1

[This anthology was prepared in the period between November 2002 and early March 2003. I had been speaking out publicly against the sanctions imposed upon Iraq, the bombing of Iraq (under cover of the U.S.-led imposition of no-y zones), and the open criminality of U.S.-U.K. plans for an invasion of Iraq: this collection of short excerpts emerged out of a determination to ensure that my statements rested upon careful analysis of the best available primary and critical sources. I shared early versions of it by email with colleagues in a number of universities in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S., and posted the nal version under my name on the University of Guelph's serverfrom which it was deleted, without consultation, in late 2003. It had in the mean time been reproduced on at least one U.S. website).]

WAR AGAINST IRAQ:

CRITICAL RESOURCES

Edited by Michael Keefer

March 2003

Contents
Preface 1. The principle of universalism 2. What is Terrorism? 3. Western War Crimes, 1991-2003 (a) The bombing of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War was criminal (b) The use of depleted uranium munitions was criminal (c) Sanctions against Iraq constituted a war crime (d) The U.S./U.K. no-y-zones in Iraq constituted a war crime 4. U.S./U.K. War Crimes in the 2003 Attack on Iraq (a) Pre-emptive war (i.e. unprovoked attack) is a war crime (b) The bombing of civilians is a war crime (c) U.S. use of chemical weapons would be a war crime (d) The responsibilities of occupying powers 3 4-7 7-10 11 11-13 13-18 18-21 21-24 24-30 30-32 32-34

5. Weapons of Mass Destruction: Did Iraq pose a threat to peace and security? (a) The evidence of Iraqs disarmament 34-39 (b) The sources of Iraqs pre-1991 WMD program 39-40 (c) U.S. use of weapons of mass destruction 40-42 6. Decoding U.S. and U.K. Propaganda (a) Key statements of the U.S. and U.K. position (b) Responses to Bush and Powell (c) Responses to Blair (d) The scandal of Blairs plagiarized Dossier (e) Another British forgery: uranium from Niger (f) Old whoppers: murdered incubator babies (1990), 265,000 Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border (1991), the supposed attempt to assassinate George Bush I (1993) (g) Newer lies: Iraqs supposed expulsion of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors (1998) (h) Recent ctions: Iraqi links with al Qaeda (i) Recent ctions: the threat of Iraqs weaponry (j) Attempts to manipulate and distort the weapons inspectors report 7. Is the United States a Rogue State? 8. War for Oil 9. The War on Terrorism (a) Ethical ironies of the War on Terrorism (b) Consequences of the War on Terrorism (c) 9/11 as an opportunity for the U.S. government (and the Project for the New American Century [PNAC] Report) (d) Manipulations of public fear 10. The attack on Afghanistan and its consequences (a) Was the war legitimate? (b) Has the war been a success in U.S. terms? (c) What have its political and humanitarian consequences been? (d) War crimes committed against Taliban prisoners of war 42 43-45 45-48 48-49 49-51 52-54 54-56 56 56-57 57 58-63 63-67 67-69 69-72 72-75 75-77 77-78 78-81 81-83 83-85

11. War crimes in Palestine 12. Larger Contexts of the Attack on Iraq: Some Recent Studies 13. What Is To Be Done?

85-92 92-94 94-98

Preface
This dossier contains excerpts from recent readings on the subject of events which for me, as for many other people, have been a source of anguish. My goal in preparing it has been to assemble a coherently organized body of material that makes clear the relevant historical facts, that exposes the many deliberate falsehoods and distortions circulated by the American and British governments and by their allies in the corporate mass media, and that provides strong examples of sceptical, historically responsible and ethically grounded interventions in what we must recognize as a matter of life and death for hundreds of thousands of children, women and men. (My own brief contributions are printed in italics. I have in all cases indicated sources, usually in the form of internet addresses.) Certain kinds of texts dealing with Iraq and related subjects have been excluded from this selection. Writers who make a virtue of amoral irrationalism and loudly repeat known falsehoods are not represented here. For a minor example of the genre, see Rex Murphy, 9/11 was the smoking gun, boys, The Globe and Mail (February 8, 2003): A19. Writers who mistake a cowardly and unethical Realpolitik for political wisdom are not represented here. See for instance J. L. Granatstein, Why go to war? Because we have to, National Post (February 20, 2003): A18. This historians strongest reason for supporting the Bush regimes aggressions is that Canada shares a continent with the United States and we will pay heavily if we do not support our neighbour. Writers whose pretense of judicious balance excludes any serious consideration of facts, ethics and international law are not represented here. This tendency is exemplied by Thomas Homer-Dixon, War: Which way to turn? The Globe and Mail (February 8, 2003): A17. The balance of this director of the University of Torontos Centre for the Study of Peace and Conict is indistinguishable from hypocrisy: he is against war, but only, it seems, for the moment. To build legitimacy for action against Iraq we must build as broad an international consensus behind war as possible. My hope is that the materials I have chosen may provide a useful basis for discussion and debate. I believe it is important to move beyond feelings of private anguish and to take our demands for justice and for peace rmly into the public sphere. Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas (whose words reappear at greater length at the end of these excerpts) is right in identifying the present moment as one in which no honest man or woman can remain silent and indifferent. Michael Keefer Toronto, February 28, 2003

1. The principle of universalism

A refusal to judge ones own actions by the same standards of morality or legality one applies to others is a common human failingbut one that in recent years has been especially evident in American political discourse. Americans have been taught by media pundits to think of their country as somehow standing outside the structures of socio-economic causality and political calculation that characterize the behaviour and the history of other countries. In this view, the United States is the culmination of a world-historical narrative of material progress and human liberation, and therefore an exception to the rules that condition the behaviour of other states, and a uniquely moral agent in world politics. (To be the end-point of a story is in some sense to escape from the story: the New Jerusalem or the City on a Hill is not a city like any other city, and the Last, Best Hope of Humankind is not a nation-state like any other nation-state.) Whether myths of this sort legitimize a politics of egalitarian emancipation, of arrogant complacency, or of vehement reaction depends very largely on whether this last, best hope is represented as something still to be actualized, as already realized, or as under threat (for example, by terror). But exceptionalism in any form contradicts the principle of universalism that is the basis both of international law and of any coherent ethics. Writings by Uri Avnery, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, Edward Said, Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, Norman Solomon, and Hans von Sponeck are excerpted in this section. [] human-rights violations and the breach of international treaties by the Iraqi regime in no way absolve the international community of their obligation to maintain ethical, moral and legal standards in their treatment of Iraq.
Hans von Sponeck, former UN assistant secretary-general and humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, Iraq: International Sanctions and What Next? Middle East Policy (October 2000), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/sponeck.shtm.

While the US government accuses Iraq of having violated 16 UN resolutions, no mention is made that the main responsibility for the violation of just about all international treaties and conventions from the UN Charter to the International Covenant of economic, social and cultural rights, the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the genocide convention points to the US and British governments (see in this connection a document of UN/ECOSOC dated 21 June 2000 (GE.00-14092) in which Prof. Marc Bossuyt, presently judge in the Belgian Supreme Court and formerly chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission gives evidence to this effect [...]).
Hans von Sponeck, Four Questions, Four Answers (European Colloquium, Brussels, September 25, 2002), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/4questions.shtm.

Of course the real issue in the Gulf [War of 1991] so far as the U.S. was concerned was oil and strategic power, not the Bush administrations professed principles, but what compromised intellectual discussion throughout the country, in its reiterations of the inadmissibility of land unilaterally

5 acquired by force, was the absence of universal application of the idea. What never seemed relevant to the many American intellectuals who supported the war was that the U.S. itself had just recently invaded and for a time occupied the sovereign state of Panama. Surely if one criticized Iraq, it therefore followed that the U.S. deserved the same criticism? But no: our motives were higher, Saddam was a Hitler, whereas we were moved by largely altruistic and disinterested motives, and therefore this was a just war.
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (1994; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 95-96.

[] the principle of universality [] says that: whatever criteria we think justify a war on the part of one country justify as well wars by other countries in the same situation. So if the United States is justied in bombing Afghanistan for providing sanctuary to terrorists, then other countries have comparable rights. Thus, Nicaragua or Cuba, which have been victimized by terrorism planned and supported by Washington, would be justied in bombing the United States. Militarily, of course, such an action would make no sense, but in terms of justice it is no more unwarranted than the U.S. action in Afghanistan.
Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, Intervention in General: Part A of 45 Questions and Answers Regarding U.S. Foreign Policy, ZNet (October 8, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2446.

[] if you take a poll among U.S. intellectuals, support for bombing Afghanistan is just overwhelming. But how many of them think that you should bomb Washington because of the U.S. war against Nicaragua, lets say, or Cuba []? Now, if anyone were to suggest this, they would be considered insane. But why? I mean, if one is right, why is the other one wrong? When you try to get someone to talk about this question, they cant understand what your question is. They cant comprehend that we should apply to ourselves the standards you apply to others. That is incomprehensible. There couldnt be a moral principle more elementary. All you have to do is read George Bush's favorite philosopher [Jesus]. Theres a famous denition in the Gospels of the hypocrite, and the hypocrite is the person who refuses to apply to himself the standards he applied to others. By that standard, the entire commentary and discussion of the so-called War on Terror is pure hypocrisy, virtually without exception.
Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews, eds. John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu (New York: Seven Stories Press, Tokyo: Little More, 2003), pp. 28-29.

America believes that the 3,000 deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence. The 3,000 deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through American and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to. The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf War, is never referred to. [.] The 200,000 deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the

6 Indonesian government but inspired and supported by America are never referred to. The 500,000 deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidized by America, are never referred to. The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to. The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to. But what a misjudgment of the present and what a misreading of history this is. People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers.
Harold Pinter, The American Administration is a Bloodthirsty Wild Animal, address on receiving an honorary degree at the University of Turin (December 11, 2002), ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2739.

Dont eat Belgian chocolate, the Israeli consul in Florida ordered the large Jewish community there. In Israel, anti-Belgian curses reached an earsplitting new crescendo. Miserable Belgium! Mad Belgium! Megalomaniac Belgium! And again and again: Anti-Semitic Belgium! Neo-Nazi Belgium! The Israeli ambassador was, of course, recalled from Brussels. [.] The storm broke when a Belgian court decided that Ariel Sharon can be sued for alleged war crimes, but only after nishing his term as prime minister of Israel. Israeli army ofcers connected with the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps can be sued even now. On an Israeli TV programme, the anchorman, a lawyer, put it this way. Anti-Semitic Belgium wants to judge the ofcers of a second country for crimes committed in a third country, while the accused have no connection at all with Belgium, are not on Belgian territory and the whole affair does not concern Belgium. That is megalomania, really a matter for psychiatrists! Strange, I replied on the programme. I seem to remember a case where country A kidnapped in country B the citizen of country C for committing in country D war crimes against the citizens of countries E, F and G, all this in spite of the fact the crimes were committed before country A even existed. I meant, of course, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, to which we all agreed. How can you compare the two! the other participants in the programme cried out in outraged unison. [.] Well, it was the Jews who demanded, after World War II, that all countries put Nazi war criminals and their allies on trial. Eichmann was judged in Israel according to the Israeli Law for bringing the Nazis and their Helpers to Justice, which does not recognize any borders. More recently the Knesset enacted another law, enabling Israeli courts to judge perpetrators of any crime committed against Jews anywhere in the world. If so, whats wrong with the Belgian law of universal jurisdiction, that allows Belgian courts to judge war criminals from all over the world? Immanuel Kant promulgated the Categorical Imperative: Act as if the principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal law of nature. [.] The Belgian law against war crimes is a step in this direction, and I hope that many other countries will follow suit. Of course, it would be better if the International Criminal Court in The Hague would full this duty, but much time will pass before it will be able to. Immense political pressures are being

7 exerted, many limitations have been imposed, its hands and feet have been shackled. Worse, the only superpower, the United States, is openly trying to destroy it [].
Uri Avnery, Its OK to Eat Belgian Chocolates, ZNet (February 23, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3107.

When the day comes that news outlets accord the life of a Palestinian child the same reverence as the life of an Israeli child, well know that media coverage has moved beyond craven mediaspeak to a single standard of human rights.
Norman Solomon, Decoding Some Top Buzzwords, ZNet (December 13, 2002), http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=2746.

2. What is Terrorism?
As the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, the word terrorism was initially used to describe Government by intimidation as directed and carried out by the party in power in France during the Revolution of 1789-1794; the system of the Terror (1793-4). This meaning was subsequently generalized to the senses of A policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted; the employment of methods of intimidation; the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized (OED, terrorism, 1, 2). The term terrorist, accordingly, was rst applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution, and especially to those connected with the Revolutionary tribunals during the Reign of Terror. By the latter part of the nineteenth century this word had come to denote Any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidationwith particular reference to tactics used by some opponents of Czarism in Russia. But from the rst decade of the nineteenth century the term had also been used to identify One who entertains, professes, or tries to awaken or spread a feeling of terror or alarm; an alarmist, a scaremonger (OED, terrorist, 1.a-b, 2). In its early uses, terrorism referred consistently to the practices of people who hold state powerthat is, to acts of exemplary violence carried out by agents of the state, in the manner of that nineteenth-century French army ofcer who is said to have prepared the soldiers under his command for battle by shooting one of them in cold blood pour encourager les autres. In contemporary usage, in contrast, terrorism is most commonly applied to acts of warlike violence carried out by agencies other than a stateor other than a state of which one approves. One deliberate effect of this usage has been to criminalize movements of resistance to colonial or neocolonial violence and aggressionmovements which might otherwise be recognized as legitimate risings against tyranny. The tactic is not a new one: the Nazis denounced resistance ghters in occupied Europe as terrorists, and the apartheid regime in South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist; the state of Israel now describes the Palestinian ghters who resist Israeli attacks upon refugee camps and cities in the occupied territories as terrorists. The notion of state terrorism has developed as a means of talking about the easily ascertainable fact that the vast majority of acts aimed at violent coercion or intimidation of a social collectivity (on the principle of victimizing a few pour encourager les autres) have been carried out by state authorities.

8 In the late nineteenth century the word terrorism was also used to describe systems of religious intimidation that had been deployed in earlier centuries to repress any leanings toward doubt or rebellion, and to ensure that people were terried into passive conformity by fear of demonic forceswitches and devils and the plagues they could supposedly unleashand terried as well by the devilish persecutions which awaited anyone who could be accused, as a heretic or witch, of taking the devils side against God and the state. (See, for example, W. E. H. Leckys discussion of the engines of terrorism in his History of the Rise and Inuence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe [1865; rpt. New York, 1888], vol. 1, pp. 37-81.) Concerted attempts are currently being made to convince Americans that they are under threat by similarly demonic agentsthe unlocatable Osama bin Laden, said to have formed an alliance (for which there has never been a shred of evidence) with the now likewise unlocatable Saddam Hussein to assault the U.S. with Saddams weapons of mass destruction (the existence of which in recent years is also unsupported by any evidence [see section 5 below]). During the build-up to the U.S.U.K. attack on Iraq many thousands of Americans were terried by Tom Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security, into panic buying of duct tape and plastic sheeting as a protection against attack by chemical or biological weapons. These were presumably to be delivered to American cities by the Iraqi drone aircraft which Secretary of State Colin Powell was at the same time describing as an urgent threat. The drones in question turned out to have an effective range of eleven kilometers; they were powered by engines resembling those of common-garden weed-whackers, and constructed out of balsa wood andwait for itduct tape. People whose skin colour or ethnic origin makes them vulnerable to suspicions of sympathy with these demonized enemies of a godly people have reason to be fearful. Since 2001, the protections against the exercise of arbitrary state power that the Constitution of the United States once provided have been systematically destroyed by the Bush regime (see section 9 [b] below). A clear regression to preEnlightenment conditions is evident in the provisions of the two so-called Patriot Acts for arbitrary revocation of citizenship, arbitrary imprisonment, and the removal of protections against forced self-incrimination. The U.S. government, moreover, has subjected prisoners to torture in its Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere, and openly acknowledges that terrorism suspects are tortured by the security forces of its client statesto which it sends suspects for that purpose. It may be time to think of reviving Leckys sense of the word terrorism. The excerpts in this section are from writings by John McMurtry, Russell Mokhiber, Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, and Arundhati Roy. For further readings on the subject of terrorism, see the following: Ahmad, Eqbal. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. Chomsky, Noam. Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002. ----. Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews. Eds. John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu. New York: Seven Stories Press; Tokyo: Little More, 2003. Scowen, Peter. Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003. (Chapters ve and six provide an account of U.S. terrorism in Central America during the 1980s.) Townshend, Charles. Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Terrorism is most frequently dened as attacks on civilians undertaken for political purposes. Terrorism is wrong if it is blowing up a small bomb in a pizza parlor or on a bus. It is wrong if it is blowing up a larger bomb in a large bus station. It is wrong if it is a plane used to take out a huge skyscraper. And it is wrong if it is a massive air force pummeling the civilian population and infrastructure of a society, or if it is sanctions denying a society the means to sustain the life of many of its citizens. Terrorism is wrong when carried out by disgruntled individuals, groups, or whole armies and governments. And it is wrong regardless of whether the motives would be worthy were the means different, or whether the motives are themselves horribly unjust, or just insane.
Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, 9/11 & Afghanistan: Part B of 45 Questions on U.S. Foreign Policy, ZNet (October 9, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2447.

Mokhiber: In his book Veil, Bob Woodward reported a couple of years ago that a CIA sponsored car-bomb killed 80 innocent civilians in Beirut. You talk about terror and the war on evil. Does the war on terror and evil include U.S. sponsored terror and U.S. sponsored deathscivilian deaths? Fleischer: I am not going to accept the premise of that question, we are talking about the United States acting in self-defense.
Russell Mokhiber, Ari & I: White House Press Brieng with Ari Fleischer, Tuesday, November 20, 2001 12:15 PM, Common Dreams, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1120-06.htm.

Setting aside the rhetoric for a moment, consider the fact that the world has not yet found an acceptable denition of what terrorism is. One country's terrorist is too often anothers freedom ghter. At the heart of the matter lies the worlds deep-seated ambivalence towards violence. Once violence is accepted as a legitimate political instrument, then the morality and political legitimacy of terrorists (insurgents or freedom ghters) becomes contentious, bumpy terrain. The US government itself has funded, armed, and sheltered plenty of rebels and insurgents around the world. The CIA and Pakistans ISI trained and armed the mujahideen who, in the 1980s, were seen as terrorists by the government in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, while President Reagan posed with them for a group portrait and called them the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers. Today, PakistanAmericas ally in this new warsponsors insurgents who cross the border into Kashmir in India. Pakistan lauds them as freedom ghters, India calls them terrorists. India, for its part, denounces countries who sponsor and abet terrorism, but the Indian army has, in the past, trained separatist Tamil rebels asking for a homeland in Sri Lankathe LTTE, responsible for countless acts of bloody terrorism. (Just as the CIA abandoned the mujahideen after they had served its purpose, India abruptly turned its back on the LTTE for a host of political reasons. It was an enraged LTTE suicide-bomber who assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.)
Arundhati Roy, War is Peace, Outlook (October 18, 2001), http://www.zmag.org/roywarpeace.htm.

10

John McMurtry identies, beyond the easily identiable violence of retail or of state terrorism, something that he calls the unseen terrorist pattern. (His analysis of this pattern has been elaborated in three recent books: Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System [Toronto: Garamond, 1998], The Cancer Stage of Capitalism [London: Pluto, 1999], and Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy [London: Pluto, 2002].) The gravest problem with corporate market fundamentalism is that it is decoupled from societys life conditions. It is, in fact, incapable of recognizing any value to anything except corporate value adding which, it is assumed, should regulate all peoples and conditions of life on earth for efciency and maximum growth. To this point, there has been no outside margin to this total doctrines demands, or government subservience to them. Since the commitments of a society to safeguard the lives of its members and to ensure they are able to express themselves as human is the measure of its civilization, this global corporate program is not merely uncivilized. It is, beneath recognition, terrorist in its meaning. For if we recognize the real meaning of terrorismto instill in innocent people fear for their life security to coerce their compliance to an armed factions demandswe see its pattern increasingly at work across world life organization. Under the nancial dictates of the corporate market backed by rising extremes of armed force, citizens everywhere are subjected to a low-intensity campaign of destabilization and fear that leaves no aspect of their lives secure. [.] The pattern cannot be plausibly denied once it is exposed. There are two major forms of attack on peoples means of life to coerce them to conform to global nancial and corporate demands. The rst is to defund societies nonprot social infrastructures everywhere until peoples have no choice but to privatize their management for prot. The second front of attack is more directly violentto wage one nancial and military war after another on the poorest peoples of the world to control their states and expropriate their regional resources. Both these wars on humanity are driven by a fanatic fundamentalismto produce ever more money for those with most money, with no limit, regulation or higher goal permitted to obstruct these transnational money sequences. The shape of this Beasts ever grosser lines dwarfs the monster beheld by St. John of the Apocalypse, or the boundless greed of Duryodhana told by the Mahabharatta. We live under an increasingly global reign of terror, but our disconnection from the meaning is its triumph.
John McMurtry, Why is there a War in Afghanistan? Opening Address, Science for Peace Forum and Teach-In, University of Toronto, December 9, 2001, http://scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca/Special_Activities/McMurtry_Page.html.

3. Western War Crimes, 1991-2003

This section is made up of excerpts from writings by Nyier Abdou and Denis Halliday, Anthony Arnove, Noam Chomsky, Reese Erlich, David Hilker, Pope John Paul II, John Pilger, Jeremy Scahill, Hans von Sponeck, and Mickey Z.

11

(a) The bombing of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War was criminal
Certain episodes attracted western media attention at the timesuch as the deliberately targeted bombing of the Amiriya air raid shelter in Baghdad on February 13, 1991, which killed some 400 civilians. But the more general criminality of the 1991 bombing stems from the fact that it was deliberately designed to destroy the life-sustaining civilian infrastructure of the country. Attacks of this kind are expressly forbidden by international law. U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi infrastructure [which provided] for civilian needs, particularly safe water and electricitynot as an accident, but as part of an explicit strategy. Amid mounting evidence of Iraqs ruined infrastructure and the painful consequences for ordinary Iraqis, Pentagon ofcials more readily acknowledge the severe impact of the 43-day air bombardment on Iraqs economic future and civilian population, Barton Gellman of the Washington Post wrote a few months after the war. Though many details remain classied, interviews with those involved in the targeting disclose three main contrasts with the administrations earlier portrayal of a campaign aimed solely at Iraqs armed forces and their lines of supply and command. Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to inuence the course of the conict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Iraq could not repair without foreign assistance. Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as collateral and unintended, was sometimes neither.
Anthony Arnove, A Decade of US War on Iraq, Socialist Worker (December 15, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2755.

(b) The use of depleted uranium munitions was criminal

The use of depleted uranium artillery and tank shells and aircraft munitions during the 1991 Gulf War could also be classied as a war crime. Although the havoc they wreak by causing birth defects, cancers and leukemia is deferred rather than instantaneous, these munitions can appropriately be described as weapons of mass destruction. more than 1 million rounds of depleted uranium (DU) shells were used by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait. The Pentagon uses these outrageous munitions because they can pierce tanks and other thick surfacesbut the shells leave behind a toxic disaster. Today, nearly 12 years after the use of the supertough weapons, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently reported, the battleeld remains a radioactive toxic wasteland. Iraqi physicians say depleted uranium is responsible for a signicant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of veterans.

12
Anthony Arnove, A Decade of US War on Iraq, Socialist Worker (December 15, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2755.

Depleted uranium is a weapon of mass destruction. Coated on missiles, and tank shells, its explosive force spreads radiation over a wide area, especially in the desert dust. Professor Doug Rokke, the US army physicist in charge of cleaning up depleted uranium in Kuwait, told me, I am like most people in southern Iraq. I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. What were seeing now, respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers are the direct result. The controversy over whether or not its the cause of these problems is a manufactured one. My own ill-health is a testament to that.
John Pilger, The Secret War: The US War Against Iraq is well under way, The Mirror (December 20, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2776.

One study conducted by Iraqi doctors indicated that 0.776 percent of Basraarea children were born with birth defects in 1998, compared to just 0.304 percent in 1990, before the Gulf War. Another study showed a rise in childhood cancers and other malignancies of 384.2 percent from 1990-2000. [.] Iraqi doctors, and an increasing number of western scientists, attribute the rise in diseases and birth defects to the U.S. and British use of depleted uranium. [.] The Pentagon conrms ring 320 tons of DU ammunition during the Gulf War. U.S. and British army veterans also suspect DU as a cause of Gulf War illnesses. Dr. Doug Rokke, now a major in the U.S. Army Reserves, was in charge of cleaning up twenty-four U.S. tanks hit by American DU shells during the Gulf War, casualties of friendly re. He and his crew worked for three months shipping the armor back to the U.S. for special decontamination. The exposure to DU contamination was so intense, Rokke told me, We all got sick within seventy-two hours. Three years later, Rokke said, a urine test showed that he had 5,000 times the permissible level of uranium in his body. A number of Gulf War veterans who worked in DU-contaminated zones have been diagnosed with the same kind of cancers as found in Basra civilians, and they also fathered children with birth defects. Rokke, a physicist with a Ph.D. and the U.S. Armys former DU Project Director, studied the military's internal documents and prepared materials on how to clean up DU contaminated areas. Based on his experience, he says, The United States military leaders knew that using DU would cause health and environmental problems.
Reese Erlich, Depleted Uranium: America's Dirty Secret, in Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You (New York: Context Books, 2003), pp. 58-60.

