Syria’s Mobile Weapons Labs: Where Have We Heard This Before?
By Peter Hart | FAIR | December 20, 2012
If you were concerned that the Syria WMD stories didn’t already feel enough like the Iraq WMD reports, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius had one just for you (12/19/12). Ignatius reports that according to a Syrian defector, the Assad government’s chemical weapons are indeed on the move. Ignatius tells readers that, according to his source,
technicians constructed a mobile lab that could combine and activate so-called “binary” chemical weapons agents. These mobile mixers were constructed inside Mercedes or Volvo trucks that appeared, from the outside, to be similar to refrigerator trucks. Inside were storage tanks, pipes and a motor to drive the mixing machinery, the defector said.
The defector estimated that 10 to 15 of these mobile laboratories had been constructed. An independent source said these numbers were high, but he confirmed that the Syrians do have mobile labs.
Now it’s not that Ignatius doesn’t know that this story sounds, well, familiar. He places that giant caveat right near the beginning of his piece:
For some historical context, readers should recall the Iraqi defector known as “Curveball,” who made allegations about Iraqi chemical weapons a decade ago that bolstered the case for war–but turned out to be fabrications.
So there’s reason to be skeptical. But evidently not too skeptical. Ignatius goes on:
Seeking corroboration for the Syrian report, I checked it with knowledgeable, independent sources, who confirmed some of the details. With that support, I want to share it with readers.
Ignatius has confidence in at least some of this story, as evinced by his lead:
Reports from inside two Syrian chemical weapons facilities offer chilling new evidence that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime developed special vehicles last year for moving and mixing the weapons–and an unconfirmed allegation that Lebanese allies of the regime, presumably in Hezbollah, may have been trained 11 months ago in the weapons’ use.
What he’s saying, in other words, is that the mobile labs exist; the more frightening allegation–that the labs might be headed to Lebanon for use by Hezbollah–is “unconfirmed.” How solid is the sourcing? He writes:
A Syrian source provided a detailed account in a telephone conversation over the weekend, drawing on intelligence provided to him by a Syrian defector who worked inside the chemical weapons network.
So we have what would appear to be a secondhand account, delivered by phone, thanks to arrangements made by a Syrian opposition group. And how do we know the weapons were headed for Hezbollah? Ignatius tells us that his source says, “The officers placed the chemicals in a civilian vehicle and were seen driving across a bridge in the direction of the highway toward Lebanon.”
What does all of this mean? That’s impossible to say–though the idea that mobile chemical weapons labs were put together last year, after the revolt started, in order to coordinate transfer of the weapons to Hezbollah is, on its face, a little far-fetched.
Ignatius gives the Iraq stories all but one paragraph, but it’s important to recall more of the journalism from that period. As Seth Ackerman wrote in Extra! (7-8/03), one of the most embarrassing–and largely forgotten–episodes of the Iraq War came when NBC breathlessly reported the discovery of Iraq’s feared mobile bio-weapons labs:
On May 12, NBC News correspondent Jim Avila, reporting from Baghdad, declared that the labs “may be the most significant WMD findings of the war.” Joining him was hawkish former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay (now an “NBC News analyst”), who was flown to Iraq to perform an impromptu inspection for the cameras. Armed with a pointer, he rattled off the trailer ‘s parts: “This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter….”
Kay’s explanation–”think of it as sort of the chicken soup for biological weapons. You mixed it with the seed stock, which came from this gravity flow tank up here into the fermenter. And under pressure with heat, it fermented”–was convincing enough for television news. Kay stated: “Literally, there’s nothing else you would do this way on a mobile facility. It is it.”
Well, except for one problem: What they found was actually equipment to make hydrogen for weather balloons. But what they were looking for was what defectors told various officials they would find–and part of what Colin Powell told the world about Iraq’s WMD program on February 5, 2003. The old saying that when you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail comes to mind.
Is “intelligence” on Syria any better? It’s unclear why we should think so. But for columnists like Ignatius, what someone told him on the phone based on what someone else may have seen is apparently good enough. And maybe it doesn’t really matter. As Ignatius once explained (Washington Post, 4/25/03):
Personally, I don’t much care if the U.S. reports about weapons of mass destruction prove to be imaginary. Toppling Hussein’s regime was still right.
Does he care this time whether or not the WMD stories he’s reporting as fact are imaginary or not? Or would toppling Assad’s regime be right no matter what?
Related articles
- Obama’s War on Syria and its Implications (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Norman Finkelstein and Neocon Denial
By Stephen J. Sniegoski | The Passionate Attachment | October 7, 2012
While a number of mainstream media pundits have acknowledged that the neocons played a major role in bringing about the war on Iraq (though usually without mentioning their connection to Israel or their predominantly Jewish ethnicity), there are stringent critics of Israel and US policy in the Middle East who totally reject this interpretation. One of the most notable of these is Norman Finkelstein, who expounds on his view in his latest book, “Knowing Too Much.” Because I must limit the length of this article, my argumentation must be kept to a minimum. My book, “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel,” provides a detailed and extensively-documented account of all the issues covered here. It should be added that Finkelstein has labeled my book as conspiratorial—which is just the opposite of what the word “transparent” in the title conveys and what is explicitly stated in the book—and he denies that there is any evidence for my contentions. It does not appear that Finkelstein has actually read my book; he probably considers it not worth reading.
Despite denying that the neocons had an effect on US Middle East policy, Finkelstein does grant that the “Jewish neocons pushed long and hard for an attack on Iraq.” (p. 75, “Knowing Too Much”) Contrary to Finkelstein, the very fact that for many years the neocons had been the major exponents of an attack on Iraq, which did become US policy, is at least prima facie evidence for their vital role in bringing about the war. Finkelstein, however, firmly holds that the neocon agenda was irrelevant to US policy, and that what was achieved was done by others and would have occurred even if the neocons had not existed.
Finkelstein does accurately point out that “Every reconstruction of the 2003 war places Cheney and Rumsfeld at the helm of the decision-making process.” (p. 76, “Knowing Too Much”) Then he devotes some space to refuting John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s alleged insinuation that the two officials were “duped” by the neoconservatives. (The two academic scholars wrote the bombshell essay, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” later expanded into a book. And I should add that it is not apparent from my reading of their book that Mearsheimer and Walt necessarily imply that Cheney and Rumsfeld were “duped.”) Finkelstein maintains that “Cheney and Rumsfeld did not only partake of the ‘belief’ of Jewish neoconservatives that Saddam posed a mortal danger. Their own ‘American nationalist’ strategic vision also largely coincided with the neoconservative agenda.” In essence, they “shared basic assumptions.” (p. 78, “Knowing Too Much”) From these claims, which I would qualify but not fundamentally differ with, Finkelstein manages to derive the idea that Cheney and Rumsfeld were not influenced by the neocons, but somehow came up with the same war agenda independently. Evidence would indicate that this is highly unlikely to have been the case.
Undoubtedly, Cheney and Rumsfeld, rather than being tricked by the neocons, were in league with them, but it also seems almost certain that they were actually influenced by the neocon agenda. For Rumsfeld and, even more so, Cheney were personally close to the neocons. Prior to the start of the George W. Bush administration, Cheney, for example, was involved in a number of key neoconservative organizations: the board of advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); the board of trustees of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI); and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). It would seem reasonable to believe that, instead of independently fashioning their own “strategic vision” that harmonized completely with that of the neocons, Cheney and Rumsfeld were influenced by the neocons’ well-developed positions, including specific strategies for action, which meshed with their own more general foreign policy attitudes—e.g., a proclivity for unilateral, aggressive action.
Although Cheney had for years identified with a tough-minded, militaristic foreign policy, he had, as Secretary of Defense, loyally adhered to the George H.W. Bush administration policy in 1991 of eschewing an occupation of Iraq, and continued to identify with that position after the end of the administration. As late as a 1996 interview for a documentary on the 1991 Gulf War for PBS’s “Frontline” program, Cheney declared: “Now you can say well you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten Saddam, I don’t think so [rather] I think if we had done that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.”
