Thrillhouse
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http://www.counterpunch.org/white02182003.html
Who Poses the Biggest Threat?
A Vet on Bush's Hypocrisy on the War Against Iraq
by CHRIS WHITE
I am a Veteran for Peace, and just like every other veteran with a peace agenda, the hypocrisy pervading my military experience largely informs my decision to resist the injustices perpetrated by my own government on the world. Just as it is hypocritical to train millions of men and women to mindlessly kill on command in order to defend the world from evil, the Bush administration's case for war on Iraq is also hypocritical in every aspect.
The president-select, thief in chief, dubya, or whatever his name shall be for the 82 percent of this country that did not vote for him, has three main reasons for invading Iraq: 1) Saddam is an oppressive ruler. 2) Saddam may possess weapons of mass destruction; 3) Saddam may have connections to terrorists. To accurately assess the validity of each reason, we need to both compare the equal record of both ourselves and our allies to each, in order to understand why Iraq is so worthy of invasion.
Reason #1: Saddam is an oppressive ruler. Well, Saudi Arabia has an oppressive monarchy that whips hundreds of children every year, and is brutally oppressive to its female population, and yet it receives massive U.S. military aid because it is a crucial ally. Turkey carries out massive torture and extrajudicial killings each year, and Kurdish culture is punishable by imprisonment, and yet it is a top recipient of U.S. military and economic aid because it is a crucial U.S. ally. Indonesia, Guatemala, Colombia, Pakistan, Israel, China, Russia, and several others also commit massive human rights abuses either against their own people, or against others, such as Russia's role in Chechnya, and yet each is a crucial U.S. ally. Why do we not invade them?
Reason # 2: Saddam may possess WMD. Again, many of our allies possess these. Israel, Pakistan, China, and Russia, to name a few, all possess nuclear weapons, AND oppress people on a large scale, and yet they are not worthy of invasion. But there is much more to this story. The details of the administration's case are also more than fuzzy. The major story in Europe and Australia last week was the revelation that Powell's case before the UN was partly plagiarized. Here's the story, reported very little in the U.S., but widely in the Mirror UK, the New Zealand Herald, and the Guardian: British intelligence, which recently came out with a document stating their belief that NO connection exists between Al Qaeda and Iraq, was also central in the intelligence gathering for Powell's case to be made against Iraq at the UN. It was discovered that "large chunks" of their dossier were taken from academic journals, not intelligence sources.
The most shocking part of this story is that Powell himself has not been entirely discredited. We have a history of lying in order get into war in this country. Whether it was the false declaration that the Mexican army had crossed into U.S. territory in 1846, which legitimated our entry into the Mexican-American War, or the false claim that the Spanish had sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba in 1898, which justified our entry into the Spanish-American War, or the lies surrounding the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964, which facilitated our entry into the Vietnam War, or the false testimony that Iraqi soldiers had murdered incubator babies upon invasion of Kuwait in 1990, further enhancing the desirability of our entry into the first Gulf War in 1991, or a number of other engagements, this country has consistently used half-truths and deception to justify bloodshed. Why should this time be any different?
The Bush administration's deception continues. According the Guardian, Hans Blix dismissed Powell's central claim in his presentation about the alleged mobile biological weapons labs, and he denied that Iraqis had attempted to hide equipment before UNMOVIC arrived. Blix's teams had already searched two of the alleged biological weapons lab vehicles, and stated that they were food-testing trucks. U.S. tips had led him to inspect them in the first place.
Powell, who has been a hawk ever since his days as National Security Advisor to Reagan, according to CNN, recently asserted that the ricin "bouncing around Europe" originated in Iraq. This has been refuted by British and French intelligence, who say "There is no, repeat, no suggestion that the ricin was anything but locally produced." "It was bad quality, not technically sophisticated." Here Powell goes badly off the rails. Although we didn't supply Saddam with ricin, we did supply him with a number of other horrible weapons, all itemized in the Riegle Report, and produced by Congress in 1994. It states that we supplied Saddam with such chemical nerve agents as sarin, soman, tabun, and VX, as well as mustard gas. Of course, this report has only received scant attention from the U.S. mainstream, but it can be downloaded from the web. In short, the Bush administration's case to prove that Saddam has WMD is largely based on plagiarism and hypocrisy.
Reason # 3: Saddam may have connections to terrorists. So do two of our closest allies, and of course, ourselves. According to the New Zealand Herald, Al Qaeda received 1 million dollars from the royal family of Qatar, and according to Newsweek, money that reached the 9/11 hijackers was traced back to an account held by Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington. What would be the response if the same connection were made with Iraq? Of course, we don't have to point out the most obvious hypocritical aspect of all: fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, and not one was Iraqi.