For those unfamiliar with DU, consider this: When red, the uranium bursts into ame and sears through steel armor. The heat of the shell causes any diesel fuel vapors in the enemy tank to explode, and the crew inside is burned alive. DU burns on contact, creating tiny aerosolized particles of

13 radiation less than ve microns in diameter, small enough to be inhaled. DU was also used by the US in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. In other words, the US has conducted four nuclear wars: Japan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan [].
Mickey Z, Anti War Speech, ZNet (February 25, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=3127.

(c) Sanctions against Iraq constituted a war crime

The sanctions against Iraq constituted a war crime as dened by Article 85 of the Additional Protocols I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949: they wilfully and with the full knowledge of those who impose them caused death or serious injury to the bodies or health of a civilian population. Furthermore, Protocol 1 Additional to the Geneva Conventions (1977) outlaws the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; according to this protocol, it is forbidden to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless drinking water installations and supplies, irrigation works, and materials indispensable to the production of foodstuffs for the specic purpose of denying them to the civilian population. The sanctions also violated the following charters of international law: 1. Constitution of the World Health Organization (1946) In this document the enjoyment of the highest standard of health is dened as a fundamental human right. 2. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) Among the rights dened here is the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of oneself and ones family, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services, and security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood. 3. Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, adopted by the UN General Assembly (1974) This charter forbids any state to use or encourage the use of economic, political or other measures to coerce another state to produce the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights, or to secure advantages of any kind. 4. UN General Assembly Resolution 44/215 (December 22, 1989) The resolution calls upon developed countries to refrain from political coercion through economic means with the aim of changing the economic or political systems, or the domestic or foreign policies, of other countries; it reafrms that developed countries should not threaten or apply trade and nancial restrictions, blockades, embargoes and other economic sanctions incompatible with the Charter of the United Nations and in violation of multilateral or bilateral undertakings. 5. International Conference on Nutrition, World Declaration on Nutrition, FAO/WHO (1992) This document recognizes access to nutritionally adequate and safe food as a basic human right, and afrms that food must not be used as a tool for political pressure.
Source: http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/intlaw.shtm.

14

It is striking that with such high-prole defections as that of [Denis] Halliday [former UN assistant secretary-general and chief UN relief coordinator for Iraq] and his successor, Hans von Sponeck, not to mention the persistent struggle of former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter to debunk US and British half-truths about the threat from Iraq, the sanctions regime remains in place. In Cairo last week for a conference launching the International Campaign against US Aggression on Iraq (ICAA), both Halliday and von Sponeck condemned the crippling of the Iraqi economy, the prevention of health care and soaring infant and child mortality rates in Iraq as nothing short of genocide perpetrated by the very organisation founded to protect the humanity and sovereignty of its member nations. Genocide is a strong word; and one that, it could be argued, is used too freely. But Halliday does not shy away from every implication the term carries: from the institutional methodology, to the systematic execution, to the racial hatred. In his address to the conference last Wednesday, Halliday dened sanctions as warfare and consistent with war crimes. Speaking of US President George W Bushs determination to invade Iraq, Halliday denounced the administrations war plans as obscene. Its criminal, he said, and I believe its indictable. While Halliday maintains that sanctionsprovided for in the UN charter are a legitimate device to force the hand of leaderships, he is pointed about the punitive nature of sanctions in Iraq, noting that he thinks given his experience in Iraq, the United Nations is rethinking, and hopefully will never use open-ended, comprehensive sanctions again. But he adds that the mistakes made in applying sanctions in Iraq have been well acknowledged, justied, compounded and sustained. The fact is, the UN Security Council has allowed these sanctions on Iraq to drag on for twelve years, and this is not happenstance; this is deliberate decision-making. Thats why Ive determined it to be a genocide.
Nyier Abdou and Denis Halliday, Scylla and Charybdis: An Interview with Denis Halliday, Al Ahram (December 30, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2810.

When I rst met Halliday, I was struck by the care with which he chose uncompromising words. I had been instructed, he said, to implement a policy that satises the denition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter those responsible. Inside the UN, Halliday broke a long collective silence. Then on February 13 this year [2000], Hans von Sponeck, who had succeeded him as humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned. How long, he asked, should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done? Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, resigned, saying privately she, too, could not tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people. [.]

15 Denis Halliday and I travelled to Iraq together. It was his rst trip back. Washington and London make much of the inuence of Iraqi propaganda when their own, unchallenged, is by far the most potent. With this in mind, I wanted an independent assessment from some of the 550 UN people, who are Iraqs lifeline. Among them, Halliday and von Sponeck are heroes. I have reported the UN at work in many countries; I have never known such dissent and anger, directed at the manipulation of the Security Council, and the corruption of what some of them still refer to as the UN ideal.
John Pilger, Squeezed to death: Half a million children have died in Iraq since UN sanctions were imposedmost enthusiastically by Britain and the US. Three UN ofcials have resigned in despair. Meanwhile, bombing of Iraq continues almost daily, The Guardian (March 4, 2000), http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,232986,00.html.

Discussions in Europe and North America with experts on international law have removed any doubt that ten years of sanctions against Iraq have resulted in serious breaches of key provisions of all relevant treaties and treaty-like instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It must be remembered that there is a hierarchical relationship between articles of the U.N. Charter and the concept of subsidiarity. Principles of justice and international law (Article 1.1) and the preservation of human rights (Article 55.c) take unquestionable preference over the provisions of Chapter VII (Article 41). UNICEF reports that some 5,000 children die every month in Iraq as a direct result of sanctions, i.e., due to a policy that is no longer based on principles of international law.
Hans von Sponeck, Iraq: International Sanctions and What Next? Middle East Policy (October 2000), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/sponeck.shtm.

Comprehensive economic sanctions against the people of Iraq are [in September 2002] entering their 13th year. The human condition[s] identied already in 1991 after the Gulf War as apocalyptic have signicantly worsened since then in both mental and physical terms. The amount of evidence collected by reputable international organisations about child mortality, malnutrition, re-emerging diseases, impoverishment, educational neglect and psychological disorders continues to accumulate (please see in particular recent reports by UNICEF, CARITAS, Save the Children/UK). What the international community has seen since May 2002 when UN/SC resolution 1409 introduced so-called smart sanctions represents, as predicted by individual members of the current UN Security Council, anything but an improvement. In addition, over $5 billion worth of humanitarian supplies remain on holdblocked by US/UK authorities. The oil pricing confrontation created by the US/UK governments to end the illegal surcharge issue has resulted in a major shortfall of funding for the present phase XII of the oil for food programme and seriously endangers the already fragile humanitarian exemption programme.
Hans von Sponeck, Four Questions, Four Answers (European Colloquium, Brussels, September 25, 2002), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/4questions.shtm.

Among those now debating whether the Iraqi people should be clusterbombed or not, incinerated or not, you are unlikely to nd the names of Denis

16 Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who have done the most to break through the propaganda. No one knows the potential human cost better than they. As assistant secretary general of the UN, Halliday started the oil-for-food programme in Iraq. Von Sponeck was his successor. Eminent in their eld of caring for other human beings, they resigned their long UN careers, calling the embargo genocide. Their last appearance in the press was in the Guardian last November [i.e. 2001], when they wrote: The most recent report of the UN secretary general, in October 2001, says that the US and UK governments blocking of $4bn of humanitarian supplies is by far the greatest constraint on the implementation of the oil-for-food programme. The report says that, in contrast, the Iraqi governments distribution of humanitarian supplies is fully satisfactory The death of some 5-6,000 children a month is mostly due to contaminated water, lack of medicines and malnutrition. The US and UK governments delayed clearance of equipment and materials is responsible for this tragedy, not Baghdad. They are in no doubt that if Saddam Hussein saw advantage in deliberately denying his people humanitarian supplies, he would do so; but the UN, from the secretary general himself down, says that, while the regime could do more, it has not withheld supplies. Indeed, without Iraqs own rationing and distribution system, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, there would have been famine. Halliday and von Sponeck point out that the US and Britain are able to fend off criticism of sanctions with unsubstantiated stories that the regime is punishing its own people. If these stories are true, they say, why do America and Britain further punish them by deliberately withholding humanitarian supplies, such as vaccines, painkillers and cancer diagnostic equipment? This wanton blocking of UN-approved shipments is rarely reported in the British press. The gure is now almost $5bn in humanitarian-related supplies. Once again, the UN executive director of the oil-for-food programme has broken diplomatic silence to express grave concern at the unprecedented surge in volume of holds placed on contracts [by the US].
John Pilger, A compliant press is preparing the ground for an all-out attack on Iraq (March 21, 2002), http://pilger.carlton.com/print/100275.

As we prepare [in January 1998] for a new round of bombings, we cry out in anguish over seven years of United Nations sanctions against the Iraqi people, which can only be understood as biological warfare against a civilian population. During the Gulf War, U.S.-led coalition forces deliberately targeted Iraqs infrastructure, destroying its ability to provide food, water and sanitation to its civilian population and unleashing disease and starvation on an unimaginable scale. United Nations reports claim that over 1 million civilians have died as a direct result of the sanctions. UNICEF reports that 4,500 children are dying each month. As people of faith, we are ashamed that the actions of the UN, whose mission is to foster peace, can be so deliberately directed toward the sustained slaughter of innocent civilians.
Pope John Paul II, Address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, January 1998; quoted by Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (1999; rpt. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000), p. 275.

17 As for the moral level, if the word can even be used, it is hard to improve on the pronouncements of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Two years ago [i.e. in 1996], when asked on national TV about her reaction to reports that the sanctions she administers have killed half a million Iraqi children in ve years, she responded that it is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it. We know well enough on what page of history those sentiments belong.
Noam Chomsky, Chomsky Comment on Iraq Bombing, http://www.zmag.org/forums/chomiraqb.htm.

In Iraq, a decade of harsh sanctions under US pressure has strengthened Saddam Hussein while leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis perhaps more people than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history, military analysts John and Karl Mueller wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1999.
Noam Chomsky, Drain the Swamp and There Will Be No More Mosquitoes, ZNet (September 10, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=11&ItemID=2312.

Weve visited a number of water treatment plants that are falling apart across the country because of the effects of the [1991] war and the sanctions. Without puried drinking water, the children are dying, an under-ve mortality rate 2 1/2 times higher than before the war. How can we possibly explain to ourselves not allowing parts for water treatment, money to pay for installation of new plants, and so on, when the water and sanitation disaster is the primary cause of the increased child mortality that now takes some 13% of all young children? When asked that kind of question, apologists for US action usually respond that the problem is not the sanctions but Saddam Husseins misuse of humanitarian materials that would alleviate the problem if he only allowed their proper use. In 1996, the Oil-for-Food Program (OFFP) was initiated, which allowed Iraq to sell certain amounts of its oil. A certain percentage (about a quarter) would be kept to pay reparations to Kuwait and another percentage would pay the UN for its monitoring expenses; the rest could be used to import humanitarian goods: food, medical supplies, medications, water treatment equipment, etc. This was supposed to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, and ofcial US policy is that it would alleviate it if Baghdad used the funds properly. Many United Nations studies have shown, however, that Iraq is in fact using the treatment appropriately. In fact, the food distribution program is considered the best that the UN has run. The problems it seems are several. Most of the goods that can be imported under the OFFP have to go through a UN Security Council committee, which deliberates in secret and where the US (along with the other permanent members of the Security Council) has a veto. Recent research by Joy Gordon (Cool War in November 2002 Harpers Magazine) cracks some of the secrecy to show that the US routinely blocks or puts on hold billions of dollars of goods that no one else (except sometimes Great Britain) objects to, on the basis either that the goods could also be used for military purposes (dual-use goods) or that more documentation is needed (and then procrastinating on the evaluation of the documentation). Childrens vaccines (might be used to extract biological weapons even though European biological

18 weapons experts atly said it was impossible), water tankers (might be used to carry chemical weapons), truck tires, milk-producing equipment, and so on have all been blocked or put on hold. Doctors here have told me that of ve chemotherapeutic agents for treating cancer (that will have a nite shelf life and need to be used simultaneously to have the proper effect) three will get through and two will be delayed until the others have expired. People at water-treatment plants told us that they got new equipment to replace their plants but then found they were missing a crucial part. And so on. If it all sounds too childish to be true, I have trouble believing it, too. Yet the stories have been consistent with UN documentation and journalistic reports in the foreign press. [.] My friends, this is the Vietnam of this generation. What we are doing here is an unspeakable evil.
David Hilker, Letter from David Hilker, ZNet (December 23, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2788.

For fuller studies of the imposition and administration of the UN sanctions against Iraq, see: Cockburn, Andrew, and Patrick Cockburn. Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein. 1999; rpt. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000. (See pp. 114-39.) Gordon, Joy. Cool War: Economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction, Harpers Magazine (November 2002), http://www.scn.org/ccpi/HarpersJoyGordonNov02.html. Pilger, John. Squeezed to death, The Guardian (March 4, 2000), http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,232986,00.html. ----. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso, 2002. (Pilgers wholly devastating interview with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin on the subject of sanctions appears on pp. 82-90.) Rai, Milan. War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq. London: Verso, 2002. (See pp. 175-84.)

(d) The US/UK no-y zones in Iraq constituted a war crime

the establishment of the two no-y-zones is based on no UN mandate and constitutes a serious breach of international law and UN resolutions which make specic mention of Iraqs territorial integrity and sovereignty. As the UN designated Ofcial for Security of UN staff in Iraq, I introduced air strike reports which reected collected and veried information on damage to life and property of civilians as a result of US/UK air incursions and attacks in Iraq. In 1999 my ofce in Baghdad recorded 132 air strikes with 144 civilian death[s] and over 300 wounded and civilian property destroyed []. It is a serious matter that the UN Security Council having a mandated oversight responsibility has not been able to stop this serious violation, particularly since US and UK pilots have operated in Iraqi airspace after Operation Desert Fox in December 1998 under enlarged rules of engagement. These allow them to use their ring power with fewer restrictions and consequently with more damage to civilian life and property.

19
Hans von Sponeck, Four Questions, Four Answers (European Colloquium, Brussels, September 25, 2002), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/4questions.shtm.

The Bush administration asserted that ring on U.S. aircraft that had entered Iraqi airspace constituted a material breach of the November 8 UN Security Council resolution on Iraq. The charge was quickly, though diplomatically, rebuffed by Secretary General Ko Annan and several foreign governments, including Security Council member China. There are no UN resolutions that prohibit Iraq from maintaining its military or taking action in defence of its territory. Von Sponeck, a former UN assistant secretary general, scoffs at U.S. medias and government ofcials characterization of these zones as having a basis in the UN charter or Security Council resolutions. There is no UN mandate for the establishment of these two no-y zones. Its an illegal establishment of a zone for bilateral interests of the U.S. and the U.K. They always refer to resolution 688, which deals with an appeal to the Secretary General to ensure the protection of minorities in Iraq. But despite the protests raised by von Sponeck and a handful of other UN ofcials, Washington continues to receive support from the UN in the form of silence.
Jeremy Scahill, No-Fly Fiasco: U.S. bombs same Shiites enlisted to oust Saddam, Now Magazine [Toronto] (December 12-18, 2002), 21, 23.

The American and British attack on Iraq has already begun. While the Blair government continues to claim in Parliament that no nal decision has been taken, Royal Air Force and US ghter bombers have secretly changed tactics and escalated their patrols over Iraq to an all-out assault on both military and civilian targets. [.] Under the United Nations Charter and the conventions of war and international law, the attacks amount to acts of piracy: no different, in principle, from the German Luftwaffes bombing in Spain in the 1930s as precursor to its invasion of Europe. The bombing is a secret war that has seldom been news. Since 1991, and especially in the last four years, it has been unrelenting and is now deemed the longest Anglo-American campaign of aerial bombardment since World War Two. The US and British governments justify it by claiming they have a UN mandate to police so-called no-y zones which they declared following the Gulf War. They say these zones, which give them control of most of Iraqs airspace, are legal and supported by UN Security Council Resolution 688. This is false. There are no references to no y zones in any Security Council resolution. To be sure about this, I asked Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was Secretary General of the United Nations in 1992 when Resolution 688 was passed. The issue of no y zones was not raised and therefore not debated: not a word, he said. They offer no legitimacy to countries sending their aircraft to attack Iraq. In 1999, Tony Blair claimed the no y zones allowed the US and Britain to perform a vital humanitarian task in protecting the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the ethnic Marsh Arabs in the south. In fact, British and American aircraft have actually provided cover for neighbouring Turkeys repeated invasions of northern, Kurdish Iraq.

20 A long-running insurrection by Turkeys Kurdish population is regarded by Washington as a threat to the stability of Turkeys democracy that is a front for its military which is among the worlds worst violators of human rights. Hundreds of thousands of Turkish Kurds have been displaced and an estimated 30,000 killed. Turkey, unlike Iraq, is our friend. In 1995 and 1997, as many as 50,000 Turkish troops, backed by tanks and ghter aircraft, occupied what the West called Kurdish safe havens. They terrorised Kurdish villages and murdered civilians. In December 2000, they were back, committing the atrocities that the Turkish military commits with impunity against its own Kurdish population. For joining the US coalition against Iraq, the Turkish regime is to be rewarded with a bribe worth $6 billion. Turkeys invasions are rarely reported in Britain. So great is the collusion of the Blair government that, virtually unknown to Parliament and the British public, the RAF and the Americans have, from time to time, deliberately suspended their humanitarian patrols to allow the Turks to get on with killing Kurds in Iraq. In March last year [2001], RAF pilots patrolling the no y zone in Kurdish Iraq publicly protested for the rst time about their enforced complicity in the Turkish campaign. The pilots complained that they were frequently ordered to return to their base in Turkey to allow the Turkish air force to bomb the very people they were meant to be protecting. Speaking on a non-attributable basis to Dr Eric Herring, a senior lecturer in politics at Bristol University and a specialist on Iraqi sanctions, the pilots said whenever the Turks wanted to attack the Kurds in Iraq, RAF patrols were recalled to base and ground crews were told to switch off their radarso that the Turks targets would not be visible. One British pilot reported seeing the devastation in Kurdish villages caused by the attacks once he had resumed his patrol. American pilots, who y in tandem with the British, are also ordered to turn their planes around and turn back to Turkey to allow the Turks to devastate the Kurdish safe havens. Youd see Turkish F-14s and F-16s inbound, loaded to the gills with munitions, one pilot told the Washington Post. Then theyd come out half an hour later with their munitions expended. When the Americans returned to Iraqi air space, he said, they would see burning villages, lots of smoke and re. The Turks do no more than American and British aircraft in their humanitarian guise. The sheer scale of the Anglo-American bombing is astonishing, with Britain a very junior partner. During the 18 months to January 1999 (the last time I was able to conrm ofcial US gures) American aircraft ew 36,000 sorties over Iraq, including 24,000 combat missions. The term combat is highly deceptive. Iraq has virtually no air force and no modern air defences. Thus, combat means dropping bombs or ring missiles at infrastructure that has been laid to waste by a 12-year-old embargo. The Wall Street Journal, the authentic voice of the American establishment, described this eloquently when it reported that the US faced a genuine dilemma in Iraq. After eight years of enforcing a no y zone in northern (and southern) Iraq, few targets remain. Were down to the last outhouse, one US ofcial protested.
John Pilger, The Secret War: The US War Against Iraq is well under way, The Mirror (December 20, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2776.

21

See also the articles listed under No-Fly Zones at http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/yindex.htm.

4. U.S./U.K. War Crimes in the 2003 Attack on Iraq

This section contains excerpts from texts by Michael Byers, writers of the Canadian Press news agency, Christine Delphy, Robert Fisk, Dinah Po Kempner, Stephen Kerr, Adrian Kuzminski, Michele Landsberg, Michael Mandel and Gail Davidson, Rahul Mahajan, Grant McCool, John Pilger, Barbara Stocking, and Mickey Z.

(a) Pre-emptive war (i.e. unprovoked attack) is a war crime

What prohibits military force is international law. The Charter of the United Nations allows war only where it ts within the narrow connes of the right of self-defence or where it is explicitly and validly authorized by the Security Council after all peaceful alternatives have been exhausted. Thats because the Charter regards war as a scourge and its main purpose was to ban it where it was not absolutely necessary and demonstrated as such to the lawfully constituted assembly of states, namely the Security Council. Without an explicit authorization from the Security Council, the mere violation of a resolution is not enough to entitle any state or states to use military force to enforce it. Israel has been in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions for thirty-ve years, but none of them explicitly authorize the use of force. Are our governments saying that any state has the right to attack Israel to enforce compliance with these resolutions? Why try to distort the plain meaning of Resolution 1441? Is it because without real Security Council authority, and lacking any claim of self-defence beyond the delusional, a US war on Iraq would constitute what the Nuremberg tribunal called the supreme international crime, the crime against peace? In fact, without valid Security Council authority, Canadas very participation in this war would make Prime Minister Chrtien and his colleagues personally guilty of murder and other crimes against humanity. [.] Intentional killing without lawful justication or excuse is murder. When its premeditated, its rst-degree murder. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War calculates that war against Iraq will result in the death of a minimum of 50,000 Iraqis, most of whom will be civilians. There are an awful lot of people serving life sentences in Canadian prisons for the murder of just one person. The law doesnt care if the victim is a Canadian or an Iraqi, and it doesnt care if the criminal is a Prime Minister or a pauper. By letter to the Prime Minister dated January 23, Lawyers Against the War put the government of Canada on notice that we will pursue prosecution of all responsible government ofcials on all appropriate charges, including murder and crimes against humanity, in both the Canadian and international criminal courts. British and American lawyers made similar declarations to their governments. We mean it.

22

Michael Mandel and Gail Davidson, Resolution 1441 and the Security Council, ZNet (February 6, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=21&ItemID=2978.

In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity. The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to ones homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the highest authority. Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied even the imsiest of United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors have found, as one put it, zilch. Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover. Using the archaic royal prerogative he did not consult parliament or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime. Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of endless war and full spectrum dominance are a matter of record. All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bushs State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: I must have war. He then had it. To call Blair a mere poodle is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility. He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American interests, such as a voracious appetite for the worlds resources, like oil.
John Pilger, Blair is a Coward, The Daily Mirror (February 2, 2003).

Clearly a state subject to armed attack from another state (or a non-state group) has the right to ght back. This basic right is enshrined in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. The problem for international lawyers here lies in determining whether there has been an armed attack and whether the response to that armed attack is necessary and proportionate. A further difculty associated with self-defence concerns the availability of a right to anticipatory self-defence. This so-called right comes in two versions. In the rst, more limited and more plausible, version a state can use force to defend itself from an imminent armed attack by another entity. In other words, there is no need for a state to wait for an attack before attacking its opponent. The second version, now termed the Bush Doctrine, seems to envisage an expanded version of this right whereby states can use force to prevent future, possible but by no means imminent armed attacks from potential enemies. This is the doctrine that would be used to justify a use of force by the

23 United States against Iraq in the absence of a Security Council Resolution. Such a doctrine would be highly controversial among international lawyers. It would also, if universally available, represent a serious threat to international order.
Lawyers Grapple with Attack on Iraq, AlterNet (January 31, 2003), http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/law/2003/0131lawyergrap.ht m.

In a fundamental change of policy, the Bush administration has embraced the doctrine of preemptive war, including the rst strike use of nuclear weapons, and is now applying it to Iraq. Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, on 26 January 2003, US Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell, said: We continue to reserve our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq alone or in a coalition of the willing There is no such unqualied sovereign right. On the contrary, as a member state of the United Nations, the US is obliged by law to pursue peaceful means in international relations, as stated in the UN Charter, Chapter 1, Article 2: All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered; and, all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state []. The UN Charter does recognize the use of unilateral military force by a member state, but only for purposes of self defense and only when an armed attack has occurred against that state, as stated in Chapter 7, Article 51 of the UN Charter: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Iraq has not been shown to have carried out an armed attack on the United States. No evidence has been offered that assigns any responsibility to Iraq for the attacks on the United States made on 11 September 2001, or any other attacks. Iraq has not been shown to be a credible threat to the US. Possession of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq, weapons already widely distributed among many countries, does not constitute an armed attack on anyone; nor does it justify unilateral US military action. If such weapons are a threat to its neighbours or anyone else, including the US, this is a matter for UN action, not unilateral American military action outside the UN.
Adrian Kuzminski, US Prepared to Violate International Law, Coastal Convergence Society (February 1, 2003), http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/law/2003/0201powell.htm.

Iraq is threatening no country with aggression and its violations of Security Council resolutions, while clear, are technical, mostly a matter of providing complete documentation about weapons that may or may not exist, and for the use of which there are no apparent plans. [.]

