http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/15/1896/

Published on Friday, June 15, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
What Every American Should Know About Iraq
by David Michael Green

Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion
and
occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George
W. Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a
traitor, or a geopolitical naif.

To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or
all
of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments
herein, nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I
will even include some of the comments and arguments made by the
administration and its supporters.

Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly
complete
account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating
America’s policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim
that
they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart -
but actually for all citizens in a democracy - it is incumbent upon us
to
educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.

Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The
very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about
this question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices
are
justified.

So, in that spirit - and as the Founders themselves said - “let Facts be
submitted to a candid world”.

* Mesopotamia has long been a playground for great powers. The British
invaded the area in 1917, causing a widespread revolt of the Iraqi
people.
Britain later ruled under a League of Nations mandate that produced the
artificial creation of the country Iraq (and Kuwait), and continued to
control oil production in the region. Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour
said
at the time, “I do not care under what system we keep this oil, but I am
quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be
available”.

* Saddam Hussein started his career as a political thug, on the payroll
of
the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s, torturing and murdering Iraqi
leftists
whose names were provided by American intelligence, and participating in
an armed coup against the Iraqi government.

* In 1972, the United States conspired with Iran and Israel to support a
revolt of the Kurdish people within Iraq against their government.

* In 1980, the United States provided encouragement, weapons,
intelligence, satellite data and funding for Saddam’s Iraq to invade
Iran,
launching an eight year war - the longest and probably the bloodiest of
the post-WWII era.

* During this war, Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to
improve relations with Saddam. The United States then restored full
diplomatic relations with Iraq, despite the administration’s clear
awareness that Saddam was using chemical weapons at the time.

* The Reagan administration also knew that Saddam had used chemical
weapons against Iraqi Kurds rising up again against Baghdad (this was
the
incident George W. Bush would later repeatedly invoke, saying of Saddam,
“He gassed his own people”), but nevertheless authorized expanded sales
to
Iraq of highly sophisticated equipment that could be used to manufacture
weapons, only two months after the Halabja incident.

* George H. W. Bush equated Saddam to Hitler. But, in the wake of the
1990-91 Gulf War, after the elder Bush had encouraged Kurds and Shiites
to
rise up against the regime, he abandoned them, leaving them to be
slaughtered by Saddam’s military, in many cases right before the eyes of
US forces who were ordered not to intervene.

* The senior Bush had a chance after that war to occupy Iraq and topple
Saddam. He chose not to because, in his own words and those of his
National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, “Trying to eliminate Saddam,
extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq … would have
incurred
incalculable human and political costs. … We would have been forced to
occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. …furthermore, we had been
self-
onsciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-
old war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding
the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international
response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion
route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a
bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and
perhaps barren - outcome.”

* The younger Bush, George W., never asked his father for advice on
Iraq.
Instead, he said: “You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms
of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to.” Bush has also
stated, “I’m driven with a mission from God. …God would tell me,
‘George,
go and end the tyranny in Iraq…’ And I did.”

* George W. Bush gave twenty interviews in 1999 to Mickey Herskowitz, a
friend of the Bush family contracted at the time to ghostwrite his
autobiography. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq at that time,
saying
“‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up
when
he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance
to
invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going
to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have
a
successful presidency.” Herskowitz said that Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were
shaped by ***** Cheney’s ideas, based on the power and glory Margaret
Thatcher earned from her Falklands War: “Start a small war. Pick a
country
where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”
Herskowitz also reports this interesting note from his interviews with
Bush: “He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake.
That
was one of the keys to being a leader.”

* During the presidential campaign of 2000, candidate Bush said very
little about Iraq, and certainly never suggested the need for urgent
action. Somehow, though, in just two years time - during which, if
anything, Iraq actually got weaker, not stronger - Saddam and his
country
became a perilous and imminent threat that had to be addressed
immediately.

* Former members of his own cabinet have revealed that Bush planned to
invade Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, well before
9/11. All discussions were about the how of doing it, never about the
why,
the justification, the costs or the wisdom.