But, what's so hypocritical about that? After all, we don't apply any of the above standards to ourselves, so why should we apply them to our allies? It could be argued that we fit all three of the criteria cited above beyond any other nation. 1) We support oppression by supplying more military assistance to more nations than any other, by far. Not to mention the fact that we have used our military or CIA to intervene in forty-five nations over the past fifty-eight years, and we are the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons against civilians. 2) We possess more nuclear weapons than any other nation on Earth, period. 3) Our connections to terrorists go deeper than any Muslim nation. We have the School of the Americas (now under new name, but same management), which has turned out hundreds of thousands of Latin American soldiers, many of whom have committed atrocities on a scale that compare to 9/11.
What if the U.S. government were held to the FBI's official definition of terrorism? ("the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives") Would our list of victims be any shorter than Iraq's? How is our military and CIA involvement in the following nations any better than Saddam's invasion of Kuwait or his oppression of his own people?
Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Granada, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Zaire, Namibia, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Iran, South Africa, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Cambodia, Libya, Israel, Palestine, China, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia, East Timor, Turkey, Angola, and Somalia.
According a Reuters article from December 26, our own CIA has recently been using tactics bordering on torture to extract information from Afghani prisoners of our bombing campaign that may have cost up to 5,000 civilian lives in and of itself. Who are we to call anyone else the bad guy when not only is our foreign policy history morally bankrupt, but we support some of the worst human rights violators on the planet, and still we claim to have a case against Saddam Hussein, a pebble in a shining sea of oppression that we otherwise hold quite dear to our hearts.
To sum up, the case for invasion of Iraq lacks proof, and is based on plagiarism, false assertions, and lies. In addition, the reasons we use for wanting to invade Iraq could apply to a number of our closest allies in the world. So, if the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq is unfounded, then why do they want to invade? I posit that not only is it for oil, which is certainly central, but it is also for maintaining legitimacy with our allies in the region. Allies such as Kuwait and Israel in particular enjoy the reassurance that we will pressure anyone who menaces them, and we take pride in reassuring them because that maintains our legitimacy as the nation they are dependent on for protection. This also sends the message to other "rogue states" that may get the silly idea to not follow us as their leader.
So, inevitably people will want answers on what we should do with Iraq. First of all, we have to admit that the case to invade could be made in many other countries, all of which are close U.S. allies. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves if we are willing to invade all of them, too. I think we realize that the answer would be a resounding NO, especially since we are talking about nations that, collectively, make up more than half of the Earth's population. So, instead we pick on tiny little Iraq. Does it make the sense they say it does?
Chris White is an ex-Marine infantryman who is currently working on his doctorate in history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He served from 1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan, and Doha, Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace.
Who Poses the Biggest Threat?
A Vet on Bush's Hypocrisy on the War Against Iraq
by CHRIS WHITE
I am a Veteran for Peace, and just like every other veteran with a peace agenda, the hypocrisy pervading my military experience largely informs my decision to resist the injustices perpetrated by my own government on the world. Just as it is hypocritical to train millions of men and women to mindlessly kill on command in order to defend the world from evil, the Bush administration's case for war on Iraq is also hypocritical in every aspect.
The president-select, thief in chief, dubya, or whatever his name shall be for the 82 percent of this country that did not vote for him, has three main reasons for invading Iraq: 1) Saddam is an oppressive ruler. 2) Saddam may possess weapons of mass destruction; 3) Saddam may have connections to terrorists. To accurately assess the validity of each reason, we need to both compare the equal record of both ourselves and our allies to each, in order to understand why Iraq is so worthy of invasion.
Reason #1: Saddam is an oppressive ruler. Well, Saudi Arabia has an oppressive monarchy that whips hundreds of children every year, and is brutally oppressive to its female population, and yet it receives massive U.S. military aid because it is a crucial ally. Turkey carries out massive torture and extrajudicial killings each year, and Kurdish culture is punishable by imprisonment, and yet it is a top recipient of U.S. military and economic aid because it is a crucial U.S. ally. Indonesia, Guatemala, Colombia, Pakistan, Israel, China, Russia, and several others also commit massive human rights abuses either against their own people, or against others, such as Russia's role in Chechnya, and yet each is a crucial U.S. ally. Why do we not invade them?
Reason # 2: Saddam may possess WMD. Again, many of our allies possess these. Israel, Pakistan, China, and Russia, to name a few, all possess nuclear weapons, AND oppress people on a large scale, and yet they are not worthy of invasion. But there is much more to this story. The details of the administration's case are also more than fuzzy. The major story in Europe and Australia last week was the revelation that Powell's case before the UN was partly plagiarized. Here's the story, reported very little in the U.S., but widely in the Mirror UK, the New Zealand Herald, and the Guardian: British intelligence, which recently came out with a document stating their belief that NO connection exists between Al Qaeda and Iraq, was also central in the intelligence gathering for Powell's case to be made against Iraq at the UN. It was discovered that "large chunks" of their dossier were taken from academic journals, not intelligence sources.