24 [] Iraq has been under illegal attack for the past decade, with numerous bombings including the Desert Fox campaign, even as it was called on to start obeying international law. The United States also took numerous illegal or questionably legal steps to subvert the legal regime of containmentpassing the Iraq Liberation Act in October 1998, which provided $97 million for groups trying to overthrow the Iraqi government, a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty and a violation of international law; stating that only with regime change would the sanctions be lifted, in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 687; and using weapons inspections to commit espionage, the information from which was then used in targeting decisions during Desert Fox. [.] [] the war the United States is planning on Iraq is an act of premeditated aggression. [.] First, in August [2002], Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ordered that the list of bombing targets be extended far beyond any goal of enforcing the no-y zones to include command-and-control centers and in general to go beyond simple reaction to threats []. By December 2002, the shift could be noted in a 300% increase in ordnance dropped per threat detecteda clear sign that simply defending the overights was no longer the primary aim of the bombings. According to the Guardian, Whitehall ofcials have admitted privately that the no-y patrols, conducted by RAF and US aircraft from bases in Kuwait, are designed to weaken Iraqs air defense systems and have nothing to do with their stated original purpose. Weakening air defense and command-and-control are the standard rst steps in all U.S. wars since 1991, so the rst salvoes in the war were being red even as inspections continued. In the rst two months of this year, bombings occurred almost every other day. [.] The war was being seriously planned from at least the spring of 2002, but in the summer there was a serious internal debate in the military between a so-called Afghan option with 50-75,000 troops and heavy reliance on air power and Iraqi opposition forces and the eventual plan, Desert Storm lite, with 200-250,000 troops and a full-scale invasion. The decision was made in late August, but the more involved plan [] required at least a six-month deployment. Ever since then, the timetable has not been one of diplomacy, U.N. resolutions, and weapons inspections, but rather one of deployment, strong-arming of regional allies needed as stageing areas for the invasion, and, quite likely, replenishment of stocks of precision weapons depleted in the war on Afghanistan. [.] In fact, the U.S. war on Iraq is itself the most fundamental violation of international law. In the language coined at the Nuremberg trials, it is a crime against peace. Former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at the rst Nuremberg trial, called waging aggressive war the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. It surely is unprecedented in world history that a country is under escalating attack; told repeatedly that it will be subjected to a full-scale war; required to disarm itself before that war; and then castigated by the international community for signicant but partial compliance.
Rahul Mahajan, UN Resolution or not, this war is illegal, ZNet (March 14, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3237.

(b) The bombing of civilians is a war crime

25

If war is forced upon us, we will ght in a just cause and by just means sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. George W. Bush, in his State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003 The Pentagon recently revealed its plan for the rst day of the inevitable saturation bombing of Iraq. Baghdad, in particular. On Air Strikes Day (or A Day) the US and Britain will launch 300 to 400 cruise missiles into Iraq. Thats more missiles than were launched during the entire 40-day Persian Gulf war of 1991, says James Ridgeway in the Village Voice. The following day, another 400 missiles will be launched. The sheer size of this has never been contemplated before, one Pentagon strategist told CBS News. There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. In warspeak, this plan is called shock and awe. The idea is to crush the enemys will to ght. According to military strategist Harlan Ullman, the planned attack will be rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima. Air Strikes Day will take the city down, wipe out the water and power supplies in Baghdad, and leave the Iraqis physically, emotionally, and psychologically exhausted. What Bush proposes, says Ridgeway, is not collateral damage, but a level of civilian destruction not seen since the Second World War, with tens of thousands of intended civilian casualties.
Mickey Z, From Dresden to Baghdad: 58 Years of Shock and Awe, ZNet (February 8, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=3003.

Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq physically, emotionally and psychologically by raining down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days. This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War. A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before. The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud inventor. He said: You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes. What will his Hiroshima effect actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14? The answer is to be found in a condential UN document, based on World Health Organisation estimates, which says that as many as 500,000 people would require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries. A Bush-Blair attack will destroy a functioning primary health care system and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic or pandemic proportions.
John Pilger, Blair is a Coward. The Daily Mirror (February 2, 2003).

The children of Iraq are haunted by the fear of not getting to grow up, of burning to death, of crying for their dead mama amidst the rubble of their home, according to a report by the International Study Team. [.]

26 The children may not know that the hawks and militarists in the United States are bandying about the theories of shock and awe, the idea being that they will pound Baghdad with 800 cruise missiles in the rst two days of the war, one every four minutes, so that Iraq buckles to its knees in total devastation, presumably shocked and overawed. But the children know that they are helpless against the thundering onslaught. Some of the youngest pre-schoolers cling, heartbreakingly, to magical comforts: one is sure that she is protected when her sister holds a blanket over their heads. The International Study Team is a group of eminent researchers, academics and practitioners who rst documented the humanitarian impacts of the Gulf War in 1991. The team just completed another tour of inspection in Iraq at the end of January and has issued Our Common Responsibility, The Impact of a New War On Iraqi Children. The report is available from War Child Canada (416-971-7474) or at www.warchild.ca. The team interviewed children in their homes and schools, and were struck to discover that parents have found no good way to inform or comfort their children What is there to say, after all? The children are consumed by fear, and even their own parents cannot protect them from the coming restorm. [.] Id be astounded if the Americans drew back from the brink, no matter how events unfold. But Canada does not have to follow them into what will amount to a bloody slaughter. Perhaps the most powerful moral lesson you can ever teach your children is to put your feet on the street today, and in the weeks to come, to say no to war.
Michele Landsberg,, Children of Iraq live in terror of U.S. onslaught, Toronto Star (February 15, 2003): K1.

Oxfam has 60 years experience of working in conict. We know the impact that military action has on civilians. In some cases, as in Rwanda, military action is necessary to save lives and is justied. But, on the basis of our experience and the current evidence, we cannot see how a military strike on Iraq can be justied, nor indeed how such an attack could be waged without violating international humanitarian law. [.] A recent visit to Iraq by aid agency experts, including an Oxfam specialist, conrmed that the water and sanitation system is on the verge of collapse. [.] Any military action that damages power supplies will inevitably destroy the already fragile water and sanitation system. Inevitably, disease will sweep through the population. Any attack that affects roads, ports or railways will lead to the collapse of the system of food distribution upon which the bulk of Iraqs population depends. Article 54 of Additional Protocol 1 of the Geneva convention prohibits attacks upon objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. In Iraq, this must be taken to include ports, roads, railways and power lines. The convention states that in no event shall actions against these objects be taken which might be expected to leave the civilian population with such inadequate food or water as to cause its starvation or force its movement.
Barbara Stocking, Director of Oxfam, Iraqis Suffering Can Be Made Worse, International Herald Tribune (December 27, 2002), http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/law/2002/1227oxfam.htm.

27

International humanitarian law, the jus in bello, concerns the way wars may be fought. It is distinct from the law governing when wars may be fought (the jus ad bellum of self-defence and the UN Charter). [.] Today, the rules of international humanitarian law are found in the 1907 Hague Conventions, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their two Additional Protocols of 1977, as well as in a parallel body of unwritten customary international law that binds all countries, including those that have not ratied the Conventions and Protocols. A central principle prohibits the direct targeting of civilians, as well as attacks on military targets that could be expected to cause civilian suffering disproportionate to the specic military goals to be achieved. [.] After decades of massive defence spending, the US is today assured of victory in any war it chooses to ght. High-tech weaponry has reduced the dangers to US personnel, making it easier to sell war to domestic constituencies. As a result, some US politicians have begun to think of war, not as the high-risk recourse of last resort, but as an attractive foreign policy option in times of domestic scandal or economic decline. This change in thinking has already led to a more cavalier approach to the jus ad bellum, as exemplied by the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence. It is beginning to have a similar effect with regard to the jus in bello. When war is seen as an ordinary tool of foreign policypolitics by other meanspolitical and nancial considerations impinge on the balance between military necessity and humanitarian concerns. [.] In Washington, it has become accepted wisdom that future opponents are themselves unlikely to abide by international humanitarian law. [.] If your enemy is going to cheat, why bother playing by the rules?
Michael Byers, The Laws of War, US-Style, London Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 4 (February 20, 2003): 9-10.

A group of U.S. law professors opposed to a possible war on Iraq warned U.S. president George W. Bush on Friday that he and senior government ofcials could be prosecuted for war crimes if military tactics violated international humanitarian law. Our primary concern is the large number of civilian casualties that may result should U.S. and coalition forces fail to comply with international humanitarian law in using force against Iraq, the group, led by the New Yorkbased Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a letter to Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The group cited the particular need for U.S. and coalition forces to abide by humanitarian law requiring warring parties to distinguish between military and civilian areas, use only the level of force that is militarily necessary and to use weaponry that is proportionate to what is being targeted. The letter, which had more than 100 signatories, said the rules had been broken in other recent wars. It said air strikes on populated cities, carpet bombing and the use of fuel-air explosives were examples of inappropriate military action taken during the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo campaign and the 2001 Afghan conict that led to civilian casualties and might be used again in Iraq.
Grant McCool, US Lawyers Warn Bush on War Crimes, Lawyers Against the War (January 28, 2003), http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/law/2003/0128uslawyers.htm.

28

Americans are innovators, and we have invented a new style of war. Now we want new rules as well. This is critical as war with Iraq looms and major world powers convene in closed session at Harvard University to discuss reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war that provide some minimal protection to noncombatants. [.] [] the US view [is] that it is acceptable to attack civilian morale in the form of nonmilitary targets whose destruction can undermine public support for war: turning the lights off in Belgrade or Baghdad, targeting the enemys industrialist supporters, destroying civilian propaganda outlets or symbols of the regime such as monuments or civilian administration. All are off-limits under international law, which limits attacks to targets that make a direct contribution to military action. The way Americans approach the issue of civilian casualties is different as well. The law forbids attacks where the cost to civilian lives and property will be excessive in relation to the direct and concrete military advantage of achieving a particular target. Americans, and to some degree the British, wish to equate the idea of an attack with an entire campaign, an overall military objective, or even a political objective such as regime change. [.] Why, in the end, do these rules, framed in other times for other battles, still matter? The fact that Switzerland [which bears responsibility for administering the Geneva Conventions], upon the objection of some states, refused to admit the media or civil society groups to the meeting at Harvard should raise alarm bells. [.] It is ironic that at the moment the United States, by virtue of its military prowess, can most afford to set the highest standard in armed conict, it is backing away from time-honored laws that impose the constraints of humanity upon slaughter.
Dinah Po Kempner (general counsel at Human Rights Watch), Americas Dangerous New Style of War, Boston Globe (January 29, 2003), http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/law/2003/0129dangerous.htm

The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the esh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegalsomething quite outside the Geneva Conventions occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon. The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when explosives fell like grapes from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors sayand the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right. Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white cannisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways. [.]

29 Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday nightthe 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villagesand, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians. Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby eldas they were along the highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villageseven if aimed at military targetsthus crosses the boundaries of international law. So it was that 27-year old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so ve-year old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs and 48-year old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year old soldier, said the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. It is like a grenade and they came into the houses, he said. Some stayed on the land, others exploded. Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year old Maryam Nasr and her ve-year old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didnt realise that Hoda, standing by her sisters bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girls scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters lying in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other words, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience. [.] It is not easy to listen to Iraqi ofcials condemning the use of illegal weapons when the Iraqi air force has itself dropped poison gas on the Iranian army and on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980-88 war against Iran. Outraged claims from Iraqi ofcials at the abuse of human rights sound like a bell with a very hollow ring. But something terrible happened around Hillah this week, something unforgivable and something contrary to international law. One hesitates, as I say, to talk about human rights in this land of torture but if the Americans and British dont watch out, they are likely to nd themselves condemned for what they have alwaysand rightlyaccused Iraq of: war crimes.
Robert Fisk, Wailing children, the wounded, the dead; victims of the day cluster bombs rained on Babylon, The Independent (April 3, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3383.

30 Red Cross doctors who visited southern Iraq this week saw incredible levels of civilian casualties including a truckload of dismembered women and children, a spokesman said Thursday from Baghdad. Roland Huguenin, one of six International Red Cross workers in the Iraqi capital, said doctors were horried by the casualties they found in the hospital in Hilla, about 160 kilometres south of Baghdad. There has been an incredible number of casualties with very, very serious wounds in the region of Hilla, Huguenin said in an interview by satellite telephone. We saw that a truck was delivering dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children. It was an awful sight. It was really very difcult to believe this was happening. Huguenin said the dead and injured in Hilla came from the village of Nasiriyah, where there has been heavy ghting between American troops and Iraqi soldiers, and appeared to be the results of bombs, projectiles. At this stage we cannot comment on the nature of what happened exactly at that place but it was denitely a different pattern from what we had seen in Basra or Baghdad. There will be investigations I am sure. Baghdad and Basra are coping relatively well with the ow of wounded, said Huguenin, estimating that Baghdad hospitals have been getting about 100 wounded a day. Most of the wounded in the two large cities have suffered supercial shrapnel wounds, with only about 15 per cent requiring internal surgery, he said. But the pattern in Hilla was completely different. In the case of Hilla, everybody had very serious wounds and many, many of them small kids and women. We had small toddlers of two or three years of age who had lost their legs, their arms. We have called this a horror. At least 400 people were taken to the Hilla hospital over a period of two days, he saidfar beyond its capacity. Doctors worked around the clock to do as much as they could. They just had to manage, that was all. The city is no longer accessible, he added. Red Cross staff are also concerned about what may be happening in other smaller centres south of Baghdad. We do not know what is going on in Najaf and Kabala. It has become physically impossible for us to reach out to those cities because the major road has become a zone of combat.
Canadian Press (April 6, 2003), http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/%201049413227648_10/? %20hub=SpecialEvent3.

(c) The U.S.s intended use of chemical weapons would be a war crime
In addition to bombing Iraqi civilians in Nasiriyah and elsewhere, the United States made it clear prior to the invasion of Iraq that it was prepared to deploy chemical weapons against the population of Baghdad. Testifying on February 5, 2003 before the House Armed Services Committee, Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Congressman Meehan whether the U.S. has plans to use so-called non-lethal weapons to disarm and disperse armed civilians encountered by U.S. forces during

31 the intense street ghting in Baghdad that was promised by the Iraqi dictatorship. Stephen Kerr writes as follows about Rumsfeld's response. A US-German NGO, the Sunshine Project, has revealed how the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), working with scientists at Penn State University's Marine Corps Research facility and the US Army Edgewood Biological and Chemical Center, have been researching and developing a chemical weapon similar to that which killed 20% of those who were exposed to it at the Palace of Culture Theatre in Moscow in October 2002. A trail of declassied documents Donald Rumsfeld would rather not discuss clearly illustrates the process, and you can nd some of them on the website of the Sunshine Project at www.sunshine-project.org. Fentanyl, a powerful sedative drug, is used as a surgical anesthetic and is also known as Sublimaze, increasingly a street drug of abuse. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that JNLWD has transformed this narcotic and others such as Ketamine (Special K) into a new non-lethal weapon which will put everyone in a room to sleep, combatants, and noncombatants, according to a JNLWD commander. Another document identies hungry refugees, unwilling to wait for the distribution of emergency food, as a target for these new non-lethal chemical weapons. And according to Defence Department Directive 3000.3, the nonlethal part of the weapon isnt 100%. So Congressman Meehan wanted to know if America had any plans for the hostile use of Fentanyl or other novel gases on Iraqi civilians, though he didnt quite put it that way. After a long pause, and the standard reminder about how Saddam Hussein lies about every single thing he says, Rumsfeld made a startling admission; the United States is planning for the use of gas against any Iraqis who resist the American invasion, and has already employed such illegl weapons in the War on Terror. Rumsfeld knows the law is not on his side. He admitted as much when he stated, With respect to the use of non-lethal riot agents I regret to say that we are in a very difcult situation. There is a treaty that the United States signed [the Chemical Weapons Convention www.opcw.org]. Rumsfeld pauses, then let me put it this way, absent a Presidential waiver in many instances our forces are allowed to shoot somebody and kill them, but they are not allowed to use a non-lethal riot control agent. No they are not allowed. The CWC outlaws the hostile use of chemistry, and in the case of non-lethal riot-control agents, forbids states from using riot control agents as means of warfare. The laws of armed conict are quite clear that weapons systems and the soldiers who employ them must discriminate between soldiers and civilians. Chemical weapons cant tell the difference, which is one major reason why they're illegal. A second reason was aptly demonstrated last October by Russian Special Forces at the Palace of Culture Theatre, who summarily executed 50 Chechen hostage takers, after the sedative gas put them to sleep. US troops employed tear gas in Vietnam to similar effect. But Donald Rumsfeld wants to remove the ban on chemical weapons, the better to police the Pax Americana. [.] There are times when the use of non-lethal riot agents is perfectly appropriate when transporting dangerous people in a conned space, in an airplane for example, when there are enemy troops in a cave in Afghanistan and you know there are women and children in there with them, and they are

32 ring out at you, and you have the task of getting at them, and youd prefer to get at them without also getting at women and children, and non-combatants, said Rumsfeld, hesitating several times. This deeply cynical statement obscures the reality that it is precisely non-combatants who may not be targeted by weapons under international law. The Geneva Convention explicitly states that The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the denition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character, thus the civilian population may not be drugged against their will with an indiscriminate chemical weapon to allow US troops to sort the wheat from the chaff as contemplated in US military planning papers, and admitted by Donald Rumsfeld.
Stephen Kerr, For the President and Poison Gas: Donald Rumsfeld and Poison Gas, ZNet (February 27, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3148.

(d) The responsibilities of occupying powers

The Iraqi people are protected by a substantial body of law First, the Geneva Conventions, in particular the 4th, which dates from 1951 and has since been reinforced by multiple treaties: the Protocol regarding refugee status in 1967, the conclusions of the UN High Commission on refugees, as well as the Guidelines on Internal Population Displacement approved by the AG of the UN in 1998; nally, they are covered under what is known as the humanitarian conventions of international law. What does this body of law state? That the lives and property of civilians must be protected as far as possible. A measure of collateral damage is permissible only in the case of legitimate military action. But that action to authorise a measure of collateral damage must be legitimate. Is the intervention of the American and British military in Iraq legitimate? Ko Annan is doubtful (Le Monde, March 13); a growing chorus of world legal authorities have declared that intervention which dees the UN charter is totally illegal. In this case, civilian deaths are simply war crimes. In all likelihood, the US will occupy Iraq. On this point, international law is very clear: as soon as the US becomes an occupying power, they become at the same time accountable for the totality of injuries suffered by civilians. Any failure to protect civilians would be a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. Article 55 of the 4th Convention obliges the US, if they occupy Iraq, to assure the civilian population's need for food, but also to guarantee their fundamental rights to care, education, freedom of movement and settlement. Wherever the occupying power fails to respect or assure respect for these rights, it will be guilty of a serious violation of the Geneva Convention, and such a violation is considered a war crime. As [early] as December 2002, the UN Predicted a Devastating Humanitarian crisis: 23 million civilians in danger How does the US plan to full their obligations? And what are those obligations, that is, what will be the population's needs? Without speaking of the direct effects of bombing by terrifying weaponsweapons of mass destruction which the US possesses and might yet usethe American military predicts the near-total destruction of Iraqi infrastructure. UN experts predict the destruction of communications centres (telephone), land and sea

33 transportation, roads and ports, trucks and boats, the railways, all bridges (which will cut off east-west links), and all power plants. Oil production will be paralysed or totally stopped. Drinking water is produced by ltration plants which depend on pumping stations which in turn are dependent on the electrical network. Without electricity, 10 million and in the long term 18 million people will be deprived of drinking water. Furthermore, ve million people depend on the sewage network. This system will cease to work. Consequences: epidemics of meningitis, measles, and pan-epidemics of cholera and dysentry. This scenario is already coming true in Bassorah, where the 2 million civilians are deprived of drinking water and electricity since March 22 and epidemics threaten the lives of 100,000 children. [.] Baghdad will soon be under siege: ve million civilians will be hostages. The Coalition is using hunger as a weapon. For Baghdadis will have no drinking water, no lights, telephones, sanitation facilities; and what will they eat? [.] UN agencies estimate emergency needs: water and food for 5 and a half million Iraqis immediately, 10 million after six weeks, care for 2 million refugees and internally displaced people; medical supplies and chemical toilets for 5.5 million people, medical supplies for 1000,000 wounded (though estimates reach 500,000), tent shelters for for 1.5 million, reconstruction of bridges and reorganisation of trucks. But these urgent needs are insignicant in comparison with what must be done in the year following invasion: food and medication for 23 million people, care for 2 million refugees, therapeutic food for 3 million pregnant and nursing women and children suffering from malnutrition; water for 18 million people, emergency shelter for 3.5 million people, care for some 60,000 people now in institutions and hospitals, mine clearing materials, materials to reconstruct bridges, all sorts of vehicles, and above all, hundreds of electrical generators. Sharing of Financial and Penal Responsibilities It is difcult to see how [in] an apocalyptic situation such as is described by UN agencies, the rights of 23 million Iraqis will be protected, because [the protection of] their basic right to life is far from certain. The USA has marshalled 3 million individual rationsthat is, one day of food for 3 million peoplein terms of food aid, and ha[s] earmarked $52 million, whereas hundreds of millions of dollars will be required. They do not hide the fact that they are counting on the rest of the world to pay the bill, although most other countries have declared their opposition to destruction--a questionable division of international labour. [.] Appeals attempting to declare this war illegal are underway in Canada and Great Britain; other countries could follow the same example. But no judicial action will happen in time to save civilian Iraqis. It is up to governments opposed to war to show the aggressors their responsibilities. The states prepared to provoke this catastrophe will be guilty, but those which allow them to do it are also from now on and already accomplices to war crimes against an entire population.
Christine Delphy, International Law and the Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq, ZNet (March 27, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3332.

For further information on this issue, see the following:

34 International Humanitarian Law Research Initiative, International Law: Ensuring humanitarian access in Iraq (April 5, 2003), http://electronicIraq.net/news/564.shtml. Mahajan, Rahul. The New Humanitarianism: Basra as a Military Target, ZNet (March 28, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3345.

5. Weapons of Mass Destruction: Did Iraq pose a threat to peace and security?
This section contains excerpts from texts by writers of the Associated Press news agency, Hans Blix, Noam Chomsky, Mohamed Elbaradei, Richard Gwyn, Richard Norton-Taylor, Niko Price, Scott Ritter (with William Rivers Pitt), Hans von Sponeck, and Andreas Zumach.

(a) The evidence of Iraqs disarmament

On September 24, 2002, a U.K. Member of Parliament, George Galloway, contacted British journalists posted in Baghdad by telephone as soon as the Blair governments dossier on Iraqs purported weapons of mass destruction capacity was released. They immediately asked Iraqi government ofcials to take them to sites named in the dossier. The Iraqis cooperated promptly, and the journalists concluded from their visits to the sites that the claims made in the U.K. government dossier were false. (It can be noted that the U.K. government dossier was kept secret until the moment of its release; neither Iraq nor anyone else outside the central agencies of the U.K. government had advance notice of its contents.)
Source: Interview of George Galloway MP on CBC Radio As It Happens (September 25, 2002).

Two sites, Al Dora on the outskirts of Baghdad and Al Fallujah III, were identied by the U.S. government (A decade of Deception and Deance, September 12, 2002) and by the U.K. government (Dossier released on September 24, 2002) as places where biological weapons of mass destruction have been in production since the departure of UN weapons inspectors in December 1998. A study published on September 9, 2002 by the U.K. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) makes the same claims about the Al Dora site. My visit to these two sites (accompanied by the ARD German TV) showed conclusively that Al Dora and Al Fallujah III facilities had been destroyed. The evidence offered by the US and UK administration as well as the IISS assessment of Iraqs WMD status does not support in any way the contention that an imminent threat emanates from Iraq justifying a military offensive. The US government-promoted mass hysteria and the psycho war are internationally unacceptable.

35
Hans von Sponeck, Four Questions, Four Answers (European Colloquium, Brussels, September 25, 2002), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/4questions.shtm.

The United States maintains that Iraq poses a threat to its security. This threat, it is argued, is so serious that a pre-emptive military strike is required to protect the US and the wider global community. The UK shares this perception. The rest of the world, particularly Iraqs neighbours, do not agree with this assessment. [.] None of the evidence the US and UK have produced is accepted by the international community as hard core and unquestionable evidence that Iraq is in possession of or trying to produce ABC [i.e. atomic/biological/chemical] weapons materials. Attempts to link acts of terrorism involving the 1993 and 2001 WTC, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-salaam, the USS Cole in Aden, the Anthrax cases in the US and collaboration with Al Qaeda to the Government of Iraq have failed.
Hans von Sponeck, Four Questions, Four Answers (European Colloquium, Brussels, September 25, 2002), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/4questions.shtm.