* Bush claims he is fighting a war on terror in response to 9/11. But in
the first eight months of his administration, his own top terrorism
advisor, Richard Clarke, could not get a meeting of cabinet-level
security
officials to discuss terrorism. They finally met, one week before 9/11,
and then the meeting was ‘hijacked’ into discussing Iraq instead. In
2004,
Clarke said “Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running
for re-election on the grounds that he’s done such great things about
terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we
could have done something to stop 9/11.” Clarke is a Republican who
voted
for Bush in 2000, and also served in the administrations of Bush’s
father,
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

* Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, “The president dragged me into
a
room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you
to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the
entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush
wanted
me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, ‘Mr.
President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We
looked
at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’ He came back at me and
said, ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection’. And in a very
intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We
wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI
experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report
out
to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all
cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got
bounced
by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back
saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again’.”

* Iraq was not in league with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, whom the
administration blamed for the 9/11 attacks. As Richard Clarke put it,
“There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever”.
Indeed, the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is a Muslim fundamentalist
organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the secular regimes
ruling Islamic countries, precisely what Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was.
Indeed, even the highly religious Saudi Arabia (from which 15 of the 19
alleged hijackers came, none of them being Iraqis) is under violent
pressure from al Qaeda for not being theocratic enough.

* Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even George Bush has now admitted
this. However, over the last six years, and still to this day, Bush
constantly conflates the two in almost every speech he gives, to the
point
where in 2003 sixty-nine percent of Americans came to believe that
Saddam
had been behind the 9/11 attacks. There can be little doubt that the
administration used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, though they
had
nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

* According to the internal top secret documents later leaked as the
Downing Street Memos, we know that the administration itself realized
that
“the case was thin” for war against Iraq, because “Saddam was not
threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of
Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

* Nevertheless, the administration made an internal decision that the
war
would be marketed around the supposed WMD threat, despite knowing it was
false. The allusions to mushroom clouds, centrifuge tubes and all the
rest
were gross exaggerations and outright lies, and were known to be at the
time by the people making them. As the Downing Street Memos reveal, a
decision for war had already been made, and the public case for it was
fabricated afterwards: “The intelligence and facts were being fixed
around
the policy”.

* The president claimed in a state of the union speech that Saddam had
gone to Africa to get uranium, seriously alarming the American public.
Before the speech, the CIA had told the White House to remove that
comment
because it was transparently false, based as it was on a crude forged
letter. Ultimately, the ‘mistake’ of including this lie was blamed on
Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who was later punished
for this grave ‘error’ by being promoted to National Security Advisor.
His
former boss, Condoleeza Rice, was punished by being promoted to
Secretary
of State.

* When Joseph Wilson came home from a trip to Niger and told the truth
about the forged letter, the administration revealed the identity of his
wife, undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame, thus potentially jeopardizing
the lives of all her contacts overseas. Eight witnesses recalled nine
conversations with Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter
Libby,
in which Libby blew Plame’s cover - an act of treason - in order to
punish
a political ‘enemy’ for telling the truth. Libby claimed not to remember
these nine conversations. Both the jury and the judge in the case
thought
Libby was unquestionably lying and convicted him of obstructing justice,
with jurors commenting that they felt sorry for him because he was
obviously taking a fall for Cheney.

* The case regarding Saddam’s chemical weapons capability was similarly
trumped up. It was based on the rantings of a single source, code-named
“Curveball”, whose handlers in the German intelligence service had
repeatedly warned the administration that he was a drunk and a liar.

* The administration continually relied upon Iraqi exiles, many of whom
had not set foot in the country for decades, as sources for information
about Iraq and as mouthpieces to justify the invasion. But it is unclear
who was using whom. Ahmad Chalabi, the most prominent of these, intended
to use the US military as a vehicle to become leader of Iraq. Despite
being wanted for massive bank fraud in Jordan, Chalabi convinced
neoconservatives that he was the “George Washington of Iraq”. His Iraqi
National Congress was the primary source for Bush administration claims
that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda,
neither
of which was true. Chalabi gloated about how his influence led the Bush
administration to war, and the Pentagon immediately flew him into Iraq
following the invasion. The army of followers that he had promised would
rally around him never materialized, and his party won zero
parliamentary
seats in the December 2005 elections. Ultimately, the United States
accused him of providing intelligence secrets to the Iranian government
and raided his offices.

* Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council sealed the deal
for most Americans regarding the case for war. It later became apparent
that almost everything Powell said that day was false, and he has
described this episode as the low point in his career.

