibility of the international organizations daring to suggest that the United States and its allies are not somehow exempt from such legal obligations.
In its ruling, the ICJ also determined that “the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly and the Security Council, should consider what further action is required to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall.” Not surprisingly, however, President Bush has promised to veto any UN Security Council resolution based upon the World Court’s ruling. The United States was also one of just six countries (five of which are dependent on U.S. economic aid) in the 191-member General Assembly to vote against a resolution upholding the ICJ decision.
Indeed, the Senate’s resolution specifically urges the administration “to vote against any further United Nations action that could delay or prevent the construction of the security fence and to engage in a diplomatic campaign to persuade other countries to do the same.” Should the Senate resolution pass, it will effectively put the United States on record that, despite the nearly unanimous World Court decision to the contrary, parties to international agreements are not bound to abide by or enforce agreement provisions.
Given that the World Court enjoined the United States and other signatories to “ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law,” any refusal by the United States government, which—as Israel’s primary military, economic and diplomatic supporter—is in the best position to “ensure compliance,” places the United States in violation of the World Court, just like Israel. However, just as the Bush administration—backed by Senator Kerry and both houses of Congress—chose to ignore the UN Charter by invading Iraq, it appears that these same U.S. leaders are quite willing to ignore the world’s highest court.
In essence, this wholesale bipartisan rejection of international law stems from the way in which U.S. backing of the expansionist agenda of the Israeli right wing has merged—under the banner of the “war on terrorism”—with the growing militarization of U.S. Middle East policy, exemplified by the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Indeed, the Bush administration, with strong backing from both parties in Congress, is now engaging in what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has referred to as the “Sharonization of U.S. Policy.”
Even if Washington were to adopt a principled and law-based policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how could Bush or Kerry criticize Israel for its occupation while maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq? How could Bush or Kerry criticize the widespread Israeli maltreatment of Palestinian prisoners when U.S. abuses against Iraqis rank even worse? How could Bush or Kerry criticize the killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli occupation forces while American occupation forces exact an even higher death toll among Iraqi civilians? How could Bush or Kerry criticize Israel’s violations of international law given the manifold violations committed by the United States in its invasion and occupation of Iraq?
In conclusion, the recent attacks against the World Court by both Republicans and Democrats are not simply an endorsement of the dangerous and illegal policies of a right-wing ally. They are, in effect, a declaration of empire—a brazen assertion that the United States and its allies are somehow exempt from longstanding and respected international legal institutions. If such a declaration goes unchallenged, the Palestinians will certainly not be the only ones who will suffer.
President Bush’s May 24 Speech on Iraq: A Critique
The most striking element of President George W. Bush’s May 24th speech at the Army War College regarding the situation in Iraq was that it could come across as quite convincing as long as you agreed with the following assumptions:
* Only the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq would lead to “the rise of a free and self-governing Iraq.”
* Conversely, if the U.S. forces withdrew, either unilaterally or as part of a transfer to United Nations authority, the result would be a totalitarian government which would “embolden the terrorists, leading to more bombings, more beheadings and more murders of the innocent around the world.”
Such assumptions, however, are extremely dubious.
Most Iraqis and other observers argue that it is the ongoing presence of American forces which is driving the insurgency and radicalizing elements of the diverse resistance to the U.S. occupation.
The claim by President Bush in his speech that he “sent American troops to Iraq to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power” would ring hollow to the millions of Iraqis who knew that their country was no threat to America’s security and that—well over a year after the ouster of Saddam Hussein’s regime—U.S. troops remain in charge.
Similarly, his claim that “Our agenda . . . is freedom and independence, security and prosperity for the Iraqi people” will not be seen as credible by a nation that has seen the U.S. occupation bring war, chaos, repression, record unemployment, and a breakdown of basic services.
While most Iraqis presumably prefer a system which promotes individual freedom, they—like most peoples who have a history of suffering under foreign rule—place an even higher priority on national freedom. As a result, by contrasting the goals of Iraqis fighting U.S. occupation forces and the U.S. occupation simply as “one of tyranny and murder, the other of liberty and life” is a false dichotomy.
Despite repeated assertions to the contrary, the United States will not “transfer full sovereignty to a government of Iraqi citizens” on June 30. It appears that the “sovereign Iraqi government” the Bush Administration claims will assume power on that date will lack many of the attributes generally associated with a sovereign state. For example, the United States, not the Iraqi government, will continue to control Iraq’s security, including Iraqi police and military personnel. This interim Iraqi authority will not have the power to enact new legislation or overturn laws imposed during the U.S. occupation. In addition, given the chaos engulfing the country and the widespread non-cooperation with U.S. occupation forces, there are questions as to how much governing power the United States has to transfer anyway.