In short, it seems reasonable to conclude that during the latter 1990s, Cheney was persuaded by neocon claims backed by numerous facts and factoids that Saddam was dangerous—though whether he really believed that Saddam was a “mortal danger” is questionable—and that his removal would be good thing for the United States that would outweigh the costs of a war. Although Cheney undoubtedly must have realized that the neocons had cherry-picked and exaggerated the intelligence claims, his involvement in the highest levels of government and partisan politics for many years had habituated him to having the truth twisted to advance policy goals.
Furthermore, Cheney was known to pick up newer views expressed in conservative circles that entailed marked changes in his actual policy prescriptions, though leaving his overall conservative attitude unaffected. For example, in regard to economic policy, he moved from being a budget-balancer to a supply-sider willing to tolerate large budget deficits. (Barton Gellman, “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” 2008, pp. 257-259) And, as Vice President, Cheney specifically relied on advice from the eminent historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, a right-wing Zionist and one of the neocons’ foremost gurus, who strongly advocated war against Iraq and other Middle Eastern states. (Gellman, “Angler,” p. 231) So while the neocon Middle East war agenda did resonate with Cheney’s general militant stance on foreign policy, there is little reason to think that he would have come up with the specifics of the policy, including even the identification of Iraq as the target, if it had not been for neocon influence.
The influence of ideas per se was not the only factor that likely motivated Cheney. The fact that Cheney and his wife, Lynne, who was with the American Enterprise Institute (known as “neocon central”), had close personal and professional relations with the neocons also would have predisposed him to give his support to the neoconservatives and their agenda.
There is certainly no inherent reason why “American nationalists” (as Finkelstein styles Cheney and Rumsfeld) qua “American nationalists” would identify with Israeli interests and pursue wars in the Middle East against the Islamic states. If global power were the American nationalist goal, one could easily argue that supporting the Islamic world would best serve its advancement. For by pursuing such an alternative policy, the United States would have the support of the major oil-producing region of the world. And if the more than one billion Muslims were friendly to the United States, they could be used, if such a weapon were necessary, to undermine America’s most powerful military adversaries—Russia and China—since both have restive Muslim populations.
It should be noted that representatives of the “realist” camp of foreign policy, which focuses on concrete national interests rather than ideals—and includes such luminaries as Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor for George H. W. Bush; James Baker, Secretary of State for George H. W. Bush; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter—did not push for the war on Iraq, and Brzezinski and Scowcroft openly opposed it.
Furthermore, large numbers of nationalist conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and other traditional conservatives, have opposed globalist American intervention and believed from the outset that wars in the Middle East were not in America’s interest. These conservative nationalists had supported a hard-line Cold War policy long before the neoconservatives came onto the scene—though while opposing Communism they were wary of American global involvement, especially nation-building, perceiving the global policy against Communism as a something of a necessary evil. During most of the Cold War, they had been the dominant face of American conservatism, but the neocons, by the end of the 1980s, would achieve a leading position in the conservative movement. They quickly purged or marginalized those who dissented from their positions, especially in regard to Israel, and mainstream conservatism itself was transformed in a neoconservative direction, a change which has been lauded by the neocons and lamented by those purged and marginalized conservatives and their followers, now called paleoconservatives. The upshot of all of this is that being an “American nationalist” did not ipso facto make one a supporter of the neoconservative Middle East agenda, as Finkelstein would imply.
Being in charge of the incoming Bush administration transition team, Cheney used that position to staff national security positions in the government with his neocon associates. While the neocons could not actually make the ultimate decisions in the Bush administration, they were in sufficiently authoritative positions inside the administration to influence the decisions that would be made. And the anger and fear resulting from the 9/11 terror attacks enabled the neocons, with their already existing war agenda, to markedly increase their influence in the administration. Significantly, the administration’s neocons were not only providing what was regarded by President Bush as expert advice but, as mentioned above, they also cherry-picked the spurious intelligence that depicted Saddam Hussein as a threat to the United States.
The formidable power of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration derived from the fact that they worked in unison to advance their war agenda and override and marginalize all opposition. Not only was there no consensus for war in the foreign policy and national security components of the executive branch, but crucial aspects of the neocon war agenda were opposed by significant elements of the military brass, the State Department, and the CIA.
Bob Woodward in his “Plan of Attack” (p. 292) notes that Secretary of State Colin Powell saw a “separate little government,” consisting of “Wolfowitz, Libby, Feith,” and what Powell privately called Feith’s “Gestapo office.” According to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell’s chief of staff, “There were several remarkable things about the vice president’s staff. One was how empowered they were, and one was how in sync they were. In fact, we used to say about both [Rumsfeld’s office] and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy . . . . They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make [it] in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government – and the rest of the government is all confused.”
Regarding the concomitant loss of power by the State Department, Wilkerson remarked: “I’m not sure the State Department even exists anymore.”
Also of vital importance was a cohesive neocon network outside the Bush administration, which helped to mobilize crucial public support for the war. Social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her book, “The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market,” provides a detailed description of the neoconservatives as an example of an interlocking network of organizations, agencies, and think tanks united behind a shared agenda that was capable of driving government policy.
It seems apparent that without all-out support from the neocon network, Cheney and Rumsfeld could not have brought about the attack on Iraq, even if that had been their goal. For the neocon network had to overcome significant opposition to achieve the implementation of their war agenda, as well as generate public and congressional support for war. For example, the neocons had championed Ahmed Chalabi and enabled much of his spurious intelligence to receive the imprimatur of the US government—though the established intelligence community regarded him as a con man.
Although Cheney and Rumsfeld could not have brought off the war without the neocon network, those two were not indispensable to the neocons, who could have likely achieved war with other individuals at the helm. For example, the hawkish pro-Israel John McCain was the favorite Republican candidate for numerous neocons in 2000 (and, of course, was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008). Given McCain’s penchant for neoconservative foreign policy advisors, his advocacy of forcible regime change in Iraq prior to 2001, and his staunch support for the attack on Iraq during the war build-up (and his later hawkishness on Iran), there is no reason to think that a President McCain, surrounded by neocon advisers, would have avoided a war on Iraq.
Nothing of what I have written is intended to imply that the neoconservatives were the sole cause for the war on Iraq or that they single-handedly drove the country to war. While neoconservatives spearheaded the war on Iraq, and without the neoconservatives the war would have been highly improbable, they obviously needed auxiliary support, in which category I would include Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most significantly, the 9/11 terror attacks created the ideal milieu to generate government and popular support for such a military endeavor, as those attacks certainly enabled the neocons’ Iraq war agenda to move to the forefront in the Bush administration. Without the popular fear and anger generated by the 9/11 attacks, it is unlikely that the neocons would have been able to successfully promote a war on Iraq. Nonetheless, the neoconservatives were the primary actors. It was they who created the war agenda, and it was they who played a key role in its implementation.
A month is a long time in the Zionist “Clash” narrative
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | May 14, 2012
In an April 4 op-ed on IsraelNationalNews.com titled “The Christian Era in the Middle East is Over,” Giulio Meotti declared:
Arab Christians have been Islamicized. Supported by the Vatican and the Orthodox Churches, they choose the war against the Jews. They will be paid back with their own extinction.
A little over a month later, Meotti appears to have changed his tune. In a May 12 op-ed on Ynetnews.com titled “Christians, Jews to unite against Islam?” the Italian author of “A New Shoah” reports on a new alignment of the Abrahamic religions:
The Coliseum, where thousands upon thousands of “Judaeis” have been massacred by the Roman emperors, became for one night an arena for alliance between Christians and Jews against “odium fidei,” or religious hatred.
Last Wednesday in Rome, Jewish leaders for the first time rallied alongside Christians in a candlelit vigil to denounce the attacks in the Middle East and Africa. It was “interfaith” or “ecumenical” dialogue at its best. Forget the theological questions, which remain unsolvable. There is an urgent mutual solidarity about the single most defining issue of our time: religious freedom.
It is about the right to life of Jews and Christians in an Islamicized Middle East. Speaking at the Coliseum, Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni slammed Western “indifference” surrounding the massacre of minorities in the Middle East.
But if Meotti is so concerned about the massacre of Christian minorities in the region, why doesn’t he denounce the key role Israel partisans played in bringing about the Iraq War or their cheering on of the Arab Spring both of which have greatly facilitated the “Islamicized Middle East” he decries?
