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CounterPunch
February
8, 2003
Categories of War
The US Gameplan
for Iraq
by
BILL CHRISTISON
former
CIA political analyst
Editors's note. In the aftermath of
Colin Powell's speech to the UN Security Council Bill Christison
sets forth once his powerful analysis of the real reasons for
the prospective US assault on Iraq. Regular readers of Bill's
piece on the CounterPunch site will recognize some material but
we believe it's important and useful to have his trenchant themes
resumed in this single intelligence briefing which, unlike Britain's
"top secret" assessment of Iraq's capabilities, was
not plagiarized from a paper written by a student in Monterey,
California. This is original work from a man who was one of the
CIA's top analysts. AC/JSC.
Why is the Bush administration willing to--some
people would say wants to--go to war with Iraq? To get at this
question, I'd like to put all the possible reasons that seem
to me worth talking about into four categories, and then look
in some detail at each category. I'd like to list the categories
in an order going roughly from least important to most important,
and then try to dispense quickly with the reasons for going to
war that seem to me the least important, so we'll have more time
for the more important ones.
The first category I want to mention
is CONSPIRACY THEORIES. These are all over the internet and maybe
in other places as well. There's a regular cottage industry out
there. I want to limit my comments here to only two of the most
extreme types of conspiracy theories. They both start with September
11, but they both get tied into Iraq as well. The first one is
the theory that President Bush himself somehow was responsible
for planning and carrying out the destruction of the Trade Center
towers in New York and the damaging of the Pentagon near Washington.
And the second is the theory that Bush didn't actually do it
himself, but he knew in advance that terrorists were going to
do it, and that he then took steps to allow it to happen.
Today these theories often include the
thought that Bush intended years ago to take over Iraq, and that
he needed the September 11 events to give him an opportunity
to do so. There may or may not be something to this last point,
but the point itself does nothing to strengthen the original
conspiracy theories, which seem to me to be patently absurd.
Now, I don't object in any way to other people devoting their
time to trying to prove such theories. Maybe one out of a hundred
will eventually prove to be true. But, in my view, there is so
much valid evidence available of what is actually happening in
the world, that I don't want to waste my time being distracted
by conspiracy theories based on flimsy bits of evidence that
always seem to have other logical explanations. So if any of
you are into conspiracy theories, I'll just say, "That's
fine, but just don't bother me with them until you have an iron-clad
case--which I don't think exists for either of the two theories
on the list here."
Lets move on to the next category. My
CATEGORY TWO contains reasons why the U.S. seems eager for war
against Iraq that must be mentioned, but whose importance, it
seems to me, is impossible to measure. I want to be very clear
here. I have put these factors into a separate category only
because I think it is impossible for us to determine whether
they are important or not. They may be very important. We just
don't know. Spending a lot of time to analyze or discuss them
is simply not very productive. Again, if you disagree, interrupt
me.
The first of these possibly important,
but in my view un-analyzable, factors is the machismo of U.S.
leaders when faced with tyrants of little real power--Qaddafi
and Castro come to mind as well as the Iraqi president--who persist
in self-destructively retaliating, as best they can, against
U.S. policies they dislike. The second item in this category
is a desire, in the case of George W. Bush, to get rid of a hateful
tinhorn who may have tried to assassinate Bush's father, and
who has successfully beaten the odds by outlasting Bush's father
in office. And the third factor in this category is the distraction
that war and the threat of war with Iraq offered from the corporate
scandals that might otherwise spread more easily right into the
White House. All of these three factors almost certainly contribute
some weight--and possibly great weight--to Bush's and Vice-President
Cheney's willingness--or desire--for war against Iraq, but it
is simply not possible for anyone outside the White House to
know how much.
Let's move right on to CATEGORY THREE
and CATEGORY FOUR. Here's where we get into the truly important--and
controversial--problems. Everything up to this point has been
fairly easy to deal with. From here on it gets tough.
I want to start by talking about CATEGORIES
THREE and FOUR together for a moment. I hope you understand,
by the way, that these are just my categories, and you might
come up with different ones. All I'm trying to do is to use these
categories to help us discuss what is a complex and multi-sided
problem. Anyway, my CATEGORY THREE contains reasons for the war
that the Bush administration claims are the most important reasons,
but which in reality are probably the least important ones to
the administration itself. (I emphasize, this is my opinion.)
I believe that the administration is advertising these reasons
so heavily at least in part to cover up other reasons, which
it is less willing to talk about but which it actually regards
as more important. My CATEGORY FOUR contains these other reasons,
which I believe the Bush administration sees as the real main
reasons for preemptively expanding the war and bringing about
regime change in Iraq. The way I break down the entries in these
two categories obviously reflects my own opinions. The placement
of every item in either Category Three or Category Four will
probably be controversial to somebody in this room. Some people
will feel that this or that item should be on the other list,
or not be on either list, or perhaps that there shouldn't even
be lists like these. Believe me, I understand that I'm about
to open up a large hornet's nest.