I believe the primary problem at this point is one of accounting. Iraq has destroyed 90-95% of its weapons of mass destruction. Okay. We have to remember that this missing 5-10% doesnt necessarily constitute a threat. It doesn't even constitute a weapons program. It constitutes bits and pieces of a weapons program which in its totality doesnt amount to much, but which is still prohibited. Likewise, just because we cant account for it doesnt mean Iraq retains it. Theres no evidence Iraq retains this material. Thats the quandary were in. We cant give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we cant close the book on their weapons of mass destruction. But simultaneously we cant reasonably talk about Iraqi non-compliance as representing a de-facto retention of a prohibited capability worthy of war. How do we deal with this uncertainty? There are those who say that because there are no weapons inspectors in Iraq today [i.e. August, 2002], because Iraq has shown a proclivity to acquire these weapons in the past and use these weapons against their neighbors and their own people, and because Iraq has lied to weapons inspectors in the past, we have to assume the worst. Under this rubric, a pre-emptive strike is justied. If this were argued in a court of law, the weight of evidence would go the other way. Iraq has, in fact, demonstrated over and over a willingness to cooperate with weapons inspectors. Mitigating circumstances surround the demise of inspections and the inconclusive or incomplete nature of the mission, by which I mean Iraqs failure to be certied as fully disarmed. Those seeking to implement these resolutionsfor example, the United States actually violated the terms of the resolutions by using their unique access to operate inside Iraq in a manner incompatible with Security Council resolutions, for example, by spying on Iraq.
William Rivers Pitt, with Scott Ritter, War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (New York: Context Books, 2002), "An Interview with Scott Ritter," pp. 29-30.

36 How should the problem of the existence and use of weapons of mass destruction in the world today be dealt with? They should be eliminated. The non-proliferation treaty commits countries with nuclear weapons to take steps towards eliminating them. The biological and chemical weapons treaties have the same goals. The main Security Council resolution concerning Iraq (687 [1991]) calls for eliminating weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems from the Middle East, and working towards a global ban on chemical weapons. Good advice. Iraq is nowhere near the lead in this regard. We might recall the warning of General Lee Butler, head of Clintons Strategic Command in the early 90s, that it is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that inspires other nations to do so. Hes talking about Israel, of course. The Israeli military authorities claim to have air and armored forces that are larger and more advanced than those of any European NATO power (Yitzhak ben Israel, Haaretz, 4-16-02, Hebrew). They also announce that 12% of their bombers and ghter aircraft are permanently stationed in Eastern Turkey, along with comparable naval and submarine forces in Turkish bases, and armored forces as well [...]. By now Israel is virtually an offshore US military base.
Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert, Interview with Noam Chomsky about US Warplans, ZNet (August 29, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2422.

Blairs defence of his policy towards Saddam Hussein and UN weapons inspectors seems increasingly incoherent. In his press conference last week he carefully linked the threat of terrorism with the need to disarm Iraq. There was a danger of weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. He described Iraq as the focal point of the problem. Yet under questioning by MPs on Tuesday, Blair admitted that no evidence had been found of any links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, something his intelligence agencies have repeatedly told him. Yet the Bush administration, encouraged by the the Israeli government, continues to promote the lie that such a link exists. [.] Any threat posed by Iraq was put into perspective this week by the former Democrat senator, Sam Nunn. He was in London to launch a report on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons by 13 respected thinktanks led by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies. The danger was not so much that a state would supply terrorist groups with these weapons. Terrorists, Nunn warned, are more likely to steal them or buy them on the open market.
Richard Norton-Taylor, A blindness that puts us all in danger, The Guardian (January 23, 2003), http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,12780,880374,00.html.

Important assessments of the question of Iraqs supposed possession of chemical, biological or (potentially) nuclear weapons include the following: Blix, Hans. Statement by Hans Blix to the UN Security Council, The Guardian (January 27, 2003),

37 http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/unmovic/2003/0127 entblixrep.htm. ----, Statement by Hans Blix to the UN Security Council (February 14, 2003), http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/blix14Febasdel.htm. ----, Statement by Hans Blix to the UN Security Council (March 7, 2003), http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm. Elbaradei, Mohamed. Statement of Mohamed Elbaradei to the UN Security Council (March 7, 2003), http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Press/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n00 6.shtml. Khadduri, Imad. Iraqs nuclear non-capability, Yellow Times (November 21, 2002), http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=874. Pitt, William Rivers, with Scott Ritter. War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know. New York: Context Books, 2002. Rangwala, Glen. Claims and evaluations of Iraqs proscribed weapons, http://www.traprockpeace.org/iraqweapons.html. Hans Blix is Executive Chairman of the current UN weapons inspection team (UNMOVIC) in Iraq; Mohamed Elbaradei is Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Scott Ritter was a member of the UN weapons inspection team that was withdrawn at U.S. instigation in 1998. Imad Khadduri, who now lives in Toronto, worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. Dr. Khadduris statement that Iraqs nuclear weapons program was abandoned after the 1991 Gulf War is supported by Scott Ritters account of the UNSCOM inspections which ended in 1998 and by Dr. Elbaradei's conclusions regarding the current IAEA inspections in Iraq. Dr. Glen Rangwala is an independent analyst, a lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge. His assessment of the evidence is the most thorough available, and is regularly updated. He has analyzed in scrupulous detail all of the claims relating to Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological warfare capacities and delivery systems made by the U.S. and U.K. governments. With one single exception the importation of rocket engines, forbidden under the sanctions, but confessed to in Iraqs December 2002 weapons declaration to the Security Councilhe nds the claims of the American and British governments to be unsupported by the available evidence. See Glen Rangwala, Claims and evaluations of Iraq's proscribed weapons, http://www.traprockpeace.org/iraqweapons.html. When I left Iraq in 1998, when the UN inspection program ended, the [nuclear weapons program] infrastructure and facilities had been 100% eliminated. Theres no debate about that. All of their instruments and facilities had been destroyed. The weapons design facilities had been destroyed. The production equipment had been hunted down and destroyed. And we had in place means to monitorboth from vehicles and from the airthe gamma rays that accompany attempts to enrich uranium or plutonium. We never found anything. We can say unequivocally that the industrial infrastructure needed by Iraq to produce nuclear weapons had been eliminated.
William Rivers Pitt, with Scott Ritter, War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know (New York: Context Books, 2002), An Interview with Scott Ritter, pp. 30-31.

38 * There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identied through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstucted or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites. * There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990. * There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminium tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even if Iraq had pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difculties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminium tubes in question. * Although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and magnet production, there is no indication to date that Iraq has imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.
Mohamed Elbaradei, Statement of Mohamed Elbaradei to the UN Security Council (March 7, 2003): The Status of Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: An Update, http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Press/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n006.shtml.

In his March 7, 2003 report to the UN Security Council, UNMOVIC Executive Chairman Dr. Hans Blix noted that U.S. claims that Iraq possesses mobile biologicalweapons laboratories and moves weapons of mass destruction around the country in trucks appear to be incorrect. (Food testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities have [sic] so far been found.) Claims that weapons of mass destruction are being manufactured or concealed underground are likewise unsupported by the evidence. (During inspections of declared or undeclared facilities, inspection teams have examined building structures for any possible underground facilities. In addition, ground penetrating radar equipment was used in several specic locations. No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far.) Blix also remarked, with respect to the ongoing destruction of the short-range Al Samoud 2 missiles, that We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks (Statement by Hans Blix to the UN Security Council [March 7, 2003], http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm). Grasping at straws, Colin Powell and other U.S. ofcials claimed in the months prior to the invasion of Iraq that Iraq possessed drone aircraft capable of attacking the United States with chemical and biological weapons. But once again, the evidence proved disappointing. A remotely piloted aircraft that the United States has warned could spread chemical weapons appears to be made of balsa wood and duct tape, with two small propellers attached to what look like the engines of a weed whacker. Iraqi ofcials took journalists to the Ibn Firnas State Company just north of Baghdad yesterday, where the drones project director accused Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, of misleading the UN Security Council and the public. Hes making a big mistake, said Brigadier-General Imad Abdul Latif. He knows very well that this aircraft is not used for what he said. In Washingtons search for a smoking gun that would prove Iraq is not disarming, Mr. Powell has insisted the drone, which has a wingspan of 7.5 metres, could be tted to dispense chemical and biological weapons. He has said it should be of concern to everybody. [.]

39 Brig.-Gen. Latif said the plane is controlled by the naked eye from the ground. Asked whether its range is above the 150-kilometre limit imposed by the UN, he said it couldnt be controlled from more than 11 kilometres. Brig.Gen. Latif said the exact range will be determined when the drone passes to the next testing stage. Ibn Firnas general director, General Ibrahim Hussein, disputed assertions by Mr. Powell and Ari Fleischer, the White House Press Secretary, that the drone was capable of dispensing biological and chemical weapons. This RPV is to be used for reconnaissance, jamming and aerial photography, he said. We have never thought of any other use.
Niko Price, Iraq says duct-taped drone was never hidden, National Post (March 13, 2003): A15.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.) Its troubling [] that Iraq is being required to prove a negative; namely that it does not have weapons of mass destruction. This is a logical impossibility. Only after an invasion can there be absolute certainty about what actually exists, or doesnt, in the country. At that time, if nothing were found, the Americans could say, and no doubt would, that the weapons did once exist but had been spirited away to Al Qaeda terrorists.
Richard Gwyn, Clock starts ticking on Iraq, Toronto Star (Dec. 22, 2002), A21.

(b) The sources of Iraqs pre-1991 WMD programs

Glen Rangwala notes that some of the relevant evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction has not been made public. It was in fact suppressed by the U.S. governmentwhose UN delegation appropriated the 12,000 page report which was submitted to the Security Council by Iraq in December 2002. The U.S. subsequently supplied to other members of the Council a censored text only 3,000 pages in length. The reason for this bizarre act of concealment is not far to seek. According to reports by Andreas Zumach in the Berlin newspaper DieTageszeitung on December 17 and 18, 2002, the full report contains embarrassingly detailed information about the complicity of western corporations and governmentsamong them 80 German corporations, 24 American corporations, and the Reagan and Bush I governments in Iraqs nuclear, chemical and biological warfare programs during the 1980s. It appears that the U.S. government contemplated using unreleased information about German complicity as a means of blackmailing Germany (which joined the Security Council as a rotating member at the beginning of January 2003) into compliance with the US attack on Iraq. A long-term high-ranking member of the government in Baghdad (whose name is known to Die Tageszeitung) has signalled his readiness to the Bush administration to deliver more specic information regarding German arms cooperation with Iraq, in return for assurances of protection after a potential regime change. According to sources, the Bush administration might want to use this information to ensure that Germany [] complies with the U.S. position in the Security Council.

40
Andreas Zumach, Die Tageszeitung (December 17, 2002), translation from http://www.democracynow.org/Zumach2.htm. The German text of Zumachs articles on Iraqs weapons report to the Security Council is available at http://www.taz.de. (See also Beaumont, Rose, and Beaver, US to punish German 'treachery', The Observer [February 17, 2003], http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3060.)

During the 1980s, when the United States supported Iraq in its 1980-88 war against Iran, the U.S. supplied Saddam Hussein's regime with biological weapons agents. According to an Associated Press report of October 1, 2002, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a biological sample company, the American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinin toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene. See U.S. gave germs to Iraq, Associated Press (October 1, 2002), http://www.timesdispatch.com/news/more/MGBPGP77R6D.html. For further evidence of the complicity of corporations and governments in Germany, the U.S., Britain and other countries in supplying the Iraqi government with weapons of mass destruction technology during the 1980s, and in providing diplomatic cover for Iraq when the regime used chemical weapons against its own Kurdish population in 1987 and 1988, see the following articles: Gendzier, Irene. Dying to Forget: The US and Iraqs Weapons of Mass Destruction, Logos Online (March 14, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3233. Hiltermann, Joost R. America Didnt Seem to Mind Poison Gas, International Herald Tribune (January 17, 2003), http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0117-01.htm. Mackay, Neil Mackay. Iraq's Arms Revealed: 17 British rms armed Saddam with his weapons, Sunday Herald (February 25, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=3124.

(c) U.S. use of weapons of mass destruction

The United States can hardly claim to occupy the moral high ground when it comes to the question of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers, among them North Korea. (For documentation of the latter threats see Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, eds. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel (New York: The New Press, 2002), p. 302 n. 62, available at http://www.understandingpower.com.) On several occasions between August 1990 and February 1991, the U.S. and Britain threatened to use nuclear weapons against Iraqa threat renewed by British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon in March 2002; see Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 188, 185. The research work of two Canadian historians, Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, appears to have conrmed that the U.S. deployed biological weapons during the Korean War, bombing parts of North Korea and China with anthrax, encephalitis and other diseases in early 1952. See Faiz Rady, 'Beyond a reasonable doubt, Al-Ahram Weekly (April 6-12, 2000, Issue No. 476), http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2000/476/in1.htm. There is also strong evidence of

41 U.S. use of the nerve gas sarin during the Vietnam War: see Barry Grey, Why did CNN retract its nerve gas report? A closer look, World Socialist Web Site (July 16, 1998), http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/july1998/cnn-j16.shtml. A much more damaging use of chemical agents during the U.S. invasion of Vietnam is of course well known, though not commonly recognized as an instance of chemical warfare. The United States forces sprayed Agent Orange repeatedly over wide tracks of South Vietnam between the mid-1960s and 1973: though categorized as a defoliant, this substance was highly toxic to humans and animals as well as to plants. In May, 2002 Noam Chomsky commented with characteristic irony on some recent non-coverage of the subject in the U.S. media. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a front-page story in all the papers. Some scientists had discovered that it would be possible to construct what are called dirty bombsbombs that would have a lot of radiation but not much destructive impactand to put them in New York somewhere. They calculated the effects and they said there wouldn't be many deaths, just a small number, but maybe a lot of disease, and it would certainly cause panic. So it's a horrible story, front-page news. The same day, there was a conference in Hanoi, in which leading U.S. scientists participated, people who had worked on dioxin, the main poisonous ingredient in Agent Orange. The conference was concerned with the effects of U.S. chemical warfare on South Vietnam, only South Vietnam. The North was spared this terror. And an American scientist at the conference tested dioxin levels in various parts of the country. Of course, those who had been subjected to crop destruction and other uses of Agent Orange had very high levels, in fact hundreds of times as high as permissible in the United States. And there are also recent cases. Many of them are just from the last few years, children. And they tried to calculate the effects, which would be colossal, probably hundreds of thousands of victims. That news was hardly even mentioned in the [U.S.] press. I had a friend do a database search. There were a couple of mentions here and there. So here, a report on our use of chemical weapons, which may have killed maybe hundreds of thousands of people: not a mention. A report that maybe it might be possible to do something in New York that might kill a few people: front-page news. Thats the difference. Thats the difference in who counts and who doesn't count.
Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews (New York: Seven Stories Press, Tokyo: Little More, 2003), pp. 27-28.

In an important article, Stephen Kerr documents the evidence that large numbers of U.S. soldiers in Iraq were exposed to sarin gas and other chemical weapons on March 4, 1991, when the U.S. Army idiotically demolished the Iraqi chemical weapons depot at Kamisiyah by blowing it up in the open air. In the same article, Kerr also provides useful information about the U.S.s own stocks of chemical weapons. See Stephen Kerr, Where's the VX? (January 24, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2909. Elsewhere Kerr has quoted at length from Donald Rumsfelds testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on February 5, 2003testimony which makes clear Rumsfelds intention, in deance of the Geneva Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention, to use chemical weapons against the civilian population of

42 Baghdad. See section 4 (c) above for an excerpt from Stephen Kerrs article For the President and Poison Gas: Donald Rumsfeld and Poison Gas (February 27, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3148.

6. Decoding U.S. and U.K. Propaganda

This section contains excerpts from texts written (or, in one case, spoken) by Prashant Bhushan, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Sandro Contenta, George Galloway, Seymour Hersh, Media Lens, Maggie OKane, Scott Peterson, John Pilger, Dana Priest, Milan Rai, and Glen Rangwala.

(a) Key statements of the U.S. and U.K. position

Important recent policy statements and claims of fact by the U.S. and U.K. governments include the following, listed in the order of their publication. (The rst nine of these texts are available at http://traprockpeace.org/iraqweapons.html.) U.S. State Department. A Decade of Deception and Deance. (September 12, 2002; background paper to President George W. Bushs speech to the UN General Assembly.) U.K. Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Iraqs Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government. (September 24, 2002). George W. Bush. Speech at Cincinnati Museum Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. (October 7, 2002.) U.S. Defense Department. Iraqi Denial and Deception for Weapons of Mass Destruction and Ballistic Missile Programs. (October 8, 2002.) U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Iraqs Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs. (October, 2002.) U.S. State Department. Fact Sheet: Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council. (December 19, 2002.) U.S. White House, What Does Disarmament Look Like? (January 23, 2003). Colin Powell. Remarks at the World Economic Forum. (Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2003.) George W. Bush. State of the Union Address. (January 28, 2003.) Iraqits infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation. 10 Downing Street Facts (U.K. Government Dossier, January 30, 2003), http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7111.asp. Colin Powell. Remarks: Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the United Nations Security Council. (February 5, 2003), http://www.un.int/usa/03clp0205.htm. Julian Borger. Straw threat to bypass UN over attack on Iraq. The Guardian (October 19, 2002), http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,815190,00.html. Tony Blair. The price of my conviction. The Observer (February 16, 2003): 20.

43

(b) Responses to Bush and Powell

Among the many recent responses to the claims advanced by George W. Bush and Colin Powell, the following (listed according to the date of their publication) are noteworthy: Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich. Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. New York: Context Books, 2003. Appendix Two: Detailed Analysis of October 7, 2002 Speech by Bush on Iraq (Compiled by the Institute for Public Accuracy on October 8, 2002), pp. 125-54. Phyllis Bennis. Powells Dubious Case, ZNet (February 5, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2976. Robert Jensen. Smoking Guns and Big Guns: The US Drive to War, ZNet (February 5, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2970. Robert Fisk.Powell Presentation: It was like something out of Beckett, The Independent (February 6, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2977. Stephen James-Kerr. The Modied Vehicles Powell Forgot to Mention, ZNet (February 6, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2986. Danny Schechter. Powell Doctrine or Doctrinaire? ZNet (February 6, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=21&ItemID=2981. Scott Ritter. Dismissing Powell: Story on Scott Ritters Reaction, Kyodo News (February 7, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2997. Normon Solomon. Colin Powell is FlawlessInside a Media Bubble, ZNet (February 7, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=21&ItemID=2993. Rahul Mahajan. Responding to Colin Powell, ZNet (February 8, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2980 Maria Tomchick. Powells Flimsy Evidence, ZNet (February 9, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3009. Mark Weisbrot. War Games: Old Europe Confronts Washington on Iraq, ZNet (February 11, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3023. Mahir Ali. Blessed Are the Peacemakers, Dawn [Karachi] (February 12, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3026.

44 Dennis Hans. Lying Us Into War: Exposing Bush and His Techniques of Deceit, Scoop Media (February 12, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3024. Joey Slinger. With friends like this, do we need other reasons, Toronto Star (February 15, 2003): A2, http://www.thestar.com. Michele Landsberg. U.S lies shouldnt be leading us into battle again, Toronto Star (February 16, 2003): A2, http://www.thestar.com. Haroon Siddiqui. Case for war eroded by absurd U.S. arguments, Toronto Star (February 16, 2003): B1, http://www.thestar.com. Robert Byrd. We stand passively mute, The Guardian (February 18, 2003): 17. Hans Blix. Statement by Hans Blix to the UN Security Council (March 7, 20034), http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/SC7asdelivered.htm. Mohamed Elbaradei. Statement by Mohamed Elbaradei to the UN Security Council (March 7, 2003), http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Press/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n00 6.shml. Niko Price. Iraq says duct-taped drone was never hidden, National Post (March 13, 2003): A15. White House Claims: A Pattern of Deceit, Institute for Public Accuracy (March 18, 2003), http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR031803.htm. Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank. Bush Clings to Dubious Allegations About Iraq, The Washington Post (March 18, 2003): A13, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A425172003Mar17.html. Seymour M. Hersh. Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program? The New Yorker (March 31, 2003), http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/? 030331fa_fact. In a recent article, Prashant Bhushan turns George W. Bushs repeated comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler against Bush himself. While selling his attack on Iraq, Bush often draws an analogy with Hitler's Germany. He likens the threat posed to the world by Saddam today to the threat posed by Hitler in the mid 30s. [.] While the analogy between Saddam and Hitler may be laughable, it is instructive, though frightening, to draw an analogy between Bush and Hitler and the threats posed by them to other nations and to world peace. [.] Compared to the military arsenal of the US today, Germanys under Hitler was nothing. The lack of respect of the US for international law is evident not only in the number of occasions that it has engaged in unilateral overt military aggression [] during the last fty years [], but also from the number of occasions that it has vetoed [otherwise] unanimous Security Council resolutions which were passed to make Israel comply with international law. [.] Any doubt whatsoever about the willingness of Bush to trample upon all norms of international law should have been dispelled by the manner in which Bush has been proclaiming his contempt for the United Nations. [.] It is obvious by now that the real objective of the attack on Iraq is not to stop Saddam from acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction []. The

45 real objectives have to do with securing and controlling Iraq's oil [], and indeed to acquire strategic control of the entire Middle East. From the belligerence and arrogance exhibited by Bush and his top advisers [], it appears that the objective is also to generate fear among other countries that the US would be willing to use its military might against nations which cross its path. The [open threat to use the] recently tested sub-nuclear mother of all bombs (MOAB) [], along with nuclear tipped deep penetration missiles, against Iraq, is not just designed to scare Iraq into submission, but also to put other countries on notice that the US will not hesitate to use weapons of mass genocide against countries which do not toe its line. [.] But it may be objected that it would be unfair to compare Bush with Hitler, since Bush leads a democratic country while Hitler had established a dictatorship. But even Hitler had come to power through a democratic election. It was only thereafter, that he used the Reichstag re and the demonizing of the Jews to generate mass hysteria and acquire absolute power. Hasnt Bush also used the events of September 11 to carefully orchestrate his war on terror to generate the same kind of hysteria? He has used that hysteria to get the Congress to abdicate and cede many of its powers to him, particularly the all-important power of permitting attack on other countries under the cover of this war on terror. He has even got several draconian laws passed, including the infamous Patriot Act, which is being used to erode civil liberties and gradually take the US on the path of a Police State. [.] [By] every objective standard, Bush today poses a much greater threat to world peace and those countries which do not toe his line, than Hitler ever did. His military arsenal is far bigger and more lethal than any arsenal ever assembled in history. He has displayed an open contempt for the United Nations and international law and an easy willingness to use unilateral military force to even commit mass genocide by using weapons of mass destruction to achieve his ends. He has skilfully generated mass hysteria in the country to increase his own power by whittling down the power of the Congress, and eroding civil liberties. His personal commercial interests and those of his men are closely tied to oil and war and he has demonstrated that he will trample upon all international norms in the pursuit of those interests.
Prashant Bhushan, Bush Must Be Stopped Now Before It Is Too Late, ZNet (March 17, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=3254.

(c) Responses to Blair

The claims advanced by Tony Blair have been no less thoroughly refuted and exposed to ridicule: Alan Simpson and Glen Rangwala. Labour Against the Wars CounterDossier (September 17, 2002), http://www.labouragainstthewar.org.uk/link5.html. Robert Fisk. The dishonesty of this so-called dossier, The Independent (September 25, 2002), http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp? story=336404. Media Lens Alert: Bitter Ironies of Propaganda. Media Lens (January 14, 2003), http://www.medialens.org/alerts/030114_Bitter_Ironies.html.

46 David Edwards. Blairs Betrayal: Part I (The Newsnight Debate: Dismantling the Case for War), Media Lens (February 10, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3012. David Edwards. Blairs Betrayal: Part 2 (The Newsnight Debate: Dismantling the Case for War), Media Lens (February 11, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3020. Conor Gearty. How did Blair get here? Conor Gearty on the folly of the impending war, London Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 4 (February 20, 2003): 7-8. John Pilger. Blair's Lies, Daily Mirror (March 14, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3235. One passage in Blairs The price of my conviction speech deserves special emphasis. Blair attempts to refute the moral case against war by setting out the moral case for removing Saddam in the following manner. [] the moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam. It is not the reason we act. That must be according to the UN mandate on weapons of mass destruction. But it is the reason, frankly, why if we do have to act, we should do so with a clear conscience. Yes, there are consequences of war. If we remove Saddam by force, people will die, and some will be innocent. And we must live with the consequences of our actions, even the unintended ones. But there are also consequences of stop the war. There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which if he is left in power, will remain in being.
Tony Blair, The price of my conviction, The Observer (February 16, 2003): 20.