The Costs of War
By Ron Paul | April 30, 2012
This month Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the addition of some 1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health staff in attempt to get a handle on the epidemic of suicides among combat veterans. Unfortunately, when presidents misuse our military on an unprecedented scale – and Congress lets them get away with it – the resulting stress causes military suicides to increase dramatically, both among active duty and retired service members. In fact, military deaths from suicide far outnumber combat deaths. According to an article in the Air Force Times this month, suicides among airmen are up 40 percent over last year.
Considering the multiple deployments service members are forced to endure as the war in Afghanistan stretches into its second decade, these figures are sadly unsurprising.
Ironically, the same VA Secretary Eric Shinseki was forced to retire from the Army by President Bush for daring to suggest that an invasion and occupation of Iraq would not be the cakewalk that neoconservatives promised. Then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who is not a military veteran, claimed that General Shinseki was “wildly off the mark” for suggesting that several hundred thousand soldiers would be required to secure post-invasion Iraq. Now we see who was right on the costs of war.
In addition to the hidden human costs of our seemingly endless wars are the economic costs. In 2008, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.” Stiglitz illustrates that taking into account the total costs of the war, including replacing military equipment and caring for thousands of wounded veterans for the rest of their lives, the Iraq war will cost us orders of magnitude greater than the 50 billion dollars promised by the White House before the invasion. Add all the costs of Afghanistan into the mix, wrote Stiglitz, and the bill tops $7 trillion.
Is it any wonder why our infrastructure at home crumbles, healthcare is more expensive and harder to come by, and unemployment together with inflation continue their steady rise? Imagine the productive power of that seven trillion dollars in our private sector. What could it have done were it in private hands; what may have been discovered, what diseases might have been cured, what might have been built, how many productive jobs created?
With the bills coming due for our decade of reckless military action, the cuts rarely come from the well-connected military industrial complex with their lobbyists and powerful political allies. In President Obama’s 2013 budget, troop strength is to be cut significantly while enormously expensive and largely superfluous weapons systems emerge essentially unscathed. As defense analyst Winslow Wheeler wrote this month, costs of the “next generation” fighter, the F-35, will increase by another $289 million. This despite the fact that the fighter is badly designed and already outdated, a “virtual flying piano” writes Wheeler.
The military contractors building monstrosities like the F-35 are politically connected and thus protected. Unfortunately, returning military veterans are less so. In the same 2013 budget, the White House proposes to increase medical and pharmaceutical costs paid by veterans while reducing their cost of living increases. And how many years of increasingly alarming mental illness and suicide statistics has it taken for the modest increase in resources to be made available?
Those who predicted the real costs of our decade of global military conquest were ridiculed, scoffed at, and fired. History has now shown us that much of what they warned was correct. America is clearly less secure after a decade of unnecessary wars. It is more vulnerable and closer to economic collapse. Its military is nearly broken from years of abuse. Will we come back to our senses?
Iran War Debate: Media Failure or Undisclosed Bias?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | March 16, 2012
Comparing the media handling of the debate over Iran with the lead-up to the war on Iraq, Stephen M. Walt observes in a recent Foreign Policy column that “most mainstream news organizations have let us down again.” In his “Top Ten Media Failures in the 2012 Iran War Scare,” Prof. Walt singles out five journalists for particular criticism:
#1: Mainstreaming the war. As I’ve written before, when prominent media organizations keep publishing alarmist pieces about how war is imminent, likely, inevitable, etc., this may convince the public that it is going to happen sooner or later and it discourages people from looking for better alternatives. Exhibits A and B for this problem are Jeffrey Goldberg’s September 2010 article in The Atlantic Monthly and Ronan Bergman’s February 2012 article in the New York Times Magazine. Both articles reported that top Israeli leaders believed time was running out and suggested that an attack might come soon.
[…]
#8: Letting spinmeisters play fast and loose with facts. Journalists have to let officials and experts express their views, but they shouldn’t let them spout falsehoods without pushing back. Unfortunately, there have been some egregious cases where prominent journalists allowed politicians or government officials to utter howlers without being called on it. When Rick Santorum announced on Meet the Press that “there were no inspectors” in Iran, for example, host David Gregory didn’t challenge this obvious error. (In fact, Iran may be the most heavily inspected country in the history of the IAEA).
Even worse, when Israeli ambassador Michael Oren appeared on MSNBC last week, he offered the following set of dubious claims, without challenge:
“[Iran] has built an underground nuclear facility trying to hide its activities from the world. It has been enriching uranium to a high rate [sic.] that has no explanation other than a military nuclear program – that has been confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency now several times. It is advancing very quickly on an intercontinental ballistic missile system that’s capable of carrying nuclear warheads.”
Unfortunately, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell apparently didn’t know that Oren’s claims were either false or misleading. 1) Iran’s underground facility was built to make it hard to destroy, not to “hide its activities,” and IAEA inspectors have already been inside it. 2) Iran is not enriching at a “high rate” (i.e., to weapons-grade); it is currently enriching to only 20% (which is not high enough to build a bomb). 3) Lastly, Western intelligence experts do not think Iran is anywhere near to having an ICBM capability.
In another interview on NPR, Oren falsely accused Iran of “killing hundreds, if not thousands of American troops,” a claim that NPR host Robert Siegel did not challenge.
Every one of those Walt identifies as examples of “media failures” — Jeffrey Goldberg, Ronen Bergman, David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell and Robert Siegel — either already has Israeli citizenship or would probably qualify for it under the Law of Return, which accords any Jew the legal right to assisted immigration and settlement in Israel, as well as Israeli citizenship.
Of course, being Jewish doesn’t necessarily mean that one is more susceptible to Israeli falsehoods about the alleged “Iranian threat.” After all, Glenn Greenwald is one of the journalists that Walt singles out for praise in countering the war propaganda. But we still need to ask if this is simply another case of “media failure”? Or are those in the media with an undisclosed bias helping to take America to another disastrous war for Israel?
Related articles
- BBC loses its “impartiality” yet again over the west-Iran standoff (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Insinuation as War Propaganda
By Anthony Gregory | The Independent Institute | February 23, 2012
In 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration made its case for war with Iraq. There were assertions given about Saddam’s maintenance of weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda. What was never said explicitly, however, was that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Yet by late 2003, seventy percent of polled Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally behind 9/11. Bush’s Republican voters were especially convinced of this.
Yet Bush and his officials never said this. And after the multiple disasters of the Iraq war began to present themselves with great clarity, the Bush officials were questioned about their pre-war intel. Yet they could say, strictly speaking, one thing they never claimed was Saddam was behind 9/11.
Condoleezza Rice had said something about the attacks originating in the same region or area as Iraq. There was all sorts of insinuation that Saddam might have been involved. And surely the Bush team never put an ounce of effort into disabusing the American people of the completely false notion that Saddam was behind 9/11. The vast majority of Americans believed it—indeed, at times, more Americans thought Saddam was behind the attacks than believed the Iraq War was just!—yet it was not only completely untrue, but not directly rooted in any explicit assertion given by the administration. Various pro-war commentators had said it, but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell—none of them ever did.
Fast forward a decade to the current day. Seventy-one percent of Americans—almost exactly the percentage that thought Saddam was behind 9/11—think that Iran has nuclear weapons. It’s a small sample, but it is consistent with polls over the last couple years, each one showing a majority believing Iran already has nukes, and almost nine out of ten Americans sure that Iran is seeking them.
Indeed, talking with “respectable” liberals—the type who listen to NPR and watch Jon Stewart—I find repeatedly that even folks who don’t want to go to war assume that every reasonable American knows that Iran is on the brink of having nukes, if the regime doesn’t already have them.
What’s bizarre about this, other than the fact that there is no credible evidence that Iran has nuclear weapons, is that no one in a position of official authority is claiming it either! Every report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, even when framed in a way to make Iran seem ominous, confirms the “non-diversion” of nuclear materials to weaponization purposes. The CIA and intelligence community have consistently stood by the National Intelligence Estimate findings that Iran has not sought a nuclear weapon since 2003 (and Iran doing so back then is only suspected based on very scant evidence produced by the Israeli government).
