Winter 2002-2003
SPECIAL PULLOUT SECTION

Attack Iraq? An Optimistic Reappraisal

Saddam Hussein has declared war on the "Forces of Evil" while George Bush has declared war on the "Axis of Evil." Their peevish rhetoric might sound boring were it not for the fact that these two men have considerable experience in the crude art of killing people.

Meanwhile, U.S. citizens sit idly (if uneasily) by, still waiting to see what Bush will eventually do. And our U.S. Congress, eager to appear patriotic and supportive of Bush, i.e., voteworthy to a brainwashed constituency, engages in token debates about policy on Iraq before hastening to approve whatever Bush is going to do anyway.

The American people's attention span is too short for the war in Afghanistan to now remain headline news. And we the people seem to forget that, before this war, the U.S. had taken the naive attitude, in its support of the Taliban against the Soviets, that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Now one wonders if Bush, Congress, and we the sheep have already forgotten that in Afghanistan the U.S. displayed its usual military genius by killing more of its own soldiers with its own weaponry than the enemy did. All the while displaying its customary attitude toward "collateral damage" by killing more civilians than the terrorists killed on September 11, 2001. But by now the Afghanistan phase of our "War on Terrorism" is drifting toward artificial closure: the government that was in power has been ousted, its military routed, religious extremists chastised, the people terrorized, and an interim government installed. Once we are sure that this government has God on its side, the U.S. will slowly withdraw, and then will turn a blind eye as this new government metastasizes into one more oppressive tyranny.

But the War on Terrorism must proceed apace because Bush, Ashcroft, and their puppeteers - the defense contractors - need a new enemy to justify the defense budget, distract us from Dick Cheney's involvement in corporate scandal, camouflage the fact that our economy is in a shambles, and allow our military to insinuate itself into even more places where it is not wanted - like the Philippines, Yemen, Pakistan. So now Saddam Hussein is the enemy du jour, with Bush accusing him of posing the triple threat of chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare.

Does Bush expect us to forget that it was the U.S. who gave Hussein much of his chemical weapons technology back when we were supporting Iraq's war against Iran? Doesn't this make our current fears about Iraq's chemical weapons program seem rather misplaced? In other words, isn't it the United States' chemical weapons program that the world should be worrying about?

However, as for worrying about Iraq's current chemical weapons program, let us remember that by 1998 the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) believed that more than 95 percent of Iraq's chemical weapons had been located and destroyed. Three nerve agents had been manufactured in that program: sarin, tabun, and VX. Both sarin and tabun have a shelf life of only five years. Any that might have eluded destruction by the U.N. inspection team would have been manufactured well before 1998 and therefore is now harmless. VX has a longer shelf life, but the U.N. inspection team believed they had destroyed all VX and its production facilities by 1996. So we can calm ourselves about the possibility of chemical weapons in Iraq.

As for Bush's worries about biological weapons, let us not forget that when Iraq was first considering biological warfare less than two decades ago, our own government seemed less concerned than curious about what the effects of such warfare might be on the Iranians. The tacit attitude by the U.S. government was: Let the Iraq military do our field testing for us. Thus, during most of the 1980s, the U.S. was fully aware that the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission was importing bacterial cultures that could be used for manufacturing biological weapons. Subsequently, the U.S. stood idly by as Iraq proceeded to produce huge quantities of liquid anthrax and load it into missiles and bombs. A much smaller, but nevertheless significant, amount of liquid botulinum toxin was also manufactured. However, the U.S. was not overly worried about these weapons during the Gulf War, when Hussein had high motivation for using them. So why is Bush worried now? When Iraq admitted to having these biological weapons in 1995, the U.N. inspection team destroyed all production and storage facilities. If any liquid anthrax eluded destruction, even in the best of storage environments it germinates and is nontoxic after three years. Botulinum toxin, if more hardy, is much more difficult to deploy as an effective weapon.

If it is true that biological weapons are easier to buy, transport, and use than are nuclear or chemical weapons, it also is true that there are probably a dozen nations whose attitude toward the U.S. makes them more likely than Iraq to inflict biological damage upon us. If we start bombing Iraq because Hussein might possibly have biological weapons, then for the very same reasons we should also start bombing Libya, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cuba, Mexico, and maybe even certain targets right here in the United States - once we figure out where those anthrax mailings of late 2001 came from.

The point being: biological weaponry in Iraq, in the greater scheme of things, is not worth Bush's presidential paranoia. In the Gulf War Hussein did not use such weapons against us when there was no doubt that he had them. It is very unlikely that he has them now. And if he does, he should be considered less a worry on this score than are several other nations and cultures who hate us.