Blair identies two categories of victims of the Iraqi tyrant. There is indeed reason for concern about torture and summary executions under Saddam Husseins brutal dictatorship. (It is worth adding that such concern does not legitimize a war of aggressionand worth noting that the U.S. and U.K. governments expressed no concern about Iraqi torture during the 1980s when Saddam was their de facto ally.) But for Blair to advance the deaths of Iraqi children as a justication for warwhen these deaths have been and continue to be caused by the genocidal regime of sanctions for which the U.S. and his own government bear direct responsibilityis breathtakingly cynical. Having failed to fabricate a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and prove that Iraq has a secret armoury of banned weapons, the warmongers have fallen back on the moral case for an unprovoked attack on a stricken country. Farce has arrived. We want to laugh out loud, a deep and dark and almost grief-laden laugh, at Blairs concern for the victims of Saddam Hussein and his admonishment (printed in the Observer) of the millions of protesters: There will be no protests about the thousands of [Iraqi] children that die needlessly every year

47 First, lets look back to Saddams most famous victim, the British journalist Farzad Bazoft, who was hanged in 1990 for spying, a bogus trial following a bogus charge. Those of us who protested at his murder did so in the teeth of a smear campaign by the British government and a press determined to cover for Britains favourite tyrant. The Sun smeared Bazoft by publishing his conviction for stealing when he was a studentinformation supplied by MI5 on behalf of the Thatcher government, which was then seeking any excuse not to suspend its lucrative business and arms deals with the Iraqi dictator. The Mail and Today suggested that Saddam was rightthat Bazoft was a spy. In a memorable editorial, the Sunday Telegraph equated investigative journalism with criminal espionage. Defending Saddam, not his victim, was clearly preferable. What did Tony Blair say about this outrage? I can nd nothing. Did Blair join those of us who protested, on the streets and in print, at the fact that ministers such as Douglas Hurd were commuting to Baghdad, with Hurd going especially to celebrate the anniversary of the coming to power of the dictator I described as renowned as the interrogator of Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the Palace of the End? There is no record of Blair saying anything substantive about Saddam Husseins atrocities until after 11 September 2001 when the Americans, having failed to catch Osama bin Laden, declared Saddam their number one enemy. As for Blairs assertion that there have been no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly under his rule, the answer is straightforward. There have been years of protests about the effects of the AngloAmerican embargo on the children of Iraq. That the US, backed by Britain, is largely responsible for the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi deaths is the great unspoken in the so-called mainstream of politics and journalism. That the embargo allowed Saddam Hussein to centralise and reinforce his domestic control is equally unmentionable. Whenever the voluminous evidence of such a monumental western crime against humanity is laid out, the crocodile tears of Blair and the rest of the warmongers barely disguise their cynicism. Denis Halliday, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations who was the senior UN ofcial in Baghdad, has many times identied the genocide of the American-driven sanctions. The UNs Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has paid tribute to the Iraqi rationing system, giving it credit for saving an entire population from famine. This, like the evidence and witness of Halliday and his successor, Hans von Sponeck, and the United Nations Childrens Fund (Unicef) and the Catholic Relief Agency (Cafod) and the 70 members of the US Congress who wrote to President Clinton describing the embargo as infanticide masquerading as policy, has been airbrushed out. [.]
John Pilger, When Saddam hanged a British journalist in 1990, MI5 had the journalist smeared in the Sun, and the Mail agreed he was a spy. What did Blair say? John Pilger can nd nothing (March 27, 2003), http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132122.

One of Tony Blairs Labour Party colleagues, George Galloway, MP for Glasgow Kelvin, has written as follows about the British prime ministers position.

48 What most irks my pro-war parliamentary colleagues is the question I regularly put to them: how has it come about that a Labour government, a Labour government, is shuttling around in limousines, from capital to capital, in the service of a foreign poweracting, as the Wall Street Journal had it, as Americas newest and brightest ambassador? As we know, an ambassador is someone sent abroad to lie for his country. It really has come to something when the Prime Minister of Great Britain is sent abroad to lie for someone else's country. He is roving ambassador to the right-wing, born-again, Bible-belting fundamentalist crew which rst turned Texas into the toxic execution chamber of the Western world, and has now, via a four-three vote in the Supreme Court and a lot of pregnant chads, given birth to a government which is a by-word for treaty-busting protocol, scuppering, agreement-wrecking international thuggery. All attempts by the world to rid itself of such plagues as landmines, proliferating small arms, pollution, chemical and biological weapons (I'm not making that last one up: the US has blocked new regulations on the basis that it would require them to allow UN inspectors to see their inventories) have been wrecked by the government now represented on the global stage by Tony Blair.
George Galloway, Blair Rides Shotgun for Bush, The Spectator (March 15, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3251.

(d) The scandal of Blairs plagiarized Dossier

At one point in his February 5, 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said, I would call my colleagues attention to the ne paper that the United Kingdom distributed yesterday which describes in detail Iraqi deception activities. The paper in question, Iraqits infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation, was rst published by Prime Minister Tony Blairs Downing Street ofce on January 30, 2003. On February 5, 2003 Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, exposed this ne paper as consisting very largely of material plagiarized from academic sources published between 1997 and 2002. Rangwala identies pp. 6, 9-12, and parts of pp. 13-14 as plagiarized from Ibrahim al-Marashis essay Iraqs Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis, Middle East Review of International Affairs (September 2002). Most of pp. 7-8 and 14-16 is copied from two articles by Sean Boyne published in Janes Intelligence Review (July and August 1997); and material on pp. 7, 13 and 15 is lifted from an article by Ken Gause in the same journal (November 2002). Rangwala notes that Marashis typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar are incorporated into the Downing Street documentwhich also, however, makes a number of deliberate changes to its source material. There are two types of changes incorporated into the British document. Firstly, numbers are increased or rounded up. So, for example, the section on Fedayeen Saddam (pp. 15-16) is directly copied from Boyne, almost word for word. The only substantive difference is that Boyne estimates the personnel of the organisation to be 18,000-40,000 (Gause similarly estimates 10-40,000). The British dossier instead writes 30,000 to 40,000. A similar bumping up of gures occurs with the description of the Directorate of Military Intelligence.

49 The second type of change in the British dossier is that it replaces particular words to make the claim sound stronger. So, for example, most of p. 9 on the functions of the Mukhabarat is copied directly from Marashis article, except that when Marashi writes of its role in: monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq this becomes in the British dossier: spying on foreign embassies in Iraq. Similarly, on that same page, whilst Marashi writes of the Mukhabarat: aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes the British dossier renders this as: supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes. [.] Apart from the obvious criticism that the British government has plagiarised texts without acknowledgement, passing them off as the work of the intelligence services, there are two further serious problems. Firstly, it indicates that the UK at least really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraqs internal politicsthey just draw on publicly available data. Thus any further claims to information based on intelligence data must be treated with even more scepticism. Secondly, the information presented as being an accurate statement of the current state of Iraqs security organisations may not be anything of the sort. Marashithe real and unwitting author of much of the documenthas as his primary source the documents captured in 1991 for the Iraq Research and Documentation Project. His own focus is the activities of Iraqs intelligence agencies in Kuwait, Aug. 90-Jan. 91this is the subject of his thesis. As a result, the information presented as relevant to how Iraqi agencies are currently engaged with Unmovic [the UN weapons inspection team] is 12 years old.
Glen Rangwala, British Intelligence Iraq Dossier Relies on Recycled Academic Articles (February 5, 2003), http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/2003/0205plagiarism.htm.

The revelations have left Prime Minister Tony Blairs ofce trying to fend off charges of plagiarism over a dossier Blair is using to sell war against Iraq to a British public that is widely opposed. An MP from Blairs own Labour party, former cabinet minister Glenda Jackson, said the prime ministers ofce would be guilty of attempting to mislead the country and parliament on the issue of a possible war with Iraq if it turns out the plagiarized material was passed off as intelligence. And of course to mislead is a parliamentary euphemism for lying, Jackson told the BBC radios Today program yesterday. Added Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle: It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths, assertions and over-the-top spin.
Sandro Contenta, U.K. denies charges of plagiarism, Toronto Star (February 8, 2003): A10.

(e) Another British forgery: uranium from Niger

The information presented here is from Seymour Hersh's March 31, 2003 article in The New Yorker, cited below. On September 24, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq's weapons

50 capability. During this secret brieng, Tenet repeated the claim that high-strength aluminum tubes which Iraq said were intended for missiles were actually intended for the construction of uranium-processing centrifuges. Tenet supported the claim that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program with a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy ve hundred tons or uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world's largest producers. On the same day, the British government released a dossier claiming that Iraq had sought to buy signicant quantities of uranium from an unnamed African country, despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it. The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, AFRICAN GANGS OFFER ROUTE TO URANIUM. On September 26, Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated Tenets and the Blair governments claim before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as evidence of [Iraq's] persistent nuclear ambitions. These representations had a denite impact on congressional deliberations over a resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to make war on Iraq: the resolution was overwhelmingly approved by Congress two weeks later. President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information: The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought signicant quantities of uranium from Africa. He commented, Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide. Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents are in fact not authentic, ElBaradei said. One senior I.A.E.A. ofcial went further. He told me, These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking. The I.A.E.A. had rst sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agencys Iraq Nuclear Verication Ofce. It took Bautes team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between ofcials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coperation, who had been out of ofce since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, has a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. ofcial said, that they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet. The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Nigers yellow cake comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear

51 power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. Five hundred tons cant be siphoned off without anyone noticing, another I.A.E.A ofcial told me. [.] Baute, according to [this] I.A.E.A. ofcial, confronted the United States with the forgery: What do you have to say? They had nothing to say. ElBaradeis disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence ofcial in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradeis report, dismissed the subject by saying, If the issue is resolved, that issue is resolved. A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. It came from other sources, Powell testied. It was provided in good faith to the inspectors. [.] The Bush administrations reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration ofcial told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda programpart of its Information Operations, or I/Opswas known to a few senior ofcials in Washington. I knew what was going on, the former Clinton Administration ofcial said of the British efforts. We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare. Over the next year, a former American intelligence ofcer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unveried and unveriable intelligence reports and tipsdata known as inactionable intelligenceto be funneled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldnt move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world, the former ofcer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. I knew a bit, one ofcial still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, but I was never ofcially told about it. None of the past and present ofcials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda ofce in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.)
Seymout M. Hersh, Annals of National Security: Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program? The New Yorker (March 31, 2003), http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1. (See also Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung, CIA Questioned Documents Linking Iraq, Uranium Ore, The Washington Post (March 22, 2003): A30, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9011-2003Mar22.)

52

(f) Old whoppers: murdered incubator babies (1990), 265,000 Iraqi troops massed on the Saudi border (1991), the supposed Iraqi attempt to assassinate George Bush I (1993)
There should be no illusions: No matter what Baghdad has or has not mentioned in its weapons disclosure documents, the United States and almost certainly Britain are going to war. If a material breach of the United Nations ultimatum does not happen by itself, it will be manufacturedjust as consent was manufactured with breathtaking cynicism in 1991. There were two glaring examples of how the propaganda machine worked before the 1991 Gulf War: First, in the nal days before the war started on Jan. 9, the Pentagon insisted that not only was Saddam not withdrawing from Kuwait (he was) but that he had 265,000 troops poised in the desert to pounce on Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed to have satellite photographs to prove it. Thus, the waverers and anti-war protesters were silenced. We now know from declassied documents and photographs taken by a Russian commercial satellite that there were no Iraqi troops poised to attack Saudi Arabia. At the time, no one bothered to ask for proof. No one except Jean Heller, a ve-times nominated, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida who persuaded her bosses to buy two photos, at $1,600 (U.S.) each, from the Soyuz Karta commercial satellite. Guess what? No massing troops. You could see the planes sitting wingtip to wingtip in Riyadh airport, says Heller, but there wasnt any sign of a quarter of a million Iraqi troops sitting in the middle of the desert. So, what will the fake satellite pictures show this time? A massive chemical installation with Iraqi goblins cooking up anthrax? The U.S. propaganda machine is already gearing up. In its sights now is is chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix. Hes too much of a softie for Saddam, former CIA director James Wolsey said recently on the Today television program. His work is of limited value. He was Ko Annans second choice. What next? Blixs granny is Iraqi? He has a drug problem? [.] The second tactic used to get consensus for war in 1991 was another propaganda classic: dead babies. Then, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, Nijirah alSabah, tearfully described how, as a volunteer at Al Adnan Hospital in Kuwait City, she had watched Iraqi soldiers looting incubators to take back to Baghdad, pitching the Kuwaiti babies on to the cold oor to die. Except it never happened. The Filipino nurses who worked in the Al Adnan maternity ward, Frieda Construe-Nag and Myra Ancog Cooke, had never seen Ms. al-Sabah in their lives. Amnesty International admitted it had been duped and Middle East Watch conrmed the fabrication, but it was too late: a marginal U.S. Congress had been swung to vote for war. George Bush the elder mentioned the incubator babies seven times in pre-war rallying speeches. It was months before the truth came out. By then, the war was over.
Maggie OKane, The re next time, The Toronto Star (Dec. 22, 2002), B1.

My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the

53 intelligence, says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise, Mr. Hamilton says. I think we have to be sceptical about it. [.] John MacArthur, publisher of Harpers Magazine and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, says that considering the number of senior ofcials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda. These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago, Mr. MacArthur says. Theyll make up just about anything to get their way. On Iraq, analysts note that little evidence so far of an imminent threat from Mr. Husseins weapons of mass destruction has been made public. Critics, including some former United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, say no such evidence exists. Mr. Bush says he will make his decision to go to war based on the best intelligence. You have to wonder about the quality of that intelligence, says Mr. Hamilton at Woodrow Wilson. This administration is capable of any lie in order to advance its goal in Iraq, says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be further identied. It is one of the reasons it doesnt want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe.
Scott Peterson, In war, some facts less factual: Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious, Christian Science Monitor (September 6, 2003), http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p01s02-wosc.htm.

The CIA ofcials said they believed that the last terrorist operation tried by Iraq against the United States was the assassination attempt against the rst President Bush during his visit to Kuwait in 1993an alleged plot that was supposedly disrupted before it could be carried out. This fabricated plot to assassinate former President George Bush Sr. was comprehensively demolished by Seymour Hersh in a forensic article in the New Yorker many years later. One of the key claims linking the alleged plot to the Iraqi government was that the remote-control ring device found in the Kuwaiti car bomb supposedly intended for George Bush has a uniquely identifying signature used in previously recovered Iraqi bombs. The US Administration released colour photographs of the ring devices to substantiate its case. Mr Hersh asked seven independent experts in electrical engineering and bomb forensics to look at the photographs. They all told him essentially the same thing: the remote-controlled devices shown in the White House photographs were mass-produced items []. The experts, who included former police ofcers, government contract employees and professors of electrical engineering, agreed, too, that the two devices had no signatures []. The US retaliation for the alleged Iraqi bomb plot was to launch 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles, 20 of which hit their targets, three of which landed on houses in the surrounding residential area. Eight civilians were killed. Even

54 if the car bomb plot had been proven to be the work of the Iraqis, there was no legal basis for this assault, which must therefore count as an act of international terrorism.
Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London: Verso, 2002), p. 132.

(g) Newer lies: Iraqs supposed expulsion of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors (1998)
It is often said that UNSCOM was thrown out of Iraq in December 1998. In fact, the agency was withdrawn on Washingtons orders. If anyone ejected UNSCOM, it was the United States. The rst UNSCOM withdrawal in late 1998 came on 11 November 1998, as US military strikes were anticipated. In his memoirs, Richard Butler records that after receiving a telephone call from the acting US permanent representative to the UN, Ambassador Peter Burleigh, he visited Burleighs ofce on 10 November 1998. Ambassador Burleigh signalled the US intention to strike Iraq by telling Mr Butler that, Considering the crisis Iraq had provoked and its refusal to obey the requirements of the Security Council, the United States had decided to draw down the staff in its embassies throughout the region. The Ambassador then advised Mr Butler, as executive head of UNSCOM, to consider evacuating UNSCOM staff from Iraq. [.] Mr Butler immediately ordered the evacuation of UNSCOM personnel. However, the threat of military action passed on that occasion []. It was not until after Mr Butlers December report had been circulated to members of the Security Council on 15 December 1998 that he was called in once again by Ambassador Burleigh. Once again Burleigh urged Mr Butler to be prudent with the safety and security of UNSCOM staff. Repeating a familiar script, I told him that I would act on his advice and remove my staff from Iraq, Mr Butler later wrote. UNSCOM inspectors were withdrawn within hours, never to return. Mr Butler carried out the withdrawal without even informing the Security Council, the body which the inspection agency supposedly reported to. The planned air strikes were supposed to be provoked by the collapse of the inspection process. It was therefore necessary to withdraw the inspectors to build the political case for military action. So UNSCOM was ejected from Iraq to facilitate a four-day bombing campaign. [.] After the bombing started, [Russian Ambassador Sergey] Lavrov said that the crisis had been created articially by the irresponsible acts of Richard Butler, while the Chinese representative at the Security Council said Mr Butler had played a dishonourable role in the confrontation. [.] The nal nail in the cofn for UNSCOM was the string of revelations concerning the penetration of the agency by US intelligence, referred to in the July 2002 revelations by former UNSCOM head, Rolf Ekeus. Scott Ritter revealed after his resignation that from the spring of 1992 until November 1993 he worked closely in UNSCOM with a man he called Moe Dobbs, a CIA Special Activities Staff covert operations specialist. [.] Mr Ritter later came to suspect that he had been manipulated, and that UNSCOM 150 [a June 1996 operation focused on Republican Guard

55 facilities] had been coordinated with a CIA-backed coup attempt which later came to light.
Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 53-55.

In 1998 and 1999 it was difcult for the media to avoid some of the more obvious facts about the withdrawal of arms inspectors from Iraq in December 1998. NBC Today accurately reported at the time: The Iraq story boiled over last night when the chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler, said that Iraq had not fully cooperated with inspectorsas they had promised to do. As a result, the UN ordered its inspectors to leave Iraq this morning. (Katie Couric, NBCs Today, December 16, 1998. Quoted, What a difference 4 years makes: News coverage of why the inspectors left Iraq, http://www.fair.org.) [.] A year later, this version of events was still commonly reported by the UK media: The UN special commission charged with overseeing the destruction of Iraqs weapons of mass destruction pulled out of Iraq in mid-December, just before the US and Britain launched a series of air strikes. (David Hirst, Iraq turns down evil UN plan to ease sanctions, The Guardian, December 20. 1999). [.] [.] Since the election of George W. Bush and the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bush and Blair have appeared increasingly determined to launch a further assault against Iraq in pursuit of regime change. If military force is to be justied, Iraq has to be portrayed as a country that cannot be relied upon to cooperate peacefully with arms inspectors. This is no simple taskIraqi lying and cat and mouse games aside, by 1998 Unscom arms inspectors had delivered 90-95% disarmament after seven years of intrusive inspections. The change in US/UK government goals has been accompanied by a change in the US/UK media version of what happened in December 1998. Thus, four years after the comment quoted above, NBC Today reports: As Washington debates when and how to attack Iraq, a surprise offer from Baghdad. It is ready to talk about re-admitting UN weapons inspectors after kicking them out four years ago. (Maurice DuBois, NBCs Saturday Today, August 3, 2002) The same transformation is found in the UK media. Brian Whitaker of The Guardian wrote in February of this year [i.e. 2002]: [Saddam] could still save his skin by allowing the weapons inspectorswho were thrown out of Iraq in 1998to return. (Whitaker, Life After Saddam: the winners and losers, The Guardian, February 25, 2002) [.] The Independent reports: Bill Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox, the last big air offensive against Iraq, after the eviction of UN weapons inspectors in December 1998. (Rupert Cornwall, United StatesPresident calls for support inside and outside America, The Independent, September 5, 2002) The Daily Telegraph is of course on-side: Saddam refused UN weapons-inspectors access to sites such as his presidential palacesthen expelled them from Iraq. (Editorial, Convince us, Mr Blair, Daily Telegraph, March 31, 2002) [.] Around the country the deception is repeated again and again [].

56 The fact that inspectors had been fundamentally successful in disarming Iraq, and were withdrawn after the spying scandal erupted, and after deliberate attempts to provoke the Iraqis, adds unwanted colour to the black and white picture of events that the US/UK governments are seeking to impose on the public. Only a stark good versus evil clash has the power to generate the required public support for military actionnuance is a liability. It goes without saying that the medium for communicating this lethally distorted picture of the world is the corporate mass mediawithout them, it simply could not be done. This is the awesome extent of their responsibility for mass violence leading to mass death.
Media Lens Alert: Iraq and Arms InspectorsThe Big Lie, Part 2, Media Lens (October 29, 2002), http://www.medialens.org/alerts/021029_Big_Lie2.HTM.

(h) Recent ctions: Iraqi links with al Qaeda

As it makes its case against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has for now dropped what had been a central argument used by supporters of military action against Baghdad: Iraqs links to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Although administration ofcials say they are still trying to develop a case linking Saddam Hussein to global terrorism, the CIA has yet to nd convincing evidence, according to senior intelligence ofcials and outside experts with knowledge of discussions within the US Government. Analysts who have scrutinised photographs, communications intercepts and information from foreign informants say they cannot validate two prominent allegations made by the government: links between President Saddam and al Qaeda members who have taken refuge in northern Iraq, and an April, 2001, meeting in Prague between September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent.
Dana Priest, CIA fails to nd Iraqi link to terror, The Age [Australia] (September 11, 2002), http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/09/10/1031608245289.html.

For a concise discussion of the repeatedand futileattempts of the U.S. government to establish links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, see Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 129-32.

(i) Recent ctions: the threat of Iraqs weaponry

One of the more grotesque features of the American and British propaganda campaign has been the insistent attempts of Bush and Blair and their subordinates to terrorize their own populations with claimsin deance of all available evidence that they are in imminent danger of chemical, biological, or even nuclear attack from a demonized Saddam Hussein, working hand in hand with Osama bin Laden (who, because he has also been demonized, can on theological if not evidentiary grounds be asserted to be in cahoots with the Iraqi dictator). Typical of this propaganda rhetoric are George W. Bushs (groundless) assertions in his Cincinnati speech of October 7, 2002: Weve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases. [.]

57 Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the nal proofthe smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. The following texts, which include Glen Rangwalas scrupulous and exhaustive assessment of all available evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, reveal the increasing desperation of American attempts to nd the desired evidence. Joseph Curl, Agency disavows report on Iraq arms, The Washington Times (September 27, 2002), http://www.washtimes.com/printarticle.asp? action=print&ArticleID=20020927-500715. Paul Reynolds, CIA undermines propaganda war, BBC News: World Edition (October 10, 2002). http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2315967.stm. Greg Miller and Bob Drogin, CIA Feels Heat on Iraq Data, Los Angeles Times (October 11, 2002), http://www.latimes.com/la-nacia11oct11,0,2360915.story. William Rivers Pitt, The Pure Essence of Stupid, Truthout (December 12, 2002), http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/12.12A.wrp.stupid.htm Riras Al-Atraqchi, The U.S. will not release vital evidence against Iraq, Yellow Times (January 21, 2003), http://yellowtimes.org/article.php? sid=1007. Glen Rangwala, Claims and evaluations of Iraqs proscribed weapons (February 18, 2003), http://www.traprockpeace.org/weapons.html. Niko Price, "Iraq says duct-taped drone was never hidden," National Post (March 13, 2003): A15. Seymour M. Hersh, Annals of National Security: Who Lied to Whom? Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq's nuclear program? The New Yorker (March 31, 2003), http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1.

(j) Attempts to manipulate and distort the weapons inspectors reports

American ofcials, most notably Bushs National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, appear to have made strenuous attempts rst to manipulate, and subsequently to distort, the reports of the UN weapons inspectors. Agence France-Presse, Iraq Largely Cooperating with Inspectors, UN Security Council Hears, Truthout (January 28, 2003), http://www.truthout.org/docsa_02/012903B.irq.jan27.htm. Judith Miller and Julia Preston, US is misquoting my Iraq report, says Blix, Sydney Morning Herald (February 1, 2003), http://www.smh.com,au/articles/2003/01/31/1043804520548.html. Colum Lynch, Rice, Blix Confer on Iraq Brieng: Acknowledgment of Violation Urged, The Washington Post (February 12, 2003), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A595302003Feb11.html.

58

7. Is the United States a Rogue State?

This section contains excerpts from writings by Noam Chomsky, David Corn, David Greenberg, Seymour Hersh, Saul Landau, Russell Mokhiber, John Pilger, and Yifat Susskind. The relevant legal framework is formulated in the Charter of the United Nations, a solemn treaty recognized as the foundation of international law and order, and under the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Charter states that The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, which detail the preferred measures not involving the use of armed force and permit the Security Council to take further action if it nds such measures inadequate. The only exception is Article 51, which permits the right of individual or collective self-defense against armed attack until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Apart from these exceptions, member states shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force.
Noam Chomsky, Rogue States, Z Magazine (Apr. 1998), http://www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/chomskyapr98.htm.

