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CounterPunch
October
15, 2002
Iraq as Prison
State
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Iraq isn't a rogue state; it's a captive nation,
the world's first prison state, kept under a level of microscopic
control and surveillance that would have made Jeremy Bentham
tremble with envy.
All the recent chatter in the media about
a forthcoming war on Iraq conveniently ignores the fact that
the US and Britain have been waging war against Saddam since
1990-although its been a decidedly one-sided affair, too one-sided
to mention apparently. Since the accords that brought an end
to the Gulf War Round One, Iraq has been remorselessly bombed
about once every three days. Its feeble air defense system is
shattered and its radars jammed; its air force is grounded, the
runways cratered; its primitive Navy is destroyed. The nation's
northern and southern territories are occupied by hostile forces,
armed, funded and overseen by the CIA.
Every bit of new construction in the
country is scrutinized for any possible military function by
satellite cameras capable of zooming down  to
a square meter. Truck and tank convoys are zealously monitored.
Troop locations are pinpointed with a lethal certainty. Bunkers
are mapped, the coordinates programmed into the targeting software
for bunker-busting bombs.
This once wealthy and secular nation
is bankrupt, its financial reserves crippled by the sadistic
sanctions that have blocked not only the export of Iraqi oil
but also the import of medical and food supplies, leading to
the deaths of millions of Iraqi civilians. Clinton's dreadful
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boasted that this horrific
toll was "worth it" in order to keep Saddam penned
in.
Now along comes mini-Bush to proclaim
to the world that this emaciated nation, shackled in the political
equivalent of an isolation tank inside a maximum security prison
for these past 12 years, is the greatest threat to world peace
on the planet. There is a freakish inevitability to the war cry,
as if zeroing in on Iraq was a natural sequel to the decimation
of Afghanistan.
Of course, the war on Afghanistan wasn't
a war in any strict historical sense-it was more like live-action
target practice, with the country and its people serving as a
high-altitude bombing range. From the Pentagon's point-of-view,
the campaign must have been vaguely dissatisfying. There wasn't
even anything really big to blow up, like those skyscrapers in
Belgrade.
Still in the wake of 9/11, many were
struck by the oddity of Bush's vow to topple the "axis of
evil," since none of the three bogey-states (Iran, Iraq
and North Korea) had much use for Osama bin Laden and his gang
of murderers.
But we now know that the war plans for
Iraq were more of a prequel than a sequel to Afghanistan. It
was germinating long before al-Qaeda hit the New York City and
the Pentagon. Hence, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's instruction
to his coven of generals only hours after the attack to try to
pin part of the blame on Saddam Hussein.
Over the next few months, Rumsfeld reiterated
his request, asking the CIA on at least 10 separate occasions
to excavate evidence of an Iraqi / al-Qaeda link. The CIA couldn't
find a thing. Still, when the Pentagon exhausted its bombing
targets in Afghanistan, the administration's sights turned to
Iraq. And the mainstream press and the US Congress have played
along, giving Bush a free pass to go after Saddam with few questions
asked.
At this fraught moment comes a vital
new book War
Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq by Milan Rai.
This serves as a bracing antidote to the daily trawl of Pentagon-approved
press releases that pass for war reporting in the US press. Indeed,
Rai's book, just published by Verso, is nothing less than a pre-emptive
strike on the Pentagon's rationale for war on Iraq, dismantling
piece-by-piece the case for invasion.
The case against Saddam boils down to
the following allegations: Iraq is in league with al-Qaeda; Iraq
is re-building it's chemical and biological weapons capability;
Iraq is close to developing a nuclear bomb or radiological weapon;
Iraq is exporting weapons of mass destruction to other nations
or terrorist groups. Most of these allegations are accepted as
fact by the US press, but Rai proves there's precious little
substance to the charges. Instead, he cleaves through the indictment
of Iraq with a Chomsky-like precision.
The book is far from an exculpation of
Saddam and his coterie of Baathist thugs. It is a defense of
the Iraqi people and an evisceration of those, in Saddam's regime
and in the Bush cabinet, who would further victimize the people
of Iraq for self-indulgent geo-political purposes.
Rai, a founder of the London-based anti-war
group ARROW, doesn't spare Tony Blair. It's only natural. Bush
has, of course, left Blair to do much of the heavy lifting-or
at least the elocution. Blair serves as a kind of Minister of
Rhetoric for the Bush crowd. He was assigned the task of assembling
the dossier against bin Laden. And later he was given the task
of presenting the case against Iraq.
Blair's bin Laden indictment was frail
on facts and speculative in the extreme. But his dossier against
Saddam, his litany of "killer facts', was vaporous by comparison.