What’s more, in the last week or so, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta stressed that not only does Iran not have nuclear weapons; there is no evidence that Iran even wants nuclear weapons!!
Even if Iran wanted to make nuclear weapons, it would probably take three or more years. Iran is reportedly attempting to enrich its uranium to 19.75% LEU. Nuclear weapons require 95%—and there is no evidence that Iran has the means to do this. It is even more dubious to believe a nuclear-armed Iran would be some sort of unprecedented threat for the United States, but that’s neither here nor there.
So what’s the deal? The Obama administration (and the Bush administration, and the UN) have all had the same official position: Iran doesn’t have nukes, and the Iranians probably aren’t looking to get them. Yet seven out of ten Americans think Iran already has them. Meanwhile, every Republican presidential candidate except Ron Paul warns about the unparalleled threat of a nuclear Iran, and the Obama White House punishes the country with tighter sanctions and ever more threats.
Indeed, Obama has thrived on the insinuation that Iran has nukes. When he acted tough back in 2009 because Iran had been caught red-handed with its fledgling nuclear facility at Qom—a civilian nuclear facility that Iran readily alerted the international community to, consistent with its continuing adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory—he did so against a backdrop of insinuation that of course everyone knows Iran wants nuclear weapons. He did this even though all that existed at Qom, according to an IAEA official, was a “hole in a mountain.” Why didn’t the president remind the public instead that there is little to worry about, since the entire Defense Department and intelligence community confirm that Iran has no nuclear weapons program?
If a war begins with Iran, it will largely be on the basis of propaganda believed by the public, propaganda that the government has never officially articulated. In the past, the U.S. thrived on outright lies for war: the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Kuwaiti babies being ripped from incubators, and so forth. There has long been a fair share of unsubstantiated allegations involved behind major U.S. wars—the USS Maine being sunk by the Spanish, the Zimmerman Telegram posing an actual threat to the United States, the Serbians committing genocide of ethnic Albanians, killing many tens of thousands of civilians in the late 1990s, and so on.
Yet today lies and unproven allegations are not enough. The U.S. warfare state appears to thrive on insinuation in its war propaganda. The U.S. war machine’s top brass never outright declare the most provocative claims about U.S. enemies. That way, when the war goes south and people begin accusing the political class of misleading them, the empire’s defenders can easily say (accurately in word if not in spirit): “Bush never claimed Saddam was behind 9/11! Obama never claimed Iran had nuclear weapons!”
But don’t think for a moment that our rulers aren’t glad the American people believe what they do. It makes wars so much easier to wage when the public buys into all sorts of nonsense. The plausible deniability that insinuated propaganda gives the ruling class is just icing on the cake.
Related articles
- US spooks say no Iranian nukes (rt.com)
Curveball and the Trucks
By Malcom Lagauche | February 17, 2011
The recent news that the person nicknamed “Curveball” lied to German authorities before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq is making headlines. The media make this sound like it is Earth-shattering. Even some CIA officials expressed shock and dismay at his current confession. How disingenuous. At the time of his revelations, even a nitwit could tell he was lying. Here is a chapter from my book The Mother of All Battles: The Endless U.S.-Iraq War that was released in October 2008. Currently, Powell is on a speaking tour of the US in which he tells how to become successful and rich. If one uses his formula, it is quite uncomplicated: lie and kill a few million people.
A couple of 15-year-old vehicles made world headlines in 2002. At first, the U.S. and British administrations heralded them as conclusive proof of Iraq concealing biological weapons. We all heard of the Iraqi “mobile germ factories” that traveled the highways of the country to keep from getting discovered. Dick Cheney said that inside these vehicles the most devastating germs were being manufactured and the Iraqis were going to pelt the east coast of the U.S. with a deadly brew that would kill millions. Cheney maintained that these germ weapons would be carried by secret drone aircraft that Iraq was developing.
Actually, there were a few drones being manufactured in Iraq and the Iraqis showed them to the world. They were made of balsa wood, had a range of about 25 miles and were used for mapping purposes. The east coast of the U.S. was a few thousand miles out of their range.
The actual importance of the two vehicles, alleged to be biological weapons factories, is minuscule, but their use for propaganda and the subsequent discovery that they were only used to pump hydrogen into weather balloons, put them on center-stage in world affairs.
The April 12, 2006 edition of the Washington Post ran a feature article, “Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War,” that brought back the subject the administration would rather the world forget. According to the article:
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.
The administration wasted no time in turning the issue around. At a hastily-called press conference, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan accused the media of unfair reporting. He did not answer questions about whether Bush knew of the results of the team of experts. If Bush did not know the information, McClellan would have quickly come forth with a reply. In this instance, silence seemed to be damning.
In addition to not being forthright with the issue, McClellan demanded an apology from the press for running the article. According to the Associated Press article “White House Defends Stand on Iraqi Trailers:”
McClellan dismissed the Post article and a report based on it that aired on ABC News Wednesday morning as irresponsible. He said ABC News should apologize and took issue with the way the Post story was written.
In 2002, these trucks took on a life of their own. They became dastardly vehicles to be used to cause a cataclysmic event in the U.S. that would be unprecedented in history. During this time, the Iraqi government had publicly stated that the trucks were used to fill weather balloons with hydrogen, but the U.S. public was told that you can’t trust the Iraqis because they lie and the U.S. doesn’t.
By November 2002, reports of these trucks, fueled by White House propaganda, began appearing in newspapers and magazines. Even the UCLA School of Public Health jumped on the bandwagon to create paranoia. On November 17, 2002, it ran an article from the Los Angeles Times called “Inspectors to Scour Iraq for Mobile Weapons Labs.” It was published in the “Bioterrorism” section of its website. Here are a few gems from the article:
* Rumbling along Iraq’s highways or threading their way through crowded streets, these mobile weapons labs may look like ice cream trucks, motor homes or 18-wheeler tractor trailer trucks, officials and experts say. But their cargo is believed to be germ agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin that theoretically could kill hundreds of thousands in an attack.
* Dubbed “Winnebagos of death,” the anonymous vehicles are hard to locate, even with sophisticated sensors.
* If the labs evade detection, U.S. intelligence analysts fear, the officers or scientists who operate them might try to use germ agents in a desperate counterattack or spirit the materials away to sell to terrorists or foreign governments.
* If such materials fall into the hands of a group such as Al Qaeda, that would turn the military campaign into what “could be the greatest proliferation disaster in history,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council official and co-author of The Age of Secret Terror.
* The British and German governments, and the CIA and Pentagon, have all asserted the existence of the mobile labs in separate reports this year.
Here’s what Colin Powell said of the two trucks in his infamous deluge of lies he told the world in February 2003 at the U.N.:
* Iraq’s mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s — this is reportedly when the units were being designed.
* The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities.
* Iraq manufactured mobile trailers and railcars to produce biological agents, which were designed to evade U.N. weapons inspectors. Agent production reportedly occurred Thursday night through Friday when the U.N. did not conduct inspections in observance of the Moslem holy day.
* An accident occurred in 1998 during a production run, which killed 12 technicians — an indication that Iraq was producing a BW agent at that time.
The CIA issued a report on May 28, 2003, without the knowledge of the secret team’s assessment of the truth behind the trucks, that smacked of the same preposterous allegations made by almost every pro-war reporter or politician in the Western world. Here is the overview of the report titled “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants:”
Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.
The design, equipment, and layout of the trailer found in late April is strikingly similar to descriptions provided by a source who was a chemical engineer that managed one of the mobile plants. Secretary of State Powell’s description of the mobile plants in his speech in February 2003 to the United Nations was based primarily on reporting from this source.
Both Powell and the CIA cite an Iraqi chemical engineer who supposedly worked on the trucks and also told of 12 deaths. This source was discredited long before either Powell or the CIA used his bogus testimony.
An Iraqi who defected to Germany in 1999 was the originator of these falsehoods. His given nickname was “Curveball,” a designation of his slippery and swerving testimony. After the Germans heard the lies, they contacted the CIA with the information, but told the U.S. intelligence organization that he could not be trusted and said they would not give any credence to his information. The Germans described Curveball as a person not living in Iraq and as an “out of control” and mentally deranged alcoholic. One CIA report stated that Curveball was “a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq.” This description was not seen by many because the neocon Office of Special Plans overrode CIA information when it deemed it necessary to keep the war plans on schedule.
