Hold the Neocons Accountable
- by Paul Craig Roberts

Will neoconservatives be held responsible for orchestrating a war in
order to pursue their Middle Eastern agenda? Will they get away with
inflicting death and injury on thousands of Iraqis and Americans?

Powerful people have good reasons to hold the neocons accountable.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is one. Deceived into lying to the
United Nations when he presented the case for a preemptive US attack
on Iraq, Secretary Powell was ruthlessly used by neocon administration
officials.Colin Powell put his reputation on the line when he gave the
UN assurances that "every statement I make today is backed up by
sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving
you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

There was not a word of truth or intelligence in what Powell told the
UN. Iraq most certainly was NOT developing chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was NOT involved with al
Qaida and the September 11 attacks on the US. Saddam Hussein had NO
weapons of mass destruction to give to terrorists.

President Bush also has good reason to hold the neocons responsible.
Deceived and trapped in a war of attrition that can have no successful
outcome, Bush's credibility is burdened with speeches even more
egregious than Powell's UN speech.

Fed disinformation, Bush dutifully regurgitated neocon fabrications
that Iraq possessed 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of
anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 30,000 prohibited warheads,
and uranium from Niger. America had to attack Iraq, Bush said, before
these fearsome weapons could be used against us.

Vice President Cheney's fear mongering was more extreme than Bush's.
Cheney claimed that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons."
References to "mushroom clouds" over American cities made ears deaf to
voices of reason.

Congress has an incentive to hold the neocons accountable. Fear
created by neocon lies caused Congress to emasculate itself, to give
up its war powers and to agree to massive sums of money being wasted
on a pointless war.

The US media has good cause to hold the neocons accountable. Neocons
manipulated the media and turned reporters, news networks and
publications into war propagandists. Uncritical acceptance of neocon
propaganda has made laughingstocks out of "conservative" media, such
as Fox News, the Weekly Standard, National Review and the Wall Street
Journal editorial page.

For example, the current issue (Nov. 24) of the Weekly Standard
confidently reports that a "top secret U.S. government memorandum"
leaked to the magazine proves beyond any doubt that "Osama Bin Laden
and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early
1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass
destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda
training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for
al Qaeda - perhaps even for Mohammed Atta."

These improbable revelations raised no suspicions at the Weekly
Standard or Fox News, which fed the story to the public without
checking it out.

The US Department of Defense repudiated the story in a November 15,
2003 press release: "News reports that the Defense Department recently
confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaida
and Iraq in a letter [from Undersecretary Douglas Feith] to the Senate
Intelligence Committee are inaccurate."

All the Weekly Standard has is a "classified annex" containing "raw
reports" or unsupported claims such as those made by self-serving
Iraqi exiles. The Defense Department news release says that "the
classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the
relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no conclusions."

But the propagandists at the Weekly Standard were not deterred by
facts.

Neoconservatives have made as big a fool of the American public as
they have of President Bush. The US has been tricked into waging a war
that already has cost us $200 billion and the sympathy of the world, a
war that disrupts the lives of tens of thousands of reserve and
national guard families, kills and maims our troops and Iraqi
civilians, destroys our alliances and foreign policy, and recruits
terrorists for bin Laden.

We went to war for false reasons. The costs are enormous. Will the
perpetrators be held accountable?

November 17, 2003

Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute
for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the
Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Copyright © 2003 Creators Syndicate

http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts17.html