Often, we read about major foreign policy issues in bits and pieces. We learn one significant bit of information and then, months or years later, we learn another. These gaps make it difficult to piece together exactly what has happened and why.
In this post, I want to explore some of the lies that were told to the American people in the months leading up to the Iraq war.
1. "Saddam Hussein tried to kill my dad. This article in Common Dreams written by Jim Lobe, an excellent journalist who has devoted much of his career to studying the neoconservatives, indicates that Saddam Hussein believed the CIA had infiltrated his government. Therefore, he would have been unlikely to believe that he could get away with such a plan. Furthermore, after the 1991 war, he sent out peace feelers to Washington and was baffled when they were rebuffed. Presumably, if he had tried to kill Bush I, he would not have been surprised. Lobe based his conclusions on a paper by the Iraq Study Group known as the Duelfer Report.
2. Bush honestly believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD. According to Tyler Drumheller, a former high-ranking CIA agent who spent 26 years in the agency before retiring, Bush had been told that Iraq had no WMD and that sources indicating that he did lacked credibility. Drumheller insists that the war was not the result of an intelligence failure but of a policy failure. The Bush administration wanted to go to war and was only interested in intelligence that seemed to verify the WMD claim. It turned a blind eye to intelligence indicating that Iraq had no WMD.
As early as 1995, the US had reliable evidence that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his WMD. Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected and told his debriefers that they had been destroyed after the 1991 war. A high-ranking military official who defected with him confirmed the story.
Think carefully about this. The US had credible evidence that the WMD no longer existed yet we continued the crippling sanctions for nearly 8 more years. The total death toll for the sanctions is over one million excess deaths, half of those among children under five. While I don't know how many people died after 1995, as opposed to before 1995, the number had to be in the hundreds of thousands. The US government starved people for no reason.
3. Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat to Israel. According to Israel Shahak, in his book Open Secrets, Saddam Hussein repeatedly approached Israel through intermediaries before the 1991 war and offered peace on Israel's terms. Shahak relied on the reports of Ze'ev Schiff, the best military correspondent in Israel who wrote for Ha'aretz. This chapter in Shahak's book is available on the web but the website posting it is viciously anti-Semitic and I don't want to link to it. However, this is really Shahak's work.
4. Saddam gassed his own people. In fact, what happened in Halabja in 1988 is anything but clear. Reports are contradictory. It is not certain whether Iran or Iraq gassed the Kurds. Furthermore, it is not clear that the Kurds were the main target. The main targets may have been the soldiers on the other side and Kurds were what the US likes to call "collateral damage." In any case, even if Saddam Hussein is guilty, the US government did nothing at the time to punish this act. It is odd go to war over this fifteen years later. It would be analogous to Japan attacking the US now in revenge for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
5. We had to go to war to liberate the Iraqi people from a tyrant. First of all, this claim is the classic "bait and switch." This was not the rationale for the war before it started; this reasoning only emerged when the US failed to find WMD. In fact, evidence indicates that Sddam tried to negotiate a peace deal in which he would open the country up to weapons inspectors AND hold elections within two years. The US rejected this deal because Saddam Hussein would have stayed in power. This story indicates that Richard Perle played a role in these negotiations and was instrumental in rejecting them.
Later on, Saddam Husseinoffered to go into exile if he could take one billion dollars and documents about Iraq's WMD program, documents that no doubt proved that the US helped Iraq develop them.
Put all of this together. The US government under a Democrat, Bill Clinton, had credible evidence that Iraq no longer had WMD and yet chose to continue a brutal sanctions program, one that punished the innocent and defenseless while letting Saddam stay in power. George W Bush went to war while knowing that the WMD claims were bogus. He went to war even though he could have removed Saddam Hussein from power and "liberated" Iraq without bloodshed. If this war had been about oil, as is often claimed, I don't understand why the US could have insisted on favorable oil contracts in exchange for letting Saddam Hussein leave the country and live. It would have been cheaper than war.
Remember this entire series of lies the next time the US government tries to sell you on another war.
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