* The Downing Street Memos reveal that the purpose of authorizing UN
weapons inspectors to go to Iraq was never actually to assess the threat
and destroy any weapons found. Instead, the purpose was to “wrongfoot”
Saddam by getting him to reject the inspectors, thus giving the American
and British governments a pretext for war. Tony Blair said “It would
make
a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in
the
UN inspectors. If the political context were right, people would support
regime change.”

* To this day Bush claims that Saddam kicked out the inspectors. That
had
been true five years previously, but not before the war. Hans Blix, the
head of the 2002-03 weapons inspection team reported that they were
getting good cooperation from the Iraqis, despite the fact that - as
revealed by one of the former team members - the US had inserted
American
spies into prior international weapons inspection teams in Iraq.

* At the time of the invasion in 2003, the weapons inspectors were
nearly
done with their work, and only asked for a month or two more to finish.
The Bush administration claimed that the threat of Saddam and his WMD
was
too grave and too urgent to wait. Bush’s claim that Saddam kicked out
the
inspectors is not only false, but masks the actual truth, which is that
the administration told the inspectors to leave because of the looming
attack, before they could finish their work and by so doing remove the
rationale for that attack.

* As war loomed, Iraq made broad overtures to the United States to
prevent
an invasion, offering to allow full, on-the-ground, American weapons
inspections, anti-terrorism cooperation, oil concessions, and even
backing
for the US position in an Israeli/Palestinian peace plan. The only thing
Saddam balked at was regime change, but even then he offered to hold
elections within two years’ time. The Americans were also informed by
the
Iraqis at the time that there were no existing WMD. The Iraqi
representatives “could not understand why the Americans were focused on
Iraq rather than on countries, like Iran, that have long supported
terrorists”. The Bush administration rejected their offer, despite that
it
met every demand that Bush was publicly making.

* Saddam had never attacked the United States, nor even threatened to do
so.

* In March of 2003, when the invasion was launched, Iraq was a gravely
weakened military and economic power which could not seriously threaten
its neighbors, let alone the United States. International sanctions had
seriously damaged its economy and killed vast numbers of its citizens,
including about 500,000 children. It had no serious weapons capability.
It
had lost control over two-thirds of its own airspace to American and
British flyers.

* In November of 2002, the United Nations Security Council passed
Resolution 1441, requiring that Iraq declare its WMD, disarm, and allow
inspections to verify that this has occurred. One week later Iraq
announced that it would accept the resolution, and the weapons
inspectors
were simultaneously deployed.

* Iraq submitted a report to the UN, as required, indicating that it
possessed no weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration
immediately and definitively asserted that Saddam was lying. In fact,
since Iraq had no WMD, and since Bush claimed that Saddam was
unquestionably lying in saying so, it was Bush who lied, not Saddam.

* Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of the supposed Iraqi WMD, “We
know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and
east, west, south and north somewhat”. But the United States government
had never informed the UN weapons inspectors - a team that Bush had
demanded be sent - of where to find those weapons.

* Two subsequent reports from teams sent to Iraq by the Bush
administration itself revealed that there were no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, though some people continue to this day to say
there
were some found there. Moreover, these teams scientifically confirmed
that
such weapons are neither missing nor hidden nor deported, but never
existed after the mandated weapons destruction which followed the Gulf
War.

* At one point Bush claimed that two small trailers found in the desert
were mobile “biological laboratories” and thus declared, “We have found
the weapons of mass destruction”, seemingly vindicating his decision to
go
to war. But even before he spoke, it was known by the Pentagon that
these
trailers had nothing to do with WMD production, and that fact was
reported
to Washington two days before the president’s statement. Bush and other
administration officials continued to make the claim for nearly a year,
despite an unequivocal report filed from the field stating that the
trailers were not, and could not be, weapons labs. Scientists and
engineers on the investigating team referred to the trailers as “”the
biggest sand toilets in the world”.

* Added all together, what emerges from the above-listed facts is that
all
the carnage and destruction that has ensued was based on the case that
Iraq was so imminent a threat - despite in fact being a very weak
military
power - that America could not wait four to six more weeks for the
weapons
inspectors to finish their work and reveal that it was no threat
whatsoever.

