Saddam Is
Monica:
The Scandal That Scuttled Powell's Case
by James Brooks
Dissident Voice
February 9, 2003
It's hard for
many Americans to see that Saddam Hussein has become George Bush's Monica Lewinsky.
Bush's argument for war flops because the world is having trouble keeping a
straight face; it has a sense of history.
Clinton launched
cruise missiles to try to escape the consequences of putting his cigar in the
wrong place, but Bush and his gang are prepared to launch World War III to
patch over the wreckage of their naughty escapades with the bad boy of Baghdad.
The duplicity of America's last twenty years in Iraq has reached its scandalous
zenith, and the whole world is laughing in the gallows.
Rumsfeld said
Saddam is so bad, no-one would cross the street to shake his hand. But the
world heard him say, "I did not have sex with that woman!" After all,
Rumsfeld crossed an ocean to shake hands with Saddam in 1983, starting an arms
sale bonanza for US corporations, a flow of chemicals and biological stocks to
launch Iraq's CBW effort, and years of high-level US intelligence and battle
planning services for Iraq's hideous chemical and biological warfare against
Iran.
But now, though
the US, Israel, and several other nations continue to develop and stockpile
such weapons, we're told that finding them in Iraq would be the "smoking
gun", a veritable semen stain on a blue dress.
It's all part of
a long and increasingly vain US effort to paint Saddam as the fallen Man from
Hope, a power-mad Slick Willie of unspeakably vile morals who took advantage of
well-intentioned US support. But the world isn't fooled. It knows that Saddam
is really the intern-on-the-make in this tryst, the self-promoting rube who
foolishly thought he could take liberties with his cigar-chomping dalliance
under the desk of world power.
Of course, the
truly piquant touch, the pièce de résistance of this scandal, is the sight of
George Bush's runt son pleading for a second war on Iraq. Not sufficiently
destroyed, Iraq must now feel "shock and awe" (the Pentagon's phrase)
under the superior might of George Bush II. But people like this are always
afraid you won't get the point. So in case you didn't really savor the absurdity
of a "democracy" waging a Freudian war, Bush, Jr. brought back all
the stars of the Reagan/Bush defense/foreign policy teams, the very boys who
were sleeping with Saddam back in the go-go Eighties, so they could all be
hypocrites together, and kill even more people in the Middle East. Even Bush
whines that this all seems "like the rerun of a bad movie."
Yes, America's
long scandal with Saddam is rich, far juicier in its lust for the morally
obtuse and the intellectually absurd than that domestic tempest that turned on
"what the meaning of is, is." This administration has taken Clinton's
moral relativism into hyperdrive, declaring that there are no limits to utter
hypocrisy, if only you have enough power. The neo-cons' supercharged propaganda
machine renders even the CIA superfluous in their thrust to destroy Saddam.
They've left the once-racy Clinton and his vicious character-kills sucking dust
in the weeds.
As heir to this
twenty-year scandal of war crime adultery, Bush, Jr. can wield many assets not
available to an upstart groper from Arkansas. Like the Comeback Kid before his
'confession', Bush has exhausted the public's faith in his ability to tell the
truth. But why should he confess? He can send Colin Powell to the UN, to make
his lame excuses sound new on an intelligent tongue.
No soap. Just as
we wouldn't have swallowed another rehash of Clinton's sex denials from Warren
Christopher, Secretary Powell's pinch-hit was a strike out with the Security
Council. He must have been hoping that Council members don't read the
newspapers, where most of his threadbare laundry had already been checked and
thrown in the discard pile. The claim of mobile CBW factories was investigated
and discounted by Hans Blix. The CIA and IAEA trashed the aluminum tubes story
months ago. UNMOVIC has already investigated a US claim that Iraq scraped a
site clean just before inspectors arrived; they found nothing to support the
allegation. And the supposed Al-Qaeda connection remains as flimsy and
implausible as ever.
Powell's "communications
intercepts" may have been real, or not. Unfortunately, the US has built
such a history of evidence fabrication that the world now trusts our
intelligence claims about as much as we trusted the Cold War pages of Pravda.
The recent UK government dossier on Iraq, which Powell praised to the UN as
"a fine paper [that] describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception
activities", is now known to be a fraud plagiarized from academic
articles. And Bush considers a new Pentagon department dedicated to telling
lies to the world.
Powell
masterminded the First War of Iraqi Obliteration, so he was a natural for the
role of "dove" in this administration. Blinded by blowback from his
own propaganda, he couldn't see that he stood before the Council with the wasted
blood of a nation on his hands, pleading for more. Ignoring the scandal mocking
him from the shadows, the General dutifully drycleaned the fraying fabric of
old lies, bad leads, and disinformation until, in the dim light of American
public knowledge, it might be mistaken for a compelling argument for war. But
the rest of the world saw it for what it was; a familiar, and still badly
stained, blue dress.
James Brooks of Worcester, Vermont, (jamiedb@attglobal.net) is an independent researcher and
former business owner whose articles have been published by Dissident Voice,
Media Monitors Network, and several other sites and newspapers. Currently Mr.
Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel,
and publishes News Links, a free daily e-mail digest of Middle East news and commentary.
To subscribe, contact jamiedb@attglobal.net