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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