As for Hussein posing a nuclear threat, the United States scarcely has a right to point the finger when its own vast nuclear arsenal is sufficient to cause a holocaust, complete with nuclear winter, that would obliterate the entire human race as surely as an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. But does Hussein actually pose a nuclear threat? Back in 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declaring that Iraq's entire nuclear program had been dismantled and destroyed, stated that it "found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material." Constant satellite surveillance of Iraq, since 1998, has shown absolutely no evidence of renewed nuclear capability. In other words, a nuclear threat from Iraq does not now exist. Yet, our president-nonelect, George Bush, willing to tell any lie if it will give him his war, on September 7 of 2002, bent that above-quoted IAEA statement into: "...a report came out of the Atomic - the IAEA - that they [the Iraqis] were six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."

The answer to this is: "Any evidence, George, would be more evidence."

To argue that the U.S. need not fear chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in Iraq is not to suggest that Saddam Hussein is anything other than cruel and despotic. This "Butcher from Baghdad" is pansuicidal - willing to sacrifice any number of his own people for the sake of keeping himself in power. Although tremendously admired by most Arab nations for his willingness to stand up to the U.S., he also is feared and despised by those same nations because they know that if the U.S. were not his main enemy, he would soon find another - Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. But for now an uneasy equilibrium holds sway amidst the Arab world. And the Arab nations unanimously oppose the U.S. going to war against Iraq. The Saudis know that a destabilized Iraq would soon become a fragmented Iraq, with the Shiites in Saudi Arabia's north eager to join up with the now persecuted Shiites of southern Iraq so they can form a nation of their own - comprised of a chunk of Iraq and a chunk of Saudi Arabia. The rebellious Kurds in southeastern Turkey, if they could join forces with the Kurds of northern Iraq, would also like to form a nation of their own. Even Kuwait has reconciled with Iraq since Hussein has now formally recognized its borders and sovereignty (a fact that the U.S. government would prefer its own citizens not know about); so even Kuwait opposes a U.S. war on Iraq. Kuwait knows that if Hussein were to fall, his successor (which could be the United States itself) might not be inclined to respect its borders and sovereignty. Moreover, other Arab nations do not forget the Iraq-Iran war which lasted from 1980 to 1988. At that time, Iraq had serious designs on Iran, with Syria and Libya as Iran's only allies. If Iraq comes apart after a U.S. invasion, Iran is going to want its portion of the spoils. (Would the U.S. then go to war against Iran to keep that from happening?) In the midst of all this, Syria could get involved in the feeding frenzy too, then get uppity toward its other neighbor, Israel. And if that confrontation were to get started, Palestinians in Jordan might get bolder, whereupon Israel might decide that the time has finally come to go nuclear.

Pull out a map, ponder all this, and you might begin to fathom why every Arab nation opposes Bush invading Iraq.

After putting your map away, spend some time pondering the fact that the United States only goes to war on behalf of another country's human rights when that war is either economically profitable for our defense contractors and the big corporations, or politically profitable for politicians garnering votes. Consider how as recently as 1998, when tribal hostilities between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda resulted in 500,000 deaths, the U.S. did not intervene since no economic interest was pressing enough to warrant halting this efficient exercise in genocide. Yet Bush expects us to believe he has compassionate concern about how Hussein is maltreating the Iraqi people?

BushÕs rhetoric paints Hussein as a diabolical psychopath. No argument here. But back in 1979, when Hussein took the title of president (after being his country's de facto ruler since the early 1970s), one of his first acts as president was to videotape a session of his own party's congress, wherein he personally ordered several members executed - on camera. He then explicitly stated to the press that this was what would happen to anyone who even considered plotting against him. Such actions did not seem to warrant our eliminating Hussein then. Nor did his garish cruelty warrant our eliminating him in 1988 when he was gassing Kurdish babies. Even after the Gulf War, with evidence in hand that Hussein had used acid baths and electric drills to torture POWs, the U.S. Defense Department promptly concealed this evidence for fear that, during the 1992 Presidential campaign, the issue would surface regarding whether Hussein should be brought to justice for these war crimes. The U.S. Defense Department, at the time, did not want to completely close the door on buying Iraq's oil - a shopping spree which indeed began in 1995 with the "oil for food program" resolution #986, and shifted into high gear with the similar resolution #1153 in 1998.

But now there are economic interests in the form of concerns about oil, which have caused Bush & Co. to realize that we need a better bargain than merely being Hussein's "oil for food" customer. When in May of 2001, the National Energy Policy report (soon to be dubbed the Cheney Report) was released, our nation's leaders became alarmed. This report pointed out that whereas in the year 2000 half of the oil the U.S. used had been imported, by the year 2020 two-thirds would have to be imported. An increase in oil dependency from 50 percent to 67 percent in the course of only two decades might spell economic disaster for the U.S. - considering the high cost of the commodity, not to mention our military vulnerability should foreign oil be cut off or significantly constricted. So thus and therefore, according to the oleaginous mentality of Vice-President Dick Cheney, concerns about the magnitude of our oil interests can no longer be deferred to the future. Iraq's oil is now well worth the mere cost of a war.

