"The name Saddam Hussein alone is enough to send an involuntary shudder of loathing, fear and abhorrence down many Israelis' backs. A latter day Hitler-wannabe, just much less "capable", Saddam threatened he would "burn half of Israel". A thug, maybe the worst of the many the Arab world has produced, he brutalized millions of his own people, started a bloody war with Iran and conquered and raped Kuwait. A depraved, murderous dictator, Saddam squandered his people's natural wealth; he took one of the Arab world's more educated and industrious peoples and stamped out their freedom, creativity, joy of life, even life itself. This Arab "hero" subjected his own people to a degree of oppression his "occupied Palestinian brethren" never dreamed of." (January 15, 2007 - Chuck Freilich, Senior Fellow, International Security Program - Belfer Center Programs or Projects: International Security BelferCenter)
"This "great benefactor" of the Palestinian people gave $10,000 to the families of routine "martyrs" and $25,000 to those of successful suicide bombers. It was a "blood relationship" in the fullest sense of the word. Had Saddam actually developed weapons of mass destruction we can only speculate how far he might have gone in support of the Palestinians. Fortunately, he was not given the chance." (Belfer Center)
"By now, however, most of us realize that there is much more to the American purpose in Iraq than a commitment to an elected government in Baghdad that could peacefully resolve sectarian tensions. The rhetoric of the Bush administration and its chief Democratic opponents (most notably Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) is increasingly laced with references - to quote Clinton - to "vital national security interests" in the Middle East that will require a continuing "military as well as political mission." In Iraq, leading Washington politicians of both parties agree on the necessity of establishing a friendly government that will welcome the presence of a "residual" American military force, oppose Iran's regional aspirations, and prevent the country from becoming "a petri dish for insurgents." (Michael Schwartz, The Arab American News - December 22, 2007)
Rumsfeld said of the Saddam regime their "logic is different" than ours. Secretary Dean Rush once said the exact same thing about the Vietnamese. When asked by reporters how that little country could challenge the mighty U.S. fleet when referring to the Tonkin Bay incident, he said only that "their process of logic are very different."
A lot of civilians have been killed in Iraq. It must be because they made the mistake of living in combat zones. It must be because they made the mistake of living in Iraq. As Zinn mentions in "Terrorism and War" (2002), when Lieutenant Colonel Dave Lapan at the Pentagon was asked about civilians killed in Afghanistan. He said,
"At our bombing altitudes--twenty-five or thirty thousand feet--we saw no people, heard no screams, saw no blood, no torn limbs. I remember only seeing the canisters light up like matches flaring one by one on the ground below. Up there in the sky, I was just `doing my job'---the explanation throughout history of warriors committing atrocities." (Zinn - "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train" - 94)
While George Bush claimed WMD was a serious concern, he was using WMD against the Iraqis. The MOAB bomb was moved to Iraq, which is currently the biggest bomb there (see note below), which leaves a large mushroom cloud like a small nuclear device, however a new bomb is under being made. A 30,000-pound weapon called Big BLU (Bomb Live Unit) is being developed as are tactical nuclear weapons for use in George W. Bush military mis-adventures. The U.S. has used cluster bomb units, napalm-like munitions and depleted uranium.
The MOAB is a massive new bomb, a weapons of mass distruction which carries 18,000 pounds of tritonal explosives and has an indefinite shelf life. It replaces the Vietnam-era "Daisy Cutter," a 15,000-pound bomb with 12,600 pounds of the less-powerful GSX explosives. The explosion is so intense it registers on earthquake measuring equipment as seismic activity. Known as MOAB the "Mother of All Bombs" and an acronym for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, it is a 21,000-pound explosive which weighs as much as six Volkswagen Beetles and is the largest so-called "conventional" bomb in use by the military. The MOAB is in the U.S. arsenal, however it has not been used.
