Iraq as Prison
State
Review of Milan Rai’s War Plan Iraq
by Jeffrey St.
Clair
Dissident Voice
October
17, 2002
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 sites 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 (Verso, 2002) 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 right1988. 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.
Jeffrey St. Clair is the
co-author of Five Days that Shook The World: The Battle For Seattle and
Beyond with Alexander Cockburn, and is a co-editor of Counterpunch, the nation’s best muckraking newsletter. Email: counterpunch@counterpunch.org