PERSPECTIVE

PERSPECTIVE

The Anglo-Americans war on Iraq

Mohammed Haruna

Nearly six months ago, precisely in its August 3, 2002 edition, The Economist made what looked like an unassailable case for war against Iraq. The world (meaning the Anglo-Americans) must wage war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the paper said, because Hussein is aggressive, cruel, and reckless and if he is not quickly taken out, his country’s oil wealth and advanced technology “could very soon give (him) an atomic bomb”.

“Perhaps the best hope (of avoiding war)”, the paper continued, “is that, as the noose tightens, Mr. Hussein will save himself by letting the inspectors return. If they do so on a credible go-anywhere, check-anything basis, such an opportunity would be worth grabbing, at least to see if it worked”.

Late last year, Hussein, against all odds, did exactly what The Economist prescribed. In actual fact he did more. Not only did he allow the UN inspectors back on a go-anywhere, check-anything basis, in December he invited his arch-enemy, the American CIA, to come over and search every inch of Iraqi territory for the so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD) it allegedly possessed. “Iraq hits back with CIA offer”, screamed The Guardian of London with a lead story in its December 23, 2002 edition. (In that story, the paper, little to any informed observers surprise, revealed that British government officials had been privately admitting that they did not have any strong evidence that Iraq possessed any WMD).

How did the Anglo-Americans respond to the Iraqi offer? You guessed right – they popooed it. Thanks, but no thanks, they said. The offer is mere propaganda. What we need is “pro-active cooperation”, whatever that meant.

And so it is that inspite of everything the Iraqis have done to prove to the world that the Anglo-Americans are lying about their allegations of Iraqi possession of WMD, the Anglo-Americans have intensified their preparations to destroy Iraq and forcibly occupy the Gulf region.

Boris Johnson, a member of British Parliament and the editor of the right wing Spectator magazine writing in the thoroughly right wing, London Daily Telegraph, best summarized the hollowness of the Anglo-Americans case against Saddam. “Saddam must go,” he said writing in the Daily Telegraph of December 26, 2002, “but don’t lie to me about the reasons”.

The reasons that the Anglo-American have given so far for relentlessly pursuing Saddam, he said, are “cynical and ludicrous attempt at Pavlovian conditioning. War in Iraq! Terrorist threat! War in Iraq! Terrorist threat! On it will go until the poor mutton-headed public believes that only the first will obviate the threat of the second. It is a belief for which, alas, there is no evidence whatever”.

Try as he may, Tony Blair, said the Spectator editor, has not been able to link Saddam with September 11. The Anglo-Americans, he said, have also not been able to find any WMD. “This week” continued the editor, “(Hans) Blix (the UN Chief inspector of Iraq’s alleged WMD) and Co continued their Cook’s tour of the Mesopotamian Rustbelt, sniffing around a milk factory that had already been blown up twice by the allied forces, in 1991 and 1998. they confirmed that, as a producer of milk, the factory was pretty washed up. They did not, it seems, find any weapons of mass destruction”.

Mr. Johnson then concluded his somewhat sarcastic piece by saying that there may indeed be good reasons for ridding the world of Saddam, but the “tiresome pretexts about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction”, are not part of such reasons.

Anyone looking for evidence that the Anglo-Americans have lied through their teeth about Iraqi possession of WMD, should read a little book titled War on Iraq by William River Pitt, in which the author had an extensive interview with Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq. Ritter was a former U.S. Marine intelligence officer and spent seven years chasing Iraq’s alleged WMD. By his own admission, he is a thorough-bred conservative and voted for George W. Bush in the last election. He is, he says, also “very pro-Israel”.

Pitt’s book traces the very interesting relationship between the Americans and Saddam. Back in 1975, the Americans had encouraged the Iraqis to cede the Shat-al-Arab waterway vital to navigation in the region and one of the causes of the Iran –Iraq war, to Iran. The country was then under the Shah, who everyone knew was America’s puppet. The Americans changed tack in 1979 when their man was overthrown. It now instigated Iraq to wrest back the water-way and thus helped start the war with Iran which lasted nearly ten years. During the course of the war in 1982, President Reagan removed Iraq from America’s list of nations sponsoring terrorism.

In 1988 after the war ended, the Iraqis thought the policy of oil dumping by its neighbours (Saudi Araia, Kuwait etc) which the Americans encouraged, was frustrating its post-war reconstruction plan. In 1990, the Iraqis specifically accused Kuwait of slant-drilling for oil into Iraqi territory and subsequently invaded it, some say not without a cynical American complicity, in August of that year.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Iraqis, who were Americas pals of yesterday, suddenly became its No 1 enemy. Under the pretext of punishing Iraqi aggression against Kuwait, Bush Snr. led an allied invasion of Iraq but stopped short of removing Saddam. Part of the price Iraq was to pay for losing the war was to rid itself of its so-called weapons of mass destruction.

The fact, says Ritter in his extensive interview with Pitt in our little book, is that Iraq had indeed been deprived of whatever weapons of mass destruction it may have possessed. Not only does Iraq no longer possess any WMD, says Ritter, the country does not even have the system to deliver them beyond its region, which means Iraq does not pose any military threat to the U.S.

According to Ritter, the UN inspection of Iraq proved conclusively that Iraqi’s chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities were effectively destroyed during and in the years after the Gulf war.