Furthermore, there is so much ill will toward the United States at this point that the legitimacy of virtually any Iraqi-led government that emerges, will—whether rightly or wrongly—be questioned.
Then, as has become typical of presidential addresses since the U.S. invasion, there is the rewriting of history:
For example, President Bush claimed, “Over the decades of Saddam’s rule, Iraq’s infrastructure was allowed to crumble.” In reality, most of the damage to the country’s infrastructure was a direct result of the heavy U.S. bombing during the Gulf War in 1991, subsequently compounded by U.S.-led economic sanctions over the next dozen years, as well as additional bombings and the failure to prevent massive looting and vandalism immediately following the U.S. takeover last year.
President Bush spoke of the lack of freedom and democracy in the Middle East as simply “a tragedy of history,” ignoring the role of the United States—which has long been the principal supporter and arms supplier of the region’s authoritarian regimes and occupation armies—in denying Middle Eastern peoples democracy and freedom.
His claim that “At every stage, the United States has gone to the United Nations” ignored the fact that the invasion and occupation of Iraq came in open defiance of the UN.
Despite growing evidence of the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners held by American occupation forces, President Bush dismissed it simply as a matter of some “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops” at just one facility.
President Bush boasted of the accomplishments of the Iraqi Governing Council, such as their approval of “a new law that opens the country to foreign investment for the first time in decades.” This ignores the fact that the council was appointed by U.S. occupation authorities and that the Iraqi people never had a say in its key decisions, such as selling off public assets to American multinational corporations with close ties to the Bush Administration.
His claim that U.S. forces are in Iraq to defeat “terrorism at the heart of its power” ignores the fact that terrorism by extremist groups inside Iraq was virtually non-existent until after the United States invaded and occupied the country.
Perhaps most misleading is President Bush’s assertion that the Iraqi resistance—consisting of more than a dozen separate groups with diverse tactics and ideology—are all simply “terrorists,” “foreign fighters,” and “Saddam loyalists.”
According to President Bush, “They seek the total control of every person in mind and soul; a harsh society in which women are voiceless and brutalized. They seek bases of operation to train more killers and export more violence. They commit dramatic acts of murder to shock, frighten and demoralize civilized nations, hoping we will retreat from the world and give them free reign. They seek weapons of mass destruction to impose their will through blackmail and catastrophic attacks.”
This is largely an effort to portray the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq not as an act of aggression—as most of the international community sees it—but as an act of self-defense. By extension, it seeks to portray those who oppose the ongoing U.S. occupation as supporters of totalitarianism and violence.
Interviews of Iraqi resistance fighters by the international media and social scientists, however, have shown no such grandiose designs. Their overriding concern is simply to rid their own country of a foreign occupation.
The rhetoric emanating from the Bush Administration bears a striking resemblance to similar efforts by the Johnson and Nixon administrations to portray the South Vietnamese guerrillas, primarily made up of nationalist peasants, as part of some grand unified communist conspiracy to take over the world. Interviews of these guerrillas similarly showed that they had no desire to conquer and occupy other countries, but to simply rid their own country of what they saw as a U.S. occupation. (They did not see the Saigon regime as a legitimate sovereign government, but as a hand-picked American creation, similar to how the Iraqis will likely see, at least initially, whatever government emerges in Baghdad.)
Unfortunately, despite polls showing a majority of the American public in opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq, the Democratic Party is choosing as its presidential nominee a supporter of the U.S. invasion and occupation. Senator John Kerry, like President Bush, has also made a series of misleading statements, falsely claiming that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and, like President Bush, insists that a continued U.S. occupation is necessary to bring peace and security to the region.
As a result, outside of the insurgent Nader campaign, the election cycle will not likely provide the forum to challenge the lies and misleading statements coming from the White House.
This then requires that ordinary Americans must take the lead in challenging President Bush, Senator Kerry, and all those who have gotten us into this tragic mess, continue to mislead us, and refuse to get us out.
Bush Endorsement of Sharon Proposal Undermines Peace and International Law
President George W. Bush’s unconditional endorsement of right-wing Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan constitutes a shocking reversal of longstanding U.S. Middle East policy and one of the most flagrant challenges to international law and the integrity of the United Nations system ever made by a U.S. president.
