91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly's ROHAN PEARCE examines the main justifications used by US President George Bush and Prime Minister John Howard to justify the US-led invasion of Iraq.
1. Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons
The UN inspections have so far confirmed the assessment of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter that "since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability has been verifiably eliminated. This includes all of the factories used to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."
UN inspectors have confirmed that if Iraq possesses any weapons of mass destruction (WMD), they are merely the forgotten legacy of its past weapons programs.
Well-respected Los Angeles Times military affairs analyst William Arkin noted in a March 9 op-ed: "Incredible as it may seem, given all the talk by the administration — including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's discourse last week about continuing Iraqi deception — there is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons."
Arkin cited sources within the US Air Force who have worked on the US war plan who told him that there isn't a "single confirmed biological or chemical target on their lists".
Despite the Bush regime's claim it has "proof" of Iraqi WMD, a March 16 Washington Post article revealed that "US intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress".
This validates a February 20 report by CBS correspondent Mark Philips that, according to weapons inspectors, US "intelligence" has been "garbage after garbage after garbage". (Philips noted that inspectors actually "used another, cruder word".)
The March 3 Newsweek exposed more of Washington's WMD lies. It revealed that in 1995, Iraqi defector General Hussein Kamel — whose description of Iraq's WMD programs is repeatedly cited by the Bush gang — told the CIA that Iraq had destroyed its WMD after the 1991 Gulf War. This part of Kamel's testimony, only recently made publicly available, has never been cited by the US warmongers.
A January 5 article in the British Observer revealed that UN weapons inspectors prophetically feared that "their work — which has failed to turn up any evidence thus far of weapons of mass destruction — will still be used as an excuse to trigger a US-led invasion of Iraq." According to the Observer, inspectors believe "that their mission has become a 'set-up job' and America will attack Iraq regardless of what they find".
2. Iraq possesses mobile bioweapon laboratories
Perhaps worried at the increasing lack of credibility of US claims about Iraq's WMD, Powell told the UN Security Council on February 5 that "one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents".
The existence of mobile bioweapon laboratories and production facilities has been a claim of the US since 2000, based on the testimony of four Iraqi defectors. The February 5 British Guardian reported, however, that "[chief UN weapons inspector Hans] Blix said he had already inspected two alleged mobile labs and found nothing: 'Two food-testing trucks have been inspected and nothing has been found'."
In an analysis of Powell's presentation, British academic Glen Rangwala notes: "An example [of the unreliability of defectors' testimony] would be the claims of Adnan Saeed al-Haideri, who Powell refers to without naming him... Haideri did not make any claims about mobile production facilities in his first press conferences in December 2001. It was only after debriefing by the US and a three-week 'debriefing' by Nabil Musawi, spokesman for the opposition Iraqi National Congress, in Bangkok, that Haideri started talking about mobile facilities, in mid-2002." (Rangwala's investigation of claims about Iraq's alleged arsenal are available from .)
3. Iraq 'deceived' weapons inspectors
In his March 17 television address, Bush claimed that "UN weapons inspectors have been ... systematically deceived". The claim that Iraq could successfully conceal any hint of an arsenal the US claims includes 38,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 25,000 litres of anthrax, and 29,984 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents is simply unbelievable. This is particularly so given that no residue from chemical or biological agents has been found during 527 inspections of 321 sites, using sophisticated equipment for testing soil, water and air samples.
Blix has dismissed claims that Iraqis were removing evidence or knew that inspectors were travelling to a particular site. On February 5, he told the Security Council: "In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming."
4. Iraq hasn't cooperated with inspectors
Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and Blix held talks with the Iraqi regime in Baghdad on February 8-9. At a press briefing following the talks, ElBaradei stated: I think we have seen a beginning of a change today. What we heard is ... that they [Iraq] will do everything they are bound to do on the Security Council resolution. They are fully committed, you know, for the disarmament process that they would go out of their way to accommodate us in every way possible. So we got a commitment to do private interviews both inside and outside Iraq. The government to encourage the scientists to do the interviews, which is a very valuable tool for us."
ElBaradei told Newsweek on February 27 "we haven't seen any area where they have declined to cooperate with us".
In his report to the Security Council on January 27, Blix stated: "The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect and with one exception it has been prompt." (The exception was an inspection conducted on a Friday, the Muslim day of prayer. Blix told the council that "the Iraqi staff were absent and a number of doors inside locked, with no keys available. The Iraqi side offered to break the doors open — while videotaping the event. However, they agreed with a suggestion that the doors in question could be [sealed] overnight and the offices inspected the next morning.")
5. Iraq has a nuclear weapons program
Among the most comprehensively disproved of the White House's accusations is that Iraq has resurrected its nuclear program and is attempting to enrich uranium and build nuclear weapons. Bush told the UN General Assembly on September 12 that Iraq "retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon". On October 7, Bush showed satellite photographs which supposedly showed new buildings at "facilities ... that have been part of its nuclear program in the past".
Kim Sengupta of the British Independent visited Tuweitha, one of the sites believed to be pictured in Bush's satellite photos: The facilities "appeared to be no more than a few sheds. Nor were there overt signs of the infrastructure needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
The San Jose Mercury News summarised the results of IAEA inspections: "The nuclear inspectors trudged through the Iraqi countryside for months. They found the Iraqi weapons infrastructure, built at great expense in the 1980s, to be in a state of decay. They sought out out-of-the-way machine shops or companies where Iraqi scientists might be congregated. But they found no sign of an organized nuclear weapons program."
The key piece of "evidence" the US has seized upon has been aluminium tubes imported by Iraq. The White House has repeatedly stated that they are for the construction of a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium.