Contempt for the rule of law is deeply rooted in U.S. practice and intellectual culture. Recall, for example, the reaction to the judgment of the World Court in 1986 condemning the U.S. for unlawful use of force against Nicaragua, demanding that it desist and pay extensive reparations, and declaring all U.S. aid to the contras, whatever its character, to be military aid, not humanitarian aid. The court was denounced on all sides for having discredited itself. The terms of the judgment were not considered t to print, and were ignored. The Democrat-controlled Congress immediately authorized new funds to step up the unlawful use of force. Washington vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to respect international lawnot mentioning anyone, though the intent was clear. When the General Assembly passed a similar resolution, the U.S. voted against it, effectively vetoing it, joined only by Israel and El Salvador; the following year, only the automatic Israeli vote could be garnered. Little of this received mention in the media or journals of opinion, let alone what it signies. Secretary of State George Shultz meanwhile explained (April 14, 1986) that Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table. He condemned those who advocate utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equationsentiments not without precedent in modern history. The open contempt for Article 51 is particularly revealing. It was demonstrated with remarkable clarity immediately after the 1954 Geneva accords on a peaceful settlement for Indochina, regarded as a disaster by Washington, which moved at once to undermine them. The National Security Council secretly decreed that even in the case of local Communist subversion or rebellion not constituting armed attack, the U.S. would consider the use of military force, including an attack on China if it is determined to be the

59 source of the subversion (NSC 5429/2; my emphasis). The wording, repeated verbatim annually in planning documents, was chosen so as to make explicit the U.S. right to violate Article 51. The same document called for remilitarizing Japan, converting Thailand into the focal point of U.S. covert and psychological operations in Southeast Asia, undertaking covert operations on a large and effective scale throughout Indochina, and in general, acting forcefully to undermine the Accords and the UN Charter. [.] The U.S. proceeded to dene aggression to include political warfare, or subversion (by someone else, that is)what Adlai Stevenson called internal aggression while defending JFKs escalation to a full-scale attack against South Vietnam. When the U.S. bombed Libyan cities in 1986, the ofcial justication was self defense against future attack. [.] The U.S. invasion of Panama was defended in the Security Council by Ambassador Thomas Pickering by appeal to Article 51, which, he declared, provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to defend our interests and our people, and entitles the U.S. to invade Panama to prevent its territory from being used as a base for smuggling drugs into the United States. Educated opinion nodded sagely in assent. In June 1993, Clinton ordered a missile attack on Iraq, killing civilians and greatly cheering the president, congressional doves, and the press, who found the attack appropriate, reasonable and necessary. Commentators were particularly impressed by Ambassador Albrights appeal to Article 51. The bombing, she explained, was in self-defense against armed attacknamely, an alleged attempt to assassinate former president Bush two months earlier, an appeal that would have scarcely risen to the level of absurdity even if the U.S. had been able to demonstrate Iraqi involvement; Administration ofcials, speaking anonymously, informed the press that the judgment of Iraqs guilt was based on circumstantial evidence and analysis rather than ironclad intelligence, the New York Times reported, dismissing the matter. [.] The record lends considerable support to the concern widely voiced about rogue states that are dedicated to the rule of force, acting in the national interest as dened by domestic power; most ominously, rogue states that anoint themselves global judge and executioner.
Noam Chomsky, Rogue States, Z Magazine (Apr. 1998), http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/chomskyapr98.htm.

What are the odds that the people in leading positions in a rogue state will themselves be roguesor, lets be frank, criminals? Set aside the records of George W. Bush and his vice-president Dick Cheney, both of whom have been plausibly accused of insider trading and other corporate crimes. Recent senior appointments in Bushs administration are symptomatic of a rogue administrations contempt for international as well as domestic law. John Poindexter, appointed in February 2002 to run a Big Brother-like Pentagon operation called Total Information Awareness that promisesif news reports can be believedto harvest all known information about everybody into a searchable Internet database (Greenberg, B1), was previously Ronald Reagans national security adviser. In that capacity he ran the secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran that was used, in direct violation of US law, to fund the mercenary contra armies used to attack Nicaragua. When he was found out, he concealed his activities, destroyed evidence and lied to Congress (Greenberg, B4); he was convicted of ve felonies involving conspiracy, obstruction of Congress, and making false statements (Landau).

60 Elliott Abrams, appointed in December 2002 to the senior Middle East position on Bushs National Security Council, was also up to his neck in the IranContra scandal as Reagans Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to Central America, and was convicted on two accounts of lying to Congress; his Congressional testimony included the immortal declaration that I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I had no idea about (quoted by Landau). Though Poindexters conviction was overturned on a technicality by conservative appellate judges, and though Abrams was given a presidential pardon by George Bush I, there is no doubt that they committed the crimes they were convicted ofas well as violations of international law which were of no interest to the U.S. courts. Other returned rogues are Otto Reich (special White House adviser for Latin America) and John Negroponte (Ambassador to the UN), both of them veterans of the Iran-Contra period. As Saul Landau writes, Reich was minister of lying to the public from his Ofce of Public Diplomacy and Negroponte as US Ambassador to Honduras had to cover upnow he has forgottenthe dreadful behavior of our allies. But for sheer audacity, Bushs (briey accepted) appointment of Henry Kissinger to conduct an inquiry into intelligence and security failings prior to September 11, 2001 takes the cake. This was, as David Corn wrote, a screw-you affront to any American who believes the public deserves a full accounting of government actions or lack thereof. As Nixons national security adviser and Secretary of State, Kissinger shares responsibility for the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70, and for the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Bangladesh (1971) and Chile (September 11, 1973). As Gerald Fords Secretary of State, he shares responsibility for the appalling war crimes committed by Indonesia in East Timor in 1975 and after, and for the large-scale torture, kidnapping and murder carried out by the fascistic Argentinian junta in 1976 and after. Kissinger is accused of direct implication in the support and nancing of the assassins of Chilean General Ren Schneider in 1970; he is accused of supporting the terrorist murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976. He is also wanted for questioning by judges in France and Spain as well as by the Chilean Supreme Court in relation to crimes against humanity.
Sources: David Corn, Kissingers Back, The Nation (Dec. 1, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2685; David Greenberg, Back, But Not By Popular Demand: Rogues Rise Again, The Washington Post (Dec. 8, 2002), B1, B4; and Saul Landau, The Bush Vision and the Culture of Power, ZNet (Dec. 12, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2740.

Mokhiber: Ari, other than Elliot Abrams, how many convicted criminals are on the White House staff? Ari Fleischer: You tell me, Russell. Mokhiber: Could you give a list of convicted criminals on the White House staff, other than Elliot Abrams? Ari Fleischer: Ill go right to the convicted criminals division and ask them. Mokhiber: Seriously, why isnt being convicted of a crime a disqualier for being on the White House staff? Ari Fleischer: Russell, this is an issue that you like to repeat every brieng Mokhiber: But you dont answer it Ari.

61
Russell Mokhiber, Ari & I: White House Press Brieng with Ari Fleischer (Monday, January 6, 2003 12:30 pm), http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0106-08.htm.

Another important Bush gang rogue is Richard Perle, Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, who was one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century (see section 9 [c] of this dossier), and is now the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a U.S. Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government ofcials, retired military ofcers, and academics (Hersh, 76). As he revealed in a statement quoted by John Pilger in speaking about America's war on terror, Perle nurtures his warmongering with sick fantasies of guring in some future epic poem of American imperialism: No stages, he said. This is total war. We are ghting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about rst we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war our children will sing great songs about us years from now.
John Pilger, Neocons and their plans for war (January 10, 2003), http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/01/1559346.php.

If total war holds out to Richard Perle the posthumous promise of a minor role in some yet-to-be-written epic celebration of the Bush regimes conquestslet us call it The Bushiadit also offers him more immediate prospects of personal enrichment. As chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Perle is a special government employee, and therefore subject to a federal code of conduct which bars any special employee from participating in an ofcial capacity in any matter in which he has a nancial interest (Hersh, 77). However, as Seymour Hersh has revealed in The New Yorker, Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. In November 2002, a Trireme representative wrote to the notorious Saudi-born arms dealer Adnan Kashoggi (who was a key gure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s), to explain that Triremes main business is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore. The letter mentioned the rm's government connections prominently: Three of Trireme's Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme's principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board. (Hersh, 76) In December 2003, Kashoggi arranged a meeting in Paris between two Trireme representatives and Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh al-Zuhair to discuss the possibility of a large investment in Trireme, and on January 3, 2003, Kashoggi arranged a private lunch in Marseilles in the south of France between Perle and alZuhair. Seymour Hersh writes that Kashoggi and Zuhair told me that they understood that one of Triremes objectives was to seek the help of inuential Saudis

62 to win homeland-security contracts with the Saudi royal family for the businesses it nanced. The prots for such contracts could be substantial. Saudi Arabia has spent nearly a billion dollars to survey and demarcate its eight-hundred-and-fty-mile border with Yemen, and the second stage of the process will require billions more (Hersh, 79). Perle is thus at one and the same time a major ideologue of total war and also, in intention if not yet in fact, a large-scale war proteer. No beans this time: in fact, Perles undiplomatic detestation of the Saudi government appears to have upset his lunch companions to the extent that they decided to embarrass him by making his Trireme manoeuverings public. It seems nonetheless that Perle is giving a new twist to the arthighly developed already among the members of the Bush gangof insider trading.
Source: Seymour M. Hersh, Annals of National Security: Lunch with the Chairman: Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Kashoggi? The New Yorker (March 17, 2003): 76-81.

Yifat Susskind of the human rights organization MADRE responds as follows to Bushs declaration to the UN that The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations and a threat to peace. Heres what Bush thinks of the authority of the United Nations: Since taking ofce, he scrapped more international treaties and violated more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years. Under Bush, the US has opposed the Kyoto protocol on global warming, boycotted a conference to promote the comprehensive (nuclear) test ban treaty and ripped up the antiballistic missile treaty. Bush refuses to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child or sign the treaty to ban landmines. The US walked out of the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism and virtually ignored the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. And Bush is the only President in history to unsign a UN treatythe Rome Treaty creating the International Criminal Court. As for being a threat to peace, theres little doubt that Bushs war on terror, which violates international law, the US Constitution, international human rights instruments and principles of international cooperation and collective security, is the single greatest threat to peace in the world today. In light of the grave and gathering danger posed by the Bush Administration, we hereby call on the United Nations to declare the United States to be a threat to peace under Article 39 of the United Nations Charter. The Security Council, acting under Article 7 of the Charter, must countermand this threat. In the event of a US veto of the Councils enforcement action, we call on the UN General Assembly to invoke its Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950 and assume the Security Councils mandate of enforcing international peace and security. To quote the president of the United States, Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
Yifat Susskind, MADRE Factsheet: analysis of Bushs Speech to UN, ZNet, http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=2359.

For further reections on the rogue state behaviour of the U.S., the following books can be consulted:

63

Blum, William. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Boston: Common Courage, 1995. ----. Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. Boston: Common Courage, 2000. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. Montral: Black Rose Books, 1979. ----. The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology. Montral: Black Rose Books, 1979. Scowen, Peter. Rogue Nation: The America the Rest of the World Knows. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003. Stich, Rodney. Drugging America: A Trojan Horse. Alamo, California: Diablo Western Press, 1999.

8. War for Oil

This section contains excerpts from texts by Michel Chossudovsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Hans von Sponeck, and the U.S, House of Representatives Committee on International Relations. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal. With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the prots of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan. A US diplomat said: The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge prots for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. We can live with that, he said. Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bushs concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet Americas voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.
John Pilger, This War is a Farce, The Mirror (October 29, 2001).

During the 31 july / 1 august [2002] hearings on Iraq in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the ranking representative of the Republican Party, Senator Richard Lugar (R-In) stated: we are going to run the oil business. We are going to run it well, we are going to make money; and its going to help pay for the rehabilitation of Iraq because there is money there!
Quoted by Hans von Sponeck, Four Questions, Four Answers (European Colloquium, Brussels, September 25, 2002), http://www.afsc.org/iraq/guide/4questions.shtm.

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America burns a quarter of all the oil consumed by humanity. A study sponsored by the US Council on Foreign Relations says that the American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrice or inconvenience. Transport in the United States alone burns 66 per cent of Americas petroleum. One estimate is that the worlds oil reserves will begin to decline within ve to ten years at the rate of about two million barrels a day. In the Middle East, the only country capable of signicantly increasing its production is Iraq, once described by Vice President Cheney as the great prize. At present, America depends on Iraqs neighbour Saudi Arabia, not just for oil but for keeping the price of oil down. However, Saudi Arabia is the home of al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden and 15 of the alleged September 11 hijackers. The grievance against the Americans for their imperial interventions in the Middle East is said to be deepest in the country that was invented by British imperialism and has since been maintained by the US as an oil colony. If America installs a colonial regime in Baghdad, certainly its dependence on Saudi Arabia will be dramatically eased, and its grip on the worlds greatest oil market will be tightened. The price, for the people of the region, for Americans and the rest of us, will be an enduring turmoil similar to that of Palestine, exemplied by last weeks terror bombing of an Israeli hotel in Kenya. This is the hidden agenda of the war on terrorisma term that is no more than a euphemism for the Bush administrations exploitation of the September 11 attacks and Americas accelerating imperial ambitions. In the past 14 months, on the pretext of ghting terror, US military bases have been established at the gateways to the greatest oil and gas elds on earth, especially in Central Asia, which is also coveted as a great prize. In Afghanistan, the president, Hamid Karzai, guarded by 46 American special forces troops, was employed by a subsidiary of Unocal, the American oil company. The post-Taliban US ambassador is a senior executive of Unocal, and a pipeline to carry lucrative oil and gas across the country from the Caspian Sea will be built by Unocal. The majority of Bushs cabinet are from the oil industry, which has made them extremely rich. Bushs father is still a consultant for the huge oil services company, the Carlyle Group, and his personal clients include the family of Osama bin Laden. One of the reasons the Americans attacked Afghanistan was not to liberate women but to liberate the pipeline deal. [.]
John Pilger, Lies, Damned Lies, and Terror Warnings, ZNet (December 5, 2002), http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2710.

Once an American regime is installed in Baghdad, our oil companies will have access to 112 billion barrels of oil. With unproven reserves, we might actually end up controlling almost a quarter of the world's total reserves. And this forthcoming war isnt about oil? The US Department of Energy announced at the beginning of this month that by 2025, US oil imports will account for perhaps 70 per cent of total US domestic demand. (It was 55 per cent two years ago.) As Michael Renner of the Worldwatch Institute put it bleakly this week, US oil deposits are increasingly depleted, and many other non-OPEC elds are beginning to run

65 dry. The bulk of future supplies will have to come from the Gulf region. [.] Some 70 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves are in the Middle East. And this forthcoming war isnt about oil? Take a look at the statistics on the ratio of reserve to oil productionthe number of years that reserves of oil will last at current production rates compiled by Jeremy Rifkin in Hydrogen Economy. In the US, where more than 60 per cent of the recoverable oil has already been produced, the ratio is just 10 years, as it is in Norway. In Canada, it is 8:1. In Iran, it is 53:1, in Saudi Arabia 55:1, in the United Arab Emirates 75:1. In Kuwait, it's 116:1. But in Iraq, its 526:1. And this forthcoming war isnt about oil?
Robert Fisk, This Looming War Isn't About Chemical Warheads or Human Rights: It's About Oil, The Independent (January 18, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2882.

The oil politics involved in the American and British assault upon Iraq are nakedly obvious. The connections between this act of aggression and the economic and geopolitical motives of the American-led attack on Afghanistan, which may be somewhat less evident, are helpfully claried by Michel Chossudovskys analysis of the informing context of the attack on Afghanistan in chapters ve and six of his book War and Globalisation: The Truth Behind September 11 (Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global OutlookTM, 2002). Proposing that The Anglo-American axis in defence and foreign policy is the driving force behind the military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East, Chossudovsky suggests that The merger [in August 1998] of British Petroleum (BP) and the American Oil Company (AMOCO) into the world's largest oil conglomerate has a direct bearing on the pattern of Anglo-American relations and the close relationship between the American President and the British Prime Minister (p. 64; see pp. 89-90). He notes that on March 19, 1999 the U.S. Congress adopted the Silk Road Strategy Act, which dened Americas broad economic and strategic interests in a region extending from the Mediterranean to Central Asia (p. 66). The geopolitical thinking underlying this Silk Road Strategy is expounded in documents of the Congressional Committee on International Relations. One hundred years ago, Central Asia was the arena for a great game played by Czarist Russia, Colonial Britain, Napoleon's France, and the Persian and Ottoman Empires. [.] One hundred years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union has unleashed a new great game, where the interests of the East India Trading Company have been replaced by those of Unocal and Total [oil companies], and many other organizations and rms. Today [we are seeing] the interests of a new contestant in this new great game, the United States. The ve [former Soviet republics] which make up Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are anxious to establish relations with the United States. Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan possess large reserves of oil and natural gas, both on-shore and off-shore in the Caspian Sea, which they urgently seek to exploit. Uzbekistan [also] has oil and gas reserves. [.] Stated U.S. policy goals regarding energy resources in this region include fostering the independence of the States and their ties to the West; breaking Russia's monopoly over oil and gas transport routes; promoting Western energy security through diversied suppliers; encouraging the

66 construction of east-west pipelines that do not transit [through] Iran; and denying Iran dangerous leverage over the Central Asian economies. [.] Japan, Turkey, Iran, Western Europe, and China are all pursuing economic development opportunities and challenging Russian dominance in the region. It is essential that U.S. policymakers understand the stakes involved in Central Asia as we seek to craft a policy that serves the interests of the United States and U.S. business.
U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacic, Committee on International Relations, Hearing on U.S. Interests In The Central Asian Republics (February 12, 1998), http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa48119.000/hfa48119_0f.htm (quoted by Chossudovsky, pp. 67-68).

This Silk Road Strategy is clearly aimed both at undermining Russian control of the Caspian Basin oil and gas reserves and at preventing other competitors (among them the French-Belgian conglomerate Elf-Total-Fina) from gaining access to them. One step towards its implementation was taken when the heads of state of Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova met in Washington to sign GUAAM, a regional military alliance under NATO protection. Chossudovsky writes that GUAAM is dominated by Anglo-American oil interests, and its formation ultimately purports to exclude Russia from the oil and gas deposits in the Caspian area, as well as isolating Moscow politically (p. 66). The relationship in GUAAM between planned pipeline routes and diplomaticmilitary alliances is very clear. Azerbaijan, governed since the military coup of 1993 by a pro-U.S. regime led by former KGB ofcial and Communist Party politburo member President Heydar Aliyevich Aliyev, signed an agreement in 1994 with an oil consortium led by BP-AMOCO. This contract, involving the development of the Charyg oil elds near Baku, provides for Azeri oil to be moved west by pipeline through Georgia to the port of Supsa on the east coast of the Black Sea, and thence by tanker to the Pivdenny terminal near Odessa in Ukraine, from where it can be moved by a pipeline linking up to an existing pipeline which runs through Slovakia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The entire length of this route, which of course bypasses Russian territory, is under the protection of NATO (pp. 72-74). Afghanistan is of major strategic importance in relation to this Silk Road Strategy. As Chossudovsky writes, It not only borders the Silk Road Corridor linking the Caucasus to China's Western border, it is also at the hub of ve nuclear powers: China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. [.] Afghanistan is at the strategic crossroads of the Eurasian pipeline and transport routes. It also constitutes a potential landbridge for the southbound oil pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea across Pakistan, which had initially been negotiated by Unocal with the Taliban government. (p. 69) Chossudovsky notes that the Silk Road Strategy Act designates Israel as America's partner in the Silk Road corridor (p. 69), and argues that the successful implementation of the SRS requires the concurrent militarization of the Eurasian corridor as a means of securing control over extensive oil and gas reserves, as well as protecting the pipeline routes on behalf of the Anglo-American oil companies. [.] Under the SRS Act, Washington commits itself to fostering stability in this

67 region, which is vulnerable to political and economic pressures from the South, North and East, suggesting that the threat to stability is not only from Moscow (to the North) but also from China (to the East) and Iran and Iraq (to the South). The SRS is also intended to prevent the former Soviet republics from developing economic, political and defence ties with China, Iran, Turkey and Iraq. (p. 71). The 1991 Gulf War advanced American military-geopolitical and oil interests in a very signicant manner: it permitted the U.S. to establish military and naval bases in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. During the 1990s, in pursuit of what in 1999 was formalized as the Silk Road Strategy, the U.S. was able to expand this presence in the Eurasian corridor by establishing military links with the GUAAM countries, and by securing permission to construct air bases in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Since the overthrow of the Taliban regime, these forward positions have been supplemented by air bases in Afghanistan. The military conquest of Iraq will leave Iran, which gured with Iraq and North Korea in George Bushs inane axis of evil, surrounded by countries containing garrisons of American troops. For further evidence of U.S. geopolitical strategic thinking, see the articles listed under Oil in Iraq, at http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/oil/irqindx.htm.

9. The War on Terrorism

This section contains excerpts from writings by Gordon Barthos, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Alex Jones, Media Lens, James Petras, John Pilger, Milan Rai, Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, and Antonia Zerbisias.

(a) Ethical ironies of the War on Terrorism

What is the new war on terrorism? The goal of the civilised world has been announced very clearly in high places. We must eradicate the evil scourge of terrorism, a plague spread by depraved opponents of civilisation itself in a return to barbarism in the modern age, and so on. Surely a noble enterprise! To place the enterprise in proper perspective, we should recognise that the Crusade is not new, contrary to whats being said. In fact, the phrases just quoted are from President Ronald Reagan and his Secretary of State, George Shultz, twenty years ago. They came to ofce at that timeReagan, and shortly after, Schultzproclaiming that the struggle against international terrorism would be the core of U.S. foreign policy. And they responded to the plague by organising campaigns of international terrorism of unprecedented scale and violence, even leading to a condemnation by the World Court of the United States for what the Court called the unlawful use of force, meaning international terrorism. This was followed by a U.N. Security Council Resolution calling on all states to observe international law, which the United States vetoed. It also voted alone, with one or two client states, against successive similar U.N. General Assembly Resolutions. So the New War on Terrorism is, in fact, led by the only state in the world that has been condemned by the International Court of Justice for

68 international terrorism and has vetoed a resolution calling on states to observe international law. The World Court order to terminate the crime of international terrorism and to pay substantial reparations was dismissed with contempt across the spectrum. The New York Times informed the public that the Court was a hostile forum and therefore we need pay no attention to it. Washington reacted at once to the Courts orders by escalating the economic and the terrorist wars. It also issued orders to the mercenary army attacking from Honduras to attack soft targetsthose are the ofcial orders: Attack soft targets, undefended civilian targets like health clinics, agricultural cooperatives and so on. [.] Prevailing Western attitudes are revealed with great clarity by the appointment of the new U.N. Ambassador to lead todays New War against Terrorism, John Negroponte. Negropontes record includes his service as Pro-Consul in Honduras in the 1980s, where he was the local supervisor of the international terrorist war for which his government was condemned by the World Court and the Security Councilirrelevantly of course in a world thats governed by the rule of force.
Noam Chomsky, September 11th and Its Aftermath: Where is the World Heading? Public Lecture at the Music Academy, Chennai (Madras), India, November 10, 2001, http://www.hinduonnet.com/ine/1824/nc.htm.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has suggested that a US-led war on Iraq will effectively mean that Osama bin Laden will have won. Whatever the faults of Saddam Hussein, and he is a brutal dictator, his regime is also secular. If Saddam does indeed fall, which Bush and Blair want, it is highly likely that an Islamist regime will take over after US troops leave, which they will sooner or later. This could have knock-on effects on Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and even Egypt: The invasion of Iraq is the quickest path to losing the war on terror and giving legitimacy to the criminal who attacked the US and the entire freedom of the world on 11 September. While few other commentators are predicting a fundamentalist regime in Iraq, many informed observers share Mr Ritters belief that al Qaedas political base would be enlarged considerably by US/UK military action.
Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 201.

There is no war on terrorism. No such war is possible when the coalition waging it consists of some of the leading terrorist states in the worldAlgeria, Turkey, Russia, China, Indonesiafalling in with the United States. The search for Osama bin Laden is circus spectacle. The goal is the control, through vassals, of former Soviet Central Asia, a region rich in oil and minerals and of great strategic importance to competing powers, Russia and China. By February 2002, the United States had established permanent military bases in all the Central Asian republics, and in Afghanistan, whose post-Taliban government is American approved. America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have dreamed of before [September 11], said Secretary of State Colin Powell. This is just a beginning. The ultimate goal is a far wider American conquest, military and economic, that was planned during the Second World

69 War and which, as Vice-President Cheney says, may not end in our lifetimes.
John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 104-05.

(b) Consequences of the War on Terrorism

In [George Orwell's] novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four], three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Todays slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism. The most potent weapon in this war is pseudo-information, different only in form from that Orwell described, consigning to oblivion unacceptable truths and historical sense. Dissent is permissible within consensual boundaries, reinforcing the illusion that information and speech are free. The attacks of September 11, 2001 did not change everything, but accelerated the continuity of events, providing an extraordinary pretext for destroying social democracy. The undermining of the Bill of Rights in the United States and the further dismantling of trial by jury in Britain and a plethora of related civil liberties are part of the reduction of democracy to electoral ritual: that is, competition between undistinguishable parties for the management of a single-ideology state.
John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 1-2.

