Antiwar.com Blog

What makes the nuclear programs of India and Iran so different, other than the fact that, unlike the former, the latter is a signatory to the Nonproliferation Treaty and has no nuclear weapons program? From President Bush’s press conference in New Delhi:

Q: Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, following up on this just a touch, what kind of message, sir, does it send to the world that India, which has been testing as late as 1998, nuclear testing, and is not — has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — is this a reward for bad behavior, as some critics suggest? And what kind of message does it send to other countries that are in the process of developing nuclear technology? Why should they sign the NPT if India is getting a deal without doing so, sir?

PRESIDENT BUSH: What this agreement says is things change, times change, that leadership can make a difference, and telling the world — sending the world a different message from that which is — what used to exist in people’s minds.

I — listen, I’ve always said this was going to be a difficult deal for the Prime Minister to sell to his parliament, but he showed great courage and leadership. And it’s difficult for the American President to sell to our Congress, because some people just don’t want to change and change with the times. I understand that. But this agreement is in our interests, and therefore, Jim, I’m confident we can sell this to our Congress as in the interest of the United States, and at the same time make it clear that there’s a way forward for other nations to participate in a — in civilian nuclear power in such a way as to address nonproliferation concerns.

India has charted a way forward. You heard the Prime Minister talk about going to the IAEA. That group exists to help safeguard — safeguard the world from proliferation.

Listen, I proposed reprocessing agreements — that stands in stark contrast to current nuclear theology that we shouldn’t reprocess for proliferation concerns. I don’t see how you can advocate nuclear power, in order to take the pressure off of our own economy, for example, without advocating technological development of reprocessing, because reprocessing will not only — reprocessing is going to help with the environmental concerns with nuclear power. It will make there — to put it bluntly, there will be less material to dispose.

And so I’m trying to think differently, not to stay stuck in the past, and recognize that by thinking differently, particularly on nuclear power, we can achieve some important objectives, one of which is less reliance on fossil fuels; second is to work with our partners to help both our economies grow; and thirdly is to be strong on dealing with the proliferation issues.

Remember the magic words:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

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When I interviewed [.mp3] former US Marine and lie-debunking UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, last year, he got all bent out of shape when I brought up Iraqi General Hussein Kamal [at about 38:00]. Kamal, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995, after which he was debriefed by the CIA, MI-6, IAEA, UNSCOM etc., and told them – with the paperwork to prove it – that Iraq had initially attempted to deceive the UN weapons inspectors after Operation Desert Storm™, still keeping some of their chemical munitions, but that he had personally overseen the destruction of every last bit of it by the end of 1991. (Kamal later went back to Iraq and was executed.)

According to Ritter, “this administration despises the American veteran, and this administration despises the men and women who wear the uniform,” as revealed by Cheney’s willingness to lie right to their face when he gave his speech to the VFW in Tennessee on August 26, 2002:

“Saddam Hussein had sought to frustrate and deceive [the inspectors] at every turn, and was often successful in doing so. I’ll cite one instance. During the spring of 1995, the inspectors were actually on the verge of declaring that Saddam’s programs to develop chemical weapons and longer-range ballistic missiles had been fully accounted for and shut down. Then Saddam’s son-in-law suddenly defected and began sharing information. Within days the inspectors were led to an Iraqi chicken farm. Hidden there were boxes of documents and lots of evidence regarding Iraq’s most secret weapons programs.

That should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself. To the dismay of the inspectors, they in time discovered that Saddam had kept them largely in the dark about the extent of his program to mass produce VX, one of the deadliest chemicals known to man. And far from having shut down Iraq’s prohibited missile programs, the inspectors found that Saddam had continued to test such missiles, almost literally under the noses of the U.N. inspectors.”

In ommitting the important details that all of this had been over for 9 years and had been completely fessed up to by the Iraqis for 7, Cheney lied to the VFW – a group of men who have fought in the wars of the past and were the most likely to have been sending their own grandsons off to kill and die under Cheney’s care.

According to Ritter, the Iraqi government had already confessed to everything and all Kamal did was confirm it. After he did so, Saddam Hussein, not knowing exactly what Kamal had given them, panicked, and dumped every last bit of paperwork he had in the UN’s lap.

The US government knew good and well since then that Hussein had no chemical weapons – nevermind the far-fetched forgery-based claim that Iraq was “reconstituting nuclear weapons.” As Ritter explained to me, and all over the place, the only reasons for the continued weapons inspections after 1995 was as a pretext to continue the sanctions, and to provide the CIA with opportunities to assassinate Saddam.