Curveball was a drunken liar who was paid to say things that the U.S. wanted to hear. He gained an easy payday for a while and then was taken off the payroll when it was discovered he was a fraud. The U.S. failed to listen to the Germans about Curveball’s dubious character.
On June 15, 2003, British newspapers wrote the truth about the two trucks and caused great embarrassment to Tony Blair because he went along with the U.S. script on the use of the vehicles. According to the Observer, in an article titled “Iraqi Mobile Labs Nothing To Do With Germ Warfare, Report Finds:”
An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis continued to insist.
A British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told the Observer last week, “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were — facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”
Never have two old beaten up trucks gained the mythical status of the two Iraqi vehicles used for producing hydrogen. Millions and millions of dollars were spent on propaganda that elevated their standing to that of world-threatening devices that could kill millions of people instantly. An unknown Iraqi drunkard had his 15 minutes of fame and improved his finances immensely because of the trucks. More than a million Iraqi lives were lost because of the lies used to describe them.
On March 13, 2007, ABC News ran a story about Curveball. Despite people knowing of his real identity and calling for caution in 2003 about his testimony, the ABC report shocked much of the U.S. population because they had never heard of Curveball.
Powell got much mileage from Curveball’s lies at the U.N. in February 2003 when he told the world of the dastardly Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories. During the March 13, 2007 ABC News report, the commentator mentioned Powell’s assessment of the old story turned new. According to ABC News, “Powell said he is furious with what happened and his former chief of staff says he feels deceived.”
The perpetrator became the victim. Powell could have refused to bring up the mobile biological weapons factories (years later, he said he was not convinced with the information), but he put on an Academy Award performance in front of the world. That presentation led to the destruction of a country and the deaths of more than a million Iraqis and thousands of U.S. military personnel. These facts did not bother him as he worried only about his image and legacy.
While speaking to the U.N. in February 2003, Colin Powell told the world that Iraq’s mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s and that was the time the trucks were being designed. In reality, they were sold to the Iraqi army by the British firm Marconi Command and Control in 1987 as trucks to carry and fill weather balloons.
Depiction of Iraqi mobile biological weapons trucks as described by Colin Powell in February 2003.
According to his testimony, each truck had two accompanying vehicles to help produce the lethal agents.
Playing the genocide card
The Politics of Genocide, an unflinching attack on Western meddling in foreign affairs, challenges the idea that external intervention can be a force for good.
By Tara McCormack | The Spiked Review of Books | August 2010
What does it mean to oppose Western intervention and military campaigns today? In a sense, it appears to be a mainstream position, as the million-strong protests against the Iraq War showed. Anti-war sentiments are not only found amongst certain protest-prone sections of the public; they are also expressed amongst the highest echelons of the political class. For instance, UK prime minister David Cameron recently accused Israel of creating an open-air prison in Gaza, and Lib-Con deputy prime minister Nick Clegg claims to have been against the Iraq War form the outset. Clare Short, who was a key member of the New Labour administration, never tires of denouncing the military intervention in Iraq as a form of neo-imperialism.
However, while a kind of ersatz anti-interventionism and criticism of government propaganda is now mainstream in relation to Iraq, critiquing Western powers’ meddling in other conflicts – such as those in the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan – invites serious charges, including comparisons with Holocaust denial. These conflicts have become fixed moral signifiers in an age otherwise ridden with moral and political uncertainty. They have come to be understood as simple cases of good vs evil, conflagrations that have sprung up in previously harmonious societies, in which one side, driven by vicious ethnic hatred, attempts to exterminate their fellow citizens. To speak of political root causes or the impact of external intervention here will invite derision and fury – and in particular from those on the left.
In fact, one of the most striking aspects about the Western response to the conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in particular was the way in which large sections of the left abandoned some core left-wing positions on foreign policy. There was a religious-style conversion to the merits of Western intervention. Erased from memory was the recent history of the West in the developing world (and in the poorer states of Europe): the exploitation, the establishment of murderous ‘friendly’ regimes, the role of the West in creating instability and war. In the 1990s, many on the left claimed that in the post-Cold War era, Western states could be a ‘force for good’ in the world. Demands for ‘humanitarian intervention’ became common; such intervention symbolised for many a new progressive post-national politics. Conflicts were no longer interpreted through a political framework, but through a moral one of victims and aggressors, innocents and ‘genocidaires’.
Certainly no one could accuse Edward Herman and David Peterson, authors of The Politics of Genocide, of being part of the new left that cheers on the humanitarian potential of Western guns and bombs. At times, their book reads like an old-school, left-wing polemic against Western intervention and the way in which the killing of millions by the West is widely ignored or accepted as a necessary evil.
The fundamental point of their book is that all killings are not treated as equal. We might assume that, in an era in which human rights are meant to be triumphant and the rule of law is supposedly being spread by supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court, all ‘crimes against humanity’ will be judged equally. Yet mass murder committed by the US and its allies tends either not to be regarded as such or to be deemed as necessary for the greater good, as part of the fight against terrorism, the suppression of women, and so on.
Herman and Peterson begin with a discussion of what they term a ‘constructive genocide’: the sanctions inflicted on Iraq during the 1990s. The consequences of these sanctions have remained little discussed, despite later widespread opposition to military intervention. Yet this collective punishment of a nation resulted in the collapse of what had been a more or less developed country and in the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to extremely harsh limits on everything from medical equipment to basic tools.
In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, was asked in a television interview if she thought that the reported deaths of half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions was a price worth paying. She replied that she did indeed think so. And, not content with the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, Albright went on to play a key part in the bombing of Serbia in 1999. In light of the ever-tightening sanctions on Iran by the Obama administration, this should give pause for thought to anyone who thinks that non-military intervention is more ‘humane’.
Herman and Peterson describe other mass killings as ‘benign bloodbaths’ – those committed by Western allies and which are far removed from normal media outrage, like the thousands of Turkish Kurds killed by Turkey during the 1980s and 1990s. While the US, under the Clinton administration, and the UK, under the Tony Blair-led New Labour government, were regularly bombing Iraq during the 1990s to enforce a ‘no-fly’ zone, ostensibly in order to protect Iraq’s Kurdish population, Turkey was engaging in a military campaign against its own Kurdish population. Turkey even regularly bombed the adjoining Kurdish area of Iraq, its military planes taking off from the same airport that British and American planes would take off from to patrol the ‘no fly’ zone in defence of Kurds…
Herman and Peterson also discuss the massacres committed by Indonesia after its occupation of East Timor in 1975. Whilst East Timor became a fashionable humanitarian cause in 1999 and 2000, journalists had largely ignored Western complicity in the arming and installing of General el-Haj Mohammed Suharto as leader of Indonesia as part of US-backed coup in the mid-1960s. Today, some of the key figures in the contemporary human-rights crusading brand of journalism, such as Samantha Power, Roy Gutman and Christiane Amanpour, simply tend to ignore Western-backed violence in their fiery polemics alerting the world to ‘war crimes’ and ‘human rights abuse’. As always, all rights are not equal and whether or not the world will pay attention to your plight depends on your relationship to powerful states.
In a sense, Herman and Peterson’s discussions of Iraq, Turkey, Indonesia and Latin America go over old ground. However, their arguments about Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur threaten some of the most cherished certainties of the post-Cold War left. They argue that the wars in Yugoslavia have been completely misrepresented by the West as a simple tale of evil nationalistic Serbs seeking to exterminate innocent Muslims. And much of what has been accepted as indisputable fact has turned out to be totally fabricated. For example, the death toll has been vastly inflated and Serbs have been wrongly accused of setting up ‘rape camps’.
It is a little-known fact that the biggest single act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ during the Yugoslav civil wars was conducted by Croatian forces (trained by American private military contractors and supported by NATO jets) in 1995, when Croatia expelled the Serbian population of the Krajina region. But Serbs had been so demonised by the Western media by then that little attention was paid to the event other than perhaps to say that they got what they deserved. This was not considered an act of ‘genocide’, nor was it brought up at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Yet the expulsion of 250,000 Serbs from Croatia was, in Herman and Peterson’s terminology, a ‘benign bloodbath’.