So far the war on terrorism has been a massacre, as in Afghanistan and as proposed for Iraq, rather than a ght with two armed combatants battling one another. [.] Alternatively, the war on terrorism has been a campaign, not a violent struggle, aiming to reduce civil liberties, expand arms trade and production, and legitimate assaults on any targets deemed unfriendly. In this regard it is like the earlier Cold War. The idea is to name an enemy, generate fear of it, and then employ that fear and associated anger to justify all kinds of government actions that would otherwise be rejectedarms deals, taxes, repressive laws, etc. The massacres and policy alterations that together constitute the war on terrorism havent been about reducing terrorism, by and large. First, the largest number of civilians killed since 9-11 have been Afghanis and Iraqis (the latter, victims of U.S.-backed sanctions). Reducing a phenomenon [i.e. the terrorist killing of civilians] rarely includes overtly expanding it. Second, the actions undertaken, even in the view of the FBI, are not only unlikely to reduce even that portion of terrorism that is directed at the United States. They are likely, instead, to fuel the resentment and grievances that lead to such attacks. So rather than a just war, the war on terrorism is a means of rationalizing illegitimate interventions abroad and repressive and predatory policies at home, without reducing terrorism.
Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, Intervention in General: Part A of 45 Questions and Answers Regarding U.S. Foreign Policy, ZNet (October 8, 2002), http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2446.

70 In totalitarian states, the supreme leader seizes dictatorial powers, suspends constitutional guarantees (citing emergency powers), empowers the secret police, and handpicks tribunals to arbitrarily arrest, judge, and condemn the accused to prison or execution. On November 13 [2001], President Bush took the fatal step toward assuming dictatorial powers. Without consulting Congress, Bush decreed an emergency order. The order permits the government to arrest non-citizens who they have reason to believe are terrorists to be tried by military tribunal. The trials are secret and the prosecutors do not have to present evidence if it is in the interests of national security. The condemned can be executed even if one-third of the military judges disagree. Dictatorial powers to jail or execute suspects without due process is the essence of totalitarian rulers. In mid-November, the Department of Justice refused to disclose the identities and status of more than 1,100 persons arrested since September 11. As in totalitarian regimes, political prisoners are constantly interrogated without lawyers and without charges by the FBI in the hope of forcing confessions. On October 26 Bush signed the USA/Patriot Act, which vastly strengthened the powers of the police over civil society. The extension of secret police powers was approved almost unanimously by Congress (most of whose members never read the law). Every clause of this law violated the U.S. Constitution. Under this law: (a) any federal law enforcement agency may secretly enter any home or business, collect evidence, not inform the citizen of the entry, and then use the evidence (seized or planted) to convict the occupant of a crime; (b) any police agency has the power to monitor all Internet trafc and emails, intercept cell phones without warrant of millions of suspects; (c) any Federal police agency can invade any business premises and seize all records on the basis that it is connected to a terrorist investigation. Citizens who publicly protest these arbitrary, invasive police actions can be arrested. The USA/Patriot Act, like its totalitarian counterparts, has a vague, loose denition of terrorism that allows it to repress any dissident organization and protest activity. According to section 802 of the Act, terrorism is dened as activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States [and] appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population [or] to inuence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion. Any anti-globalization protest, such as occurred in Seattle, can now be labeled terrorist, its leaders and participants arrested, their homes and ofces searched, documents seized, and, if they are not citizens, shipped to military tribunals. These emergency decrees and laws are in place until 2005 and beyond if the investigations began prior to the terminal year.
James Petras, Signs of a Police State Are Everywhere, Z Magazine (January 2002), http://www.zmag.org/Zmag/Articles/jan02petras.htm.

On February 7, 2003 the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan public interest think-tank in [Washington] DC, revealed the full text of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act [or Patriot Act II] of 2003. The classied document had been leaked to them by an unnamed source inside the Federal government. [.] The intentions of the White House and Speaker [Dennis] Hastert concerning Patriot Act II appear to be a carbon copy replay of the events that

71 led to the unprecedented passage of the rst Patriot Act. [.] The fact that Dick Cheney publicly managed the steamroller passage of the rst Patriot Act, ensuring that no one was allowed to read it and publicly threatening members of Congress that if they didnt vote in favor of it they would be blamed for the next terrorist attack, is by the White Houses own denition terrorism. [.] Here is a quick thumbnail sketch of just some of the draconian measures encapsulated within this tyrannical legislation: SECTION 501 (Expatriation of Terrorists) expands the Bush administrations enemy combatant denition to all American citizens who may have violated any provision of of Section 802 of the rst Patriot Act. (Section 802 is the new denition of domestic terrorism, and the denition is any action that endangers human life [or] that is a violation of any Federal or State law.) [.] SECTION 201 of the second Patriot Act makes it a criminal act for any member of the government or any citizen to release information concerning the incarceration or whereabouts of detainees. It also states that law enforcement does not even have to tell the press whom they have arrested []. SECTION 312 gives immunity to law enforcement engaging in spying operations against the American people and would place substantial restrictions on court injunctions against Federal violations of civil rights across the board. [.] SECTION 103 allows the Federal government to use wartime martial law powers domestically and internationally without Congress declaring that a state of war exists. [.] SECTION 109 allows secret star chamber courts to issue contempt charges against any individual or corporation who refuses to incriminate themselves or others. This section annihilates the last vestiges of the Fifth Amendment. [.] SECTION 402 is entitled Providing Material Support to Terrorism. The section reads that there is no requirement to show that the individual ever had the intent to aid terrorists. [.] SECTION 411 expands crimes that are punishable by death. Again, they point to Section 802 of the rst Patriot Act and state that any terrorist act or support of terrorist acts can result in the death penalty. [.] [.] The second Patriot Act dwarfs all police state legislation in modern world history.
Alex Jones, Total Police State Takeover: The Secret Patriot Act II Destroys What Is Left of American Liberty. A Brief Analysis of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as Patriot Act II, Infowars (February 10, 2003), http://www.infowars.com/print_patriotact2_analysis.htm.

Imagine a society where people can be stripped of their citizenship overnight. Or be made to disappear into police gulags without trace. Where very book they read and purchase they make is known to the powers that be. And where they can be executed for protesting against the governing regime. Saddam Husseins Iraq? You bet. But the United States of America may also become this kind of society if U.S. president George Bush presses his war on terror much further. In a commentary for Global Viewpoint/Tribune Media Services International this week novelist Norman Mailer warned that a pre-fascist

72 atmosphere pervades the U.S. as it moves in an imperial direction led by intrusive government, corporations and the military. [.] The American Civil Liberties Union took out a full-page ad in the New York Times this week to warn that core American values are under attack. A leaked copy of Attorney-General John Ashcrofts proposed Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003dubbed the Patriot Act IIconrms that Washington is weighing sweeping new laws that impinge on long-established freedoms. If enacted by Congress, the measures would let government: * Create 15 new death penalties including one that could cover protesters engaged in civil disobedience, if someone dies, even accidentally, during a protest. * Strip Americans of their cherished citizenship if they support groups deemed to be terrorist by the administrationeven if they are unaware of the groups links to terror. * Shelter federal agents from prosecution for carrying out unlawful surveillance, if they are acting on orders from Bush or other high-ranking members of the executive branch. This would have made Richard Nixon-era Watergate prosecutions impossible. * Permit secret arrests in immigration and other cases where the detainees are not charged with crimes. * Authorize a wider range of home searches and wiretaps without warrant. To be fair, the Americans dont have a lock on unhealthy legislation. Here in Canada, federal Privacy Commissioner George Radwanski has been warning that similar anti-terror laws assault our own rights. Theres something dreadfully wrong when democratic, open societies like the United States and Canada feel driven to protect themselves by enacting legislation that would not be out of place in Baghdad today.
Gordon Barthos, Carrying a torch for Liberty, Toronto Star (February 27, 2003): A24.

(c) 9/11 as an opportunity for the U.S. government: the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) Report
The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the worlds resources, it said, was some catastrophic and catalysing eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the new Pearl Harbor, described as the opportunity of ages. The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and think-tanks were established to avenge the American defeat in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a peace dividend following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime. One of George W Bushs thinkers is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about total war, I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in

73 describing Americas war on terror. No stages, he said. This is total war. We are ghting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about rst we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we dont try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war our children will sing great songs about us years from now. Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I. Lewis Libby, Cheneys chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagans education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bushs ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism. The PNACs seminal report, Rebuilding Americas Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could ght and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars. This has happened. It said the United States should develop bunkerbuster nuclear weapons and make star wars a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is. As for Iraqs alleged weapons of mass destruction, these were dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. While the unresolved conict with Iraq provides the immediate justication, it says, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post, co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, reveals how 11 September was manipulated. On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be a principal target of the rst round in the war against terrorism. Iraq was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible. Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steeles estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of that debate with their lives. Time and again, 11 September is described as an opportunity. In last Aprils New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bushs most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them to think about how do you capitalise on these opportunities, which she compared with those of 1945 to 1947: the start of the cold war. Since 11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states if necessary. Under cover of propaganda about Iraqs alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

74 In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This super-intelligence support activity will bring together the CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception. According to a classied document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require counter-attack by the United States on countries harbouring the terrorists. In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaigncomplete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americansas justication for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution. You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media: the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position. Our position is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never know ofcial lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in Tony Blairs Iraq dossier and Jack Straws inept lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to explain). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black propaganda.
John Pilger, Americas Bid for Global Dominance, The New Statesman (December 12, 2002), http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2744.

For further information about the Project for a New American Century, see the following: Abrams, Elliott (and 24 others). Statement of Principles, PNAC (June 3, 1997), http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm. Donnelly, Thomas, Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt. Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, PNAC (September 2000), http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses .pdf. Kristol, William (and 40 others). Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism, PNAC (September 20, 2001), http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm. ---- (and 32 others). Letter to President Bush on Israel, Arafat and the War on Terrorism, PNAC (April 3, 2002), http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter-040302.htm. Escobar, Pepe. This war is brought to you by, Asia Times Online (March 20, 2003), http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html.

75 Johnson, Chalmers Johnson. Iraq Wars, www.tomdispatch.com, also available at ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2869. Shavit, Ari. White mans burden, Haaretz (April 6, 2003), http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jtml? itemNo=280279& %20contrassID=2&subContrassID=14&sbSubContrassID=0&listS rc=Y.

(d) Manipulations of public fear

On November 7, the day before the United Nations Security Council voted on a resolution that made an American and British attack on Iraq more than likely, Downing Street began issuing warnings of imminent terrorist threats against the United Kingdom. Cross-Channel ferries, the London Underground and major public events were all said to be targeted. The anonymous Government sources described emergency security measures that included a rapid reaction force of army reservists and a squadron of ghter jets on constant standby. Plans were being drawn up to evacuate major cities and deal with large numbers of contaminated corpses. Police snipers were being trained to kill suicide bombers and anti-radiation pills were being distributed to hospitals. By November 11, Tony Blair himself was telling the British public to be on guard against an attack that could lead to maximum carnage. Curiously, the national state of alert for a likely attack, colour-coded amber, which such a grave warning would require, was never activated. It remains on black special, which is just above normal. Why? That was more than two weeks ago, and urgent questions remain unanswered. Now health service teams are to have smallpox vaccinations to meet the threat of a germ warfare attack; and the Foreign Ofce has produced a remarkable video suggesting that Britain is about to attack Iraq because of its concern for that countrys human rights record. (This must mean Britain will soon attack other countries because of their human rights records, such as China, Russia and the United States.) [.] Where is the evidence, any evidence, for a national alert that borders on such orchestrated hysteria? And what explains its uncanny timing with the latest American and British machinations at the UN on Iraq? Lying as government strategy is known as black propaganda. [.] Since September 11, 2001, every attempt by black propagandists in Whitehall and Washington to justify an unprovoked attack on Iraq by linking the regime in Baghdad with al-Qaeda terrorism has failed. First, there was the charge that Iraq was responsible for last years anthrax scare in the United States, then it was claimed that Mohammed Atta, one of the alleged September 11 hijackers, had made contact with Iraqi intelligence in Prague. Both claims have been proven false, along with stories planted in newspapers by American intelligence that Iraq has been training alQaeda terrorists at a secret base.
John Pilger, Lies, Damned Lies, and Terror Warnings, ZNet (December 5, 2002), http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2710.

76

In the United States, the Bush administration is busy terrorising Americans. There will be nuclear attacks, bombs in high-rise apartment blocks, on the Brooklyn bridge, men with exploding beltsnote how carefully the ruthless Palestinian war against Israeli colonisation of the West Bank is being strapped to Americas ever weirder war on terrorand yet more aircraft suiciders. If you read the words of President Bush, VicePresident Dick Cheney and the ridiculous national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, over the past three days, youll nd theyve issued more threats against Americans than Mr bin Laden. But lets get back to the point. The growing evidence that Israels policies are Americas policies in the Middle Eastor, more accurately, vice versais now being played out for real in statements from Congress and on American television. First, we have the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee announcing that Hizbollahthe Lebanese guerrilla force that drove Israels demoralised army out of Lebanon in the year 2000 is planning attacks in the US. After that, we had an American television network revealing that Hizbollah, Hamas and al-QaidaMr bin Ladens organisationhave held a secret meeting in Lebanon to plot attacks on the US. American journalists insist on quoting sources but there was, of course, no sourcing for this balderdash, which is now repeated ad nauseam in the American media. Then take the Syrian Accountability Act that was introduced into the US Senate by Israels friends on 18 April. This includes the falsity uttered earlier by Israels Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, that Iranian Revolutionary Guards operate freely on the southern Lebanon border. Now there havent been Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon let alone the south of the countryfor 18 years. So why is this lie repeated yet again? Iran is under threat. Lebanon is under threat. Syria is under threatits terrorism status has been heightened by the State Departmentand so is Iraq. But Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister held personally responsible by Israels own inquiry for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, isaccording to Mr Busha man of peace.
Robert Fisk, A Firestorm is Coming, The Independent (May 25, 2002).

With the convenient discovery of a deadly poison in Wood Green, London, Tony Blair has again made explicit reference to the related threats of international terrorism and Iraqthreats that will sooner or later, Blair insists, unite against us. As anyone who has glanced even briey at the subject knows, there is no evidence whatever that Iraq has any links with international terrorism Saddams sworn enemy, al Qaeda, includeddespite probably the most intense and sophisticated monitoring, investigation and surveillance programme in all history. Attempts were made to establish a link in the immediate aftermath of September 11 but were soon abandoned, even by the Bush administration. Nevertheless, with Blair giving the green light, ITN [Independent Television News] is happy to suggest a connection, moving from the report of the discovery of the poison, ricin, to Iraq thus: Well while the hunt for the ricin goes on, so do the preparations for war more military hardware was committed today to targeting Iraq. (Mark Austin, ITV 6:30 News, January 8, 2003)

77

Media Lens, The Great Betrayal, ZNet (January 10, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=2849.

Last Fridays National Post front couldnt have been more chilling if it had run a nude family photo of Michael Jackson. Triple Crisis Fuels Alarm in U.S. dominated a page lled with horrifying headlines such as North Korea: Its nuclear missiles could reach the West Coast, Spies warn of wave of assassins, Bush administration fears Saddam in nightmare alliance with al-Qaeda, and, spookiest of all, The four horsemen are saddling up. While we here in the Big Pink arent being urged to stock up on duct tapehardly necessary since the country seems to be actually held together by the stuffwe cant avoid the spill-over scare-mongering from south of the border. [.] Are you ready? demanded ABC, introducing a Martha Stewart moment which showed how to convert a laundry room into a fallout shelter with tape and tarps. Interestingly, they never discuss how this do-it-yourself homeland improvement scheme compares with the gabillions of tax dollars worth of military and materiel that will rain down on the people of Iraq. If seeing a Terror Alert: High sign on your TV screen makes you feel edgy, imagine what its like to be living in Baghdad or Basra, wrote media critic Norman Solomon (www.fair.org) last Thursday. For people in the United States, the odds that terrorism will strike close to home are very small compared to the chances that any particular Iraqi family will be decimated before summer.
Antonia Zerbisias, Why networks are fuelling the fear, Toronto Star (February 16, 2003): D10.

10. The attack on Afghanistan and its consequences

This section contains excerpts from writings by Robert Fisk, Marc Herold, James Ingalls, Michele Landsberg, Geov Parrish, Milan Rai, Stephen Shalom and Michael Abert, Stefan Steinberg, Alan Thompson, and Thomas Walkom.

(a) Was the war legitimate?

Didnt the U.S. in fact get Security Council endorsement for its war in Afghanistan? No. The United States went to the Security Council twice and both times the resolution that emerged did not authorize U.S. military action against Afghanistan. Resolution 1368 did call on all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks, but this is a far cry from authorizing the United States to decide unilaterally to wage a war against Afghanistan.

78
Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, 9/11 and Afghanistan: Part B of 45 Questions on U.S. Foreign Policy, ZNet (Oct. 9, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2447.

The argument for making war on Afghanistan rested on two propositions: rstly, that there was incontrovertible evidence that the atrocities of 11 September were organised by Osama bin Laden; and, secondly, that there was no nonviolent means of apprehending the al Qaeda leader. In fact, these two propositions do not amount to a justication for the use of force, but let us keep to establishment assumptions. On 4 October 2001, two interesting things happened in Britain. Prime Minister Tony Blair produced a dossier of evidence against Mr bin Laden, which was rubbished throughout the British mediadescribed by the Independent on Sunday, for example, as conjecture, supposition and assertions of fact. Hardly incontrovertible evidence. Also on 4 October 2001, the Daily Telegraph carried a story under the heading Pakistan halts secret plan for bin Laden trial. According to this report, leaders of two Pakistani Islamic parties, the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Jamaat Ulema-e-Islam, negotiated Mr bin Ladens extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the 11 September attacks. The agreement was that Mr bin Laden would be held under house arrest in Peshawar, and tried before an international tribunal under Islamic sharia law. [.] One key element of the agreement was that the international tribunal could decide either to try him on the spot or to hand Mr bin Laden over to America. This was a new departure for the Taliban. Up until 1 October, the Taliban had been offering to negotiate bin Ladens extradition to a third country, but had refused to contemplate the possibility of handing him over to Washington. Why did the extradition break down? It was not blocked by the head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar. According to the Daily Telegraph, the extradition was vetoed by Pakistans military leader, President Musharraf. The ostensible stumbling block was that he [Musharraf] could not guarantee bin Ladens safety. This is rather implausible. It is intriguing to read that the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlain, was notied in advance of the mission to meet Mullah Omar. During the war on Afghanistan, a US ofcial was quoted as saying that casting the objectives too narrowly would risk a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr bin Laden were captured. It is at least conceivablein my view it is likelythat it was a US veto that killed the extradition agreement, just as US hostility had rebuffed previous extradition offers from the Taliban.
Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 37-38.

(b) Has the war been a success in U.S. terms?

The links of [Afghan president] Hamid Karzai to the UNOCAL company (and the C.I.A., Britains M16 and the U.S. Armys 5th Special Forces Group) are well knownKarzai having served as a well paid consultant to UNOCAL when it was negotiating with the Taliban. The man

79 who spotted Karzais leadership potential and recruited him to the fold was then RAND program director, Zalmay Khalilzad. The Bush Administrations special envoy to Afghanistan, appointed nine days after Karzai took ofce, is Zalmay Khalilzad, graduate of the University of Chicago, another UNOCAL consultant and whose father was an aide to King Zahir, who actually drew up the risk analysis of the proposed $2 billion CentGas pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Multan, Pakistan. Khalilzad was undersecretary of defense for George Bush I, during the war against Iraq. After a stint at the Rand Corporation think tank, he headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department and advised Donald Rumsfeld. But he was not rewarded with any promotions. The required Senate conrmation would raise extremely uncomfortable questions about his role as UNOCAL adviser and one-time staunch Taliban defender. He was assigned instead to the Security Councilno Senate conrmation requiredwhere he reports to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (who was a board member of another oil giant, Chevron). The Enron Corporation, a major political contributor to the Bush campaign, conducted the feasibility study for the CentGas deal. Bush Administration support for the Taliban into August 2001 was guided by energy considerations, in particular wresting control from Russia of the still largely unexploited oil and gas reserves of Central Asia. Russia has kept Central Asias vast oil and gas reserves bottled up by restricting access to export pipelinesall of which run over Russian territory. The famous UNOCAL pipeline would go directly from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistanso long as an Afghan Governmentwhether Taliban or Karzai can guarantee its safety.
Marc Herold, Karzai & Associates Trickle-Down Reconstruction, Cursor (May 12, 2002), http://www.cursor.org/stories/karzai.htm.

The Americans take them shackled and hooded on to transport aircraft to Kandahar. They live in pens of eight or 10 men. They are given cots with blankets but no privacy. They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly because the Americans want to watch their prisoners at all times. But United States forces have not only failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing for war in Iraq: they are nding it almost impossible to crack the al-Qaida network because Bin Ladens men have resorted to primitive means of communication that cut individual members of al-Qaida off from all information. This extraordinary, grim scenario comes from an American intelligence ofcer just back from Afghanistan who agreed to talk to The Independent and to supply his own photographs of prisonerson condition of anonymity. [.] The ofcer, who spent at least six months in Afghanistan this year, was scathing in his denunciation of General Abdul Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek warlord implicated in the suffocation of up to a thousand Taliban prisoners in container trucks. Dostam is totally culpable and the US believes hes guilty but hes our guy and so we wont say so.
Robert Fisk, With Runners and Whispers, Al-Qaida Outfoxes US Forces, The Independent (December 6, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2712.

80

Today [October 2002], many of the forward bases of the U.S. Special Forces are under intermittent guerilla attack. Rockets, self-propelled grenades, mortar re hit the bases at night. U.S. troops scamper out to search in vain for the attackers. [.] [.] Just as in the Soviet case, it took a year for the mujahideen opposition to regroup and coalescethis is now happening as the forces of Hekmatyar, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban cooperate. The gradual strengthening of the mujahideen was followed by attacks on the Soviets Afghan allies, who were easier targets. These attacks then forced the Soviets to take charge of security operations themselves, undermining the illusion of partnership with a local regime. Precisely this has been happening as the U.S. provides protection to Karzai and as it moves the 82nd Airborne Division units into southeastern and western Afghanistan. [.] Yet, for all their numerical and technological advantages, the Americans and their allies have not gured out how to confront a foe so skilled at concealment. The Soviets referred to their Afghan adversaries as dukhi, the Russian word for ghosts, invisible spirits who attacked out of nowhere only to disappear into nowhere. Russian observers have noted that the United States is at roughly the same stage where they were in 1981, supporting a weak central government, faced with a bubbling opposition. Ambushes, hit-and-run, rising popular resentment, coalescing opposition forces and an invisible enemy all point to a Vietnam redux.
Marc Herold, U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan: Vietnam Redux, Cursor (October 31, 2002), http://www.cursor.org/stories/vietnam_redux.htm.

The Chrtien government has committed Canadian infantry to Afghanistan on what is supposed to be a peacekeeping mission. Almost precisely at the moment when it seemed obvious that Prime Minister Jean Chrtiens government had long since decided to throw its support behind a U.S.-led invasion of Iraqwith or without a United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly authorizing an attackthe government revealed plans to commit up to 2,000 troops to Afghanistan this summer on a one-year peace-keeping mission. With war on everyones mind this week, Defence Minister John McCallum praised the new mission as betting of Canadian tradition. McCallum said Canada will send a brigade headquarters and battle group to Kabul for two six-month rotations to jointly command the international stabilization force in Afghanistan. After making the announcement in the House of Commonsin response to a staged question from a Liberal backbench MPMcCallum met with reporters to defend the new peacekeeping endeavour. This is a tough and dangerous mission, but its also in the peacekeeping tradition of Canadians, McCallum said.
Alan Thompson, Call to arms: Canada will take part in a U.S.-led war on Iraqjust not with ground forces. The decision to return to Afghanistan as peacekeepers is seen as a compromise, Toronto Star (February 15, 2003): E1.

McCallums coded language (a tough and dangerous mission), coupled with the fact that a senior Canadian army ofcer resigned in protest over the decision to send troops to Afghanistan, suggests that the Canadian government must be aware that

81 Canadian troops posted to Kabul will be engaged in a counter-insurgency operation rather than in peacekeeping work. The Canadian public, however, has been given no notion of the situation into which our troops will be inserted. Even a journalist as habitually astute as Thomas Walkom anticipates that their function will be a janitorial one. [] Afghanistan is now a side-show. U.N. peacekeeping, which in the time of Pearson was designed to cool international hot spots, has become a clean-up. Canadian troops going into Kabul will act as a kind of janitorial service, to sort out the mess left after the war against Afghanistans former Taliban government.
Thomas Walkom, As the old world order passes away, Canada can only sit and watch, Toronto Star (February 15, 2003): E5, http://www.thestar.com.

(c) What have its political and humanitarian consequences been?

One year after the Americans promised a return to democracy, most of Afghanistan remains carved up among a collection of opulently thievish warlords, many of them the same commanders of armies of mass rape, torture, and murder from whom the country ed to the Taliban as an antidote six years ago.
Geov Parrish, Match Game, ZNet (November 16, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2633.