By giving unprecedented backing for Israeli plans to annex large swaths of occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank in order to incorporate illegal Jewish settlements, President Bush has effectively renounced UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, which call on Israel – in return for security guarantees from its Arab neighbors – to withdraw from Palestinian territories seized in the June 1967 war.
All previous U.S. administrations of both parties had seen these resolutions as the basis for Arab-Israeli peace.
These Israeli settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which deem it illegal for any country to transfer civilian population onto territories seized by military force. UN Security Council resolutions 446, 455, 465 and 471 call on Israel to remove its colonists from the occupied territories.
President Bush, however, has unilaterally determined that Sharon’s Israel, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, need not abide by UN Security Council resolutions.
Not surprisingly, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was highly critical of the U.S. endorsement of Sharon’s plan, noting that “final status issues should be determined in negotiations between the parities based on relevant Security Council resolutions.”
Not only does President Bush’s announcement effectively destroy the once highly-touted “road map,” this marks the first time in the history of the peace process that a U.S. president has pre-empted negotiations by announcing support of such a unilateral initiative by one party. Both Israel and the United States have continued to refuse to even negotiate with Palestine Authority president Yasir Arafat, Palestinian prime minister Amhed Qureia, or any other recognized Palestinian leader.
President Bush also went on record rejecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to what is now Israel. While it had been widely assumed that the Palestinians would be willing to compromise on this area once talks resumed, by effectively settling issues that were up for negotiations, it has pre-empted key concessions the Palestinians may have made been able to make in return for Israeli concessions. However, the Bush Administration has determined that it now has the right to unilaterally give away Palestinian rights and Palestinian land.
The shock experienced by the Palestinians is matched only by the dismay of moderate and liberal Israelis, who fear this will only encourage Palestinian extremists. By incorporating these illegal settlements – which the Clinton Administration recognized were an “obstacle to peace” – it divides the West Bank in such a way that makes a viable contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
Indeed, in response to the announcement, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi said that Bush has “put an end to the illusions” of a peaceful solution.
Here in Jerusalem, the leading daily Yediot Ahronot this morning carried the headline “Sharon: The Great Achievement” above a photo of the smiling prime minister alongside President Bush. Indeed, the consensus here is that the U.S. endorsement was stronger and more enthusiastic than Israeli rightists had even dared hope for. Deputy prime minister Ehud Olmert called in “an amazing victory.”
It is also being widely interpreted as an effort to short-circuit last fall’s Geneva Initiative – supported by the Palestinian leadership and leading Israeli moderates – where Palestinians agreed that Israel could annex some blocs of settlements, but only along Israel’s internationally- recognized borders and only in exchange for an equivalent amount of territory currently part of Israel that would be granted to the new Palestinian state.
More fundamentally, Bush’s endorsement of an Israeli annexation of land it conquered in the 1967 war is a direct challenge to the United Nations Charter, which forbids any country from expanding its territory through military force. This therefore constitutes nothing less than a renunciation of the post-World War II international system, effectively recognizing the right of conquest.
Kerry’s Support for the Invasion of Iraq and the Bush Doctrine Still Unexplained
As casualties mount and disorder continues in Iraq, and as the lies that were put forward to garner support of the invasion are exposed, Massachusetts senator John Kerry and his supporters have desperately sought to defend his decision to back the U.S. invasion and occupation. Their failure to make a convincing case may spell trouble for Senator Kerry’s dreams of capturing the White House in November.
Senator Kerry, like President Bush, believes that while it is okay for the United States and a number of its regional allies to possess a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, countries the United States does not like must be prevented, by military force if necessary, from doing the same. And Senator Kerry ‘ like President Bush ‘ apparently believes that unilateral military intervention, not comprehensive arms control treaties, is the way to deal with the threat of proliferation.
And, if the country targeted for invasion does not really have such weapons, Senator Kerry ‘ like President Bush ‘ will simply claim that they do anyway.
Back in October 2002, when Senator Kerry voted to grant President Bush a blank check to make war, he tried to scare the American public into thinking that such an invasion was essential to the defense of the United States. Despite a lack of credible evidence, Kerry categorically declared that ‘Iraq has chemical and biological weapons’ and even claimed that most elements of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programs were ‘larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.’ Furthermore, Kerry asserted that Iraq was ‘attempting to develop nuclear weapons,’ backing up this accusation by claiming that ‘all U.S. intelligence experts agree’ with such an assessment. He also alleged that ‘Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents, which could threaten Iraq’s neighbors as well as American forces in the Persian Gulf.’