My CATEGORY THREE has only two entries
in it. The first is the desire of the U.S. to "disarm"
Iraq, specifically to eliminate any and all of Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction--that is, nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons--as well as any potential for their future production.
The other one is the desire to "introduce democracy"
into Iraq, after actions by the United States have brought about
a change of regime and the removal of Saddam Hussein. (By the
way, from here on I'll start using, at least some of the time,
the term "WMD" instead of "weapons of mass destruction.")
Let's talk about the first of these issues--
the disarmament or WMD issue. Everyone in the room here should
note that I have put this in the category of not being one of
the really important reasons for going to war, and I am suggesting
it is largely a pretext rather than a real reason. And yet the
Bush Administration is now loudly proclaiming every day that
disarmament is the single issue that dominates all others, and
that this issue, in the end, justifies preemptive war. That means
a couple of things. It puts the onus on me to prove--or at least
do my best to prove--that the disarmament of Iraq is not and
should not be an issue of such great importance.
I'd like to make one other point very
clear right at the start of discussing this issue. I think that
both the evidence and the logic of the situation make it quite
evident that Saddam Hussein has been trying to acquire nuclear
weapons and other WMD since at least 1980, if not before. I think
also that his intentions to acquire such weapons have never changed,
and that he will--assuming he stays in power--keep right on trying
to acquire these weapons. But even though I believe all this,
I do not think the U.S. should go to war on account of
it. Here's my best effort to persuade you to agree with me.
As already mentioned, the U.S. now threatens
to launch preemptive wars against nations trying to develop weapons
of mass destruction. This is a policy change of extreme importance.
In the almost 58 years since the age of nuclear weapons began,
the U.S. has deliberately decided, time after time, not to launch
wars against any nations for simply acquiring, rather than using,
the most important type of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear
weapons. Ever since shortly after World War II, we have rejected
launching wars against the Soviet Union, China, England, France,
Israel, India, and Pakistan, all of whom have acquired nuclear
weapons. If the U.S. is really concerned about the further spread
of such weapons, we should understand that other nations--not
just Iraq--will over the long run never go along with U.S. desires
until the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear powers themselves show
a real willingness to negotiate seriously on creating an entire
nuclear-weapons-free world. And this is precisely, in
my opinion, what the U.S. should do.
In this connection, the recent actions
of North Korea are quite instructive. Caught pretty much red-handed
by U.S. intelligence in lying about their nuclear weapons program,
the North Koreans brazenly told the U.S. something like this:
"Sure, we have a weapons program. You Americans already
have thousands of these weapons, so why shouldn't we have some,
too?" Now, in just the last few weeks, the United States
has backed off--and backed off a long way when it comes to North
Korea--from its shiny new preemptive war strategy, while insisting
that preemptive war is still a good strategy for the much weaker
Iraq. Washington is, in practice, encouraging other nations
to conclude that if you can somehow acquire just a few nuclear
weapons, you really can stand up to the U.S. At the same time,
Washington's bumbling and inconsistent policy is strengthening
the belief around the world that weapons of mass destruction
have little to do with the real reasons why the U.S. wants to
go to war with Iraq.
But how, you might ask, could preventing
the further spread of WMD, particularly nuclear weapons, around
the world be considered by anyone in his right mind a "less
important" issue? (This is, of course, precisely what I
can be charged with doing.)
The answer to that is really pretty obvious.
Except as a propaganda tool, every U.S. administration since
Harry Truman's has in practice made the spread of nuclear weapons,
the major type of weapons of mass destruction, a less important
issue than the short-term perceived needs of U.S. national security.
That's close to 58 years now that we've been doing this. No administration
has ever been willing even to discuss giving up the United States'
own nuclear weapons. In these same years, however, most U.S.
leaders and practically every American foreign policy or intelligence
"expert" who ever worked on the nuclear-proliferation
issue understood that, given this cast-in-concrete U.S. policy,
preventing the further spread of such weapons among either friends
or foes over the long run was impossible. The result is that
over the past half-century, the U.S. has badly botched, and been
completely hypocritical about, its alleged policy of opposing
nuclear proliferation. The administrations of Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson, who made the most noise against proliferation, are
regarded by the Arab and Muslim worlds as the most hypocritical
of all, because they acquiesced in Israel's acquisition of nuclear
weapons during the 1960s.
