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June
19, 2003
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
June
18, 2003
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
Elaine
Cassel
Dark Star Chambers: Secret Trials,
Nameless Defendents, Veiled Threats to Defense Lawyers
Col.
Daniel Smith
Iraq's WMDs: Integrity, Ethics and
Intelligence
Chris
Fagen
Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War
Rick
Fantasia and Kim Voss
Bush's Low Intensity War on Labor
Sam
Hamod
Theater of Deception: Bush, Sharon,
Abbas
M.
Shahid Alam
Illuminating Tom Friedman
Jon
Brown
Greens & Dems: a Reply to Publius
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/18
June
17, 2003
Dr.
Susan Block
Sex, Lies and WMDs
Elaine
Cassel
Scalia, the Rumsfeld of the Supremes
Roger Burbach
Brazil Under Lula
Dan
Bacher
The WTO's War on Salmon
Peter
Phillips and Jason Spencer
Entertainment Media 2003
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation
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Wayne Madsen
Outting Ashcroft's Latest Hypocrisy
Larry
Kearney
Starlight
Steve
Perry
The Bush Administration
Lies Marathon, Day 3
June
16, 2003
Frida
Berrigan
Death in Aceh: US Weapon Aid the
Repression
Publius
Candidate Dem and Citizen Green
Tarif
Abboushi
Roadmap or Roadkill?
Rep. John
Conyers
Bush's Deceptions about Iraq Threaten Democracy at Home
Julian
Samuel
A Review of Pilger's The New Rulers of the World
Uri
Avnery
The Children of Death
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies,
Part 2
June
14 / 15, 2003
Edward
Said
A Roadmap to What and Where?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pryor Unrestraint: Killer Bill Pryor's
Mad Quest for the Federal Bench
David Lindorff
Rumsfeld v. Belgium
Jennifer
Loewenstein
Suicide's Most Willing Accomplice
Lee Sustar
US Tax System: Rigged for the Rich
Ben
Tripp
Of Dissidents and Dissonance
William
S. Lind
Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence
Joanne
Mariner
Rebellious Judges
Gila Svirsky
A Macabre Alliance
Mickey
Z.
Where We Are
Chris Floyd
Metaphysics as a Guide to Murder
Noah
Leavitt
Peru as Our Crystal Ball?
Yves Engler
and Bianca Mugyenyi
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Dr.
Gerry Lower
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Ted Dace
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Engel
Midnight at the Apocalyptic Pancake
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Smith, Greeder, Albert, and O'Hayer
Website
of the Weekend
AEI: Starts Wars; Creates
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June
13, 2003
David
Vest
Bush
Roadmap to What?
Ron Jacobs
The Iranian Revolution, Reloaded?
John
Chuckman
The Man Who Wasn't There
Jason Leopold
Six Months Before War White House Silenced Critics of WMD Intelligence
Michael
Leon
Missing Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
Negar Azimi
Ashcroft's Cruel Version of America
Saul
Landau
Shiite Happens
Hammond
Guthrie
Then and Now
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/13
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
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Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
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Impeach
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June
19, 2003
Lying, Flag Waving,
Redefining Conservative Values
An
Election Must Be Slouching Toward Us
By SAUL LANDAU
"Residents said the troops had appeared
to fire randomly in the direction of the city center after coming
under attack, killing two occupants of a white Nissan pickup
truck traveling near the scene. The wreckage of the truck was
still visible. 'They went crazy, they fired everywhere,' said
one witness, Safi Jaber. The residents said the soldiers had
stopped an ambulance trying to approach the scene, and that the
U.S. armored vehicle had rammed the pickup. One of the victims
was a 19-year-old man.'His wedding was supposed to be today,'
said Khalil Ibrahim, a local electrical engineer."
"Saddam never ruined our shops.
Is this the liberation Bush talks about?"
-- Iyad Qubaisi, owner of a now demolished
spare parts shop in Falluja, Iraq (May 22, 2003, Reuters)
OK, we liberated Iraq, whatever that means. Saddam
is gone. But all is not exactly resolved. We read daily about
the death and horror involved in colonial administration by inexperienced
U.S. forces. "Perhaps we should have left that to our coalition
partners, the British and Spanish, who have had centuries of
experience in running occupied territories," a national
security wit commented to me.
Before assessing the aftermath of the
war and before national memory atrophies completely, let's review
U.S. entry into the Iraq war. Some media now focus on the Pentagon's
apparently bogus staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue. But the
implications of Bush's actions reach beyond the public relations
realm. They go to the very core of the ethos of U.S. government.
A colleague who calls himself a conservative
and an ardent Bush supporter, although initially opposed to the
war because conservatives don't approve of wars without an exit
strategy, told me that it didn't matter whether we discover stockpiles
of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. "Saddam Hussein
was a weapon of mass destruction unto himself," he insisted,
"and the Iraqi people are better off. Didn't you see them
dancing for joy when we liberated them? So a thousand or two
died! That's the price of freedom." Similar arguments reverberate
on right wing radio talk shows the milder ones, where opponents
of war have not yet become traitors.
But, I asked my colleague, if the issue
was bringing freedom to Iraqis why didn't the President just
say that. He shrugged. "Freedom has a price," he insisted
and walked away. "Do you believe in a government of law
or of men?" I called after him. "Do you think a nation
has the right to attack a weaker one without casus belli?"
Indeed, Bush didn't emphasize this point
when he launched war against Iraq. Instead, in his January 28,
2003 State of the Union speech he insisted that Iraq had "materials
to produce as much as 500 tons of Sarin, mustard and VX nerve
agent." Bush cited the "30,000 munitions capable of
delivering chemical agents," a fact he attributed to U.S.
intelligence.
