Copyright: Eric S. Margolis, 2002
Mar 29, 2002
HONG KONG - The sun long ago set on the British Empire. Today, its heir and successor, the American Imperium, is at a high noon of wealth and power. Even so, Britain's PM Tony Blair appears determined to cling to at least a token of the imperial era when the small, rainy island in the North Sea ruled a full quarter of the globe.
Blair continues to accentuate Britain's post-colonial role as Washington's most loyal and accommodating ally, in part compensating for the glaring strategic and diplomatic ineptitude of the Bush Administration, which was shown full force by Vice President Cheney's recent embarrassing fiasco of a trip to the Mideast.
Playing moon to the American sun means keeping the EU at arm's length, and joining in US wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. While Britain's health system crumbles and its Victorian railroads pose a growing public danger, the Labor government still finds money to bomb Iraq and, most lately, to dispatch 1,700 Royal Marines to enforce Washington's writ in Afghanistan.
This past week, the British government claimed an Al-Qaida biological weapons laboratory, complete with anthrax spores, had been discovered in Afghanistan. This allegation turned out to be fake, but it was used to justify sending more soldiers to the war in Afghanistan. That nation's exiled king, Zahir Shah, who is due to shortly be restored to the throne by Washington, recently described the US war as `stupid and useless.' But Blair evidently does not think so. By raising the British ante in the Great Game of Caspian Oil, London hopes to join the US in exploiting the mineral riches of Central Asia.
The Ali Baba-Osama bin Laden cave hoax reminds me of a far bigger and more outrageous piece of British hypocrisy. Tony Blair says he plans to join George W Bush's proposed crusade against Iraq because wicked Saddam Hussein may possess forbidden chemical and biological weapons. Washington and London insist Iraq must be invaded and Saddam destroyed because he MIGHT use biowarfare weapons at some later date.
And from where did the Butcher of Baghdad get these chemical and biological weapons? From Her Majesty's government. In 1990, on assignment in Baghdad, I discovered a group of British chemical technicians who told me - and showed me documents - that they had been employed until a few weeks earlier at Iraq's top secret Salman Pak laboratories developing or researching germ warfare weapons: anthrax, botulism, Q-fever, and tularemia.
The British technicians said they had been secretly seconded to Iraq by British intelligence, MI6, and the Ministry of Defence with the objective of producing biological weapons for use by the Iraqi Army against Iran. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, waging a bloody, eight-year war. Iraq's germ warfare feeder stocks came, with full US government approval, from an American laboratory in Maryland. German firms supplied equipment and training for Iraq's chemical weapons manufacturing, in the full knowledge of the US, British, and German governments.
Iraq's war of aggression against Iran was encouraged and funded by the US as well as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Gulf Emirates. Iraq was covertly supplied huge quantities of arms thanks to US support. Israel, while publicly denouncing Iran as a `terrorist state' and `enemy of the Jewish people,' secretly sold Iran US $5 billion of American arms and spare parts.
In a final irony, Saudi Arabia helped finance Iraq's secret nuclear research program, hoping to produce a nuclear weapons for the Arabs to counter the threat of Israel's large nuclear arsenal. Iraq bartered oil to South Africa in exchange for South African artillery, uranium, and nuclear weapons technology - technology South Africa had acquired from Israel in exchange for semi-processed uranium ore.
So, in 1988 Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons was an ally of the west, lauded even by former vice-presidential candidate US Senator Joseph Lieberman, as a good dictator and friend of America. As long as Saddam showered Iranian troops and rebellious Kurds with mustard and nerve gas, and developed germs to infect Iran, that, by Washington's utilitarian morality, was AOK.
But in 2002 Saddam `MIGHT" have a few drums of nerve gas or vials of nasty germs that MIGHT be used, that is cause for an international crusade to overthrow the evil Saddam and destroy his vats of death. If the US and Britain just happen- in the process of saving mankind from the Iraqi Fu Manchu - to gain control of Iraq's oil, second only to Saudi Arabia's, well, all the better. Good Christian folk, to use George W's lexicon, deserve to control oil and have a God-given right to drive their gas-guzzling SUV's as much as they want.
The US wants to smash Saddam for defying the US and daring to challenge its Mideast Oil Raj. A lesson is to be made of Iraq to deter any other US satraps from getting too independent. Britain is happy to accept crumbs from America's Mideast and Central Asian banquets. Israel wants the US to destroy Iraq, thus sparing its soldiers the bloody job. Washington does not care how many Iraqi civilians die - and the toll, according to the UN is now well over 500,000 - in order to overthrow old ally turned wicked Saracen, Saddam Hussein.
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