The Iraq dossier was written by John Scarlett, a former M-16
officer working with the Join Intelligence Committee, the British
equivalent of the National Security Council.
Scarlett submitted his report in April.
But it fell far short of what had been demanded by Blair and
Bush. In fact, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was so infuriated
by the lack of evidence that he sent the six-page document back
to the Scarlett with instructions to amp up the allegations against
Saddam.
In the end, the Blair dossier didn't
disclose much that was new. Indeed, all of the hard evidence
regarding Iraq's bio-weapons capacity stems largely from reports
by UN inspectors prior to 1999. British intelligence concluded
that there wasn't any evidence that Saddam was any greater of
a threat than he was in 1991 at the conclusion of the Gulf War.
Some of the new claims are tenuous at
best. For example, the CIA is cited as saying that farm pesticides
could be converted into chemical weapons. This is undoubtedly
true; however, those same pesticides pose a much greater health
risk to Americans in the fields of Iowa and Louisiana than whatever
emerges from labs of Baghdad.
Other allegations are simply ludicrous.
For example, Time magazine quoted a CIA source as saying that
Swiss medical equipment used to "break-up kidney stones"
could be converted by Saddam's scientists into triggers for nuclear
bombs.
Of course the lack of a factual basis
only made Blair shout that much louder. Rai argues that Blair's
bellicosity, his attempts to paint Saddam in "bolder and
more terrifying" terms, stems from the more skeptical British
public and renegades within his own Labour Party. "An overwhelming
Iraqi threat," Rai writes, "is the only kind of justification
that will 'sell' President Bush's war."
In an effort to add fiber to their charges,
Blair and Bush have trotted out a number of Iraqi defectors.
But this odd collection has demonstrated about as much credibility
as the members of the Kuwaiti royal family who falsely claimed
before congress back in 1990 that Saddam's troops had dumped
babies our of incubators in the hospitals of Kuwait City.
Take the peregrinations of Dr. Khidir
Hamza, the self-professed former head of the Iraqi nuclear program,
who defected in 1994. The US-educated Hamza retired from the
Iraqi nuke program in 1987, but has been put forth to the media
by US intelligence to make a number of wild claims, including:
that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks in the US; that Iraq
gave technical and financial aid to the al-Qaeda operatives behind
the 9/11 attacks; that Iraq is developing a "dirty bomb"
and is close to assembling a nuclear weapon capable of striking
Israel.
Hamza hasn't been in a position to know
about any of these matters in over a decade and former UN weapons
inspector Scott Ritter labels him a "fraud", who concocts
information to curry favor with his backers in the CIA.
On the crucial issue of Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction (the top reason cited by the Bush-Blair tag
team for overthrowing Saddam), Rai concludes that there's been
no new evidence produced since December 1998 and there's no evidence
at all that they've provided such weapons to other nations or
to terrorist groups.
"The evidence produced so far is
worrying," says David Albright, former nuclear weapons inspector
for the International Atomic Energy Agency. "It is an argument
for getting the inspectors back in as fast as possible, but not
for going to war."
The second argument advanced for invading
Iraq is that Saddam was somehow behind the attacks of 9/11. This
conspiracy was first promoted by former CIA director James Woolsey,
Al Gore's tutor in intelligence matters. Recall that Woolsey
helped script Gore's craven speech on the floor of the senate
justifying his vote for war against Iraq in 1990. Then in 1998
Woolsey helped peddle through congress the Clinton/Gore-crafted
Iraq Liberation Bill, authorizing funds for the overthrow of
Saddam. "Regime change" isn't a new coinage.
Within days of 9/11, the ghastly Woolsey
was front and center before the cameras asserting, with the knowing
look of an Langley insider, that the attacks had been carried
out by a "state-sponsored" group of terrorists. The
culpable state? Iraq, naturally.
Woolsey's main piece of evidence consisted
of a rumor that Osama bin Laden had sent an emissary to Saddam's
birthday party in Baghdad in April of 1988. That's right, 1988.
At this soirée, Saddam supposedly offered to finance and
train al-Qaeda recruits.
Even Bush tried to make the case early
on, but got tangled up in his own tortured syntax: "I see
linkages between someone who is willing to murder his own people.
I hold Saddam Hussein to account and we are going to do that."
Now it's clear why Dick Cheney, the executive producer of the
Bush Administration, insists that Tony Blair makes all the really
big speeches.
Several former CIA agents were quick
to dismiss the allegations of a Saddam/bin Laden partnership.
One retired CIA officer with experience in the Middle East told
the Daily Telegraph: "The reality is that Osama bin Laden
doesn't like Saddam Hussein. Saddam is a secularist who has killed
more Islamic clergy than he has Americans. They share almost
nothing in common except a hatred of the United States. Saddam
Hussein is the ultimate control freak and for him terrorists
are the ultimate loose cannon."