Let's move nearer to the present. As
early as March 2001, the Bush administration went through a phase
of blaming Russia for helping other nations to obtain nuclear
weapons. On the 23rd of that month, Donald Rumsfeld stated on
national television, "Let's be very honest about what Russia
is doing. Russia is an active proliferator. They are part of
the problem. They are selling and assisting countries like Iran
and North Korea and India with these technologies which are threatening
other people, including the United States"
Russia continues to this day providing
aid to Iran, and U.S. criticism of Russia for doing so also continues,
although since September 11 the rhetoric has cooled because Moscow
is now Bush's good ally in the War on Terror. But such statements
as Rumsfeld's have made a very unfavorable impression in nations
that do not entirely support U.S. policies. They believe the
United States itself has been an "active proliferator"
since World War II, most particularly with respect to Israel.
Rumsfeld and most U.S. policymakers, past and present, seem not
to understand how profoundly mistrusted we are because of our
lenient attitude toward Israel's nuclear capability. Many other
nations will never accept a status quo that perpetuates
Israeli possession of nuclear weapons and at the same time prevents
them from ever acquiring such weapons. They will always be suspicious
that the U.S. really opposes nuclear proliferation only for its
enemies, while acting too often as a hidden enabler of proliferation
for its friends.
This entire confusing mess has finally
come home to roost at the beginning of 2003. The U.S. has spent
years pursuing inconsistent policies on proliferation, in practice
downgrading the importance of the issue while noisily playing
up its importance in propaganda. The current U.S. administration
has been doing the same. And the propaganda volume control has
been turned to the very maximum in order to obfuscate the real
reasons why the administration shows such eagerness to expand,
preemptively, the war with Iraq.
Now, just as crunch-time is arriving
for Iraq, along comes North Korea to embarrass the big, hypocritical
bully and ramp up quiet eruptions of what must be very satisfying
schadenfreude in more nations of the world than Washington
can easily count. It's not worth bothering even to discuss the
weird statements coming out of Rome on the Potomac that attempt
to explain why we cannot use our new preemptive war strategy
on North Korea right now, even though in military terms, as already
mentioned, that nation would appear to be a considerably greater
danger than Iraq to its own neighbors and even to the U.S. None
of the arguments swirling around Washington address in a meaningful
way the most important points we should be talking about.
The first point that needs more discussion
is that, even if the U.S. quickly and successfully polishes off
Iraq, in an immediate military sense anyway, and then a few weeks
later goes and does the same to North Korea, the world has already
seen the most aggressive U.S. administration since Teddy Roosevelt
blink, and blink big time. The perceived value and reliability
of the U.S., as a protective shield against potential enemies
of our allies, will inevitably diminish. In this regard, think
immediately of Japan and Taiwan, which look on the U.S. as a
shield against North Korea and, more importantly, against China.
Think also, in a somewhat longer time frame, of other Southeast
Asian countries from Thailand to Australia that might question
the "stayability" of the U.S. Whatever else happens,
a sea-change is probable in the U.S. relationship with Asia.
(But you should also think of positive changes, both in Asia
and elsewhere, that might be more likely to emerge over time
than seemed possible even a few months ago. A multipolar world
has its pluses.)
The second point to be aware of is that,
if the stalemate between North Korea and the U.S. drags on for
more than a few weeks, other nations in the world will, as already
mentioned, see even greater value in having their own nuclear
weapons, and perhaps also other types of WMD. The Bush administration
can argue all it wants that it does not have to hurry in solving
the North Korean problem. Its arguments will be nonsense. Each
week that passes will to some degree increase the likelihood
that one nation or another, or even some subnational group, will
initiate or expand a WMD program. At a minimum, nuclear weapons
alone will have made it possible for North Korea to stand up
to the U.S. for a longer period than most of us up to now would
have thought possible.
A third point: North Korea has made it
clearer than ever that in a world of nation-states, the only
world we'll have for some time to come, small countries are increasingly
able to obtain nuclear weapons and other WMD. One small country,
Israel, got them in the late 1960s, but its ties with an acquiescent
United States made it a special case. North Korea already has
become, or is on the verge of becoming, the second small country
to acquire nuclear weapons. (Pakistan and India are both much
larger and more powerful, and not really in the category of "small.")
The Bush administration is seriously in error if it believes
that it can ever so dominate the rest of the world militarily
that it can suppress all nuclear and other WMD threats against
itself. The best rational judgment one can make is that the opportunity
for global domination is already lost to this and any future
administration. Not only the threats but also the actuality of
further nuclear and other WMD proliferation will almost certainly
increase in the next few years. The present events involving
North Korea, and the U.S. reaction thereto, only encourage such
a development.
