Antiwar.com Blog

In the frenetic rush to war, much was said about Iraq’s alleged ongoing bioterror programs. Many of us sat spellbound and shocked (and for more than just one reason) as Colin Powell stood before the United Nations and itemized the threats facing the world’s population from Saddam Hussain’s possession of WMDs. We’ve heard over and over the now-debunked allegations — at least I thought I had heard all of them. It seems in all the clamor of the drumbeating, I missed hearing one of threats. It must have been a very brief senior moment for me because I don’t remember “rail cars” being repeated again and I was surprised when I found it quoted on the CIA’s web page: Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants, 28 May 2003

Iraq manufactured mobile trailers and railcars to produce biological agents, which were designed to evade UN weapons inspectors. Agent production reportedly occurred Thursday night through Friday when the UN did not conduct inspections in observance of the Muslim holy day…

So I went back and pulled up Secretary of State Powell’s UN speech of February 5, 2003 and sure enough there it was:

“Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. We have diagrammed what our sources reported about these mobile facilities. Here you see both truck and rail car-mounted mobile factories. The description our sources gave us of the technical features required by such facilities are highly detailed and extremely accurate…As shown in this diagram, these factories can be concealed easily, either by moving ordinary-looking trucks and rail cars along Iraq’s thousands of miles of highway or track, or by parking them in a garage or warehouse or somewhere in Iraq’s extensive system of underground tunnels and bunkers…”

There are some who still contend that Saddam Hussain did indeed have all these mobile weapons laboratories and that they may still be hidden away — in fact, the CIA is currently offering rewards for information of the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD — but how do you hide a rail car? You can’t just drive it off into someone’s garage and close the door. You can’t sneak it over the border into another country in the dead of night even during a sandstorm without someone noticing a train moving across. And with all the satellite and overflight photographs, you can’t bury it out in the desert and then bulldoze up miles of railroad track so they can’t be followed. So, where are the railcars?

Is it just me who believes we need to dredge up all of these “intelligence” sources and their handlers and get some heads rolling? They lied, and thousands died.

In order to maintain troop levels in Iraq, stop-loss and stop-movement orders are preventing those who would choose to leave the military from doing so, adding to the strain on families where both husband and wife are soldiers and facing separations of as long as two years.

Brian Stewmon returned late last month from an 11½-month tour in Iraq. He got home just in time to kiss his wife goodbye and send her off on her own yearlong deployment. “We expected separation, but we never expected two years,” Michelle Stewmon said last week, just after arriving in Kuwait. “People don’t know that it’s going on. They’re shocked this is happening.” The Stewmons are among a small number of dual-military families taking a double-barreled hit from the Army’s supercharged operations tempo the past two years.

Servicemembers who marry know it’s possible that one or both could be deployed. Most Army families have endured a South Korean or Balkans tour. But Operation Iraqi Freedom, with its one-year tours and large personnel demands, has boosted the burden to something no pre-9/11 soldier could have imagined.
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French General Philippe Morillon, whose intervention saved the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica from defeat in 1993 and helped establish it as a “safe area” for civilians (and the 28th Infantry Division of the Bosnian [Muslim] Army), made a fatal error last week. He let the truth slip out in his testimony against Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague Inquisition. Now the association of former Srebrenica residents plans to sue him for being an “accessory to genocide”, reported a Croatian daily. Continue reading “Telling the truth now a crime in Bosnia?”

I suppose the oft-bleated excuse that “9/11 changed everything” will be blamed for why the man who warned against Big Brother has become Big Brother. Here’s then-Sen. John Ashcroft’s thoughts on the Internet and the Bill of Rights back in 1997.

There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.

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In today’s “Best of the Web,” James Taranto pokes fun at Mikhail Gorbachev for finally admitting the obvious about the Soviet war on Afghanistan; now, I’ll poke fun at Taranto for failing to see the obvious parallels:

The Soviet Union’s 10-year invasion of Afghanistan was a mistake, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged on the eve of the 15th anniversary of Soviet withdrawal.

“The fact that we moved our troops into Afghanistan was a political mistake, which had to do with the Soviet Union’s ideological approach to international policy in those years,” Gorbachev was quoted by Interfax as saying.

“An attempt to force an extraneous social model on a country that has deep traditions of its own is always doomed to failure,” Gorbachev said.

Taranto misses the real joke because he hasn’t been reading his Weekly Standard:

A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.

Such as, say, bankrupting themselves to force extraneous social models on countries that have deep traditions of their own?

“Riverbend” is the alias of a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who started her own blog, Baghdad Burning, back in August of last year to write about her day-to-day experiences and thoughts in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. In her entry for February 15th, 2004, she speaks about the bombing of Baghdad during Gulf War I, focusing on the deaths of hundreds of mostly women and children huddled for safety in a bomb shelter in the Amiriyah district.

Amiriyah itself is an area full of school teachers, college professors, doctors and ordinary employees- a middle-class neighborhood with low houses, friendly people and a growing mercantile population. It was a mélange of Sunnis and Shi’a and Christians- all living together peacefully and happily. After the 13th of February, it became the area everyone avoided. For weeks and weeks the whole area stank of charred flesh and the air was thick and gray with ash. The beige stucco houses were suddenly all covered with black pieces of cloth scrolled with the names of dead loved ones. “Ali Jabbar mourns the loss of his wife, daughter, and two sons”; “Muna Rahim mourns the loss of her mother, sisters, brothers and sons”
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