"On 11 September 2007 the Russian military announced that it had tested what it called the "Father of All Bombs". Described as the world's most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered munition, the Russian military claimed it was four times more powerful than the American "Mother Of All Bombs." While the Russian bomb was reported to contain 7.8 tons of "thermobaric" explosive, compared to the more than 8 tons of explosives in the American bomb, the Russian bomb was said to use more highly efficient explosive, with a yield equivalent to 44 tons of TNT. The bomb was reported to have a blast radius of 300 meters, double that of the American bomb, while the temperature at the epicenter was also reported to be twice as high." (GlobalSecurity.org )
"Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton, the former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and now Ambassador to the United Nations -- two proponents of what has been called the "democratic domino" theory, have both clearly stated that Washington's ambitions do not end in Baghdad." (SIFY News - Apr 10, 2003 - "After Iraq, US may 'reform' Saudi, Iran")
"Media also daily assures us that since we are the most envied and admired people on earth, everyone else on earth is eager to immigrate to the U.S. so that he can share in the greatest pie ever baked by arbitragers...." (Gore Vidal, "Dreaming War" - 2002) |
George Bush says the Arab world hates us because they envy us and want to destroy our freedom. George Bush is a simpleton - but he is a dangerous simpleton and he is an "imminent threat" to others, including those who have to die to make the world safe for American investments and our oil under their sand.
" Contrary to the claims of many Administration critics, the government distorted, but did not wholly fabricate, the U.S. intelligence community's assessments. The U.S. intelligence community--as well as those of all of the Western European states, Israel, Iran, Russia, and China--were nearly unanimous in the belief that by 2003, Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs. Only a tiny number of analysts dissented from this position, and those that did so tended to be discredited for one reason or another. Of course, the intelligence communities were wrong in this belief, but it is simply not the case that the Bush Administration claimed that Iraq had reconstituted its WMD programs, contrary to the beliefs of the intelligence professionals. Where the Administration exaggerated the conclusions of the intelligence community was in claiming that Iraq had ties to al-Qa'ida, and that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was on the brink (usually described as "one year") of acquiring a nuclear weapon. Ninety percent of the intelligence analysts did believe that Iraq would have nuclear weapons within five to seven years (as reported in the 2002 Special National Intelligence Estimate), but very few believed that Iraq could acquire one within a year. On this set of issues, see Paul Pillar, "Intelligence, Policy, and the War in Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 2 (March/April 2005); Kenneth M. Pollack, "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong?" The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 293, No. 1 (January/February 2004); United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, (Washington, DC: GPO, 2004); United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Postwar Findings about Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How they Compare with Prewar Assessments, (Washington, DC: GPO, 2006)." (from the notes for THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS OF FAILURE IN IRAQ: A RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION Kenneth M. Pollack in MERIA - Meria.idc.ac.il)
"If Iraq does slide into all-out civil war, the Bush Administration will have only itself to blame. It disregarded the advice of experts on Iraq, on nation-building, and on military operations. It staged both the invasion and the reconstruction on the cheap. It never learned from its mistakes and never committed adequate resources to accomplish either its original lofty aspirations or even its later, more modest goals. It refused to believe intelligence that contradicted its own views and doggedly insisted that reality conform to its wishes. In its breathtaking hubris, the Administration engineered a Greek tragedy in Iraq, the outcome of which may plague us for decades." (ibid)
"The invasion of Iraq was born of a great many different ideas. As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz noted in an interview with Vanity Fair, the threat of Saddam with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was simply the one threat upon which all of the senior members of the Bush Administration agreed--and believed that it could be used to justify the war to the public. Not all of these ideas were foolish. Some of their rationales for war were quite reasonable: the international consensus that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs--which turned out to be entirely mistaken but was considered "incontrovertible" at the time; the fact that Saddam was one of the most brutal tyrants of the previous sixty years; the fact that his ambitions ran directly counter to those of the United States--and his efforts to achieve them had destabilized the Persian Gulf for twenty-five years; and the problem that the world was losing interest in keeping him bound by sanctions, as evinced by the postwar revelations of the Volcker commission concerning the corruption and manipulation of the Oil-for-Food program by the Iraqi government to secure the political support of France, Russia, and China, among other countries." (ibid)After 911, everything changed. Saddam Hussein threatened to use weapons of mass destruction and he has had them. We can now say in retrospect that it was a bad call. But now that we are there and George Bush upset the balance of power in the region; and Iran has been the greatest benefactor of this war, how do we leave?
Related ContentHank Roth
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