The process will only be slowed, not
stopped, even if there is a U.S. conquest of Iraq, followed by
a later conquest of North Korea, followed by a later conquest
of Iran, followed by a later conquest of--whom? Libya--Syria--Indonesia--Brazil--Argentina--other
countries or groups? Either the present nations having weapons
of mass destruction, including the U.S., will have to negotiate
away their own WMD, or we'll have to allow other nations to have
them, or we are likely to have something close to perpetual wars
arising from the U.S. instigation of preemptive wars. My own
judgment is that for a long time to come, the U.S. will continue
to refuse to give up its own WMD, and that therefore the U.S.
should allow other nations to acquire WMD (since we can't stop
them all in any case), and continue to rely on containment and
deterrence to prevent other nations from actually using
WMD.
This seems to me to be the least bad
of a bad group of alternatives. Even this least bad alternative,
however, will probably over time lead to greater global chaos.
If today there is no possibility of U.S. agreement to a multilateral
global nuclear and other WMD disarmament, including U.S. disarmament,
just possibly the increasing dangers of global chaos will bring
closer the time when such an agreement does become possible.
We should in any event not employ preemptive war simply to stop
other nations from acquiring rather than using weapons of mass
destruction, because as each year passes, that policy becomes
less possible to implement.
My own problem with preemptive war, by
the way, goes even deeper. Wars inevitably kill innocent people,
often in large numbers. That's an obvious cliché, but
it is true. Even if Congress gave the CIA and the rest of the
U.S. intelligence community unlimited resources and reorganized
the complete intelligence apparatus of the country so that it
became infinitely more efficient that it's ever been, one thing
is crystal clear: IT IS BEYOND BELIEF THAT THE U.S. WOULD EVER
HAVE INTELLIGENCE GOOD ENOUGH TO MAKE LAUNCHING A PREEMPTIVE
WAR MORALLY ACCEPTABLE. There is always an element of guesswork
with respect to a potential enemy's intentions, and those intentions
can change instantly--and at the last moment.
This question of intentions is vital.
It is not enough, despite the Bush administration's arguments
to the contrary, to know that some possible enemy possesses and
has the capability to use weapons of mass destruction.
You need to know--and know for sure--the intentions of
that possible enemy as well. Even if you have a 90-percent degree
of confidence in your judgment of what another country, or a
sub-national group, truly intends to do, initiating a preemptive
war and killing innocent people is still a prohibitively immoral
action. You should also understand that even your 90-percent
degree of confidence is nothing but a guess. Any way you slice
it, you are killing people on the basis of a guess. And to believe
that any nation's intelligence services can ever provide a 100
percent degree of confidence is just one more form of arrogance.
This is particularly the case when there
is good reporting available that the honesty of U.S. intelligence
analysts may have been subverted by an administration that seeks
to manufacture intelligence information that supports its case
that war against Iraq is necessary. I want to read a few lines
from a senior CIA analyst who retired from the Agency far more
recently than I. This is from a column written by this analyst
that has appeared in Miami and Birmingham, Alabama, and perhaps
other newspapers. It was written in the form of a letter to President
Bush on the eve of his State-of-the-Union address. The title
of the column is kind of cute; it is "Caveat Preemptor."
Here are a few quotes from it.
"Mr. President:
"Until last week many Americans
were inclined to take your top aides at their word that the looming
war with Iraq is not about oil or vengeance but rather about
Iraq's continuing pursuit of "weapons of mass destruction."
Now, all but the most unquestioning loyalists are having second
thoughts.
"Doubt grew exponentially as France
and Germany, with whom we have extensive intelligence sharing
arrangements, took strong issue with your administration's claims
about Iraq. It is the view of those two major allies and others
that the evidence that Iraq is continuing to pursue new weapons
of mass destruction is far from conclusive and that it falls
far short of justification for starting a war.
"In [your recent speeches, your
advisers] had you making alarmist claims that our allies know
do not square with the judgments of the US and wider allied intelligence
communities. I'll mention just two:
"[1] --Singling out the high-strength
aluminum tubes Iraq has been trying to purchase, you said they
"are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." You
probably recall that this has always been a highly contentious
view within US intelligence and scientific circles, and that
the British "White Paper" of Sept. 24, 2002 stated
that there was "no definitive intelligence" that the
tubes were destined for a nuclear program. The UN inspectors
in Iraq have now concluded that the tubes were not meant for
enriching uranium but rather for making ordinary artillery rockets,
as the Iraqis have said. And the press has the story. [By the
way (this is me talking now, not my CIA ex-colleague), Bush in
his State of the Union speech last week on January 28, repeated
his charge regarding these aluminum tubes. Colin Powell mentioned
them again in the UN Security Council and recognized that they
were a controversial issue. I think we'll just have to watch
this one for a while. Now back to my ex-colleague's OpEd column.]