Every single one of these claims, no less than similar claims by President Bush, was false. Despite this, however, Senator Kerry and his supporters somehow want the American public to trust him enough to elect him as the next president of the United States.
Senator Kerry and his supporters claim that he was fooled by exaggerated reports about Iraq’s military prowess from the administration. However, there were other senators who had access to the same information as Kerry who voted against going to war. Furthermore, former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter personally briefed Senator Kerry prior to his vote on how Iraq did not have any dangerous WMD capability; he also personally gave the senator ‘ at his request ‘ an article from the respected journal Arms Control Today making the case that Iraq had been qualitatively disarmed. Members of Senator Kerry’s staff have acknowledged that the senator had access to a number of credible reports challenging the administration’s tall tales regarding the alleged Iraqi threat.
Should Senator Kerry win his party’s nomination, then, it will show that the Democrats ‘ just like the Republicans ‘ have no problems with rewarding a politician who lied about a foreign country’s military capabilities in order to justify invading it.
In failing to apologize for lying about Iraq’s military threat, Senator Kerry and his supporters ‘ like President Bush and his supporters ‘ have demonstrated their belief that the United States has the right to invade a Third World country on the far side of the globe simply on the suspicion that they might possess certain dangerous weapons and delivery systems that could possibly be used against us.
And Senator Kerry was not interested in people learning the truth. During the summer of 2002, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on Iraq’s alleged military threat which only invited witnesses who would argue that Iraq was somehow a danger to U.S. national security. Kerry ‘ one of the senior Democrats on the committee ‘ ignored thousands of phone calls and emails encouraging him to invite Ritter and other witnesses who would challenge those who were falsely insisting that Iraq had a dangerous stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Senator Kerry, no less than President Bush, simply did not want dissenting views to be heard.
Senator Kerry and his supporters have also tried to justify his October 2002 vote by claiming that it was not because he believed that the United States should actually take over that oil-rich nation by military force, but because he felt it was necessary to force Saddam Hussein into allowing the United Nations inspectors back into Iraq.
This rationale is also false: Senator Kerry’s vote to authorize military force against Iraq was cast on October 11. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had agreed to allow UN inspectors to return without conditions on September 16, nearly four weeks earlier.
In fact, on August 28, the Bush Administration stated that they would seek the ouster of the Iraqi government regardless of whether Iraq allowed weapons inspectors back in. On September 18, the administration formally rejected Iraq’s offer to allow the United Nations unfettered access to the country and instead called for ‘regime change.’ On September 20, Bush publicly presented his new strategic doctrine of pre-emptive invasions of foreign countries.
In other words, Kerry knew that his vote to authorize U.S. military force was an endorsement of the Bush Doctrine that had nothing to do with whether or not Iraq allowed the United Nations to enforce its requirements for disarmament.
Kerry and his supporters claim he does not really reject multilateralism and international law. They note that, in voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Kerry stated at that time that he expected President Bush ‘To work with the United Nations Security Council’ and ‘our allies . . . if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force.’ He then promised that if President Bush failed to do so, ‘I will be the first to speak out.’
However, Senator Kerry broke that promise. When President Bush abandoned his efforts to gain United Nations Security Council authorization for the war in late February 2003 and pressed forward with plans for the invasion without a credible international coalition, Kerry remained silent.
When President Bush actually launched the invasion soon afterwards, Senator Kerry praised him, co-sponsoring a Senate resolution in which he declared that the invasion was ‘lawful and fully authorized by the Congress’ and that he ‘commends and supports the efforts and leadership of the President . . . in the conflict with Iraq.’
Some have tried to defend Kerry’s votes by saying he was simply na’ve, a rather odd defense of one of the most intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced and hard-working members of the U.S. Senate. Even if this more forgiving interpretation were correct, however, it still raises serious questions.
As Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt described it, ‘Liberal base voters never trusted George W. Bush from the beginning, and believed in their hearts that he was approaching the Iraq situation with bad intentions. The fact that Kerry trusted him, and trusted him enough to ignore Senator Robert Byrd’s dire warnings of constitutional abrogation of Congressional responsibilities which was inherent in the resolution, makes it hard for those voters to trust Kerry.’