The loathing is mutual. As Robert Fisk
notes, bin Laden sees Saddam Hussein as a western-installed despot,
a description that is not without foundation.
The list of known, captured and killed
al-Qaeda members includes Saudis, Syrians, Yemeni, Jordanians,
Egyptians and Americans, but to date no Iranians, Afghans, Libyans,
North Koreans or Iraqis.
After the initial allegations promoted
by Woolsey fell flat, a new charge surfaced. Supposedly, hijacker
Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague a few months before
the 9/11 attacks, the implication being that here Atta received
his final instructions from Saddam. The evolution of the story
is a textbook case of media inflation. Within days the allegation
had mushroomed from Atta huddling with a "low-level"
Iraqi agent, to a secret meeting with a "mid-level"
Iraqi intelligence agent, to a session with a "senior"
Iraqi official to, finally, a pow-wow with the "head of
Iraq's intelligence service."
One report played up in the German press
even had Atta "obtaining a flask of anthrax" as this
assignation.
While the US press ran wild with speculation
over Atta's ties to Saddam, a Czech police investigation revealed
that Atta had not visited Prague in 2001, although a Mohammed
Atta (not necessarily "THE" M.A.) apparently had been
to the city twice in the previous year. But this Atta didn't
meet with an Iraqi diplomat/intelligence operative. The man who
met with the Iraqi agent (identified as the ambassador to the
Czech Republic) was actually another Iraqi named Saleh, who is
now a used car dealer living in Nuremberg, Germany.
At the time Atta was supposed to be getting
his murderous instructions in Prague, he was actually living
just down road from the FBI HQ in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The
unraveling of this breathless story did not make the front page
of the US newspapers and to this day references to Atta's supposed
Prague rendezvous are sallied forth as evidence of Iraq's complicity
in the 9/11 attacks.
Not only is there no evidence of a link
between al-Qaeda and Saddam, there's a rather thin record of
Iraqi sponsorship of international terrorism of any kind since
the end of the Gulf War.
"Iraq's not a terrorist state,"
says Gen. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor to George
Bush during the Gulf War. "Iraq is primarily a problem of
a hostile military power. It's a pretty traditional enemy."
So much for Iraq as the leading edge
in "asymmetrical" warfare.
But still the beat of the war drums goes
on. The less sense the war makes, the louder the battle cries.
I get the feeling that Bush and Blair
are going to have to attack quickly or stand down. The resistance
to this war is strong already and mounting daily. Of course,
the support of the French, Russian and German governments can
be bought. That's taken for granted. The real problem for both
Bush and Blair is at home, where hundreds of thousands have already
taken to the streets, with even bigger demonstrations in the
works.
So Milan Rai's book is sharply timed.
It can serve as a much-needed gameplan for the anti-war movement,
a tool to fight distortions and lies with facts and historical
truth.
Woodblock prints by Emily Johns and photographs
by Kim Weston-Arnold adorn and compliment Rai's book. I am particularly
struck by the beautiful and haunted faces of the Iraqi children
in Weston-Arnold's photos taken during her visit to Baghdad in
May of this year. I go back to those faces again and again. These
kids have already endured miseries and hardships that are unknown
by anyone living in the United States or Britain. The unyielding
goal of the anti-war movement must be to preserve those lives
and in doing so resolve to make them better.
Yesterday's
Features
Alexander Cockburn
Vindication
Through Violence:
Jimmy Carter and the DC Sniper
Robert Jensen
The American
Political Paradox:
More Freedom, Less Democracy
Ben Tripp
Congratulations! It's a War!
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Red!
David Krieger
A Bleak Day for America
Anis Shivani
George W. in Therapy
Ken Paff
Where Do Hoffa's Tactics Belong in a Mob-Free Teamsters?
Carol Norris
The Politics of Fear
Elaine Cassel
The Lynne Stewart Case:
When Representing an Accused Terrorist Can Land a Lawyer in Jail
Musa AlShaer
Scenes
from an Occupied Wedding
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: a serialized
novel (Episode 3)
M. Shahid Alam
I Will Fight Your Enemies
New
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to Subscribers:
- How to Change the Subject: Corporate Scandal and Pension
Reform as Weapons Against Warmongering;
- Padilla's Predecessor: Court Ruling Cites 1904 War
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- Adios Hitchens: the Dorian Gray of Our Time;
- Object of Suspicion: How the FBI Watched Janis Ian
From Birth;
- First Carter, Then Clinton,
Now Sen. John Edwards:
Another "New South" Slimeball;
- Corporate Crooks: Nature or Nurture?
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