"[2]--You also claimed that Iraq
could produce a nuclear weapon "in less than a year."
Our allies are finding it difficult to reconcile that with the
formal estimate of the US intelligence community that Iraq will
not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until the end of the
decade, if then.
" [Y]ou now seem captive to the
"intelligence" coming from Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. You will recall how[unhappy]
Wolfowitz was last fall, when the CIA insisted that reports tying
Iraq to al-Qaeda lacked credibility
"To be sure, CIA's conclusions are
often unwelcome. The question is whether they are more accurate
than the ones you are getting from the Pentagon.
"That words can have far-reaching
consequences is shown by North Korea's decision, after you labeled
it part of the "axis of evil" in last year's address,
to renege on its commitment to forgo nuclear weapons . No one
should have been surprised when the North Koreans concluded that,
without a strengthened nuclear deterrent, they would be next
in line after Iraq for a US 'preemptive' attack."
To sum this up, the U.S. does not have
a consistent or meaningful policy on preventing the further spread
of weapons of mass destruction, and most senior U.S. officials
know full well that we will never devote a top priority to preventing
that further spread as long as we are unwilling to give up our
own such weapons. Furthermore, the recent events with respect
to North Korea provide more evidence that U.S. willingness to
expand the war in Iraq almost certainly arises from some cause
or causes other than the weapons-of-mass-destruction issue. This
very day, Secretary of State Powell has presented the best case
he could make on weapons violations by Iraq. Even if he had proved
beyond a doubt that Iraq was continuing to develop and produce
weapons of mass destruction right now--a point that will be the
subject of intense controversy in the--it would still be wrong,
in my opinion, to make that a cause for war, for all the reasons
I've already mentioned.
I'd better move on now to the other item
in CATEGORY THREE, the desire of the U.S. to "introduce
democracy" into Iraq, after actions by the United States
have brought about a change of regime and the removal of Saddam
Hussein.
Here's another matter on which the present
foreign policy of the U.S. is, in my opinion, dead wrong. Supporting
the concept of encouraging the gradual spread of greater democracy
in the Middle East and elsewhere is obviously a good thing--but
only if it is done by peaceful means. Whatever kind and
quality of democracy develops in any country should be brought
about largely by the people in that country. It is criminal,
in my opinion, to go around the world introducing by military
force, and killing people to do it, something that we in our
American wisdom define as "democracy." Our own version
of democracy is quite incomplete and quite imperfect, and we
should be humble enough to realize that, and also humble enough
to let other people around the world do it their own way. Above
all, it should not be necessary that one prerequisite of any
other country's "democracy" be that it remain perpetually
subservient to the United States--which would seem to be one
aspect of the kind of "democracy" that Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and apparently
also the president himself, would like to see throughout the
Arab world. Another point to be made here is that U.S. mouthings
about democracy do not have a believable ring of truth to them
to people in the world's poorer countries, or to me either, given
the high degree of U.S. support for non-democratic governments
in these parts of the world over the last half-century. That's
why I regard this item as another cover-up and pretext, and not
a real reason.
All we have left now is the last category,
CATEGORY FOUR. This contains the reasons for war that the Bush
administration doesn't want to talk too much about, but which,
in my view, it actually regards as the most important reasons.
I've put three entries into this category--and again, I emphasize
that some of you might prefer to see different items listed here,
or might want one or more of my items removed. The first
reason here is oil--the desire for greater U.S. control of Iraqi
(and thus indirectly other Middle Eastern) oil resources. The
second reason is the U.S. desire to extend the U.S. drive for
global domination. The third and last reason on this list is
the desire of many dominant leaders of the Bush administration
in the U.S., in partnership with the Sharon government in Israel,
that a conquest of Iraq become the first stage of a "strategic
transformation" of the entire Middle East.
It's probably unnecessary, I know, but
I ask you all to note that there are multiple reasons
on this list. There are three of them. This is important, because
many experts and other sophisticated people are writing stuff
and giving talks these days on what this war in Iraq is all about,
and too many of them in my opinion are saying or implying that
OIL is the only real reason behind the U.S. government's policies
on the war. In my view, all of the three reasons on the list
here are real reasons, and it's also my view that each of them
is equally important. It's not correct--again, my opinion--that
any one of these three is more important than the other
two.