Senator Byrd introduced a resolution in the fall of 2002 clarifying that authorizing an invasion of Iraq would not alter the Constitutional authority to declare war and that no additional authority not directly related to a clear threat of imminent, sudden and direct attack on the United States could be granted to the president unless Congress authorized it. Senator Kerry, perhaps in anticipation of possibly becoming the next president and not wanting the legislative branch interfering with his right to invade other countries, voted ‘no.’
‘Every nation has the right to act preemptively if it faces an imminent and grave threat,’ declared Senator Kerry. Furthermore, Kerry insisted that Iraq posed such an ‘unacceptable threat’ because of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and sophisticated weapons systems that he and Bush falsely claimed that Iraq possessed, and therefore the United States had the right to invade and occupy that country.
As a result, there is little reason to hope, that, as president, Kerry won’t launch invasions of other countries by making similar false claims that their governments are ‘an imminent and grave threat’ to the United States.
As an alternative to authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq unilaterally, some Democratic senators put forward an amendment in October 2002 which would have allowed for U.S. military action to disarm Iraq of any weapons of mass destruction and weapons systems pursuant to any future UN Security Council resolution authorizing such military actions. Senator Kerry voted against it. In doing so, Senator Kerry not only tacitly acknowledged that it was not really any potential Iraqi weapons that concerned him, but he was willing to ignore U.S. obligations under the United Nations Charter.
Indeed, Senator Kerry attacked former Vermont governor Howard Dean ‘ his previous major rival for the Democratic presidential nomination ‘ for arguing that a genuine international coalition should have been established before the United States invaded Iraq. Kerry claimed that such multilateralism advocated by Dean ‘Cedes our security and presidential responsibility to defend America to someone else’ since it would ‘permit a veto over when American can or cannot act.’ Dean’s call for the United States to work in broad coalitions, insisted Kerry, is ‘little more that a pretext for doing nothing.’
Like President Bush and his supporters, Senator Kerry and his supporters appear to believe that raising such questions about pre-emptive war is indicative of a lack of commitment to the country’s national security.
The Democrats are badly mistaken if they think that the ‘electability’ of a Democrat who can defeat President Bush in November is enhanced by nominating someone who essentially supports the same illegal and dangerous policies.
For there are millions of voters who would have been willing to actively campaign and vote for Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark or any other Democrat who opposed the invasion, but who have too much respect for the U.S. Constitution and the UN Charter to support someone like John Kerry. Should Senator Kerry get the nomination, these voters will raise the legitimate question as to why Americans should bother to defeat President Bush in November if he will simply be replaced by someone who essentially supports the same reckless foreign policy agenda?
The outcome of nominating the pro-war Senator Kerry, then, could be the same as when the Democrats chose the pro-war vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, as their presidential nominee back in 1968: by alienating the party’s anti-war majority, it could make possible a Republican victory in November.
Interview of Bush Reveals Dangerous Assumptions Behind U.S. Foreign Policy
A number of critiques have been written about President George W. Bush’s responses to Tim Russert’s questions in the February 8 edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” primarily regarding his shifting rationale for the invasion of Iraq. More problematic, however, was the fact that President Bush made a number of assertions that were patently false or–at the very least–misleading. The failure of Mr. Russert to challenge these statements and the ongoing repetition of such rationales by the administration and its supporters make it all the more imperative that such assertions not be allowed to go unquestioned. The implications of Bush’s statements are quite disturbing, since they involve such fundamental issues as international terrorism, the United Nations, weapons of mass destruction, and the policy of preemption.
International Terrorism
A major Bush administration rationale for the 2003 Iraq War was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s alleged links to the terrorist al Qaeda network and other active Iraqi involvement in international terrorism. Regarding the failure to find any evidence for such involvement, President Bush stated in his “Meet the Press” interview: “We knew the fact that he was paying for suicide bombers. We knew the fact that he was funding terrorist groups.” This statement is a stretch. Saddam Hussein’s support for Abu Nidal (a secular nationalist group composed primarily of Palestinian exiles) and other terrorists peaked during the 1980s–the very time period when the U.S. dropped Iraq from its list of countries backing terrorism in order to provide the Iraqi dictator with technical and military support. According to the U.S. State Department, the last direct involvement by the Iraqi government in an act of international terrorism was the alleged 1993 assassination attempt in Kuwait against former President George H.W. Bush.