Bush also repeated the line about Iraq
as a nuclear threat. The chorus of Secretary of State Colin Powell,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney
and lesser potentates declared in a variety of fora, including
the UN Security Council, that U.S. intelligence agencies had
definitive knowledge of weapons of mass destruction, intimated
that UN weapons inspectors were slow or incompetent because they
hadn't found them and, finally, that Saddam was in "material
breach" of UN Security Council Resolution 1441. The world
had the obligation to invade Iraq to stop him before he could
either use these weapons himself or deliver them to the Al Qaeda
terrorists, with whom U.S. intelligence assured he had close
and secret links.
Thus far, neither weapons of mass destruction
in the three categories mentioned, nor Iraqi government links
to Al Qaeda terrorists have surfaced. The UN inspectors searched
the locations that Powell described in his February 5, 2003,
UN Security Council speech and slide show where he even flashed
an anthrax vial. Just before the war on March 6, Bush claimed
that "in some cases, these materials have been moved to
different locations every 12 to 24 hours or placed in vehicles
that are in residential neighborhoods." Wasn't Saddam Hussein
clever to outwit the UN inspectors? As of May 27 (five plus weeks
since Bush declared victory), U.S. inspectors also failed to
find even traces of the infamous products despite claims
by NY Times reporter Judith Miller that unnamed officials and
experts were sure they still existed.
UN Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix,
in the May 24, 2003 Guardian, said that "the main justification
for the war was weapons of mass destruction, and it may turn
out that in this respect the war was not justified."
Even if some small traces are one day
discovered, the facts now point to disturbing possibilities related
to the start of the war. U.S. intelligence agencies didn't know
their butts from the proverbial hole in the wall; higher ups
in the agencies distorted their evidence; or Bush and Cabinet
Members lied for the purpose of garnering public support for
war.
In September 2002, I traveled to Iraq
with Congressman Nick Rahall (W-WV) and former Senator James
Abourezk (D-SD). On September 19, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq
Aziz and Parliament Speaker Sa'doun Hamadi assured us that Iraq
had no such weapons. I remained skeptical. After all, Saddam
had used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war. What happened
to them?
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter
made a strong case for the fact that the inspectors had indeed
found and destroyed much of what Saddam had of such weapons before
their 1998 departure. Ritter insists that Saddam could not have
accumulated what Bush alleges by 2002.
Yet, not one high U.S. official has vacillated
about claims of Saddam's perfidy in relation to weapons of mass
destruction. We're not talking about a long lapse of time. In
his January 20 address to the Reserve Officers Association, Rumsfeld
asserted that Saddam Hussein "has an active program to acquire
and develop nuclear weapons." Powell estimated conservatively
to the UN Security Council that "Iraq today has a stockpile
of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent."
"They sent them to Syria,"
the first response to the failure of finding the hideous weapons,
brought derisive laughter from critical members of the media.
How could Saddam have sneaked such massive weaponry across the
border, given U.S. spy satellites and other detection devices?
So, our leaders lied or they exaggerated
the capabilities of our $40 billion a year intelligence apparatus.
If Bush lied, then he or his advisers simply invented the WMD
excuse as a pretext for something else: liberation of Iraq or
to step one in a strategy of remaking the Middle East by force.
This more elaborate plan would seek not only to destroy the Muslim
terrorists, but offer permanent security to Israel and U.S. oil
interests as well.
In the April 1, 2002 and February 17,
2003 New Yorker, on remaking the Middle East and bringing democracy
to the region, Nicholas Lemann analyzes how the neo cons in the
administration, like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, eschewed
the idea of having this policy debated and fashioned instead
a grandiose scheme to gull the public. The steps taken by Bush
seem to have followed their plan and circumvented not only the
debate itself, but the Constitutional provision that Congress
declare war. So, what to conclude about our own system after
the Iraq war? The conservatives, who once affirmed their belief
of a government of laws and not men, have turned pragmatic on
their one-time dogma. The former prudent and penny-pinching Republicans
who abhorred the very concept of a national deficit have also
morphed into missionaries of deficit spending on the domestic
side.
Law itself, including the protection
of our basic liberties, has become transformed into a malleable
instrument of power that the powerful simply circumvent when
it behooves them. In the 21st Century the law of power seems
to have replaced the law of the statute. And power as the foundation
for a republic replaces the time honored accountability system
with secret plotting at top levels.
When doubt arises about the legality
and virtue of the Iraq invasion and skeptics question motives
of those who launched it, flag wavers appear to overwhelm the
doubters. The last refuge of scoundrels, indeed!
Saul Landau's work also appears on www.rprogreso.com. He is a fellow of the Institute
for Policy Studies and teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University.
His films on Iraq and Cuba are distributed by Cinema Guild 800-723-5522.
He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org.
Today's Features
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
Elaine
Cassel
Dark Star Chambers: Secret Trials,
Nameless Defendents, Veiled Threats to Defense Lawyers
Col.
Daniel Smith
Iraq's WMDs: Integrity, Ethics and
Intelligence
Chris
Fagen
Ignoring the World's Bloodiest War
Rick
Fantasia and Kim Voss
Bush's Low Intensity War on Labor
Sam
Hamod
Theater of Deception: Bush, Sharon,
Abbas
M.
Shahid Alam
Illuminating Tom Friedman
Jon
Brown
Greens & Dems: a Reply to Publius
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/18
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