So, in my view, these three reasons combined
will be the real causes of an expanded preemptive war against
Iraq--if that war actually takes place. And after Bush's State
of the Union speech, it's hard to see what can stop it. It's
possible--in fact I think it's likely--that a final coup attempt
will be made to oust Saddam Hussein before the U.S. military
offensive actually starts. In Bob Woodward's recent book, Bush
at War, it comes out clearly that Bush was very favorably
impressed with the CIA's covert action abilities in Afghanistan,
and there is good evidence that he has provided the money--wrongly
in my opinion--for a major expansion of these capabilities. Unless
the judgment is made that there's no possibility of a successful
coup, it's hard for me to believe that Bush would not order the
attempt to be made.
Some Iraqi, either an exile or someone
inside the country, would have to be found, of course, who would
willingly allow himself to be controlled by the U.S. and who
would immediately invite the U.S. military in to occupy the entire
country. If that happened, U.S. ground units might then be able
to complete the occupation rapidly, with minimal U.S. and allied
casualties, and with fewer Iraqi casualties than any other scenario
would permit. However, the possibilities for failure of such
an operation would be great. Even if it were successful, hatreds
of the U.S. throughout the Muslim world would still rise, and
the likelihood of further terrorism against the U.S. would increase.
So my best guess is still that warfare
is going to be necessary if the Bush administration remains hell-bent
on getting rid of Saddam Hussein. And my belief still is that
these three reasons are the ones that will most likely lead the
U.S. into a bigger war against Iraq regardless of the degree
to which Baghdad cooperates in implementing the U.N. resolution
on disarmament.
With respect to the first reason, oil,
Iraq has, after Saudi Arabia, the next-largest known oil reserves
in the world, and U.S. oil and other corporations that are friends
and supporters of Bush and Cheney would be delighted to see a
regime change in Iraq that resulted in a government more subservient
to the United States. It seems fairly evident that Bush and Cheney
would also be delighted to please them. I don't think this needs
any further discussion.
The second reason listed here is at least
as important as oil. Iraq is almost certainly regarded in the
administration as the first of several major hindrances to the
U.S. drive for global hegemony and domination. The other two
nations in President Bush's "axis of evil" (and others
to be added) will, in good time, presumably also have to be neutralized,
even though North Korea, for the moment anyway, has thrown a
monkey wrench into U.S. global domination plans.
The third and last reason why the U.S.
government wants to go to war, and one that the Bush administration
really doesn't want to publicize, is the desire on the
part of many of the most senior U.S. officials, and no doubt
most senior officials in the present government of Israel as
well, to completely overturn, by military action if necessary,
the status quo that has existed in the Arab nations of
the Middle East for the past several decades. In the U.S., these
senior officials are led by Vice-President Cheney, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the number-two and number-three
men in the Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
For the past ten years these officials,
plus a number of others now in the Bush administration, have
been urging the removal of Saddam Hussein by military action.
The writings of this group have often explicitly stated that
the removal of Saddam should be only a precursor to other large
changes in the Middle East, all of which, it was alleged without
proof, would be favorable to the U.S., but all of which would
definitely be favorable to Israel. According to good evidence,
Rumsfeld himself pressed hard for war against Iraq immediately
after the September 11 attacks. According to David Martin, a
very conscientious and careful reporter who is the CBS News National
Security Correspondent, " barely five hours after American
Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was telling
his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq--even though
there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks."
The very next day, September 12, "at
4 p.m., the NSC [National Security Council] reconvened."
This comes from Bob Woodward's new book that I've already mentioned.
Woodward continues: "Rumsfeld insisted on a point he had
made before. 'Are we going against terrorism more broadly than
just al Qaeda?' Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al
Qaeda? he asked. Rumsfeld was speaking not only for himself when
he raised the question. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was committed
to a policy that would make Iraq a principal target of the first
round in the war on terrorism. Rumsfeld was raising the possibility
that they could take advantage of the opportunity offered by
the terrorist attacks to go after Saddam immediately." Although
at that time, one day after the terrorist attacks, Bush decided
that they had to concentrate first on al Qaeda and Afghanistan,
he was sympathetic to Rumsfeld's views and, a few months later,
by the Spring of 2002, he agreed that Iraq should be the next
target. Note that the initial rationale here had nothing to do
with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; it was that September
11 offered an "opportunity" to go after Saddam.