More recently, Iraq has provided money to a tiny pro-Iraqi Palestinian faction, the Arab Liberation Front, which has passed it on to some Palestinian families of “martyrs” killed in the struggle against the Israeli occupation. Recipients have included families of suicide bombers who murdered Israeli civilians, but most of those helped have been families of militiamen killed in battles with Israeli occupation forces or families of civilians shot by the Israelis. And the amount given to families of terrorists was far less than the value of the families’ homes, which are usually destroyed right after a terrorist attack as part of Israel ‘s policy of collective punishment in the occupied territories. Thus, this minimal Iraqi assistance probably did not result in any additional terrorist attacks. Hamas, the Palestinian group responsible for the majority of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, receives most of its funding from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries.
Meanwhile, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is being justified in the name of the war on terrorism. President Bush claimed that Iraqis are fighting U.S. occupation forces, not because they resent being invaded and occupied by a foreign power, but because they “are people who desperately want to stop the advance of freedom and democracy.” In the “Meet the Press” interview, President Bush reiterated the widely accepted belief that “freedom and democracy will be a powerful long-term deterrent to terrorist activities.” Though this is undoubtedly true, the Bush administration continues to provide military, economic, and diplomatic support to Middle Eastern dictatorships and occupation armies that deny Arab and Muslim people their freedom and democratic rights. It is not surprising that the majority of the leadership, financial support, and membership in the mega-terrorist al Qaeda network stems from countries with U.S.-backed dictatorships, like Saudi Arabia.
UN Security Council Resolutions
Another unchallenged statement in Bush’s “Meet the Press” interview was the president’s assertion that the invasion of Iraq was fought in part to uphold UN Security Council resolutions violated by Iraq . Alluding to UN Security Council Resolution 1441, President Bush stated that Saddam Hussein “defied the world once again.”
Though Baghdad had defied several UN Security Council resolutions prior to unanimous passage of Resolution 1441 in November 2003, Iraq appears to have been largely in compliance at the time of the U.S. invasion. Hussein’s regime unconditionally allowed inspectors from the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) unfettered access within Iraq shortly after the resolution was passed; released what evidence it had of its proscribed weapons, delivery systems, and weapons programs and their disassembly (which was initially greeted with skepticism but now appears to have been accurate); and arranged with UNMOVIC the modalities regarding interviews with Iraqi scientists, overflights of Iraqi airspace, and other UN activities. Remaining disputes were largely technical in nature and could not reasonably be considered cases of “material breach” of the UN resolution.
Citing the resolution’s warning of “serious consequences” to Iraqi noncompliance, President Bush argued: “if there isn’t serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences. People look at us and say, they don’t mean what they say, they are not willing to follow through.” Even if one were to accept the assertion that Iraq was in material breach of 1441, the resolution states that the Security Council “remains seized of the matter,” essentially reiterating the UN Charter’s stipulation that only the Security Council as a whole–not any single member–has the right to authorize the use of military action to enforce the resolution.
In any case, at the time Iraq was attacked, there were more than 100 UN Security Council resolutions being violated by governments other than Iraq . The Bush administration has opposed enforcing these resolutions by military or any other means, however, since the majority of violating governments are considered U.S. allies. As a result, the administration’s claim that invading Iraq was somehow an effort to uphold the integrity of the United Nations and its resolutions is disingenuous at best.
In the February 8 interview, President Bush rejected the idea that he rushed into war by claiming that he acted militarily only after he went “to the international community … [to] … see if we could not disarm Saddam Hussein peacefully through international pressure.” However, as is now apparent, the international community did disarm Saddam Hussein peacefully through international pressure. So, why did the United States have to invade?
Weapons of Mass Destruction
In response to Mr. Russert’s questions regarding the failure to find Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), President Bush defended the decision to invade the oil-rich country by observing: “We remembered the fact that he had used weapons, which meant he had had weapons.” No one disputes that Saddam Hussein had possessed and used chemical weapons, both against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. These war crimes took place over 15 years ago, however, at a time when the U.S.–supportive of the Baghdad regime–was downplaying and covering up Iraq’s use of such weapons. The Bush administration has failed to provide evidence that Iraq still had chemical weapons or any other WMDs during the five years prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
President Bush’s claim that, in the months leading up to the invasion, “the international community thought he had weapons” is patently false. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had determined back in 1998, after years of inspections, that Iraq no longer had a nuclear program, and after four months of rigorous inspections just prior to the invasion, the agency gave no indication that anything had changed. UNMOVIC–though frustrated at Iraq’s failure to fully account for all the proscribed materials–similarly determined that there was no evidence of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. Rolf Ekeus, former head of UNMOVIC’s predecessor agency, the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), declared that Iraq was “fundamentally disarmed” as early as 1996. At the United Nations and other forums, representatives of many of the world’s governments questioned U.S. and British accusations that Iraq still had WMDs.
