arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

Before this nation invests trillions of dollars and spills the blood of innocents over war with Iraq, Congress and the American people should consider the following. The first Bush administration lied to and manipulated Congress, the American public and the Arab peoples in order to win support for the Gulf war. Dick Cheney was then George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, and Paul Wolfitz was a Defense Department aide.

The history of U.S. behavior in the Persian Gulf demands that Congress and the American people get second and third independent opinions before relying on the current Bush administration's "facts" about Saddam's intentions and capabilities. One good source on the subject is former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark's "The Fire This Time" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1994.)

Clark demonstrates that a primary motive for the Gulf War was the G. H. W. Bush administration's vision of empire and domination of the Gulf region rather than realistic threats from Saddam Hussein. He quotes a 46-page Pentagon document which says that in the Middle East and Southwest Asia the "overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

The New York Times on March 8, 1992, said the document showed the Pentagon wants "a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy." Clark says, "It is a vision of world empire worthy of Alexander, Caesar or Genghis Khan."

He adds that in 1988, the U.S. government started to manipulate the Kuwaiti royal family into provoking Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. The invasion of Kuwait would then justify "a massive assault on Iraq to establish U.S. domination in the Gulf," says Clark. The Gulf War was fought "to establish U.S. power over the region and its oil," and not to defend Kuwait from Iraqi invasion as the George H. W. Bush administration claimed, according to Clark.

A 1989 memo recounting a meeting between Kuwaiti Brigadier Fahd Ahmed al-Fahd, director of Kuwait's Department of State Security, and Director William Webster of the CIA "discussed CIA training for 128 bodyguards for Kuwaiti royalty, and intelligence exchanges about Iraq and Iran between the CIA and Kuwait," writes Clark. Quoting from the memo:

"We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us, on condition that such activities are coordinated at a high level."

According to Clark, many experts have confirmed the memo's authenticity, though the CIA has disputed it.

In August of 1990, the Bush administration needed to convince Saudi Arabia to allow U.S. troops on its soil. Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell met with the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

The administration pressured the Saudis, claiming Saddam Hussein had thousands of troops on the Saudi border. Cheney and Powell showed Bandar satellite photos, allegedly of Saddam's gathering troops, and urged him to show the photos to the Saud family in order to convince them to listen to a U.S. delegation. However, there were no Iraqi troops near the Saudi border according to independent evaluations of satellite photos.

On August 5, 1990, Cheney, Powell and Defense Department aide Paul Wolfitz, among others, further pressured the Saudis to admit U.S. troops. At the time, Saudi diplomats didn't believe an Iraqi invasion was imminent. King Fahd had just dispatched a team to look for Iraqi troops on the Saudi border, and the team found nothing.

Ramsey Clark writes that on August 6, "worn down after four days of intense pressure from Washington, King Fahd agreed, in essence, to let the United States use Saudi Arabia as a staging ground for an assault against Iraq. But he asked President George H. W. Bush to declare in any public announcements that the Saudis had requested U.S. troops to defend their borders."

A month later, Bush told Congress 120,000 Iraqi troops had moved into Kuwait. However, U.S. News & World Report on January 20, 1992, stated that the same week Cheney was pressing the Saudis to admit our troops, a U.S. intelligence officer reported that Republican Guard troops were withdrawing from southern Kuwait back to Iraq.

Clark writes that on January 6, 1991, Florida's St. Petersburg Times reported satellite photos "showed there were no Iraqi troops on the Saudi border by August 8 [1990], when Bush announced the U.S. deployment." Two defense intelligence experts employed by the Times, one a former DIA satellite photo specialist, said the existing photographic evidence didn't support the Bush administration's claims.

"The satellite photos," says Clark, "were a very big news story. They showed that the U.S. government lied to justify placing 540,000 troops in Saudi Arabia to attack Iraq. However, the major media almost unanimously refused to cover the story. The only national press mention was a small piece on December 3 in Newsweek . . . The editors of the St. Petersburg Times approached the Scripps-Howard news service and the Associated Press—twice—with the story. Neither was interested."

Some members of the corporate press helped the Bush administration demonize Saddam Hussein, according to Clark, "in order to sell the war to the U.S. public." The alleged purpose for the war kept shifting. Early in the demonizing effort, Bush used oil as an excuse, saying, "[We] cannot permit a resource so vital to be dominated by one so ruthless. And we won't." (James Ridgeway, "The March to War," Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1991.)

A new excuse for the war was mentioned in the November 14, 1990, New York Times: "[Secretary of State James] Baker . . . is said to have grown exasperated with White House speech writers' inability to present the President's Gulf policy in a simple, coherent and compelling fashion so that it will have the sustained support of the American public.

"Since the start of the Gulf crisis in August [of 1990], the President's justifications for sending troops have included everything from 'vital interests' being at stake, to the principle that aggression should not be allowed to pay, to President Saddam Hussein of Iraq being worse than Hitler.