On September 22, 2002, the New York
Times Magazine carried a detailed study of Wolfowitz. According
to this profile, Wolfowitz "has an almost missionary sense
of America's role. In the current case, [the Middle East,] that
means a vision of an Iraq not merely purged of cataclysmic weaponry,
not merely a threat disarmed, but an Iraq that becomes a democratic
cornerstone of an altogether new Middle East. Wolfowitz's moralistic
streak may explain the affinity between the born-again and resolutely
unintellectual president and this man he calls 'Wolfie.' A senior
official who has watched the two men interact says that Wolfowitz
and the president have reinforced each other in their faith in
'a strategic transformation of the whole region.' "
Now, I want to emphasize that many Israelis,
and many American-Jewish people here in the U.S., oppose this
war with Iraq. Nevertheless, evidence that has accumulated over
recent years shows that there is a great deal of support in the
present Israeli government for this concept that regime change
in Iraq should be the first stage of a "strategic transformation"
of the entire Middle East. It is clearly not in Sharon's interest
to play an overt and active role in pushing the U.S. in this
direction, but Uri Avnery, a leading Israeli peace activist who
opposes the occupation and founded Gush Shalom in the
early 1990s, makes a good case that Sharon himself does favor
the transformation by force of the Muslim Middle East. Before
becoming a peace activist, Avnery wrote two extensive biographical
studies of Sharon, with Sharon's cooperation. Commenting on the
various schemes of Wolfowitz and others in Washington, Avnery
wrote in early September of 2002:
"A grandiose, world-embracing and
logical design. What does it remind me of? Indeed the style sounds
vaguely familiar. In the early '80s, I heard about several plans
like this from Ariel Sharon (which I published at the time.)
His head was full of grand designs for restructuring the Middle
East, the overthrow of regimes and installing others in their
stead, moving a whole people (the Palestinians) and so forth.
I can't help it, but the winds blowing now in Washington remind
me of Sharon. I have absolutely no proof that the Bushies got
their ideas from him, even if all of them seem to have been mesmerized
by him. But the style is the same. "
On the question of urging the U.S. into
a war against Iraq, an even more recent article by Avnery says
that the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. is pushing the Bush administration
to start a war. Also on the question of starting the war, the
Christian Science Monitor of August 30, 2002 carried an
article under the headline, "Israel Sees Opportunity in
Possible U.S. Strike on Iraq." In this article, the Israeli
deputy defense minister stated that, "If the Americans do
not do this now [that is, start the war], it will be harder to
do it in the future. And as deputy defense minister, I can tell
you that the United States will receive any assistance it needs
from Israel."
On October 1, 2002, Akiva Eldar, a leading
commentator in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, who opposes
the almost 36-year-old occupation of Palestinian territories,
wrote an article detailing the activities in Israel in 1996--that's
more than half a dozen years ago--of two Americans who now hold
very senior positions in the Bush administration, Richard Perle
and Douglas Feith. These two "joined a small group of researchers
who were asked to help Benjamin Netanyahu in his first steps
as prime minister" after his election in 1996. The document
they prepared for Netanyahu, according to Eldar, "presents
an ambitious plan for a U.S.-Israeli partnership --not one focused
narrowly on territorial disputes." It even included "plans
for Israel to help restore the Hashemite throne in Iraq"--that
is, to help bring about regime change in Iraq and restore a monarchy
there. (Now that's a truly superior way to introduce democracy,
isn't it?) The article goes on to show that in September 2002
Richard Perle, one of the American experts and now a key Pentagon
adviser, organized a briefing for top U.S. defense leaders on
how to transform the Middle East that included a graphic labeling,
among other things, Palestine as Israel, Jordan as Palestine,
and a new Iraq as "the Hashemite Kingdom."
All of this indicates at least that Perle
and, no doubt, his Defense Department colleague Douglas Feith
are pressing in Washington for the same thing now that they were
urging in Israel almost seven years ago. All of this, and much
other evidence, also indicates that the present government of
Israel wants a U.S. conquest of Iraq--one that will lead to "transformation"
of the Middle East--to be carried out as quickly as possible.
If a U.S.-Israeli partnership with such goals does become official
U.S. policy, it will mean a new era of colonialism for the entire
Middle East--a colonialism dominated by the U.S. and Israel.
It is difficult, for me anyway, to imagine a better recipe for
more terrorism and for perpetual war.
I want to end with a comment that may
be implicit in my earlier remarks, but I'd like to make it explicit.
We place a high value on American lives. We do not--and all the
world sees this--seem to place anything like the same value on
other lives. Note the report of a couple of weeks ago
that the proposed U.S. military strategy for the war on Iraq
includes launching 700 to 800 precision-guided missiles onto
Baghdad in the first 48 hours of an attack. This is reportedly
more missiles than were launched during the entire previous Gulf
War of 1990-1991. The purpose of this attack would be to destroy
the complete infrastructure of Saddam Hussein's regime and all
his command-and-control mechanisms. But it is obvious that, however
precise these missiles are, a large number of ordinary Iraqi
people would also be killed. The Pentagon did not deliberately
release this information. It was uncovered by the same enterprising
CBS reporter, David Martin, whom I mentioned earlier, and I'd
guess it probably embarrassed the Pentagon. More recently, just
this past weekend on February 2, a long article appeared in the
New York Times that I think was deliberately provided
to the Times by the Pentagon. This newer article describes
how 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles will be used on
the entire country of Iraq in the first 48 hours of the attack,
but says nothing about how many will be dropped on heavily populated
Baghdad. The initial 48-hour bombardment will use 10 times the
number of precision-guided weapons employed in the first two
days of the 1991 Gulf War. This new article also emphasizes the
standard official line that the U.S. will do everything possible
to minimize civilian casualties and damage to the civilian infrastructure.