* All the world, including the Bush administration, clearly understood
that Security Council Resolution 1441 did not authorize an invasion of
Iraq. Thus, in March 2003, the US drafted a second resolution which
would
explicitly do so. It needed nine out of fifteen votes, with no permanent
member vetoes, to pass. In a press conference, Bush was asked whether he
would call for a vote regardless of anticipated outcome. He responded,
“No
matter what the whip count is, we’re calling for the vote. We want to
see
people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and
the
utility of the United Nations Security Council. And so, you bet. It’s
time
for people to show their cards, to let the world know where they stand
when it comes to Saddam.” But after extensive American pressure,
lobbying
and even spying on Security Council members, only four countries were
prepared to vote in favor of the resolution, with three of the five
permanent members opposing. The president quietly withdrew the
resolution
he had promised “no matter what”.

* To this day Bush says in his speeches that Saddam did not comply with
the UN, that Saddam kicked the inspectors out of Iraq, and that Bush had
Security Council authorization to invade. None of those statements are
true.

* In 2004, after saying that the Iraqi threat of WMD was urgent, Bush
was
asked by a reporter whether he had concerns about North Korea’s nuclear
weapons development program, which - unlike Iraq’s - was quite real. In
response, the president just opened his palms and shrugged. North Korea
has since actually tested a nuclear warhead. Yet there is little
expressed
concern, the president almost never mentions it, there is no invasion
being planned and no war drums being beaten.

* For that matter, there never was when the Soviet Union had more than
20,000 nuclear warheads mounted on ballistic missiles targeted on the US
and set to a hair trigger. Bush never explained why nuclear deterrence
worked against the Soviets with all their weapons for forty years, but
couldn’t have had the same effect against Iraq today.

* Bush also never explained why Iraq had to be invaded, even though more
than thirty countries had greater WMD capability at the time.

* When the WMD and al Qaeda link rationales for the war were exploded,
the
administration began arguing that its central purpose in invading Iraq
was
to bring democracy to the country and to the Middle East. At the same
time, however, it has done next to nothing about Darfur, where more than
200,000 people have been murdered in a clear case of ongoing genocide.
Since the first requisite for being able to vote is to be alive, it is
unclear how invading Iraq in the name of democracy could be so urgent,
yet
saving lives in Darfur of little concern and no action.

* The administration was told in advance by American intelligence
agencies
that there was a very high danger that Iraq could explode into ethnic
chaos following an invasion. It chose to attack anyhow.

* According to former US diplomat Peter Galbraith, Bush was startled to
learn - in January 2003 - that there was a difference between Sunni and
Shiite Muslims. Responding to the three Iraqi exiles whom he had invited
as guests to the Super Bowl, Bush looked at them and said, “You
mean…they’re not, you know, there, there’s this difference. What is it
about?” As Bush often likes to brag, he governs based on gut feelings,
not
on intelligence or analysis. Those who know him state that he doesn’t
read
books, and he himself admitted he doesn’t read newspapers.

* Before the war, General Eric Shinseki testified to Congress that
several
hundred thousand troops would be needed to govern this country of 25
million people during a post-war occupation. But since the
administration
was insisting that the war could be handled with far fewer troops and at
far less expense, General Shinseki and at least one other general who
made
the same argument were publicly humiliated and had their long and
prestigious military careers terminated for political reasons. Four
years
later, Bush is now ‘surging’ in Iraq by adding troops to the 140,000 or
so
that were already there, in addition to the 80,000 or so highly
expensive
mercenaries the taxpayers are funding. With the total now nearing
250,000
soldiers occupying the country, it is still transparently not enough to
keep the peace.

* To say that there was never a plan for the post-war occupation of Iraq
is technically incorrect. There was an extensive plan which the State
Department had put together, working with experts and Iraqi exiles. But
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld didn’t want the State Department to
have the credit and control for the occupation, so he and Bush threw
State’s document in the garbage. Then there was no plan.

* Most of the Americans sent to staff the Coalition Provisional
Authority
(CPA) had no technical or professional training or experience in the
work
to which they were assigned. Rather, they were chosen because they were
Republican Party loyalists.

* One of the most significant blunders the United States committed
during
the occupation was to dismiss the entire Iraqi Army, sending them home
unemployed and armed, along with anyone associated with the Ba’ath
Party,
despite the fact that everyone who wanted to work at a professional
level
anywhere in Iraqi society had been forced under Saddam to join the
Party.
The first Chief Executive of the CPA, General Jay Garner, refused to
purge
all Ba’athists from Iraqi governing institutions, and instead sought to
maximize Iraqi control of the post-war government as much as possible.
He
was quickly fired.