In his interview with Russert, President Bush said: “I don’t think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential … that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent.” And top administration officials claimed on several occasions prior to the war that Iraq ‘s threat was already “imminent.” Now that we know this was not the case, President Bush is claiming: “It’s too late if they become imminent.” The president also argued that although Saddam Hussein may not actually have possessed weapons of mass destruction, “he could have developed a nuclear weapon over time–I’m not saying immediately, but over time.” But given the IAEA’s findings that Iraq ‘s nuclear program had been completely dismantled and with a strict embargo against military and dual-use technology and raw materials, it is doubtful that Baghdad could ever have produced a nuclear weapon.
Of greater concern to world peace is that, through this interview and related comments, President Bush’s doctrine of preemption has been expanded to include the right to invade a country if a U.S. president determines that the government of that country poses even a hypothetical threat some time in the future. As President Bush put it: “There was no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a danger to America,” not because he actually had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion, but because “he had the capacity to make a weapon.” The president went on to claim that Washington’s chief post-invasion weapons inspector, David Kay, reported that “Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons.”
Even this assertion is questionable. Kay had actually stated that Iraq’s entire infrastructure for nuclear and chemical weapons was virtually destroyed. Though Kay did believe that Iraq might have been able to produce dangerous biological agents, he felt they were far more difficult to weaponize “in a usable way.” In a February 17 story, the Boston Globe quoted former CIA counterterrorism chief and former National Security Council Intelligence Director Vincent Cannistraro as saying that the Iraqis had the “capability” of developing WMDs only in the sense that they had the knowledge of how to do so, but they did not have many of the basic components to actually produce such weapons. Only by importing technology and raw materials in the 1980s from Russia, Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S. was Iraq able to develop its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs in the first place. Thus, the administration has never been able to make a credible case for Iraq reconstituting such programs, as long as sanctions curtailed the necessary inputs.
In addition to the eight or nine nations that currently have nuclear weapons, there are more than 40 other countries that are theoretically capable of developing such weapons. At least twice that many could develop chemical and biological weapons, and a couple of dozen already have. The Bush administration has failed to make a compelling case as to why Iraq–which, unlike the other nations, allowed inspectors unfettered access to the entire country to look for such weapons, weapon components, and delivery systems–was a greater threat than all the others.
The Doctrine of Preemption
A cornerstone of Bush’s doctrine of preemptive military intervention is the notion that deterrence cannot work. In response to those who stressed containment of Iraq as an alternative to offensive war, President Bush replied: “We can’t say, ‘Let’s don’t deal with Saddam Hussein. Let’s hope he changes his stripes, or let’s trust in the goodwill of Saddam Hussein. Let’s let us, kind of, try to contain him’.”
Despite assertions to the contrary, the doctrine of containment has never assumed goodwill on the part of the other party. If there was an assumption of goodwill from the Iraqi regime, intrusive inspections and strictly enforced sanctions would not have been necessary. Besides, who was suggesting that the world not “deal with” Saddam Hussein? For a dozen years prior to the U.S. invasion, the United Nations put more time, money, and effort into successfully insuring that Saddam Hussein could no longer threaten its neighbors or its Kurdish minority than it expended on any other issue.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before “Meet the Press” in 2001, confidently stated that “we have been able to keep weapons from going into Iraq ” and that the sanctions on military and dual-use items had been “quite a success for ten years.” In a meeting with the German foreign minister in February 2001, Powell spoke of how the United Nations, the U.S., and its allies “have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions” with the result that “they don’t really possess the capability to attack their neighbors the way they did ten years ago.” Iraq , continued Powell, was “not threatening America . Containment has been a successful policy, and I think we should make sure that we continue it,” he added. Instead, given that a dictator in possession of WMDs and an offensive delivery system during the 1980s was defanged by a UN-led disarmament program in the 1990s, it appears that containment did work.
One argument that Bush and his supporters have put forward is that if Saddam Hussein had developed nuclear weapons, “we would have been in a position of blackmail.” Such reasoning makes no sense. During the cold war, the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and other delivery systems pointed at the U.S. , and Washington had no defense against them, yet there were no attempts at blackmail. This was because the U.S. could have blackmailed the Soviets as well. Such a stalemate is known as deterrence and was the backbone of U.S. defense policy for decades. If it could work against a powerful totalitarian state like the Soviet Union , why wouldn’t it work against a weak third world country like Iraq ?
