A monstrous lie
On April 8, the Pentagon revealed that an Iraqi factory near Hindiya,
south of Baghdad, which the US invaders had originally told journalists
was a facility for producing the nerve agent sarin, was, in fact, a pesticide
factory.
This was one of a string of embarrassments for the White House, which
had justified its March 19 invasion of Iraq — the final act of US aggression
in a 13-year war of military attacks and economic strangulation — with
the claim that Saddam Hussein's regime threatened the world with an arsenal
of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
The day before, US marines had shed their chemical and biological protective
suits — a tacit admission by US commanders that the threat of an attack
using such weapons was non-existent. Indeed, the invasion forces have not
found a single shred of evidence to support the accusations made by the
US and its British and Australian appendages that Iraq has a functioning
program for the production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
The White House and the Pentagon, of course, knew this before the invasion.
After all, intensive inspections by the United Nations Monitoring, Verification
and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy
Agency had found nothing after more than 400 inspections at over 300 different
sites.
But this didn't prevent the invasion of Iraq by the “coalition of the
willing” — the US and its British and Australian appendages. Nor did it
prevent Washington justifying its invasion to domestic and international
public opinion as an effort to “disarm” Iraq. On April 9, Hans Blix, the
head of UNMOVIC, told the Spanish daily El Pais: “There is evidence
that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts
about their attitude to the [weapons] inspections.”
A monstrous lie was used to justify imperialist aggression against a
Third World country, whose industrial infrastructure, and capacity to produce
any weapons at all, had been shattered by six-weeks of intensive bombing
in 1991 and a crippling 12-year long economic blockade. This was a predatory
war aimed at US corporate conquest of Iraq's principal natural resource
— oil.
The warmakers in the White House and the Pentagon, and their masters
on Wall Street, know that the public mustn't understand the truth about
this invasion — the political cost would be too high. So they persist with
the fiction that Iraq possesses a WMD arsenal.
The Pentagon is likely to respond to its inability to “discover” Iraq's
alleged arsenal by fabricating evidence, Russian foreign minister Igor
Ivanov warned that country's parliament on March 26.
But even such a frame-up will suffer from a fatal flaw — the inescapable
fact that there has not been a single report of Iraqi forces using
chemical or biological weapons!
But while Saddam Hussein's troops haven't employed his mythical arsenal
of chemical and biological weapons, the US has not hesitated to use lethal
depleted uranium (DU) weapons in Iraq.
An August 2002 report by a United Nations commission noted that, since
the 1991 Gulf War when the US also used DU, “Cancer appears to have increased
between seven and 10 times and deformities between four and six times”.
According to the March 30 British Sunday Herald, a study by the
UK Atomic Energy Authority “found that 500,000 would die before the end
of century, due to radioactive debris left in the [Iraqi] desert”.
Professor Doug Rokke, a former director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium
project, told the Herald that the use of DU weapons was a war crime.
Pointing out the White House's hypocrisy, he told the paper: “There is
a moral point to be made here. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal
weapons of mass destruction — yet we are using weapons of mass destruction
ourselves. Such double-standards are repellent.”
This war was never about “disarming” Hussein, and, while many Iraqis
will understandably welcome the end of Hussein's despotic regime, the war
was not waged to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny.
Those absent from cheering crowds tearing down symbols of Hussein's
rule were the ones whose bodies were charred beyond recognition by US “smart”
bombs, those whose cars were riddled with machine gun bullets at US checkpoints
and the children still lying in overcrowded hospitals covered in shrapnel
wounds from US cluster bombing of civilian areas.
Even before the war against Iraq has ended, Washington is already preparing
to use Iraq as a base from which to brutalise neighbouring countries —
which will also be declared to have WMD — into submission to its rule.
Washington's 13-year-long war against Iraq has probably cost the lives
of up to a million Iraqis. What the Iraqi people desperately need is massive
international humanitarian aid, the lifting of the economic embargo and
the immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops so that they can be free
to rebuild their country without even a day under the tyranny of any foreign
overlords, whether appointed by the US or the UN.
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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