The most shocking part of this story is that Powell himself has not been entirely discredited. We have a history of lying in order get into war in this country. Whether it was the false declaration that the Mexican army had crossed into U.S. territory in 1846, which legitimated our entry into the Mexican-American War, or the false claim that the Spanish had sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba in 1898, which justified our entry into the Spanish-American War, or the lies surrounding the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964, which facilitated our entry into the Vietnam War, or the false testimony that Iraqi soldiers had murdered incubator babies upon invasion of Kuwait in 1990, further enhancing the desirability of our entry into the first Gulf War in 1991, or a number of other engagements, this country has consistently used half-truths and deception to justify bloodshed. Why should this time be any different?
The Bush administration's deception continues. According the Guardian, Hans Blix dismissed Powell's central claim in his presentation about the alleged mobile biological weapons labs, and he denied that Iraqis had attempted to hide equipment before UNMOVIC arrived. Blix's teams had already searched two of the alleged biological weapons lab vehicles, and stated that they were food-testing trucks. U.S. tips had led him to inspect them in the first place.
Powell, who has been a hawk ever since his days as National Security Advisor to Reagan, according to CNN, recently asserted that the ricin "bouncing around Europe" originated in Iraq. This has been refuted by British and French intelligence, who say "There is no, repeat, no suggestion that the ricin was anything but locally produced." "It was bad quality, not technically sophisticated." Here Powell goes badly off the rails. Although we didn't supply Saddam with ricin, we did supply him with a number of other horrible weapons, all itemized in the Riegle Report, and produced by Congress in 1994. It states that we supplied Saddam with such chemical nerve agents as sarin, soman, tabun, and VX, as well as mustard gas. Of course, this report has only received scant attention from the U.S. mainstream, but it can be downloaded from the web. In short, the Bush administration's case to prove that Saddam has WMD is largely based on plagiarism and hypocrisy.
Reason # 3: Saddam may have connections to terrorists. So do two of our closest allies, and of course, ourselves. According to the New Zealand Herald, Al Qaeda received 1 million dollars from the royal family of Qatar, and according to Newsweek, money that reached the 9/11 hijackers was traced back to an account held by Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington. What would be the response if the same connection were made with Iraq? Of course, we don't have to point out the most obvious hypocritical aspect of all: fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, and not one was Iraqi.
But, what's so hypocritical about that? After all, we don't apply any of the above standards to ourselves, so why should we apply them to our allies? It could be argued that we fit all three of the criteria cited above beyond any other nation. 1) We support oppression by supplying more military assistance to more nations than any other, by far. Not to mention the fact that we have used our military or CIA to intervene in forty-five nations over the past fifty-eight years, and we are the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons against civilians. 2) We possess more nuclear weapons than any other nation on Earth, period. 3) Our connections to terrorists go deeper than any Muslim nation. We have the School of the Americas (now under new name, but same management), which has turned out hundreds of thousands of Latin American soldiers, many of whom have committed atrocities on a scale that compare to 9/11.
What if the U.S. government were held to the FBI's official definition of terrorism? ("the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives") Would our list of victims be any shorter than Iraq's? How is our military and CIA involvement in the following nations any better than Saddam's invasion of Kuwait or his oppression of his own people?
Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Granada, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Zaire, Namibia, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Iran, South Africa, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Cambodia, Libya, Israel, Palestine, China, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia, East Timor, Turkey, Angola, and Somalia.
According a Reuters article from December 26, our own CIA has recently been using tactics bordering on torture to extract information from Afghani prisoners of our bombing campaign that may have cost up to 5,000 civilian lives in and of itself. Who are we to call anyone else the bad guy when not only is our foreign policy history morally bankrupt, but we support some of the worst human rights violators on the planet, and still we claim to have a case against Saddam Hussein, a pebble in a shining sea of oppression that we otherwise hold quite dear to our hearts.
To sum up, the case for invasion of Iraq lacks proof, and is based on plagiarism, false assertions, and lies. In addition, the reasons we use for wanting to invade Iraq could apply to a number of our closest allies in the world. So, if the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq is unfounded, then why do they want to invade? I posit that not only is it for oil, which is certainly central, but it is also for maintaining legitimacy with our allies in the region. Allies such as Kuwait and Israel in particular enjoy the reassurance that we will pressure anyone who menaces them, and we take pride in reassuring them because that maintains our legitimacy as the nation they are dependent on for protection. This also sends the message to other "rogue states" that may get the silly idea to not follow us as their leader.
So, inevitably people will want answers on what we should do with Iraq. First of all, we have to admit that the case to invade could be made in many other countries, all of which are close U.S. allies. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves if we are willing to invade all of them, too. I think we realize that the answer would be a resounding NO, especially since we are talking about nations that, collectively, make up more than half of the Earth's population. So, instead we pick on tiny little Iraq. Does it make the sense they say it does?
Chris White is an ex-Marine infantryman who is currently working on his doctorate in history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He served from 1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan, and Doha, Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace.