The same process of propaganda and misrepresentation occurred in Kosovo in 1999. At least this time there were some vocal critics in the UK against Western intervention and against the way in which the conflict was being presented. Figures in the British Labour Party, such as Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell and Alice Mahon, were very vocal in their arguments against the NATO bombing and against the demonisation of the Serbs. At the time Clare Short, self-professed anti-war heroine during the Iraq invasion, compared her critical colleagues to Nazi appeasers.
As for the 1994 killings in Rwanda, Herman and Peterson suggest these may have been even more misrepresented than the Yugoslav wars. The events in Rwanda have been portrayed as one of the greatest acts of evil in the twentieth century, an event of unimaginable barbarism. The accepted narrative is simple: genocidal Hutus launched a sudden and inexplicable attack on fellow Tutsi citizens, massacring hundreds of thousands until stopped by the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame. Herman and Peterson argue that this turns the real history of the conflict on its head. Kagame and the RPF, trained by American forces, in fact launched an invasion and occupation of Rwanda.
Any kind of evidence that has challenged the established tale has been quashed or dropped. For example, research done by the academics initially sponsored by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTFR) revealed that by far greater numbers were killed in areas controlled by the RPF than in those controlled by government forces. In 1994, a UN investigation and report commissioned by the UN High Commission for Refugees found similar patterns, but was subsequently suppressed. When a former ICTFR investigator brought forward evidence that the infamous assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana (supposedly a signal for the Hutu attacks to commence) was actually perpetrated by members of the RPF (which would clearly challenge the entire Western presentation of the conflict), chief prosecutor Louise Arbour dismissed his evidence. She argued that it was not within the remit of the ICTFR.
Kagame has gone on to rule Rwanda with an iron fist, killing thousands of Hutu refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and has been a key actor, along with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in the destabilisation and looting of the DRC. In his spare time, Kagame hangs out with members of the global elite, such as former US president Bill Clinton, Microsoft-millionaire Bill Gates, and Starbucks-founder Howard Schultz.
The Politics of Genocide is a compact, sharp and unflinching attack on Western aggression, demolishing the propaganda that has structured Western orthodoxies around international conflicts. The only caveat is that Herman and Peterson raise several questions that they do not, in the end, answer. For instance, to the authors the explanation for post-Cold War Western involvement, deception and propaganda is simply ‘business as usual’ – the pursuit of Western interests. But when it comes to Iraq and Rwanda, for instance, it is unclear exactly what interests were at stake for the West.
Herman and Peterson argue that America sponsored Kagame as he was a willing ally, yet Habyarimana was not in the slightest hostile to Western interests. As for Saddam Hussein, he in no way threatened Western interests – quite the opposite, he was a loyal ally. Even his invasion of Kuwait was done with America’s knowledge. Yet Western powers turned Saddam into a pariah and began to stop Iraq from selling its oil.
In order to understand contemporary Western intervention we have to move beyond an assumption that material interests lie at the heart of it and reconsider the realities of the post-Cold War political context.
Tara McCormack is a lecturer in international politics at the University of Leicester. She is author of Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to Critical and Emancipatory Approaches to Security, published by Routledge.
Related articles
- Madeleine Albright and Iraq Genocide Memorial Day (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The Case for a Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy (alethonews.wordpress.com)
The “New” Iraq
By Ghali Hassan | May 4, 2010
Seven years after the illegal invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-American fascist armies, it is clear today that the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Iraqi nation was a premeditated and unprovoked act of naked aggression aimed at expanding U.S.-Israel Zionist power. These barbaric crimes ‘should never be forgotten and never be forgiven’.
“By violating international laws and conventions in 2003 in order to attack a defenceless nation for no reason [other than serving Israel’s Zionist-fascist ideology], George W. Bush [and Tony Blair were] reclaiming those most primal instincts that had led the Mongol barbarians Hulagu and Turko-Tamerlane to destroy Baghdad in 1258 and 1401 respectively. And by going back to the law of the jungle, Bush [and Blair] did not just destroy Baghdad and the whole of Iraq, but [they] also instigated a treacherous plan against the precious legal and institutional heritage that mankind has been laboriously building since the Treaty of Westphalia of October 24, 1648, generally considered the founding document of the nation-state and the first attempt at outlawing the right of might”, writes Tunisian journalist Hmida Ben Romdhane (La Presse de Tunisie, April 11, 2010). Unlike the destruction of Baghdad by the barbarian Mongols, the destruction of the Iraqi society by the West’s most recent militarised religio-fascist alliance of George Bush and Tony Blair is an act of terrorism that will live in infamy.
Unprovoked Aggression
There is no doubt that the barbaric attack on Baghdad in March 2003 will remain one of the most violent acts of terrorism in the history of mankind. According to U.S. officials, “Shock and Awe” was aimed at terrorising the entire Iraqi population and intimidating Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Syria and Iran. After 13 years of genocidal sanctions, that deprived Iraqi children and the population as a whole of essential medical supplies and nutrition, Iraqis are virtually defenceless in the face of overwhelming violence.
It is estimated that the 13-year long U.S.-Britain imposed sanctions – coated with the United Nations despicable colour – caused the death of more than 2 million innocent Iraqi civilians, including the death of more than 600,000 children under the age of 5 years. The sanctions were accurately described as the real weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to John Mueller and Karl Mueller, the brutal and inhumane sanctions against the Iraqi people have caused far more deaths over time than the combined use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the two world wars (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999).
Unsatisfied by the enormous atrocity and resilience of the Iraqi people and their government, the U.S. and Britain concocted a pretext (WMD and link to terrorism) to justify an illegal act of aggression to occupy Iraq. After the pretext was exposed as a lie, the U.S. and U.S. accomplices concocted a new pretext to justify the illegal aggression, the West’s “moral responsibility” and concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. The so-called “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P – not applicable to the Palestinians – was the same concept used by the German Nazis to justify Nazi terror. The difference was that the Nazis were allegedly “protecting ethnic Germans” in Poland and Russia.
Not since the Fascist army of Adolf Hitler invaded and occupied parts of Europe has the world witnessed such barbaric violence and destruction as that being perpetrated by the Anglo-American fascist armies. [Editor notes that the author seems to be forgetting the barbaric atrocities committed by the European and US powers in Malaya, Kenya, Korea, Algeria, Vietnam etc…] For most Iraqis today, living under U.S. military Occupation is no less brutal than Poles or Russians were living under the brutal Nazi occupation that most Westerners considered barbaric.
Prior to the invasion, Iraq was subjected to a massive and vicious propaganda campaign. The country was portrayed as a pariah state by mainstream-Zionist media and their despicable journalists distorting facts and promoting aggression. Iraq’s late president Saddam Hussein was demonised and used as a moral compass to justify Anglo-American aggression and war crimes.
Western opportunists and America’s apologists who pretended to be “against” the Anglo-American aggression and hide behind the “No War for Oil” Zionist deception have long fallen in line. The so-called “liberal class” and “progressives” have often described the murderous Occupation as a “failure” and “incompetence”, praised the U.S.-staged fraudulent elections and attacked the legitimate Iraqi Resistance as “violent insurgency” and “bigoted Sunnis”. Their criticism of the Occupation and U.S. imperialism has always been an intellectual cowardice. If the U.S. failed to impose its Zionist-imperialist agenda on Iraq, credit must go to the Iraqi Resistance. It shatters the myth of invincibility of the ‘world’s only superpower’.
From time to time the “liberal class” and “progressives” criticise Barack Obama’s policies and calling him ‘worse than Bush’, as if Obama has the power to make changes to U.S. criminal policies. The motive is to manipulate the public and deflect attention away from the anti-Muslim Zionist ruling class that control the centres of power and finance in America. We all know that Obama has no real power to make changes. He is just another product, a tool, of the Zionist ruling class. Indeed, the Obama Administration is the most Zionist administration in U.S. history.
After seven years of hibernation, the “liberal class” and “progressives”, including Israel’s apologists are back to show their loyalty (backflipping), attacking Iran and condemning Iran’s alleged “rigged” elections. It is important to remember that Iran doesn’t pose a threat to any nation, but Israel with its fascist ideology and an arsenal of nuclear weapon poses a threat not only to entire region but to the world. The same Zionist propaganda that led to the aggression against Iraq is being recycled.
