Last Wednesday, hidden in the back pages, was the news that all the
remaining weapons inspectors in Iraq have finally ended their hopeless
search for weapons of mass destruction. What they have effectively
done is admit that such weapons do not and even did not exist in Iraq
in the run-up to the war. So as it turns out, Scott Ritter, a former
weapons inspector, Hans Blix, the UN, and everyone else in the world
was right in opposing Bush's flawed and psychotic rationale for
invading Iraq.
Althougth, the crucial issue that this situation raises is that the
whole concept of weapons inspections, as the Bush administration sees
it, is a dangerously flawed concept. Weapons inspectors ask
governments to do something which is a logical impossibility, to prove
a negative thesis, in effect, to prove that one does not have weapons.
It is impossible to prove such a negative, and this is what Bush used
as an excuse to start the war in Iraq.
In Hans Blix's book on his role as leader of the Iraq inspections,
Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, he lists a
host of groundless suspicions and false accusations against the Iraqi
government. Incredibly, Blix ultimately assigns much of the blame for
the war on Saddam for failing to sufficiently appease the inspectors.
Blix seems to have played the role of Bush's bureaucratic leader,
treating the inspections, instead of the truth, as ends in themselves.
But if in a conflict one side is telling the truth and the other is
not, then 'remaining neutral and balanced' means at the very least
becoming implicated in the falsehoods of one side.
Scientific neutrality, on the other hand, means treating a question
objectively and keeping an open mind. If such neutrality had been
practiced, equal weight would have been given to the hypothesis that
Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction as was given to the hypothesis
that it possessed them. A truly scientific approach would have led
inspectors to conclude that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction
after all. Although this was the stance of weapons inspector Scott
Ritter, to his credit, and he became one of the most vehement critics
of the war.
On March 2003, Bush signalled his intention to invade Iraq with this
terrible signal:
"Saddam Hussein ... told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass
destruction, but he's got them."
So far, about a 100,000 Iraqis have died. More than 1,350 U.S. troops
have been killed and still more dying every day, and still tens of
thousands of more U.S. troops have been physically and psychologically
injured. After wasting hundreds of billions of dollars, with no end in
sight, it is about time that Bush at least admit that he made a
mistake.
And the Iraq war has hampered our ability to track down Osama bin
Laden. It has also damaged America's credibility and strained all our
ties with our closest of allies.
The bitter truth is that Saddam had no nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons, despite all of Bush's teleprompter read lies, and Cheney's
constant assertion that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has
weapons of mass destruction" and Condy Rice's ominous warning of "a
mushroom cloud", e.t.c.
They were all wrong. America was spooked into going to war based on
lies.
In the run up to the Iraq war, I can remember at least 3 different
occassions when Bush blatantly lied and scared everyone into thinking
that Iraq had WMDs, in his State of the Union address, at the United
Nations, and in a speech in Ohio. Bush not only said that Iraq had
WMDs, but he said that Iraq had "500 tons of WMDs", and he even said
that he knows where they are too. So Hans Blix, the United Nations,
and all the other weapons inspectors kept asking and begging Bush to
share with them the information about where these WMDs supposedly are
so they can be promptly inspected and dismantled, but Bush said that he
couldn't tell of the location because "it would compromise our
intelligence sources". But now we know that Bush's intelligence source
was the convicted Iraqi swindler who goes by the name of Ahmed Chalabi.
Now the news says that Charles Duelfer's 1,700-strong Iraq Survey Group
has quietly abandoned the fruitless quest for WMDs in its final report.
In conclusion, the United Nations military and economic sanctions had
effectively contained Iraq before the U.S. invasion. The "pre-emptive"
U=2ES. attack, launched without United Nations' approval, was uncalled
for. The Security Council got it right when they asked the U.S. not
to attack until inspectors could probe more deeply.
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For more info, go to these links:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/news/archive/2005/01/12/n=
ational1823EST0706.DTL
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-01-13-wmd-edit_x.htm
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