* As a result of this war, over 3,500 Americans are dead, and perhaps
20,000 or so are gravely wounded. Americans have not been allowed to see
the caskets returning to Dover Air Force Base.

* The best, most scientific, and least politicized estimate of Iraqi
dead
suggests that probably close to one million have now perished in the
country’s post-war chaos, out of a population of 25 million.

* Nearly four million Iraqis have been forced to leave their homes as
refugees from the violence, flooding Jordan and Syria, especially. The
United States allowed all of 202 refugees - many thousands of whom have
been targeted for death for having cooperated with the US occupation -
to
settle in America in 2006. America’s major ally in the region, Saudi
Arabia, is building a wall to keep them out.

* The United States has spent half a trillion dollars on the war, so
far.
Estimates suggest that the number could rise to two trillion dollars
before the war is over and the continuing costs of medical care and
economic displacement are fully accounted for.

* America’s army has been described by Colin Powell as “broken”. Almost
all our land forces are deployed in Iraq - a war of choice - leaving
none
for use in a real foreign crisis.

* Similarly, our National Guard and Reserve troops have been used in
ways
that were never intended to fight this war - along with about 80,000
highly expensive mercenaries - so that the president could avoid an
unpopular draft. This means that Guard and Reserve troops and their
equipment are unavailable for use in national emergencies such as
Hurricane Katrina.

* As a result of the war, America is far more hated today throughout
much
of the world, especially the Mid-East, and is seen as a imperialist
power.
The Iraq invasion thus played directly into the hands of Islamic
radicals
like Osama bin Laden.

* America’s own intelligence agencies concede that Iraq has become a
giant
factory for the minting of new terrorists, where almost none existed
prior
to the invasion.

* Terrorist incidents worldwide have gone up seven-fold since, and
largely
because of, the invasion of Iraq.

* Iran, a country whose government truly does despise the United States,
has been an enormous beneficiary of the war. Prior to 2003, Iran was a
natural check on Iraq among Middle East powers, and vice versa. Now Iran
is enormously influential in Iraq and throughout the region, its growth
in
power alarming its neighbors.

* A very real possibility exists that the civil war now raging within
Iraq
will become a regional war, perhaps drawing in Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Iran,
Jordan, Syria, Israel and others.

* Gas prices have doubled since the war began. The potential also exists
for a global depression should further conflict limit the flow of oil to
industrialized countries, just as these economies were damaged by OPEC
doing the same thing in the 1970s.

* To this day, American troops in Iraq do not have sufficient body or
vehicle armor, leading to hundreds of unnecessary deaths. Communities
across America have literally held bake sales to raise funds for
purchasing armor for their own kids. When confronted by a soldier about
this, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld replied, “You go to war
with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to
have at a later time”.

* Companies like Halliburton, meanwhile, in which the Vice President
still
maintains financial interests, have received multi-billion dollar
contracts for work in Iraq, without having to competitively bid for
them,
and with the internal influence of Cheney’s office in winning the
assignments. Numerous scandals have emerged from these contracts,
including billing for work never completed. Eight billion dollars in
cash,
entrusted to the Coalition Provisional Authority, has gone missing in
one
incident alone.

* Before the war, when they were marketing it to the public and
Congress,
administration officials hinted that it would be quick, easy and cheap.
After the invasion, George Bush declared, under a “Mission accomplished”
banner, that fighting had ceased before the war had really even begun.
It
has now lasted longer than America’s involvement in World War Two, and
the
administration has begun to talk about Iraq using the Korean model of a
fifty-year occupation.

* The invasion of Iraq was supposedly part of an American ‘war on
terrorism’. But, today, the United States is protecting Luis Posada from
extradition to Venezuela or Cuba, despite that Posada has bragged about
blowing up an airliner and killing seventy-three people on board, as
well
as a string of other bombings of Cuban hotels and nightclubs. The
government claims that Posada cannot be extradited to Venezuela because
he
might be tortured, even though Venezuela has no such reputation - but
after Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the Attorney General’s renouncing of
the
Geneva Conventions, the United States now does.