The Zionists’ (the architects of the war) murderous strategy in Iraq was to destroy the fabric of the Iraqi society, and turn Iraq into a colonial dictatorship subservient to U.S.-Israel Zionist power. There was no “failure” or “incompetence” on the part of the U.S. government, as suggested by the loyal “opposition”. The destruction of Iraq was planned at least two years before the aggression in 2003. It was driven by the neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues (in lay terms, Zion-fascists) with strong ties to Israel’s fascist regime. “They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a U.S. war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-U.S. puppet regime”, writes American sociologist James Petras.
As a result of the illegal invasion and seven years of murderous Occupation, an estimated 1.5 million defenceless Iraqi civilians, mostly women, children and young men, have been murdered, with the majority by the invading Anglo-American armies. It is the most premeditated and barbaric mass murder of innocent civilians in the history of human civilisation. The “new” Iraq is a nation of orphans and widows.
Furthermore, many American officials and international organisations have quietly acknowledged that the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage was deliberate and premeditated. It was designed to remove Iraq’s history as the birthplace of civilisation. Even Adolf Hitler never thought of committing such heinous crimes during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Priceless cultural artefacts may have been stolen by Nazi officials but never destroyed. In Iraq, Museums and galleries holding the history of world civilisation were trashed and looted. Libraries were ransacked and books were burned en masse. It was all performed under the watchful eyes of the invading armies. As James Petras noted: “[T]he destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation”.
In the “new” Iraq, Iraqis are living in a climate of fear and terror today. From the outset, the Occupation fomented violence in order to destroy the Iraqi society. Before the invasion, Iraqis lived side-by-side in every city and town regardless of ethno-religious backgrounds. They accommodated intermarriage and live in a cultural and mosaic society. To encourage anarchy and insecurity, the occupying army disbanded the Iraqi Army, police and security forces and replaced them with Kurdish warlords, political gangsters, imported death squads, and religious militias. “The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the U.S. Occupation forces”, writes James Petras. From the outset of the Occupation, the U.S. sought to control Iraq through violence and the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ by handing out political positions to expatriates along strictly ethno-religious lines. The so-called “political process” was designed to achieve this division of Iraq.
By propping up corrupt criminals, religious fundamentalists and terrorists who were parachuted into Iraq by the invading armies, the American and to a lesser extent the British governments were able to hide behind a facade of corrupt expatriate stooges and blaming them for the Occupation-generated violence and crimes. Corruption is one of the most effective colonial tools, brought into Iraq to deflect attention away from the Occupation. Transparency International has ranked (the ‘new’) Iraq as the fourth most-corrupt nation in the world in its annual survey. Indeed, the creation of a corrupt and illegitimate puppet government inside the Occupation Headquarters (known as the ‘Green Zone’) aimed at transforming Iraq into a “failed state” that needs Western interference and “help”.
Expatriate stooges were appointed and encouraged to compete against each other for the title of Iraq’s “strongman”. The more violent and corrupt the “strongman” the more accepted by the U.S. administration. Hundreds of young men are disappearing every month (if not every week) into “secret” prisons, where they are routinely tortured, raped, humiliated and many of them later murdered. Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) were the first to blame the puppet government for crimes committed under the radar screen of the occupying forces while they remain silent when Iraqis are tortured, raped and massacred by U.S.-British invading armies. Both, AI and HRW reports on Iraq were consciously prepared to exonerate the occupying armies and depict Iraq as a “sovereign” nation marred by violence and violation of human right law.
Violence will continue to engulf Iraq’s major cities; just enough to justify the ongoing murderous Occupation. This serves U.S.-Israel Zionist interests and diverts public attention away from the Occupation. Furthermore, to enforce colonial divisions and facilitate the liquidation of anti-Occupation Resistance leaders, the U.S. occupying army used Nazi-like methods to separate populations along ethno-religious lines by erecting walls around neighbourhoods in Baghdad and other cities. For example, the Capital Baghdad with its marked ghettoes and perpetual violence is a mirror image of Warsaw under Nazi occupation under wretched living conditions.
Deterioration of Living Conditions
Since 2003, living conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate. Once a middle-class nation, Iraq has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution. In the “new” Iraq, nearly half the population live in extreme poverty. A report by the British charity organisation, Oxfam, shows that 43 percent of Iraqis live in absolute poverty and some 8 to 10 million Iraqis need emergency aid. The country is still under the genocidal sanctions. The official unemployment rate is more than 50 percent of the Iraqi active population. The illegitimate puppet government’s own statistics revealed that 45 percent of Iraqis live in absolute poverty lacking the necessities to survive. Nearly 62 percent (15.8 million) of Iraqis ‘completely depend’ on the food rationing system to survive from month to month. The system was created by President Saddam Hussein to confront the genocidal sanctions and avert mass starvation. Despite the reduction in the number of food and non-food items by the illegitimate puppet government, many Iraqis still depend on the system to survive.
After seven years of murderous Occupation and deteriorating living conditions, Iraq is suffering the worst refugee crisis in history. “Iraq would be the world’s second-worst crisis, as the report points out, second only to Afghanistan, and ahead of Sudan. So the strain on Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Jordan and Syria, and to a lesser extent on Lebanon is immense”, said Jessica Mathews, President of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S. propaganda think-tank known for its pro-Israel Zionist bias. At least 2.7 million Iraqis are internally displaced (by violence) and living in conditions of extreme poverty, enduring constant attacks and eviction from temporary shelters. An estimated 3 million Iraqis, with the means to do so, have fled Iraq into exile in neighbouring countries. Only a small number of Iraqi refugees were allowed into those Western nations who pretend to have “liberated” Iraq. The majority of Iraqi refugees have found a safe haven in Syria and Jordan. Most of Iraqi refugees are in ‘legal limbo’, unable to work and with no hope of returning to their country. The primary causes for Iraqi refugees’ flight are violence, lack of access to water, sanitation, electricity, health care and education.
Targeting Iraq’s Education
Iraq’s education, once the best in the region, has been the target of the Occupation. Iraq’s education has been dismantled by the invading armies and their collaborators. The Iraqi curriculum has been changed to distort history and depicts the U.S. and Israel as democratic and civilised societies by covering up their war crimes, flagrant violations of international law, human rights, violent ideology, corruption, growing inequalities, gross injustices and racist policies at home and abroad. It is estimated that only 30 percent of the 3.5 million of school age were attending schools. The majority of the dropouts are female. According to a report by UNESCO, school attendance prior to the Anglo-American aggression was nearly 100 percent. The crisis is exacerbated by the increase number of orphaned children. There are at least 5 million Iraqi orphans, many of them live on the streets.
Iraqi universities and colleges have been besieged by U.S.-created extremists and criminals. Tens of thousands of prominent Iraqis, including academics, doctors, teachers and political personalities have been murdered in cold blood in a U.S-Israel orchestrated assassination campaign dubbed “De-Ba’athification”. Many had to leave Iraq for safety reasons, which contributed to brain drain.
The planned campaign was designed not only to kill Iraq as a nation by destroying Iraq’s human resources and independence, but also to remove the base of the Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation. Professional Iraqis who survived the murderous campaign have left the country, leaving an education system in a state of collapse. Students are being graduated en masse without the necessary professional knowledge, especially those who work in the health care services. “There is really a huge difference between now and the times of Saddam Hussein, when medical graduates left college with competence to treat any patient”, said Professor Fua’ad Abdel-Razak of Baghdad university (IRIN, 16 May, 2007). Before the invasion, education and healthcare with modern health facilities were universal.
Deterioration of Iraq’s Healthcare
Iraq’s healthcare system has deteriorated at an alarming rate with a devastating impact on the health of the Iraqi people. The deterioration of the healthcare services has seen a marked increase in mortality. According to UNICEF, under the Occupation, Iraqi children are now dying faster than before invasion. One in four children under five years of age is chronically malnourished. One in eight Iraqi children die before the age of five, and millions of Iraqi children are affected by post traumatic disorder. “Healthcare in Iraq since 2003 is worse than during the sanctions. At that time we had little equipment and medicine, but in the last three years we have lost almost all the specialists”, said Dr Majeed al-Naomi in a Baghdad clinic. It is estimated that at least, 25 percent of Iraq’s 18,000 physicians had left the country since the invasion in 2003 which is devastating the healthcare system.