Maybe Vice-President Dick Cheney should listen to a cogent, sobering, even eloquent analysis, made by one of our longtime statesmen, as far back as April 13, 1991, right after the Gulf War. This statesman, arguing against extending the Gulf War to Baghdad, warned, "If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?" I recommend this thesis to our Vice-President Dick Cheney on the grounds that there is much wisdom in it, and also on the grounds that he himself is the one who said it.

But of course that was back in 1991. Now Dick Cheney is interested in a more simple and tidy equation: The cost of oil is going up so fast that the risks involved in securing Baghdad must not stand in the way of a cheap bargain. (Similar economic concerns explain why Russia for so long opposed a U.N. Security Council resolution supporting Bush's intended war on Iraq. Russia has been Iraq's biggest customer, and understandably does not want to lose its oil supplier, much less end up buying oil from the U.S. via Iraq.)

So while Bush claims that the U.S. must invade Iraq to protect the world from Hussein, the truth is: Bush believes the U.S. needs to invade Iraq to protect itself from oil dependency.

Perhaps we can oppose Bush's bellicose rhetoric by suggesting to Americans that instead of invading Iraq, we work at doing away with our government's hypocrisy about Iraq. Since before the Gulf War of 1991 we have enforced an economic embargo against Iraq. Yet, with that oil for food program in place all these years, the U.S. government has pretended to be extending humanitarian aid to Hussein's suffering populace, while actually not caring at all about this aid going to the Iraqi military. So all along the U.S. has been glad to do business with a criminal, since what the U.S. gets out of the deal is cheap gas for its fleet of SUVs.

Also (as long as we are on the subject of hypocrisy), what about that statement made, less than two decades ago, so many times by Ronald Reagan: "It is in the best interests of the United States that the war between Iran and Iraq continue." That war killed 400,000 and wounded 750,000 Iranian and Iraqi soldiers and civilians. And the U.S. military was a part of that war. In 1982, only two years into his Presidency, Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. military intelligence to supply Iraq with precision satellite photos of Iranian troop positions. It was these photos which allowed Iraq to, with such deadly precision, kill Iranian soldiers with nerve gas. Later, the very helicopters which Reagan gave Iraq, ostensibly to transport their political officials, would be used to spray nerve gas on the Kurds in 1988Ñan act of genocide now well documented with recently released photographs, in vivid color, of those dead Kurdish children.

Keeping all this in mind, consider further: Given that the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal is now established, should they start by trying Reagan for what he did to escalate and prolong that war - a war which claimed well over a million casualties? Or should they go back even further and try Kissinger for what he did to Vietnam? Maybe instead of invading Iraq we should insist that Hussein be tried by the international war crimes tribunal. However, out of fairness, he should wait his turn while we first try Kissinger, Reagan, Pinochet, and a few others.

Could logic such as this convince the American people that they should halt Bush before he goes on another rampage? Perhaps not. Such trials do take time, and Bush shows no evidence of being a patient man. For too many American people, an impatient man comes across as a man of action. They like that.

So let us take a different approach here, and simply ask: What would invading Iraq accomplish?

Actually it would accomplish a lot of things: More Iraqi people killed - as if Hussein isn't doing a good enough job of that already. More dead American soldiers - probably most of them, like happened in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan, killed by our own weaponry again. Our economy seemingly stimulated while actually it is plundered. And as for the effect on terrorism? Arabs and Moslems who before only hated us, but were not yet aggrieved enough to join the squadrons of suicide bombers, would be eager to enlist. Not because they are crazed, infidel terrorists, but because they are willing to sacrifice their lives to avoid being interfered with by a foreign country. Just as, lest we forget, a group of American revolutionaries sacrificed their lives back in the 18th century to avoid being interfered with by a foreign country.

Instead of invading, why not pull out all military support of every Arab nation in the world? Let them deal with one another as they see fit, not because, as Reagan so cheerfully told us, war between them is in our best interest, but because with the U.S. military out of the picture, Arab nations would have better opportunity for resolving their mutual difficulties. If they fail, then at least this failure was not made worse by the clumsy, self-interested meddling of foreign invaders.

Is there any way of distracting Bush from that war he covets? Maybe there is. Let us not forget that President Bush has hinted, several times, that if Hussein will allow free elections in his country, then an invasion of Iraq might not be necessary. Suppose such an election could be arranged by the United Nations. If Hussein were to win this election, though not by a majority vote, then he and George Bush would have something in common. Bush could call up Hussein, and they, together, could enjoy a good chuckle at their unique way of winning elections.

Two enemies sharing a laugh? This could be the perfect formula for world peace.

(Rather than here take up space with footnotes verifying the above information, the author will personally answer questions about sources. His phone number is: 314-966-2167.)