* None of the principals who decided to go to war in Iraq had ever seen
combat themselves. George W. Bush used his father’s influence to avoid
ervice in Vietnam. John Ashcroft got seven draft deferments. ***** Cheney
got five deferments, and later said “I had better things to do in the
Sixties than fight in Vietnam”. Neither Paul Wolfowitz nor Richard Perle
nor Condoleeza Rice ever served, and Donald Rumsfeld never fought in a
war. The only senior member of the administration who had was Colin
Powell. Powell advised Bush to be cautious about invading Iraq, and was
thus sidelined from discussions leading up to the war. George Bush’s
Secretary of State was not informed of the decision to invade Iraq until
after Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, had been told by the
president.

While many can imagine political leaders making mistakes, most Americans
find it inconceivable that an American president could actually put
personal or political interests ahead of the national interest or the
welfare of the troops, especially on so grave an issue as war and peace.

But such individuals would do well to remember that there is a long
history of this sort of behavior, and that it is an unfortunate part of
human nature. The Europeans used to have an expression for this, which
was
all too well earned from their own experiences. They noted that “War is
the sport of kings”.

This is precisely why America’s Founders so feared the concentration of
political power that they created a system devoted to spreading that
power
out, through checks and balances, through federalism, and through
guaranteed civil liberties. Often those institutional obstacles have
been
successful at preventing presidents from acting like kings, but
sometimes
not. During the George W. Bush presidency, Congress has been a
side-show,
and many of America’s Bill of Rights-provided civil liberties have been
shredded.

Some Americans may believe that, while Europeans have been unfortunate
enough to have suffered under warring governments, that could never
happen
here. The truth, alas, is that it already has, many times. We know today
that the stories we were told by our government to justify US
involvement
in the Mexican war, the Spanish-American War and the Vietnam War, for
instance, were complete and knowing fabrications, as the secret internal
history of the latter war - the Pentagon Papers - definitively proved in
that case.

Today, Americans will have to decide for themselves whether George Bush’s
invasion of Iraq to protect the United States from the threat of
terrorism
was legitimate, or yet another example of a president sporting like a
king, at the expense of the American people, the troops, the Iraqis, and
the world.

Personally, I think the evidence above does exactly what I had intended
it
would do in assembling it for this article. On the question of the
motivation and justification for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, it
speaks
for itself.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to
his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be
found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/15/1896/

Published on Friday, June 15, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
What Every American Should Know About Iraq
by David Michael Green

Some people think that anyone who disagrees with the American invasion and
occupation of Iraq is either a bleeding-heart liberal appeaser, a George
W. Bush hater, a blame America firster, an underminer of the troops, a
traitor, or a geopolitical naif.

To those who see opponents of the war as fitting into one, several, or all
of these categories, I say read this page. I will make no arguments
herein, nor even commentary. I will twist no data nor spin any tales. I
will even include some of the comments and arguments made by the
administration and its supporters.

Instead of arguing against the war, I will try to offer a fairly complete
account of the relevant facts one might wish to consider when evaluating
America's policy in Iraq. Especially for those who continually claim that
they, more than others, have the best interests of the troops at heart -
but actually for all citizens in a democracy - it is incumbent upon us to
educate ourselves about this most important of national policies.

Those troops are being maimed and are dying on our behalf every day. The
very least we can do is spend a brief amount of our time learning about
this question so that we can decide whether their continued sacrifices are
justified.

So, in that spirit - and as the Founders themselves said - "let Facts be
submitted to a candid world".

* Mesopotamia has long been a playground for great powers. The British
invaded the area in 1917, causing a widespread revolt of the Iraqi people.
Britain later ruled under a League of Nations mandate that produced the
artificial creation of the country Iraq (and Kuwait), and continued to
control oil production in the region. Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour said
at the time, "I do not care under what system we keep this oil, but I am
quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available".

* Saddam Hussein started his career as a political thug, on the payroll of
the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s, torturing and murdering Iraqi leftists
whose names were provided by American intelligence, and participating in
an armed coup against the Iraqi government.

* In 1972, the United States conspired with Iran and Israel to support a
revolt of the Kurdish people within Iraq against their government.

* In 1980, the United States provided encouragement, weapons,
intelligence, satellite data and funding for Saddam's Iraq to invade Iran,
launching an eight year war - the longest and probably the bloodiest of
the post-WWII era.

* During this war, Ronald Reagan dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to
improve relations with Saddam. The United States then restored full
diplomatic relations with Iraq, despite the administration's clear
awareness that Saddam was using chemical weapons at the time.