In his March 7 report to the Security Council, ElBaradei reiterated the IAEA's conclusion: "As previously reported, Iraq has maintained that these aluminium tubes were sought for rocket production. Extensive field investigation and document analysis have failed to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81mm tubes for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets.
"Based on available evidence, the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq's efforts to import these aluminium tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuges and, moreover, that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable re-design needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program."
He told the council that "after three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq".
6. Iraq has tried to import uranium
Perhaps the biggest scandal during the inspections process has been the discovery that documents provided to the IAEA by the US and British governments which "proved" that Iraq tried to import uranium from Niger were faked. The March 18 Mercury News reported that the fakes were crude, with misspelled words and "dates that did not match the day of the week". Powell told NBC's March 9 Meet the Press program that "it was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine".
7. The al Qaeda terrorist group is connected to Iraq
The White House has tried to capitalise on the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York to justify its war on Iraq by trying to link Saddam Hussein's regime with Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist network, believed to be responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
Such links are non-existent. A February 5 report by the BBC revealed that a top-secret British government report stated: "While there has been contact between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime in the past, we believe that any fledgling relationship foundered due to mistrust and incompatible ideology."
This is confirmed by a recording, purported to be of bin Laden, broadcast on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television network on February 11, in which Hussein's regime is attacked as "infidels".
This didn't stop Powell trying to use the tape to "prove" a link between bin Laden and Hussein. On February 11, he told a US Senate budget committee that "once again he [bin Laden] speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq. This nexus between terrorists and states that are developing weapons of mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and ignored..."
The same day as Powell testified, FBI head Robert Mueller told a Senate's select committee on intelligence: "Although divergent political goals limit al Qaeda's cooperation with Iraq, northern Iraq has emerged as an increasingly important operational base for al Qaeda associates, and a US-Iraq war could prompt Baghdad to more directly engage al Qaeda." Northern Iraq, however, is not under Baghdad's control, being run as a semi-autonomous area by Washington's Kurdish allies — the Kurdish Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
The February 2 New York Times reported that FBI agents were "baffled" by the "Bush administration's insistence on a solid link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's network", since they had found no such evidence.
8. The US cares about Iraqi human rights abuses
The White House's purported concern for the human rights abuses of the Hussein regime is shallow cover for the war indeed. Throughout the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, Washington played a key role in supplying Iraq with chemical and biological weapons and turned a blind eye to the Hussein regime's brutality toward Iraqi dissidents.
In December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then a leading official in the Reagan administration and presently Bush's secretary of war, travelled to Baghdad and met with Hussein. The meeting had been arranged in light of Washington's concerns that Iran might win the Iran-Iraq war. On March 24, 1984, the day the press reported that Iraq had used chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers, Rumsfeld was again in Baghdad, meeting Iraq's foreign minister.
The December 30 Washington Post outlined the nature of US support for Iraq during the war: "The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague."
The January 28 issue of Global Security Newswire revealed that the US "trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967, according to an official army letter published in the late 1960s... While the training was described as mostly defensive, it also included offensive instruction in such subjects as principles of using chemical, biological and radiological weapons, and calculating chemical munitions requirements...
"Iraqi and other foreign officers received the free instruction through the Pentagon's Military Assistance Program, according to the letter, at a time when the United States was seeking to counter Soviet power and influence around the world."
9. The US cares about the plight of Iraqi Kurds
In a March 15 radio address, Bush "commemorated" the anniversary of Baghdad's 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja. "With that single order, the regime killed thousands of Iraq's Kurdish citizens. Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending from the sky. Many who managed to survive still suffer from cancer, blindness, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth defects among their children."
Bush didn't mention that in 1991, US intelligence sources told the Los Angeles Times they believed "American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs". Nor did he mention that, in response to the Halabja attack, the US Senate passed a motion that would impose sanctions on Iraq but President Reagan vetoed the measure.
On March 16, Rubar Mohammad, a Kurd whose husband was killed in the attack, told Reuters: "If America is using this attack on Halabja as a justification for war, then they should have attacked Saddam in 1988, not now... It is too late to raise this issue now. It should have been talked about when it actually happened."
After the end of the 1991 Gulf War, President George Bush senior described Baghdad's suppression of a Kurdish uprising in the north as an "internal matter". Similarly, the US didn't object to Turkey's 1995 invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan — the "no-fly" zone "protected" by US jets. The US described Turkey's deployment of 35,000 troops as "self defence".
The White House was also quite content to cut a deal with Turkey, whereby, in exchange for the use by US troops of Turkish territory to invade northern Iraq, Turkish troops would be allowed to occupy areas of Iraqi Kurdistan to ensure that the Iraq Kurds won't establish an independent Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border.
10. Iraq is a 'threat'
The biggest lie of the US has been that Iraq is a threat to "world peace" and, more specifically, the military and economic might of the United States. Even gung-ho US nuclear scientists that were part of the IAEA inspections in Iraq arrived as "hawks", but left "as doves, after finding Iraq a ruined country, not a threat to anyone'", reported the March 18 Mercury News.
At the Security Council's March 19 meeting, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan outlined the state of Iraq: "In the past 20 years, Iraqis have been through two major wars, internal uprisings and conflict, and more than a decade of debilitating sanctions." As a result, Iraq's infrastructure "no longer meets the most basic needs for clean water, health or education. Already, Iraq's most vulnerable citizens — the elderly, women and children, and the disabled — are denied basic health care for lack of medicine and medical equipment. Already, nearly one million Iraqi children suffer from chronic malnutrition... All that is true as we speak. And in the short term, the conflict that is now clearly about to start can only make things worse — perhaps much worse."
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 26, 2003.
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