First, the lie of clear and present danger. Condoleezza Rice told it in typical fairy tale imagery on August 15th, "If Saddam Hussein is left in power doing the things he's doing now, he'll wreak havoc again. This is a threat that will emerge in a very great way." The message here is quite clear: an enormous threat looms on the horizon. Don't hamper our efforts to disarm it.
But what are the "things" Saddam Hussein is doing, and what is the "havoc" he wrought and where? Perhaps Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld can shed light on this. He told reporters recently it was "safe to say" that Iraq has developed mobile biological weapons laboratories. "They move around a lot of things to avoid detection or, if not detection, at least to avoid having them attacked." He gave no evidence of this, but we are well beyond the point where we hold our policymakers to proof.
What evidence there is actually runs counter to the argument that the Iraqi government has weapons of mass destruction. What we know, according to Scott Ritter, is that UNSCOM destroyed 90%-95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction from 1991-1998. What we know is that the IAEA declared Iraq free of nuclear weapons programs. UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in December of 1998, in advance of the furious four-day bombing campaign known as Desert Fox. We know the Iraqi conventional military capacity is the smallest in the region. And we know that while it may take only a bathtub and a chemistry set to create certain biological or chemical agents, it entails a great deal more than that to arm weaponry with those agents and deliver them effectively to a target. Instead of threatening Iraq with a massive military invasion based on the speculation that it is developing weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration should be doing everything in its power to ensure that weapons inspectors return. This includes negotiating openly in good faith, which brings us to the second lie.
The second lie is two-part, and it runs something like this: a) time and again in the years after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. has done everything it could to negotiate in good faith with Iraq; b) the Iraqi government cannot be trusted. Isn't this what the sanctions regime and weapons inspections have been all about, an honest and painstaking attempt to hold Iraq accountable to reasonable and essential UN resolutions, for the benefit of humanity? This is the message, but the reality is something else altogether.
Look at the recent attempt by Iraq to determine clearly what has been accomplished by the UN weapons inspectors and what remains, and to identify clear benchmarks for establishing when the inspections process is complete. In a March letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri wrote: "What has been achieved in seven years and seven months of Iraq's cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA in the disarmament area? What are the disarmament tasks and remaining questions to be clarified through the inspections?" Reasonable, useful questions. But instead of legitimizing Iraq's right to negotiate, the U.S. dismissed these and the other questions Iraq submitted.
Even a glance at the official record shows that the U.S. has repeatedly blocked efforts by other Security Council members to ease or lift the sanctions, efforts aimed at relieving widespread Iraqi civilian suffering. It was the presence of U.S. spies on the UN weapons inspection team that contributed to the collapse in 1998 of the weapons inspection process, not long before its likely completion. And it is the U.S. which violates Iraqi sovereignty daily by flying war planes over two-thirds of its countryside, without any legal authority, bombing it frequently, and often hurting or killing civilians.
Iraq is our enemy, Americans are told repeatedly, understanding without being told that one does not negotiate with the enemy. Saddam Hussein, Americans are told, is merciless, diabolical, a maniacal dictator who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Look what he did to his own people! He gassed them! Thus sweep dialogue and negotiation off the table. How can you have dialogue without trust, and who can trust such a villain?
Americans know how to relate to an enemy: we defend ourselves, and if necessary we attack. What would we do if we didn't have any enemies? This is more than a fanciful question, because the "enemy" we call Saddam Hussein is to an important degree an American creation,Ñnot only in the literal sense, that the U.S. helped him into power and has provided him with military intelligence and weaponry, but more importantly the popular image of Saddam Hussein as a menace has been portrayed so starkly and held before us so steadfastly that it is fixed securely in the popular American consciousness.