The only response the administration has been able to offer is that Saddam Hussein was a “madman.” This label was used by President Bush a half dozen times in his “Meet the Press” interview alone: “You can’t rely upon a madman, and he was a madman. You can’t rely upon him making rational decisions when it comes to war and peace, and it’s too late, in my judgment, when a madman who has got terrorist connections is able to act… Containment doesn’t work with a man who is a madman.”
Although Saddam Hussein certainly has a record of making poor political and strategic judgments, that does not make him a “madman.” Other heads of government have made poor decisions on issues of war and peace, including President Bush. Such behavior does not imply that the Iraqi dictator would have launched a suicidal first strike against the U.S. with a nuclear weapon.
Saddam Hussein demonstrated repeatedly while in power that he cared first and foremost about his own survival. He apparently recognized that any attempt to use WMDs against the U.S. or any of its allies would inevitably have led to his own destruction. This is why he did not use them during the 1991 Gulf War, even when attacked by the largest coalition of international forces ever amassed against a single nation and even though he still had chemical weapons and long-range missiles. (In contrast, prior to the Gulf War, Saddam was quite willing to utilize his arsenal of chemical weapons against Iranian forces, because he knew that the revolutionary Islamist regime was isolated internationally. He was similarly willing to use them against Kurdish civilians, because he knew that they could not fight back.)
President Bush still raises the idea that if Saddam Hussein had one day developed a nuclear weapon or other weapon of mass destruction, he would have “then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network.” There is no evidence that the Iraqi government ever considered such a dangerous move, even when its contacts with terrorist groups and its WMD programs were at their peaks during the 1980s. Saddam Hussein’s leadership style has always been that of direct control; his distrust of subordinates (bordering on paranoia) was one of the ways he was able to hold on to power for so long. He would never have gone to the risk and expense of developing weapons of mass destruction only to pass them on to some group of terrorists, particularly radical Islamists who could easily turn on him. When he had such weapons at his disposal, their use was clearly at his discretion alone.
At the time of the U.S. invasion last year, Iraq’s armed forces were barely one-third of their pre-Gulf War size. Iraq’s Navy was virtually nonexistent, and its Air Force was unable to even get off the ground to challenge U.S. forces. Pre-invasion military spending by Iraq has been estimated at barely one-tenth of 1980 levels. The Bush administration has been unable to explain why in 2003, when Saddam enjoyed only a tiny percentage of his once-formidable military capability, Iraq was considered so massive a threat that it was necessary to invade the country and replace its leader–the same leader Washington had quietly supported during the peak of Iraq ‘s military capability.
In his interview, President Bush claimed that his policy of preemption–demonstrated in Iraq–has had positive repercussions elsewhere, citing Libya’s decision to end its nascent WMD programs and open up to international inspections. However, Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi surely must have observed that Iraq was invaded only after it had given up its WMD programs, while North Korea, choosing to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, was not invaded. The Libyan decision, the result of a year-long series of diplomatic initiatives, seems to have come in spite of the U.S. invasion of Iraq , not because of it.
Ironically, in his interview President Bush claimed that “we had run the diplomatic string in Iraq ” at the time of the invasion but that “we’re making good progress in North Korea.” The reality, of course, is that UN-led diplomatic efforts had successfully eliminated Iraq’s WMD threat prior to the U.S. invasion but that North Korea has broken its treaty commitments and is apparently now developing nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the Bush administration refused to engage in any direct negotiations with Iraq prior to war, raising questions as to how the U.S. could have “run the diplomatic string.”
As his trump card in the NBC interview, President Bush tried to claim that the U.S., through its invasion and occupation of Iraq, was bringing democracy to that country and would thereby make the world safer, since “free societies are societies that don’t develop weapons of mass terror.” This, unfortunately, is not true. The U.S. was the first society to develop nuclear weapons and is the only country to have actually used them. Great Britain, France, Israel, and India are also considered free societies, yet they have developed nuclear weapons as well.
These last claims simply reflect a broader pattern in the interview as a whole. The interview was an opportunity for President Bush to present an honest and clear representation of U.S. policy in Iraq to the American people. Instead, his presentation was a defensive effort littered with untruthful assertions and misleading statements to justify a policy which is losing support among Americans as a whole. The American people deserved better.