“Nuclear weapons”, he pointed out, “cannot be created in a basement or cave. They require massive amount of electricity and highly controlled technologies not readily available on the open market”. As for chemical weapons, said Ritter, even if Iraq had managed to hide them, the weapons would have become useless by now, because of their relatively short shelf life. “All this talk about Iraq having chemical weapons” he said, “is no longer valid”.

To prove his point he has repeated challenged one, Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who claims to be Saddam’s bomb-maker, to a debate. He has also challenged his former boss at UN inspection, the Australian diplomat, Richard Butler, who has often peddled America’s line on WMD, to a similar debate. Both Hamza and Butler have so far refused to pick up the challenge.

“I have”, he said, “challenged Richard Butler to a debate in front of a camera and a live audience. He won’t do it. He’s avoiding the kind of debate he should be encouraging”.

All the talk about Iraqi possession of WMD, says Ritter, is mere propaganda peddled by a trio of Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy and Richard Pearl, one of Bushe’s advisers.

“Donald Rumsfeld was politically dead,” said Ritter. “No one thought of Donald Rumsfeld as having any potential. Paul Wolfowitz was seen as a raving lunatic of the far right. Richard Peale is not called ‘The Prince of Darkness’ without cause. Those are three people who seemed destined to spend the rest of their lives snipping from the fringes as they’d done for the previous decade. And now suddenly, they are running the show”.

Needless to say, Ritter’s dissention from the Establishment position has earned him its enmity. Three times he has been investigated by the CIA and the FBI for possibly compromising his country’s security but so far he has not been found guilty. Similarly all attempts to give him a bad press have failed. “All the reporters who have covered me”, he said, “come back saying the same thing: they cannot prove me wrong on a point of fact. When I say something occurred it occurred exactly the way I said”.

Since the Anglo-Americans persist in waging war on Iraq inspite of their inability to prove their allegations of Saddam’s link to so-called international terrorism and his possession of WMD, the real reasons for their aggression must lie elsewhere.

Elsewhere obviously includes oil. Next to Saudi Arabia, Iraq reportedly has the largest oil reserve in the world. The alleged involvement of so many Saudi nationals in September 11, shows that the days of Americas extra-ordinarily cozy relationship with the Saudi monarchy are over. Grabbing Iraqi oil, could serve as an insurance against the probable collapse of the Saudi oligarchs. Of course, the Americans could also grab the Saudi oil, but that would prove more difficult because they would need to demonise the Saudi oligarchs like they have done Saddam. But then even the most effective propaganda takes time to sink in.

Ritter does not think Iraqi oil is the chief consideration in the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq. “We can get all the oil we want from Iraq”, he says. “The Iraqi oil minister has made it clear that, once the sanctions are lifted, Iraq will do whatever they can, to ensure the strategic energy requirements of the United States are met”.

I am not so sure that Bush will be happy to rely on the word of any Iraqi oil minister. Even if he is, surely the action of gun-boat diplomacy speaks louder than the word of any minister.

And so it is that Bush, who is an oil man, his vice, Dick Cheney who is also an oil man, and Bushe’s security adviser, Condolesa Rice, who is an oil lady, would move full steam ahead to invade oil-rich Iraq, no matter what the rest of the world thinks. That is, if they have not done so by the time you are reading this piece.

However, important as oil is as a factor in the Anglo-American aggression against Iraq, it is possibly not the most import ant consideration, at least in the short run. The reader who has watched the hilarious comedy, Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, should be able to identify a second and possibly more important reason for the war on Iraq.

“When the President of the United States is caught in a scandal just two weeks before the election” says the blurb of the movie, “it is up to his White House adviser, Ronnie Brean (De Niro) to clean up the mess. Ronnie joins forces with Hollywood Producer, Stan Moss (Hoffman) to divert the country’s attention from the president’s crime. They decide that what is needed to stop the media spotlight is a war, but lacking a real war, they fake one.”

Facts, they say, can sometimes be stranger than fiction. The similarities between Wag the Dog and Gulf War III starring Bush Jnr, Rumsfeld and Co makes the latter look even stranger than the former. And I am hardly alone in thinking this way. I am at least in the good company of one Professor Robert Alford of the City University of New York Graduate Centre. Robert Fisk, a British journalist writing in the London Independent of December 23, 2002, quotes a research by the professor, which seems to link the Enron scandal with the Iraqi war. Bush and his vice, as we all know, have been seriously implicated in the scandal, as individuals with huge interests in the energy business.

When the Enron scandal first broke in January 2002, Professor Alford discovered from his survey of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, the story received 1,137 mentions in those newspapers. At that time Iraq got only 200 mentions. By Spring the Iraqi story grew almost 100%. Enron declined by 50%. By early summer, Iraq had received 1,529 mentions. In sharp contrast, Enron had received only 310.

“Remarkable, ins’t it”, concluded Fisk, “how you can clear a messy economic scandal off the front pages by renaming your hate figure.. Of course, it is also a good idea to change hate figures when your closest ally, Israel, is in danger of producing one in the form of Ariel Sheron”.

There are people who will argue that Fisk’s conclusions, which I share, are far-fetched. They will argue that Saddam is truly a monstrous character that the Iraqis and the rest of the world would be happy to be rid of.

Perhaps Saddam is indeed truly a monster. But then as Pitt the author of our little book, War on Iraq, says, the Iraqi leader, “is our monster”, meaning Saddam was a monster created by the Americans. “He is”, says Pitt, “as much an American creation as Coca-Cola and the Oldmobile”.

As the Anglo-Americans prepare to wage war on Iraq, it seems they have hardly learnt the lesson that monsters like Saddam are the inevitable consequences of gun-boat diplomacy.