An even more egregious example of the contempt that the War Party holds for their expendeble toy soldiers – our friends, neighbors, kin and the grandsons of those men at the VFW – is the shocking, but quite overlooked finding in the big new poll of American troops in Iraq: 85% of them believe that they are in Iraq to get revenge for Saddam Hussein’s role in the attacks of September 11th. Eighty-five percent!

Who could possibly be giving them that impression?

The President of the United States denies that he or his administration have ever even implied such a thing:

“This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda.”

Audio here.

So, who supports the troops then? We in the antiwar movement who want them home at their bases, doing nothing in safety, or our neighbors who believe any lie the state tells them and support the politicians’ decisions to send them off to a desert to die for nothing?

Update: The great Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution – one of my favorite blogs – wrote in to set me straight. I had it wrong when I said General Hussein Kamal had overseen the destruction of the last of Iraq’s chemical and biological (such as they were) munitions in 1993.

It was 1991. That is, within a year of the first Gulf War. The above text has been changed to reflect that fact.

Jeremy noted how evidence has shown Saddam Hussein pardoned two men who plotted to kill him, and jailed the head of his secret police when four innocent men were executed.

As part of his defense before the Hague Inquisition, Slobodan Milosevic has presented many documents showing that he never ordered any of the crimes he’s accused of (even more so, that there was no evidence many of the crimes he’s accused of actually happened), and that instead, his government actually prosecuted military and police personnel who were murdering or mistreating civilians, seizing or destroying their property.

Imperial aggression is always preceded by a propaganda campaign painting their target as the new Hitler, and coming up with fresh lies after the original ones have gone stale and rotten. As a libertarian, I’m opposed to both the kind of satrapy Saddam Hussein ran, and to the post-modern, managerial state Milosevic presided over. But the Empire, which has all but eradicated liberty at home and has military presence in just about every country abroad, engages in wanton aggression, torture and hate-mongering, has absolutely no right to judge either of them. Something about the speck in someone else’s eye and a beam in one’s own, as I recall from the religious heritage of America’s founders…

I hate that something so obvious needs a caveat, but here, for those who aren’t so bright: Saddam bad. k? Alright, let’s move on.

When I was little, during the Gulf War, it was popular to talk about “Saddam Insane.” 10-year-olds didn’t make this up on their own — it was fed to us, via our parents and teachers, by the media as Pentagon organ. The US was raking Saddam’s army with waves of bullets for occupying Kuwait, it must only be because Saddam was a drooling crazy man who wanted to kill Christian babies, right? America only attacks people who are raving lunatics.

I will now not defend anything about Saddam Hussein, but will merely point out a couple of things I noticed just now on the morning carnage search.

The trial of Saddam Hussein took a new twist as prosecutors produced a letter purportedly showing the former Iraqi dictator spared the lives of two Shiites accused over an assassination bid.

…

The letter said that the intelligence service found that the two [Saddam assassination attempt plotters] — Ali Jaafar, 50, and Jassem Mohammed, 63 — had been released by mistake and were still alive. Saddam had then been asked how to proceed.

…

Saddam wrote back saying: “If luck has saved them, who am I to be tough on them.” The two were not executed. Saddam is believed to have pardoned them considering their old age.

You get that? He pardoned two men who had escaped his execution order. Two men who had plotted to kill him. You know what? That is crazy — I would have had them liquidated anyhow. …if I was into that sort of thing…which I’m not. *cough*

Reading on in the same article:

Four of the victims were added to the list by mistake and executed, the letter also said.

The head of the secret service was sentenced to three years in prison for this mistake, the court was told.

That’s right — the head of the Mukhabarat was put in prison for three years for taking the lives of four innocent men. Is this the behavior of a mass-murdering maniac? In fact, when was the last time anyone got a slap on the wrist in any state in the US for the execution of an innocent man?

Just more obvious proof that all one had to do was not overtly provoke Saddam to be just fine in Ba’athist Iraq. Hell, even if you did you sometimes turned out just fine. Just ask Ali Jaafar and Jassem Mohammed. They might still be alive if they haven’t been killed by the current war.

The Washington Post reports that Iraqi morgues have revised the number of those killed in last week’s sectarian attacks to 1,300.

What a mess we have helped to make. It is no wonder that 48% of Americans want US troops pulled out of Iraq now.

Even William F. Buckley now says “It Didn’t Work,” and that it is time to leave.