"Beginning last Friday in Moscow, Mr. Baker first began to say that what was at stake in the Gulf was the 'pocketbook' and 'standard of living' of every American."

Clark notes that when an opinion poll revealed that 54 percent of respondents would think the Gulf war justified if it would prevent Iraq from gaining nuclear weapons, George H. W. Bush said, "Every day that passes brings Saddam one step closer to realizing his goal of a nuclear weapons arsenal."

In April 1992, nuclear weapons experts reviewed analyses from the International Atomic Energy Agency and determined Iraq hadn't been close to developing any atomic bombs. The Bush administration had exaggerated this and other "threats," including the capabilities of Iraq's military force.

On February 26, 1991, Iraq had said on Baghdad Radio it was withdrawing forces from Kuwait. However, U.S. forces bombed the troops as they retreated along the Basra road and, according to Clark, attacked a "long row of cars along a 7-mile stretch," killing thousands, including fleeing civilians.

On February 28, 1991, the U.S. and Iraq called a ceasefire. By the war's end, many thousands of Iraqi civilians, many of them children, were dead as a result of bombing or sanctions.

Ramsey Clark says the George H. W. Bush administration committed a number of war crimes in its conduct of the Gulf War. He writes, "If crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are the most violent offenses a nation can commit, then the greatest love of country is to protest and seek to prevent one's own country from committing such violence."

A Buzzflash editorial of July 9, 2002, "Why are they shooting our women and children?" discussed the July bombing of the wedding party in Afghanistan.

It reminds us of the human suffering our politicians sometimes forget when considering whether to wage war, with the following example from a New York Times account of an incident in Oruzgan Province:

"Around her in the orchard, there was unspeakable gore. A woman's torso had landed in one of the small almond trees. Human flesh was still hanging on the tree five days after the attack, and more putrefying remains were tangled in the branches of a pomegranate tree, its bright scarlet flowers still blooming.

"They were collecting body parts in a bucket," said the governor of Oruzgan Province, Jan Muhammad, who arrived the day after the attack." (see http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/08/international/asia/08VILL.html)

The proposed war with Iraq would involve more of this kind of suffering. We owe it to ourselves, to future generations, to American military personnel and to Iraqi innocents to evaluate possible war with Iraq in the context of recent history.

In September, 1990, Jordan's King Hussein wrote: "The large industrial powers saw in the Gulf crisis a golden opportunity to reorganize the area according to designs in harmony with their ambitions and interests, at the expense of the aspirations and the interests of the Arab peoples, and to put in place a new international order."

Those in the Pentagon and the G. H. W. Bush administration who manipulated the Arab people for their own goals of world domination revealed a mindset of nationalist superiority. "When patriotism proclaims a nationalist superiority over others, it is racist," says Ramsey Clark. "When it compels absolute obedience to authority, it is fascist. . . . Might does not make right among nations any more than it does among individuals. When patriotism seduces a people to celebrate a military slaughter, the people have lost their vision."

Clark continues, "Love of country carries the duty to know what your government does, to relentlessly seek the truth of its conduct, to evaluate its words skeptically, to analyze carefully what is learned, to make judgments, and to act on them."

He concludes, "Sadly, the U.S. government, like nearly all others, takes an adversarial position against its own citizens regarding its acts. Officials lie to the people. The United States kept its bombing of Cambodia in the 1970s secret, not so Cambodians would be ignorant of it. . . . rather, it was kept secret from the American people to avoid protest."

This glimpse of history doesn't mean the current administration is doing what the first Bush administration did. However, it indicates the George W. Bush administration's stated justification for the war should be challenged. It also implies we need a Congress and media that will independently investigate every aspect of this proposed war instead of accepting the Bush administration's rationale at face value.

Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said there will probably be war with Iraq. According to recent wire reports, Congress is merely waiting for the Bush administration to make its case before agreeing to war.

Is the Bush administration the most reliable information resource for making a case to Congress? Can the Bush team be counted on to give Congress truthful data? After all, when George W. Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, was George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Defense, he misrepresented data in order to trump up support for the Gulf War.

In protest of the U.S. government's conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain said: "Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."

Does the George W. Bush administration's proposed war in Iraq deserve the blind loyalty of Congress and the American people? Or does America deserve better than the future we'll probably reap if we give our unthinking loyalty to a highly questionable, recklessly costly and certainly grisly war?

I hope conscientious citizens of this and other countries will call and write the U.S. Congress and ask them to thoroughly and independently investigate—and to question the Bush administration's data—instead of jumping like lemmings into war with Iraq. Feel free to mail this article to members of Congress, and let's send them all the other Bush-administration-free information we can. After all, we ordinary citizens can make a case to Congress, too, and our case won't be motivated by visions of oil, empire, nationalist superiority and world domination.