February 2, 2004
NEW YORK - `We were all wrong,' David Kay, the White House's chief weapons hunter and longtime war booster, admitted last week. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as the US and Britain had long alleged.
Claims Iraq had nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots, long-ranged missiles, links to al-Qaida — all were false. The only thing real: Iraq's oil.
President George W. Bush fevered warnings that Iraq posed an `imminent threat' to all mankind were nothing more than hot air.
If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction(wmd's), as it long insisted, we must draw one of two conclusions.
President George Bush, and Secretaries Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, lied outrageously about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed, and gravely deceived Congress and the American people. The real reason for the Iraq adventure was oil piracy and promoting Greater Israel.
Or, they were misinformed almost beyond belief and must be judged totally incompetent to lead a great nation.
If Bush and his team of chest-thumping, self-proclaimed national security experts were truly so misinformed about Iraq's weapons and capabilities, then they launched a war by mistake….and presided over the two biggest nationals security fiascos since Pearl Harbor: the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.
Bush's plans announced this week for an investigation of intelligence leading to the war is nothing more than a whitewash designed to defer this explosive issue until well after elections.
President Saddam Hussein, whom Bush repeatedly branded a `liar,' was in fact telling the truth all along when he said all of Iraq's old weapons systems had been destroyed. It was Bush and Blair who were not telling the truth.
Saddam should hire lawyer Johnny Cochrane and sue the US and Britain for all they're worth.
So, take your pick. The Iraqi war either was the Mother of All Lies, or the Mother of All Fiascos.
Confronted by these ugly facts, Bush tried to re-brand the unprovoked war against Iraq by claiming it was justified because Saddam was such a horrid man. What arrant hypocrisy. When Saddam committed his worst deeds — the 1980's — he was a close US ally, secretly supported by Washington and London with arms, intelligence, technicians, and cash.
Now, the White House is trying to blame CIA for the Iraq fiasco. CIA director George Tenet certainly wronged his agency and nation by not going public to debunk White House war propaganda over Iraq.
But active and retired CIA officers kept warning the public and media (including this writer) that intelligence on Iraq had been deeply corrupted and politicized by a cabal of pro-war neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon and Vice President's office. They were ignored.
A shadowy Pentagon intelligence unit, the Office for Special Projects, was created by pro-Israel neo-conservatives to whip up war fever against Iraq. The OSP fed fake or wildly exaggerated reports from Israeli intelligence to the White House and Pentagon, which were then trumpeted by neo-conservative media.
A former senior Israeli intelligence official recently confirmed his nation had been a `full partner' in generating `flawed' intelligence supplied to pro-war factions in US and British intelligence. In other words, Israel's far right Likud Party fed fake intel to Likud's American supporters embedded in the Pentagon, Vice President's Offcie, and National Security Council.
This column has maintained for the past ten years that a campaign of lies and disinformation was being waged against Iraq. Though I detested Saddam, whose brutal secret police threatened to hang me, I was incensed to see western democracies fabricating war propaganda worthy of Nazi propagandist, Dr Goebbles.
I watched with disgust as so-called `Iraq experts' and neo-conservative propagandists, few of whom had ever been to Iraq, warned night after night on US TV about the `deadly threat' from Iraq. Genuine Mideast specialists were systematically excluded from US media commentary. As one reader just noted, the US media was not `embedded,' it was in bed with the government.
By challenging war propaganda, I became the object of viscous attacks by fellow journalists and media pundits in the US and Canada. Each week, I was flooded by hate email.
I even left twice weekly shows at TV Ontario — after nine years — after the station producers tried to censor my views on Iraq and kept prompting a pro-war, neo-con party line on TVO's programs.
`Don't be on the losing side,' a close friend warned last year. `Why risk your career and reputation by insisting Iraq has no wmd's and saying the US invasion was wrong and illegal'
Why? Because I knew Iraq had no wmd's and no means of delivering them, and I passionately hate propaganda of all kinds — worst of all, when it comes from democratic governments.
`Do you feel vindicated?' a radio show host asked me last week…`you predicted a year ago that no wmd's would be found in Iraq.'
Not vindicated. Just dismayed. Dismayed by the continuing widespread indifference — or even approval — by many Americans of the aggression against Iraq that violated international law and basic norms of civilized behavior. Dismayed by the cowardly attitude of the US Congress and the mainstream media. And deeply concerned by growing hatred for the US around the globe.
Too few Americans seem troubled their president either lied or blundered them into a horrible mess in Iraq, so far costing 523 Americans dead, nearly 10,000 casualties, and US $200 billion for 2003-04, not to mention the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, and the current nightmarish mess in Iraq.
This is an historic malfeasance far exceeding in gravity Nixon's Watergate scandal or Bill Clinton's prevarications.
The war fever, and hatred of Muslims and foreigners fostered by the Bush Administration continues to grip America. I am not comparing the US in 2004 to Nazi Germany, but one begins to understand how Germans, another educated, highly civilized people, were driven in the 1930's by a campaign of fear and lies into supporting a policy of aggression, religious hatred, and racism.
Foreign Correspondent