* The Reagan administration also knew that Saddam had used chemical
weapons against Iraqi Kurds rising up again against Baghdad (this was the
incident George W. Bush would later repeatedly invoke, saying of Saddam,
"He gassed his own people"), but nevertheless authorized expanded sales to
Iraq of highly sophisticated equipment that could be used to manufacture
weapons, only two months after the Halabja incident.

* George H. W. Bush equated Saddam to Hitler. But, in the wake of the
1990-91 Gulf War, after the elder Bush had encouraged Kurds and Shiites to
rise up against the regime, he abandoned them, leaving them to be
slaughtered by Saddam's military, in many cases right before the eyes of
US forces who were ordered not to intervene.

* The senior Bush had a chance after that war to occupy Iraq and topple
Saddam. He chose not to because, in his own words and those of his
National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, "Trying to eliminate Saddam,
extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq ... would have incurr=

incalculable human and political costs. ... We would have been forced to
occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. ...furthermore, we had been sel=

onsciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-
old war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding
the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international
response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion
route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a
bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and
perhaps barren - outcome."

* The younger Bush, George W., never asked his father for advice on Iraq.
Instead, he said: "You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms
of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to." Bush has also
stated, "I'm driven with a mission from God. ...God would tell me, 'Georg=

go and end the tyranny in Iraq...' And I did."

* George W. Bush gave twenty interviews in 1999 to Mickey Herskowitz, a
friend of the Bush family contracted at the time to ghostwrite his
autobiography. Bush was thinking about invading Iraq at that time, saying
"'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a
commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when
he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to
invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going
to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a
successful presidency." Herskowitz said that Bush's beliefs on Iraq were
shaped by ***** Cheney's ideas, based on the power and glory Margaret
Thatcher earned from her Falklands War: "Start a small war. Pick a country
where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
Herskowitz also reports this interesting note from his interviews with
Bush: "He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake. That
was one of the keys to being a leader."

* During the presidential campaign of 2000, candidate Bush said very
little about Iraq, and certainly never suggested the need for urgent
action. Somehow, though, in just two years time - during which, if
anything, Iraq actually got weaker, not stronger - Saddam and his country
became a perilous and imminent threat that had to be addressed
immediately.

* Former members of his own cabinet have revealed that Bush planned to
invade Iraq from the very beginning of his administration, well before
9/11. All discussions were about the how of doing it, never about the why,
the justification, the costs or the wisdom.

* Bush claims he is fighting a war on terror in response to 9/11. But in
the first eight months of his administration, his own top terrorism
advisor, Richard Clarke, could not get a meeting of cabinet-level security
officials to discuss terrorism. They finally met, one week before 9/11,
and then the meeting was 'hijacked' into discussing Iraq instead. In 2004,
Clarke said "Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running
for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about
terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we
could have done something to stop 9/11." Clarke is a Republican who voted
for Bush in 2000, and also served in the administrations of Bush's father,
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

* Right after 9/11, according to Clarke, "The president dragged me into a
room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you
to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the
entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted
me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr.
President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked
at it with an open mind. There's no connection.' He came back at me and
said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection'. And in a very
intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We
wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI
experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out
to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all
cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced
by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back
saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again'."

* Iraq was not in league with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, whom the
administration blamed for the 9/11 attacks. As Richard Clarke put it,
"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever".
Indeed, the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is a Muslim fundamentalist
organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of the secular regimes
ruling Islamic countries, precisely what Saddam Hussein's Iraq was.
Indeed, even the highly religious Saudi Arabia (from which 15 of the 19
alleged hijackers came, none of them being Iraqis) is under violent
pressure from al Qaeda for not being theocratic enough.

* Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Even George Bush has now admitted
this. However, over the last six years, and still to this day, Bush
constantly conflates the two in almost every speech he gives, to the point
where in 2003 sixty-nine percent of Americans came to believe that Saddam
had been behind the 9/11 attacks. There can be little doubt that the
administration used 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq, though they had
nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

* According to the internal top secret documents later leaked as the
Downing Street Memos, we know that the administration itself realized that
"the case was thin" for war against Iraq, because "Saddam was not
threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of
Libya, North Korea or Iran."

* Nevertheless, the administration made an internal decision that the ...

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