To: peace@nmsu.edu
From: "Matthew Webb" <catalyst@harborside.com>
Subject: The twenty lies of George W. Bush Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2003 22:07:22 -0800
The twenty lies of George W. Bush By Patrick Martin 20
March 2003
Monday night's 15-minute speech by President Bush, setting
a 48-hour deadline for war against Iraq, went beyond the usual distortions,
half-truths, and appeals to fear and backwardness to include a remarkable number
of barefaced, easily refuted lies.
The enormous scale of the lying suggests two political
conclusions: the Bush administration is going to war against Iraq with utter
contempt for democracy and public opinion, and its war propaganda counts heavily
on the support of the American media, which not only fails to challenge the
lies, but repeats and reinforces them endlessly. Without attempting to be
exhaustive, it is worthwhile listing some of the most important lies and
contrasting Bush's assertions with the public record. All of the false
statements listed below are directly quoted from the verbatim transcript of
Bush's remarks published on the Internet.
The decision for war with Iraq was made long ago, the
intervening time having been spent in an attempt to create the political climate
in which US troops could be deployed for an attack. According to press reports,
most recently March 16 in the Baltimore Sun, at one of the first National
Security Council meetings of his presidency, months before the terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Bush expressed his determination to
overthrow Saddam Hussein and his willingness to commit US ground troops to an
attack on Iraq for that purpose. All that was required was the appropriate
pretext-supplied by September 11, 2001.
The US-led United Nations regime of sanctions against Iraq,
combined with "no-fly" zones and provocative weapons inspections, is
one of brutal oppression. The deliberate withholding of food, medical supplies
and other vital necessities is responsible for the death of more than a million
Iraqis, half of them children. Two UN officials who headed the oil-for-food
program resigned in protest over the conditions created in Iraq by the
sanctions. The CIA used the inspectors as a front, infiltrating agents into
UNSCOM, the original inspections program. The CIA's aim was to spy on Iraq's top
officials and target Saddam Hussein for assassination.
Iraq has never "defied" a Security Council
resolution since the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. It has generally
cooperated with the dictates of the UN body, although frequently under protest
or with reservations, because many of the resolutions involve gross violations
of Iraqi sovereignty. From 1991 to 1998, UN inspectors supervised the
destruction of the vast bulk of the chemical and biological weapons, as well as
delivery systems, which Iraq accumulated (with the assistance of the US) during
the Iran-Iraq war, and they also destroyed all of Iraq's facilities for making
new weapons.
According to the Washington Post of March 16, referring to
the 1991-1998 inspection period: "[U]nder UN supervision, Iraq destroyed
817 of 819 proscribed medium-range missiles, 14 launchers, 9 trailers and 56
fixed missile-launch sites. It also destroyed 73 of 75 chemical or biological
warheads and 163 warheads for conventional explosives. UN inspectors also
supervised destruction of 88,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions, more
than 600 tons of weaponized and bulk chemical weapons agents, 4,000 tons of
precursor chemicals and 980 pieces of equipment considered key to production of
such weapons."
The Washington Post article cited above noted that CIA
officials were concerned "about whether administration officials have
exaggerated intelligence in a desire to convince the American public and foreign
governments that Iraq is violating United Nations prohibitions against chemical,
biological, or nuclear weapons and long-range missile systems." The article
quoted "a senior intelligence analyst" who said the inspectors could
not locate weapons caches "because there may not be much of a
stockpile."
Former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook, who resigned
from the Blair government Monday in protest over the decision to go to war
without UN authorization, declared, "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass
destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term." Even if Iraq is
concealing some remnants of its 1980s arsenal, these would hardly deserve Bush's
lurid description, since they are primitive and relatively ineffective.
"Some of the most lethal weapons ever devised" are those being
unleashed by the United States on Iraq: cruise missiles, smart bombs, fuel-air
explosives, the 10,000-pound "daisy-cutter" bomb, the 20,000-pound
MOAB just tested in Florida. In addition, the US has explicitly refused to rule
out the use of nuclear weapons.
No one, not even US government, seriously believes there is
a significant connection between the Islamic fundamentalists and the secular
nationalist Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which have been mortal enemies for
decades. The continued assertion of an Al Qaeda-Iraq alliance is a desperate
attempt to link Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks.
It also serves to cover up the responsibility of American
imperialism for sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The forces that now
comprise Al Qaeda were largely recruited, trained, armed and set in motion by
the CIA itself, as part of a long-term policy of using Islamic fundamentalists
as a weapon against left-wing movements in the Muslim countries. This policy was
pursued from the 1950s and was escalated prior to and during the Soviet
intervention in Afghanistan, which ended in 1989. Osama bin Laden himself was
part of the CIA-backed mujaheddin forces in Afghanistan before he turned against
Washington in the 1990s.
The Bush administration went to the United Nations because it wanted UN sanction for military action and it wanted UN member states to cough up funds for postwar operations, along the lines of its financial shakedown operation for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Bush's most hawkish advisors, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, initially opposed going to the UN because they did not want diplomacy to slow down the drive to war. They only agreed after Secretary of State Colin
Powell argued that the pace of the US military buildup in
the Persian Gulf gave enough time to get the UN to rubber-stamp the war.
This is belied by virtually every statement on Iraq issued by the governments of France, Russia, China, Germany and other countries opposed to military action, which have repeatedly declared that they see no imminent threat from Iraq. Bush brands his opponents on the Security Council as cowards, as though they were afraid to take action against Saddam Hussein. These countries were, in fact, increasingly alarmed-by the United States, not Iraq. Insofar as they summoned up resolve, to the shock of
the Bush administration, it was to deny UN support for the
war that Washington had already decided to wage.
