Case for War Eroded by Absurd US Arguments
Published on Sunday, February 16, 2003 by the Toronto
Star
"Case for War Eroded by Absurd US Arguments"
by Haroon Siddiqui
When punch-drunk with power, you get blinded to reality and become deaf to even friendly advice. One suspects that's what's happening to America.
What else explains its determination to invade Iraq in the face of the biggest anti-war protests of modern times? Against the near-unanimous advice of key allies, including Jean Chrétien? In defiance of the report of the United Nations inspectors that Saddam Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction, that he has not resumed his nuclear program and that it may be possible to peacefully force him to comply with all his international obligations?
When Colin Powell responded to Hans Blix and Mohammed elBaradei at the crucial Security Council session Friday, it was as though he had not heard what they, along with the French foreign minister, had said in challenging some key aspects of Washington's relentless propaganda.
While all wars are preceded by varying degrees of mass manipulation, the current American blitz to soften public opinion at home and badger allies abroad has been in a league all its own.
America has been twisting facts, leaping to questionable, at times illogical, conclusions and resorting to scare tactics.
Just last week, in the middle of a terror alert, and on a day when Osama bin Laden reinserted himself into the headlines, the FBI announced that hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives are already in the United States awaiting orders to carry out terrorist attacks. If so, why doesn't the FBI just scoop them up?
America insists that Saddam Hussein is linked to Al Qaeda through Ansar al-Islam, a murderous guerrilla force of about 500 operating a poison factory in a remote corner of northeast Iraq. If so, why not blast it and them, rather than cite them to justify blasting innocent Iraqis?
America says Saddam's Unmanned Aerial Vehicles can fly more than 800 kilometers and possibly attack Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Oman, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and parts of the Central Asian republics. Why is it, then, that these potential victims do not feel threatened and almost all are opposing the war?
Very little of what the Bush administration is saying is being believed. The world has grown wiser to American proclivity for exaggeration. People have vivid memories of such 1991 Gulf War stories as Iraqi soldiers ripping out Kuwaiti babies from incubators.
The world is also wary of American intelligence, which is what Washington has been citing almost every day to justify attacking Iraq.
The folks who failed to foresee Sept. 11 also had no inkling of the 1979 Iranian revolution, Iraq's invasion of Iran the same year and of Kuwait in 1990, or the 1998 nuclear tests in India.
In 1998, American cruise missiles flattened a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan, on the basis of intelligence that it was making chemical weapons. The same day, cruise missiles killed an unknown number of Afghans at what the CIA had identified as bin Laden's base, which was said to be hosting "literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe" that day, under the tutelage of "about 600 key terrorist leaders."
In post-Taliban Afghanistan, American intelligence has been consistently wrong about the whereabouts of bin Laden and Mullah Omar. In 2001, American planes dropped leaflets over Kandahar offering a $10 million bounty for the capture of Omar — with a picture of someone else, who had to hide in his home for months.
In the case of Iraq, the first American allegation of a Saddam link with terrorism was based on CIA intelligence that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met an Iraqi operative in Prague in April, 2001. The report proved false. Former Czech leader Vaclav Havel said so himself.
There is no knowing, yet, what to make of the latest CIA assertions about other such terror links. But we do know that Blix and elBaradei have shot down the CIA declarations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Only last October, CIA director George Tenet was saying that the chances of Saddam using those weapons were "very low." His position has since "evolved," after he was leaned on by the Bush administration.
It is simply not credible for America to now claim that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction "may turn up in our cities" — especially not after the revelation that, unlike Iraq, North Korea has missiles capable of reaching North America.
The American case for war — dubious to start with because of its inconsistencies and double standards, and because of the politics of oil — is getting eroded by Washington's absurd and increasingly dishonest arguments.
Haroon Siddiqui is the Star's editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursdays and Sundays.
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