Furthermore, Thousands of tons of white phosphorous shells, ‘depleted’ uranium (DU), napalm, cluster bombs, and neutron bombs were dropped on Iraqi population centres, including Baghdad Basrah and Fallujah. The Anglo-American armies used more than 1700 tons of DU during the 2003 invasion on top of more than 320 tons of DU used in 1991 attacks on Iraq. In the natural environment, these weapons’ particles have extremely long half-lives and there is strong evidence of their detrimental effects on the health of the Iraqi people.
Iraqi officials are reporting incidences of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen sharply since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Many suspect the causes are contamination from weapons used in years of Anglo-American criminal wars and unchecked pollution. In Fallujah, Iraqi children are suffering from brain damage, deformity and cancer. An Iraqi doctor said that the rate of deformity and cancer among children in Fallujah is extremely high when compared with the rate of cancer and deformity of that in 2003. A spike in the number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralyzed babies there has alarmed doctors. Fallujah was the target of two massive assaults by the U.S. military. In Basra, Doctor Jawad al-Ali said: “We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before the 2003 war, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly to radiation as a cause.” In Basra, Leukaemia cases were up by 600 percent since 1990.
Access to clean water remains inadequate in many parts of the Iraq. According to the World Bank survey, 87.5 percent of the population have no adequate water supply, and 20 percent proper sewage disposal. In many parts of Iraq, including Baghdad and Basra, the water, soil and air are contaminated with radio-active particles caused by DU shells without adequate healthcare services the situation is rapidly worsening for the most vulnerable Iraqis, including women and children.
The Status of women
According to UNICEF, before the Anglo-American invasion, “Rarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power and support as they do in Iraq”. After seven years of U.S. Occupation, the status of Iraqi women has deteriorated beyond belief. The U.S.-imposed constitution has stripped Iraqi women of all the civil and basic rights that they enjoyed before the invasion and condemns them to statutory second-class citizens. Unemployment among Iraqi women is nearly 80 percent. A report by the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) released on the fourth anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion stated that: “women of Iraq have gradually lost most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of occupation”. You would think European Islamophobes who pretend to support Muslim womens’ “liberation” in Europe would be concerned about Iraqi womens’ rights under Occupation. Instead, they are engaged in a fascist campaign of anti-Muslim hatred to justify Western war on Muslims.
According to Professor Maha Sabria of Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, “The status of women here is linked to the general situation. The violation of women’s rights was part of the violation of the rights of all Iraqis. […] At the same time women do not have freedom of movement because of the deteriorated security conditions and because of abductions of women and children by criminal gangs”. (Inter Press Service, 12 March 2010).
Furthermore, as a result of the U.S. Occupation and its violence, there are 2.5 million widows in Iraq, the highest in the world. According to the United Nations, in 2006, 90 to 100 women were widowed each day by the Occupation and its collaborators. Many of these widows do not know what happened to their spouses and most of them receive no assistance from the puppet government.
Throughout Iraq, women are living in fear of their lives and dignity. Kidnapping and rape are the common crimes under the Occupation. Over 10,000 women have suffered detention at the hands of U.S. forces and their Iraqi collaborators. The majority of detainees remain without charges. They are tortured and abused on regular basis. (See my: Iraq: A cluster of torture prisons, Online Journal, March 08, 2006). The situation for Iraqi women reflects the country’s situation under U.S. military Occupation.
Elections and Colonial Dictatorship
The recent U.S.-staged illegitimate elections were conducted in an atmosphere of terror and execution perpetrated by the Occupation forces and their collaborators. The final outcome of fraudulent elections was ensured. Like the 2005 elections, the 2010 elections were widely regarded, both in Iraq and outside Iraq, as rigged and fraudulent elections. The elections designed to legitimise the Occupation and validate a corrupt U.S.-imposed colonial dictatorship led by U.S. stooges. With a puppet government in place, the U.S. can claim that Iraq is sovereign and that U.S. Occupation of Iraq is legitimate (See my: Iraq’s Fraudulent Elections, New Matilda, January 19, 2005; Iraq: A Colonial Dictatorship, Global Research, April 29, 2005).
Unlike Iran’s recent free elections that have been condemned as “rigged” by the Zionist media and Western opportunists, Iraq’s fraudulent elections – under murderous foreign military Occupation – were promoted and praised as “democratic”. While Iyad Allawi, the U.S.-created thug claimed “victory”, prolonged post-elections’ wrangling is the norm. He has called for the privatisation of Iraq’s industries and Iraq’s oil and gas resources. Before he was parachuted into Iraq, Allawi was a Western-paid terrorist based in Europe. He still is a paid terrorist. In Iraq, Allawi and his associates were involved in terrorism, including the bombing of buses used by schoolchildren. Whatever, there is no evidence that a puppet government will demand an end to the Occupation. Meanwhile, Nori al-Maliki, the Iranian quisling has not given up his chance to continue serving U.S. and Iran interests from his office in the ‘Green Zone’.
Meanwhile, Obama’s “commitment” to troops’ withdrawal by the end of 2011 is flawed. It is a propaganda designed to manipulate the public and promote the perception that Iraq is a free and sovereign nation. The Occupation continues, but it is “invisible occupation”, as Priya Satia of Stanford University rightly called it. “In reality, most of the ‘withdrawing’ forces are merely relocating to forward operating bases where they appear to be hunkering down for a long entr’acte [pause] offstage in expensive, built-to-last [military bases]” (Financial Times, July 01, 2009). “But Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for invisible occupation again: indeed they never fall for it the first time … in 1932”, added Satia. Moreover, the so-called “Status of Forces Agreement” between the U.S. military and the puppet government is a fraud, because it was never ratified by the Iraqi people. It is a deal between an occupier and a puppet government.
American military bases are being built (against the wishes of the Iraqi people) to enforce a permanent colonial occupation and to serve U.S.-Israel Zionist interests… There are nearly 300 U.S. military bases in Iraq; many of them are the size of small towns. American advisors (at least 1,400 CIA agents) will remain stationed in the largest embassy in the world in the centre of Baghdad as a symbol of U.S. imperialism. In addition, there are at least 100,000 mercenaries (‘private war contractors’) fanning violence throughout Iraq.
Finally, the impacts of the murderous Occupation on the lives of the Iraqi people are reflected in numerous Western polls that revealed a significant majority of Iraqis despise the presence of U.S. troops and mercenaries and want an end to the murderous Occupation. Hence, without armed resistance, it is unlikely the U.S. will end its illegal colonial Occupation of Iraq. The legitimate Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation will continue until Iraq is liberated.
The premeditated and deliberate destruction of Iraq in pursuit of U.S.-Israel Zionist expansion constitutes a war of aggression that resulted in genocide. The ultimate responsibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Anglo-American fascist armies in Iraq rests with those who deliberately planned and executed an act of unprovoked aggression. George Bush, Tony Blair and their accomplices are guilty of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Their crimes are reminiscent of the crimes committed by Nazi leaders. In civilised societies they would be hanged for their crimes.
The Iraqi people have the right to live in a sovereign nation free of repression, torture and terrorism; to enjoy justice and respect for human rights, and prosperity. The only condition to build a new Iraq for all Iraqis, proud of its history and Arab identity, is the liberation of the Iraqi people from U.S. colonial Occupation.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.
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Book Review
In 2007, Michael Parenti Called Out The Greater Israel Project
The Dissident | January 28, 2026
In my last article, I covered the left-wing scholar Michael Parenti- who passed away at the age of 92 this week- and his prophetic writings on the Ukraine proxy war in 2014.
Parenti’s writings on the Israel lobby and the greater Israel project were equally prophetic.
In his 2007 book “Contrary Notions” Parenti called out “Israel First” Neo-cons and Israel’s role in the Iraq war, and predicted to a tee the future Israeli/American wars in the Middle East in service of Greater Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
In a section of the book aptly titled “Israel First”, Parenti wrote… continue
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