But it contains no reference at all to the difficulties of minimizing
civilian casualties in metropolitan areas. So I'd guess the air
attack on Baghdad is still on.
I simply cannot justify in my own mind
a war that will lead to major civilian casualties. If it turned
out that there were not heavy casualties, I still could not justify
a war for any of the three reasons I've already discussed as
being the real causes of the war, or for all of them combined.
And even if the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were
the real reason--which I think is clearly not the case--that
issue would not in my opinion justify a preemptive war either.
At a minimum, we ought instead to continue the present U.S. policies
of containment and deterrence. THIS WAR AGAINST IRAQ IS COMPLETELY
UNJUSTIFIED, and we the people of the United States should be
ashamed of ourselves if we allow it happen.
CATEGORY 1: CONSPIRACY
THEORIES
1. President Bush himself caused
Sep. 11 events.
2. Bush knew of Sep. 11 events
in advance, and allowed them to happen.
CATEGORY 2: REASONS
WHOSE IMPORTANCE IS IMPOSSIBLE TO MEASURE
1. Machismo of U.S. Leaders.
2. Bush's desire get rid of dictator
who tried to assassinate his father.
3. Belief that Iraq war would
distract people from corporate scandals or other Bush problems.
CATEGORIES 3 AND 4:
OVERVIEW
Category 3: Reasons the Bush administration
publicly claims are the most important, but which may actually
be the least important to the administration.
Category 4: The real reasons--those that
actually are likely to be the most important ones
to the Bush administration.
CATEGORY 3: THE HIGHLY
PUBLICIZED BUT LESS IMPORTANT REASONS
1. U.S. desire to "disarm"
Iraq--to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
2. U.S. desire to "introduce
democracy" into Iraq.
CATEGORY 4: THE REAL
REASONS FOR THE WAR
1. Oil--U.S. desire for greater
control over Iraqi oil resources.
2. U.S. drive for global domination.
3. Desire in the Bush administration,
and in the Sharon government of Israel, that conquest of Iraq
be first stage of "strategic transformation" of the
entire Muslim Middle East.
Bill Christison
was an analyst for the CIA from 1950 to 1979. At various times,
he worked on Soviet and European affairs, on global nuclear proliferation,
and later, on Asian and African affairs. In the 1970s, he served
as a National Intelligence Officer and as the Director of the
CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He now lives
in Santa Fe, NM. He can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Today's Features
Linda Heard
Powell
at the UN: Spiel, Stunts and Special Effects
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Peggy
Noonan, Space Case
The Columbia and the Manufacture of Tragedy
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to Believe Him: Powell Does Beckett
Robert Jensen
Powell
at the UN:
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Colin
Powell's Big Flop
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Powell vs. Blix
The Case for War Remains Unmade
Rahul Mahajan
Responding
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Is This All You've Got?
Paul de Rooij
Where Are the Incubators, Gen. Powell?
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February
1 / 2, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Railroading
Rosenthal; PeeWee and the Sex and the Sex Police
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Star Whores: Astronomers &
Apaches on Mt. Graham
Dian
Hardison
Former NASA Engineer: "I Fucking Warned Them"
Jerry Kroth
Jung & the Shuttle: Symbol &
the Sychronicity with the Columbia Disaster
Dave
Lindorff
Bush
& HItler: The Strategy of Fear
Behzad Yaghmaian
Report from Istanbul: the Peace
Movement in Turkey
Alan
Maass
Emptying Death Row
Forrest Hilton
The Weight of Forgetting: the Bolivian
Blockades in Context
Kurt
Nimmo
Inventing Crimes: FBI/CIA Entrapment
Matt Taibbi
Iraqt-Up: At Peace Rallies, Hundreds
of Thousands Go Missing
Jeremy
Scahill
Live
from Baghdad: FoxNews: Paying Saddam
Don Atapattu
Songs of Protest
Brian
J. Foley
An Immodest Proposal
Lawrence McGuire
Poker at Camp David
Adam
Engel
Just
Do It: Outrunning the President
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|