Only three nations are contributing military forces to the
war: 250,000 from the US, 40,000 from Britain, and 2,000 from Australia. The
other members of the "broad coalition" are those which have been
bribed or browbeaten to allow the US to fly over their countries to bomb Iraq,
to station troops, ships or warplanes on their territory, or provide technical
assistance or other material aid to the war. None will do any fighting. All are
acting against the expressed desire of their own population.
Bush defines the UN body's responsibility as serving as a
rubber stamp for whatever action the United States government demands. In
relation to the UN, however, the United States does have definite
responsibilities, including refraining from waging war without Security Council
authorization, except in the case of immediate self-defense. Under Article 42 of
the UN Charter, it is for the Security Council, not the US or Britain, to decide
how Security Council resolutions such as 1441 are to be enforced. The US
decision to "enforce" its interpretation of 1441 regardless of the
will of the Security Council is a violation of international law.
The widely reported US military strategy is to conduct an
aerial bombardment of Iraq so devastating that it will "shock and awe"
the Iraqi people and compel the Iraqi armed forces to surrender en masse.
According to one press preview, US and British forces "plan to launch the
deadliest first night of air strikes on a single country in the history of air
power. Hundreds of targets in every region of Iraq will be hit
simultaneously." Estimates of likely Iraqi civilian casualties from the
immediate impact of bombs and missiles range from thousands to hundreds of
thousands, and even higher when the long-term effects are included.
This is particularly cynical, since the immediate
consequence of Bush's 48-hour ultimatum was the withdrawal of all UN
humanitarian aid workers and the shutdown of the oil-for-food program, which
underwrites the feeding of 60 percent of Iraq's population. As for medicine, the
US has systematically deprived the Iraqi people of needed medicine for the past
12 years, insisting that even the most basic medical supplies, like antibiotics
and syringes, be banned as "dual-use" items that could be used in a
program of biological warfare.
The goal of the Bush administration is to install a US
puppet regime in Baghdad, initially taking the form of an American military
dictatorship. It is no exaggeration to say that the US government has been the
leading promoter of dictatorships around from the world, from Pinochet of Chile
to Suharto of Indonesia to Saddam Hussein himself, who, according to one recent
report, got his political start as an anti-communist hit-man working in a
CIA-backed plot to assassinate Iraq's left-nationalist President Qasem in 1959.
A classified State Department report described by the Los
Angeles Times of March 14 not only concluded that a democratic Iraq was unlikely
to arise from the devastation of war, it suggested that this was not even
desirable from the standpoint of American interests, because "anti-American
sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term could lead to the
rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the United States."
This combines a lie and a brutal truth. The Bush
administration has taken every possible measure to insure that war takes place,
viewing the resumption of UN weapons inspections with barely disguised hostility
and directing its venom against those countries that have suggested a diplomatic
settlement with Iraq is achievable. In prosecuting the war, the Bush
administration is indeed prepared to use "every measure," up to an
including nuclear weapons, in order to win it.
There will be colossal sacrifices for the Iraqi people, and
sacrifices in blood and economic well-being for the American people as well. But
for Bush's real constituency, the wealthiest layer at the top of American
society, there will be no sacrifices at all. Instead, the administration is
seeking a tax cut package of over $700 billion, including the abolition of
taxation on corporate dividends. Major US corporations are in line to reap
hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the rebuilding of Iraqi
infrastructure shattered by the coming US assault. These include the oil
construction firm Halliburton, which Vice President Cheney headed prior to
joining the Bush administration, and which continues to include Cheney on its
payroll.
Every aggressor claims to deplore the suffering of war and
seeks to blame the victim for resisting, and thus prolonging the agony. Bush is
no different. His hypocritical statements of "concern" for the Iraqi
people cannot disguise the fact that, as many administration apologists freely
admit, this is "a war of choice"-deliberately sought by the US
government to pursue its strategic agenda in the Middle East.
No one, even in the American military-intelligence complex,
seriously believes this. US counter-terrorism officials have repeatedly said
that a US conquest and occupation of Iraq, by killing untold thousands of Arabs
and Muslims and inflaming public opinion in the Arab world and beyond, will
spark more terrorism, not less.
This is belied by the record of the past twelve years,
which has seen a steady decline in Iraqi military power. Saddam Hussein has
never been a threat to any "free nation," if that term has any
meaning, only to the reactionary oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf and to
neighboring Iran, all ruled by regimes that are as repressive as his.
The demands of the world were expressed by the millions who
marched in cities throughout the world on February 15 and March 15 to oppose a
unilateral US attack on Iraq. Bush seeks to have it both ways-claiming to
enforce previous Security Council resolutions against Iraq ("the just
demands of the world"), while flagrantly defying the will of the majority
of the Security Council, the majority of the world's governments, and the vast
majority of the world's people.
For "the Iraqi people," substitute "the Egyptian people," "the people of the Arabian peninsula," "the Pakistani people" or those of other US-backed dictatorships, not to mention the Palestinians who live under a brutal Israeli occupation that is supported by Washington. Does the US government believe that any of them are "deserving and capable of human liberty?" When the parliament of Turkey, under the pressure of popular opposition, voted to bar the US from using Turkish territory to invade Iraq, the Bush administration appealed to the Turkish military to pressure the government into overturning this democratic decision.