*UN Chief Nuclear Inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei’s March 7 report to the UN exposed as a fraud the main U.S. argument about Iraq’s supposed nuclear activities. For months, U.S. officials have cited Iraq’s importing of aluminum tubes, and the purported effort by Iraq to purchase uranium from Niger as proof that Iraq posed a “grave and imminent danger.” ElBaradei told the UN “there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment” of uranium into weapons-grade material. Powell was briefed on the falseness of the aluminum tube claim prior to his testimony before the U.N. on the subject last month, and made misrepresentations to the Security Council with this knowledge. ElBaradei also revealed that the documents cited by U.S. officials about the purchase of uranium by Iraq from Niger “are in fact not authentic” and were forgeries.
*To the dismay of the Bush administration, Hans Blix reported that Iraq was “pro-actively” cooperating with the inspectors and that the inspections could be fully completed and “will not take years, nor weeks, but months.” Iraq originally agreed to accept the weapons inspections in 1991 with the promise that economic sanctions would be lifted when it was confirmed that it was “disarmed” of non-conventional weapons. Thus Iraq could be finally free of the economic sanctions that have killed more than one million Iraqis in the last decade. That the inspections process was constructed solely as a pretext for war is demonstrated by the fact that when the inspections failed to serve as a trigger for war, the administration had no further use for them.
Confronted with the revelation of their own lies and concealment, Bush and Blair are rushing to begin the slaughter lest the growing global antiwar sentiment overwhelm their plans. One day after his national television “war speech,” the UN weapons inspectors and others exposed Bush’s pretext for war as a lie in their March 7 report. According to the U.N. weapons inspectors, the U.S. and the U.K. provided “faked evidence” to the U.N. to support the claim that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons, a series of forged letters. (“Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake, U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Document on Purchases Were Forged,” Washington Post, March 8, 2003, A1) As claims made by Bush and Powell are dismissed and discredited day by day, they are desperate to have the headlines focus on the coming war rather than the crumbling façade that they have asserted justifies the war.
The underlying premise of the White House propaganda for months can be summed up into one single message: This war will happen because no one can stop us. Bush and company know that they don’t have the truth on their side, nor the law, nor world public opinion, nor the governments of the world, nor the UN. Their strategy is based on the myth of invincible military superiority: a supremacy in arms and equipment that can always crush those that it targets and always succeed in intimidating and bullying those who attempt political opposition. It is this same arrogance of power that dragged the country into twelve years of war in Vietnam killing more than a million Vietnamese and 58,000 GI’s before the madness was brought to an end. It seems that the only lesson taken by the Bush Administration from the Vietnam War is that the administration should launch massive and obliterating destruction and killing with the belief that this will eliminate protracted battle for the U.S. This is a dangerous fallacy. A war launched by the U.S. government in the Middle East will have catastrophic consequences in the region and in the U.S. for years to come.
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1 comment on “EVIL DICTATOR BUSH + CO. = PROVEN LIARS!”
And the sick thing is that it’s being brushed aside.