Whether Saddam Hussein would attack the U.S. if given the chance, however, is a matter of speculation. What we do know is that he never has. We also know that the government of Iraq has cooperated fully in the implementation of the Oil-For-Food programÑthis despite the humiliation of having to ask for permission whenever they want to buy something, despite the frustration of having to go through a cumbersome foreign bureaucracy just to spend their own money, and despite having to pay the salaries and living expenses of this imposed bureaucracy. They have not redirected funds, they have not misused goods, and they have not intentionally allowed humanitarian items to sit, unused, while people suffered. We also know, from a 1998 UN Food and Agriculture report, that the Iraqi government established a national system of food rationing after the Gulf War. It did so in the face of sudden and catastrophic food shortages brought on by the international economic embargo. By doing so, it averted catastrophe for its people. According to the report, "Widespread starvation was avoided through an effective public rationing system, which provided minimum quantities of food to the population." It was this same system upon which the UN piggybacked in implementing the Oil-For-Food program. The UN has used this system as a model for developing countries in other parts of the world.
This of course isn't to suggest that the government of Iraq is blameless or without responsibility. And certainly the brutal repression of ethnic minority groups is a state crime, a gross violation of human rights. What this crime tells us most clearly, however, is that Iraq's government is a military dictatorship; it maintains power by silencing opposition. When threatened, it may react with any violent means at its disposal. But it doesn't mean in and of itself that the government of Iraq cannot and will not negotiate in good faith with the U.S. and with the UN Security Council.
If anyone in this equation has a right to consider anyone an enemy, surely the Iraqi government has the right to consider the U.S. its enemy. It was U.S. military strength, after all, that devastated the Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War, in what any sane person can see was a criminal use of overwhelming force. Indeed, war itself was unnecessary, and might well have been avoided if the U.S. hadn't thwarted regional diplomatic efforts and ignored Saddam Hussein's serious offer to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait, facts that were not lost on the Iraqi government at the time and certainly have not been forgotten.
A third lie is that the desire to overthrow the Iraqi regime is rooted in humanitarian zeal. It is, as George Bush said last week, "in the interest of the world." The fact that most of the international communityÑincluding every Arab nation, Russia, China, Germany, and FranceÑhas expressed opposition to such a move has left him undeterred in his belief. Donald Rumsfeld committed an even grosser misrepresentation when he argued that toppling the Iraqi regime is in the best interest of the Iraqi people. "Twelve years ago, Iraqi people were among the best educated and most highly skilled in the region. Today, millions of the most educated and skilled Iraqis have left the country, fleeing this regime." Take out this regime, he said, and these people will gladly return to play a major role in "rebuilding Iraq." Another constellation of fairy tale images: the big friendly woodcutter disposing of the wolfish tyrant; refugees returning, full of gratitude, to renew their homeland.
Which brings us to the fourth lie, the most egregious: the failure to speak honestly about the likely impact on civilian life of a massive invasion. What Rumsfeld in his fanciful assertion didn't mention was the brutal air assault that is likely to precede any ground invasion, once again no doubt targeting essential civilian infrastructure such as the electrical grid; the predictably bloody ground war itself; and the foreign occupation that will follow it. Can we really bend our minds to believe that this is a necessary first step in rebuilding Iraq? If the U.S. wants to help Iraq rebuild, it can start by lifting economic sanctions, and rather than threatening further damage it can commit sizable donations toward repairing Iraq's devastated infrastructure. Other countries will surely follow this lead.
Donald Rumsfeld also seems to have forgotten that Saddam Hussein was in power 12 years ago when Iraq boasted such a large class of well-educated, highly-trained citizens. And he is wrong about the reason for the departure of Iraqi skilled workers and intellectuals, most of whom fled not the repressive regime but the oppressive sanctions which have destroyed the Iraqi economy. I doubt they feel any depth of gratitude to the United States, the architect, builder, and enforcer of the sanctions. Gratitude is engendered by free and open relations, fair dealings, and respect. Despite all that our government has done, it may not yet be too late for dialogue and negotiation. The government of Iraq may yet be willing to give the U.S. another chance.
David Smith-Ferri is a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a campaign to end the war against Iraq. He can be reached at smithferri@pacific.net
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2002
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