As to what happened regarding starvation, we have virtually no idea. No one in the West with the means to count cares to do so. There is some suggestive data, however, that indicates that there were serious humanitarian consequences. Medicine Without Frontiers reported a doubling of the child mortality rate between August 2001 and January 2002 (see the MSF report, 2/21/02 []). Michael Finkel reported in the New York Times Magazine that in the single Afghan district of Abdulgan out of 15,000 residents, the total number of dead during the war has to run into the 1,000s. An estimate in the Guardian (Jonathan Steele, 5/20/02) puts the indirect death toll at 20,000. Nakamura Tetsu, a Japanese doctor who heads an NGO that has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for 19 years, has said that tens of thousands starved to death as a result of the bombing [].
Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert, 9/11 and Afghanistan: Part B of 45 Questions on U.S. Foreign Policy, ZNet (October 9, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=2447.

President Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech in January [2002] that the United States had saved a people from starvation, and freed a country from brutal oppression, but the facts show that the US bombing actually exacerbated many of the dangers that existed in pre-Sept 11 Afghanistan. On September 6 2001, the World Food Program described widespread pre-famine conditions. They were just about to start a new project to provide food aid to 5.5 million people, but [ten] days later (Sept [16]), all aid convoys were stopped at the borders to prevent terrorists from

82 escaping. This put at risk the millions of Afghans who were in danger of starvation, since refugees could no longer leave, and aid couldnt get in. A month after Bushs State of the Union announcement that we saved a people from starvation, Doctors without Borders reported (21 Feb) that The food crisis in northern Afghanistan is reaching alarming proportions. Mortality rates in one Northern camp have doubled since August. That is, twice as many people are dying per day now compared to before the US bombing. The relief agency CARE has just issued a policy brief (end of September 2002) entitled, Rebuilding Afghanistan: A little less talk, a lot more action, in which they complain that promises [to rebuild the country] now look increasingly suspect. This is what is called nation building. Reconstruction needs in Afghanistan are, according to the report, signicantly higher than in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, or East Timor, where international donations averaged $250 per person per year. And yet, in Afghanistan only $75 has been pledged per person for 2002, and $42 per person per year over the next ve years. CARE estimates that Afghanistan needs at least $10 billion over the next 5 years to rebuild, which is not at all forthcoming. Over $10 billion has been spent on Afghanistan since October 7 2001, mostly by the US government; 84% of it was spent to bomb the country and to nance anti-Taliban ghters. Part of the US plan included a regime change shifting the balance of power away from the Taliban and towards the Northern Alliance. That meant paying warlords $100,000 each and supplying them with truckloads of weapons. We were reaching out to every commander that we could, an intelligence ofcial told the Wall Street Journal (15 Apr 02). Presently the warlords that we supported are the greatest threats to stability in Afghanistan, according to CARE. [.] The United States has eliminated the Taliban, but what is in its place? The president Hamid Karzai has little popular support. He relies on the backing of the US (even his bodyguards are mostly US Special Operations soldiers) and is at the mercy of various warlords, also backed by the US. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution calls him basically the mayor of Kabul during daylight hours. So the US has eliminated one source of instability in Afghanistan, and replaced it with another, which it (partially) controls. The prospects are just as bleak for Iraq, if the US decides to engage in the kind of regime change and nation building it implemented in Afghanistan.
James Ingalls, Afghanistan: The First Puppet Regime in the Post Sept 11 World (Talk given at the Afghan Womens Mission Conference, October 30, 2002), ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=49&ItemID=2565. [Date of border closing corrected.]

Remember Afghanistan? U.S. President George Bush was going to go in there, bomb the Taliban out of existence, catch Osama bin Laden, install a brand-new democracy and make sure that all the boys and girls could go to school. Not only that: By routing the Taliban, Bush could enjoy the rare pleasure of draping himself in the silken mantle of a ghter for womens rights. During his post-war January, 2002 state of the union speech, he introduced leading Afghan feminist and cabinet minister Dr. Sima Samar (Today, women are free, he said) and basked in the applause of Congress. If youd like to check up on the progress of those grand promises, you can do so tonight [March 2, 2003] when The Passionate Eye (CBC Newsworld at 10 p.m.) shows The

83 Daughters of Afghanistan, a new documentary featuring journalist and activist Sally Armstrong, who has visited that country dozens of times since she began crusading [sic] for Afghan womens rights in 1996. The state of Afghanistan is especially relevant right nowthough littlereportedbecause the chaos and misery there give us a glimpse of just how difcult it is to reform a country by means of aerial bombardment. Armstrong says that only about 30 per cent of Afghan girls attend school today, due to lack of resources and a Taliban-like fundamentalist grip on the country outside the capital. The warlords are still running the country, and their rule is cruel, violent and deeply misogynist. Outside of Kabul, girls and women are still jailed for trying to escape forced marriages. They are forced to wear the burqa, attacked by fanatic vice squads, and even seized and subjected to demeaning gynecological chastity exams if caught anywhere near a man. Schools are rebombed; warlords troops rape with impunity. Dr. Samar, so admired by President Bush, was forced out of government by a vicious hoked-up fundamentalist plot a mere six months after becoming deputy prime minister. Reduced to a human rights commissioner, she is left without protection or funds by an indifferent U.S. [.] The United States has utterly failed to keep its promises to Afghanistan, and especially its promises to reinstate democracy (as though democracy could ever be imposed by outsiders, from aboveas it were). Its worth watching this compelling documentary, just to taste the courage and resilience of the women, and the depth of their betrayal by American power. The Washington Post says that American hamburger joints are springing up everywhere in Kabul. There might be post-war hamburgers in Baghdad too, but there will be no fast-food version of democracy.
Michele Landsberg, Afghanistan documentary exposes Bushs promises, Toronto Star (March 2, 2003), http://www.thestar.com.

Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire has studied in detail the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and its humanitarian and political consequences. His essays on the subject include the following: Marc Herold, An Average Day: 65 Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S. Bombs on December 20th, Cursor (December 29, 2001), http://www.cursor.org/stories/ontarget.htm. ----, A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States; Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan: A Comprehensive Accounting [revised], Cursor (March 2002), http://www.cursor.org/stories/civilian_deaths.htm. ----, Karzai and Associates Trickle-Down Reconstruction, Cursor (May 12, 2002), http://www.cursor.org/stories/karzai.htm. ----, The Bombing of Afghanistan as Reection of 9/11 and Different Valuations of Life, Cursor (September 11, 2002), http://www.cursor.org/stories/heroldon911.htm.

(d) War crimes committed against Taliban prisoners of war

The United States is alleged to have been implicated in at least two largescale massacres of prisoners of war in November 2001. After the surrender of the Taliban forces in Kunduz in late November, the Afghani Taliban were released, but between 400 and 800 foreign-born troops (Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Chechens, and Arabs),

84 who had apparently believed they would also be released after their surrender, were trucked to the Qala-i-Janghi fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif, which the Northern Alliance warlord General Dostum was using as his headquarters. On the night of November 24, several prisoners committed suicide with concealed hand grenades (one of the explosions also killing two of Dostum's men). On November 25, Northern Alliance troops tied the hands of some 250 prisoners behind their backs, and two American CIA agents began to interrogate them. These actions sparked off a revolt of the prisoners, who appear to have thought they were about to be executed. In the ensuing ghting, which involved heavy U.S. bombing of the fortress and the use of U.S. and British special forces soldiers, most of the Taliban soldiers were killed. All who escaped from the fortress were shot, and an Associated Press photographer stated that up to 50 of the corpses he saw had their hands bound. A total of 86 Taliban survived the massacre by hiding in tunnels under the fort. Shortly after the massacre at Qalai-i-Janghi, a further 3,000 of the 8,000 Taliban troops who had surrendered at Kunduz were locked into closed and unventilated containers and taken by truck to a prison compound in Shibarghan; according to the drivers, 150 to 160 of the 200-300 prisoners in each container died in transit. Witnesses claim that an American ofcer gave orders to re into the containers, and that survivors were tortured and summarily executed by American troops. The prisoners were then dumped in the desert, where with some thirty to forty American soldiers looking on, those still alive were shot. In June 2002, the Irish director Jamie Dorans lm Massacre in Mazar, which documents these crimes, was shown in Berlin to members of the German parliament, and in Strasbourg to deputies and members of the press at the European Parliament. This lm aroused widespread calls in Europe for an investigation of war crimes; in the United States, news of its existence was suppressed by the corporate media. Dorans new lm includes interviews with eyewitnesses to torture and the slaughter of some 3,000 POWs. It also contains footage of the desert scene where the alleged massacre took place. Skulls, clothing and limbs still protrude from the mound of sand, more than six months after the event. The lm has received widespread coverage in the European press, with articles featured in some of the main French and German newspapers (Le Monde, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt). Jamie Doran has also given interviews to two of the main German television companies. While the documentary has become a major news story in Europe, it has been virtually blacked out by the American media. The UPI released a dispatch on the screenings last week, yet the existence of the lm has not even been reported by such leading newspapers as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. The lm and its allegations of US war crimes have been similarly suppressed by the television networks and cable news channels.
Stefan Steinberg, Afghan war documentary charges US with mass killings of POWs, World Socialist Web Site (June 17, 2002), http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jun2002/afgh-j17.shtml.

The account provided above of alleged war crimes against Taliban prisoners of war is based upon Steinberg's article, and upon the following articles:

85 White, Jerry. After US massacre of Taliban POWs: the stench of death and more media lies, World Socialist Web Site (November 29, 2001), http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/mass-n29.shtml. ----. More evidence of US war crimes in Afghanistan: Taliban POWs suffocated inside cargo containers, World Socialist Web Site (December 13, 2001), http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/des2001/pows-d13.shtml. WSWS Editorial Board, The Geneva Convention and the US massacre of POWs in Afghanistan, World Socialist Web Site (December 7, 2001), http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/dec2001/pows-d07.shtml.

11. War crimes in Palestine

This section contains excerpts from writings by Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert, Pepe Escobar, Kristen Ess, Robert Fisk, Amira Hass, Justin Huggler, John Pilger, Mitchell Plitnick, Tanya Reinhart, and Norman Solomon. It is by no means obvious to most North Americans what direct connections there might be between the American-led attack on Iraq and the ongoing violence inicted by the Israeli government upon the Palestinian population of the territories which Israel has occupied, in deance of international law and of repeated UN Security Council resolutions, since 1967. Since the 1960s, Israel has been used by the United States as a surrogate, a means of indirectly exercising a destabilizing American power over potentially hostile Arab states which are also an essential source of oil. Israel is clearly a key U.S. ally: it has for many years been the primary recipient of U.S. military aid (to the tune of well over $3 billion every year); its policies of settlement and ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories have also received steady U.S. diplomatic and nancial support. Israel has in turn provided open and covert assistance to American geopolitical goals in Africa and in Central and South America as well as in the Middle East, and has a long record of hostilities with Iraq. However, the direct connection between the crises in Iraq and Palestine arises out of the fact that, in their present forms, both crises are a consequence of a single policy vision enunciated and now applied by the right-wing ideologues who in 1997 formed the Project for the New American Century (see section 9[c] above for information about the PNACand who are now in effective control of U.S. foreign policy. (The members of the PNAC group include Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, who was recently obliged by charges of conict of interest to resign his position of chairman of the Defense Policy Board, but remains a prominent spokesman for the Bush regime.) The role of the PNAC group in formulating a Middle East policy in which the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the destruction of Saddam Husseins regime in Iraq are directly linked is analyzed by Pepe Escobar in the following excerpts from an important article published in Asia Times on March 20, 2003. Its no surprise that Bush, on February 26 [2003], chose to unveil his vision of a new Middle Eastern order at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right-wing Washington think-tank. The PNACs ofce is nowhere

86 else than on the 5th oor of the AEI Building on 17th St, in downtown Washington. The AEI is the key node of a collection of neoconservative foreign policy experts and scholars, the most inuential of whom are members of the PNAC. The AEI is intimately linked to the Likud Party in Israelwhich for all practical purposes has a deep impact on American foreign policy in the Middle East, thanks to the AEIs inuence. In this mutually-benecial environment, AEI stalwarts are known as Likudniks. Its no surprise, then, how unparalleled is the AEIs intellectual Islamophobia. [.] The AEIs foreign policy agenda is presided over by none other than Richard Perle. As Perle is a longtime friend and advisor to Rumsfeld, he was rewarded with the post of chairman of the Pentagons Defense Policy Board: its 30-odd very inuential members include former national security advisers, secretaries of defense and heads of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Perle is also a very close friend of Pentagon number two Wolfowitz, since they were students at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s. Perle now reports to Wolfowitz. On September 20, 2001, Perle went on overdrive, fully mobilizing the Defense Policy Board to forge a link between Saddam and al-Quaeda. The PNAC sent an open letter to Bush detailing how a war on terrorism should be conducted. The letter says that Saddam has to go even if evidence does not link him to the attack. The letter lists other policies that later were implementedlike the gigantic increase of the defense budget and the total isolation of the Palestinaian Authority (PA), as well as others that may soon follow, like striking Hezbollah in Lebanon and yet-to-be-formulated attacks against Iran and especially Syria if they do not stop support for Hezbollah. The Bush administration strategy in the past few months of totally isolating the PAs Yasser Arafat and allowing Israeli premier Ariel Sharon to refuse as much as a handshake, was formulated by the PNAC. Another PNAC letter states that Israels ght is our ght for reasons both moral and strategic, we need to stand rm with Israel in its ght against terrorism. The PNAC detested the Camp David accords between Israel and the Palestinians. For the PNAC, a simmering, undeclared state of war against Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Iran is a matter of policy. Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Reagan, is also a member of the board of the Jerusalem Post. He wrote a chapterIraq: Saddam Unboundin Present Dangers, a PNAC book. He is very close to ultra-hawk Douglas Feith, who was his special counsel under Reagan and is now assistant secretary of defense for policy (one of the Pentagons four most senior posts) and also a partner in a small Washington law rm that represents Israeli suppliers of munitions seeking deals with American weapons manufacturers. It was thanks to Perlewho personally defended his candidate to Rumsfeldthat Feith got his current job. He was one of the key people responsible for strategic planning in the war against the Taliban and is also heavily involved in planning the war against Iraq. David Wurmser, former head of Middle Eastern projects at the AEI, is now special assistant to PNAC founder John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and a erce enemy of multilateralism. Wurmser wrote Tyrannys Ally: Americas failure to defeat Saddam Hussein, a book published by the AEI. The forward is by none other than Perle. Meyrav Wurmser, Davids wife, is a co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute. In July 1996, Perle, Feith and the Wurmser couple wrote the notorious paper for an Israeli think tank charting a roadmap for Likud superhawk and

87 then-incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu. The paper is called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Perle, Feith and the Wurmsers tell Bibi that Israel must shelve the Oslo Accords, the so-called peace process, the concept of land for peace, go for it and permanently annex the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The paper also recommends that Israel must insist on the elimination of Saddam, and the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. This would be the rst domino to fall, and then regime change would follow in Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Saudi Arabia. This 1996 blueprint is nothing else than Ariel Sharons current agenda in action. In November last year, Sharon took the liberty to slightly modify the domino sequence by growling on the record that Iran should be the next after Iraq. Bushs speech on February 26 [2003] at the AEI claimed that the real reason for a war against Iraq is to bring democracy[.]. The AEI and the PNAC shaped the now ofcial Bush policy of introducing democracyby bombing Iraqand then successfully transforming the lives of millions of people throughout the Middle East, in the words of AEI scholar Michael Ledeen. At his AEI speech, Bush did nothing else but parrot the idea.
Pepe Escobar, This war is brought to you by, Asia Times Online (March 20, 2003), http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EC20Ak07.html.

80 percent of the Palestinians killed in recent months by the Israeli Defense Force during curfew enforcement were children, according to an October report from the Israeli human rights group BTselem. Twelve people under the age of 16 had been killed, with dozens more wounded by Israeli gunre in occupied areas, during a period of four months. None of those killed endangered the lives of soldiers, BTselem said.
Norman Solomon, Decoding Some Top Buzzwords, ZNet (December 13, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=2746.

There are about 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Last night Israeli soldiers abducted 14 more. Since Sharon was re-elected Israeli soldiers have killed 28 Palestinians. This is just in the past eight days. In the last two months Israeli soldiers have murdered 72 Palestinians. This means that the Israeli military kills four Palestinians a day. [.] My phone rang all night. [.] Friends are calling from the hospital in Gaza where I live, telling me more about the devastation there. The other night Israeli soldiers shot two nurses in Al-Awda Hospital []. Friends are calling from Rafah, more houses are demolished, the Israelis wont stop shooting. Two more kids are dead. My friends in the water municipality tell me that more pump stations are destroyed and more wells are contaminated. Just in Rafah its at 60 percent without water. This is ethnic cleansing and in all cases of ethnic cleansing a great deal of effort goes into making the public think those being cleansed are bad, are evil, deserve it, are terrorists. I saw the little boy whom Israeli soldiers shot in one of the camps. He is on permanent crutches, no more than 50 pounds. He and his friend threw stones at a heavily armoured Israeli tank. He is permanently maimed, his friend is dead. The kids in the camp dont have school again today. Only 50 percent of the entire last year was not under curfew in this area.

88
Kristen Ess, Occupied Palestine Report, ZNet (February 8, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3004.

A senior ofcer was asked last week if he thought the IDF [Israel Defence Force] could prevent a provocation by supporters of the transfer idea in the army and among the settlers of the West Bank, and foil any attempt at a mass expulsion of Palestinians. [.] The ofcer admitted he had doubts whether the army could, or would even try, to prevent such an expulsion. The army failed when it did not prevent the settlers from sabotaging the Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank, or prevent the settlers from stealing the olives. The state failed, because as far as we know, those settlers who did sabotage the olive harvest have not been dealt with, although their identities are known to the authorities. [.] Every day between ve and twenty Palestinians are arrested in the territories. Every few days the IDF invades some place and demolishes something. Every other day, in addition to armed Palestinians, and Palestinians plotting terror attacks being killed, Palestinian civilians are accidentally killed, including children and the elderly. [.] There are checkpoints with soldiers who scold the elderly and the young or deliberately delay them for no reason; the travel restrictions; the iron gates that turn villages and towns into detention centers; the summons to the Shin Bet, which tries to recruit collaborators and get information about a neighbor or cousin; the curfews and the children locked up at home; the roads that the IDF bulldozers crush and crumble; the houses that are demolished because a terrorist lived in them; the tool and die shops that are destroyed; the water and electricity grids that are damaged during raids; the paving of another road for Jews only; the tear gas grenades at rioters; the destruction of more farmland under tank treads.
Amira Hass, Terror as a Natural Phenomenon, Haaretz (January 15, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2871.

The question hung over the concrete rubble and twisted iron support rods, the ruined buildings where Palestinians said three young men were killed when the Israeli army demolished them this week. Is the Israeli military taking advantage of a time when the world is not paying attention to what is going on here, when media coverage is focusing on Iraq, to step up its campaign in the occupied territories? In the past week, while the worlds press focused on the UN security council and Baghdad, the violence has suddenly surged. In six days, at least 30 Palestinians have been killed in a series of Israeli operations, chiey in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Nablus. The dead have been a combination of unarmed civilians, armed militants, members of the legitimate Palestinian security forces and one a medic trying to reach a sick patient.
Justin Huggler, Bodies Piling Up in Gaza and the Apartheid Wall in Bethlehem, The Independent (February 22, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=3103.

89 When we read about political assassinations and murder of civilians by Israeli helicopters, we should understand, as the victims do, that these are U.S. helicopters with Israeli pilots, provided in the full knowledge that that is how they are going to be used. The point generalizes, and extends to the diplomatic arena as well. To give one example, consider the Fourth Geneva Convention, established immediately after World War II to formally criminalize Nazi atrocities. The U.S. is among the High Contracting Parties that are bound by solemn treaty obligations to enforce the Convention. Apart from the U.S. and Israel, the world has repeatedly insisted that the Convention applies to the territories that Israel occupies with U.S. support. The same conclusion has been forcefully enunciated by the ICRC, which has the responsibility to oversee application of the Convention. The government of Switzerland is the responsible state authority. In that capacity, it called a conference on the matter for December 5 [2001]. The conference was boycotted by the U.S. and Israel, andmore surprisinglyAustralia, under U.S. pressure, according to the Australian press. The report on the conference in the London Financial Times opened by stating that The European Unions 15 member states were among 114 countries that yesterday agreed an unprecedented declaration reafrming the illegality of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories and calling on Israel to respect international humanitarian law. A database search the next day found no reports in the U.S. media [].
Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert, Extending U.S. Dominance By Any Means Possible, ZNet (January 2, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/jano2albertchomsky.htm.

Noam Chomsky has commented elsewhere on the blatant illegalities of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, from the early period following the 1967 war through to the Oslo peace process. The plan for the Palestinians under military occupation was described frankly to his cabinet colleagues by Moshe Dayan, one of the Labor leaders more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. Israel should make it clear that we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads. Following that recommendation, the guiding principle of the occupation has been incessant and degrading humiliation, along with torture, terror, destruction of property, displacement and settlement, and takeover of basis resources, crucially water. [.] The goal of the Oslo process was accurately described in 1998 by Israeli academic Shlomo Ben-Ami just before he joined the Barak government, going on to become Baraks chief negotiator at Camp David in summer 2000. BenAmi observed that in practice, the Oslo agreements were founded on a neocolonialist basis, on a life of dependence of one on the other forever. With these goals, the Clinton-Rabin-Peres agreements were designed to impose on the Palestinians almost total dependence on Israel, creating an extended colonial situation, which is expected to be the permanent basis for a situation of dependence. The function of the Palestinian Authority (PA) was to control the domestic population of the Israeli-run neocolonial dependency. That is the way the process unfolded, step by step, including the Camp David suggestions. The Clinton-Barak stand (left vague and ambiguous) was hailed here [in the U.S.] as remarkable and magnanimous, but a look at the facts made it clear that it wasas commonly described in Israela Bantustan

90 proposal; that is presumably the reason why maps were carefully avoided in the US mainstream. It is true that Clinton-Barak advanced a few steps towards a Bantustan-style settlement of the kind that South Africa instituted in the darkest days of Apartheid. Just prior to Camp David, West Bank Palestinians were conned to over 200 scattered areas, and Clinton-Barak did propose an improvement: consolidation to three cantons, under Israeli control, virtually separated from one another and from the fourth canton, a small area of east Jerusalem, from the center of Palestinian life and communications in the region. And of course separated from Gaza, where the outcome was left unclear. But now that plan has apparently been shelved in favor of demolition of the PA. That means destruction of the institutions of the potential Bantustan []. The prominent Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell writes that the government is no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era. This new policy is a regression below the Bantustan model of South Africa 40 years ago to which Clinton-Rabin-Peres-Barak and their associates aspired in the Oslo peace process.
Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert, Interview with Chomsky, Z Magazine / Znet (April 3, 2002).

Israel is asking the United States for $8bn (5bn) in loan guarantees and has sent to Washington one of the former army ofcers implicated in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinian civilians to persuade the Bush administration to grant the money. Amos Yaron, who is now director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defence, was the military commander in Beirut when Lebanese Phalangist militiamen entered the refugee camps and slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian refugees. He ordered ares to be dropped over the camps, at the request of the Phalange, and Israeli soldiers blocked the exits to prevent civilians from leaving the area.. Israel is pleading for the moneyalong with an additional $4bn in military aidon the grounds that a US invasion of Iraq will provoke further attacks against Israel.
Robert Fisk, Israeli at US Loan Talks Is Implicated In Massacre, The Independent (January 13, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticled.cfm? SectionID=22&ItemID=2857.

I believe that even much before its present atrocities, Israel has followed the South-African Apartheid model. Behind the smoke screen of the Oslo "Peace process", Israel has been pushing the Palestinians in the occupied territories into smaller and smaller isolated enclavesa direct copy of the Bantustans model. Unlike South Africa, however, Israel has managed so far to sell its policy as a big compromise for peace. Aided by a battalion of cooperating 'peace-camp' intellectuals, they managed to convince the world that it is possible to establish a Palestinian state without land-reserves, without water, without a glimpse of a chance of economic independence, in isolated ghettos surrounded by fences, settlements, bypass roads and Israeli army posts a virtual state which serves one purpose: separation (Apartheid). But what Israel is doing under Sharon far exceeds the crimes of South Africa's white regime. It has been taking the form of systematic ethnic

91 cleansing, which South Africa never attempted. Since April last year (following the Jenin "operation") we are witnessing the daily invisible killing of the sick and wounded being deprived of medical care, the weak who cannot survive in the new poverty conditions, and those who are bound to reach starvation. Since the US is backing Israel and the European governments are silent, it is the moral right and duty of the people of the world to do whatever they can on their own to stop Israel and save the Palestinians.
Tanya Reinhart (Professor of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University), Academic Boycott: In Support of Paris VI (February 4. 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=2961.

The Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi has described a deep and unconscious racism [that] imbues every aspect of western conduct toward Iraq. She wrote: I recall that a similar culture prevailed in the UK during the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when Nasser was the archvillain and all Arabs were crudely targeted. Today, in Britain, such overt antiArabness is unacceptable, so it takes subtler forms. Saddam-bashing, a sport ofcially sanctioned since 1991, has made him the perfect surrogate for antiArab abuse. [] veiled racism [has] propel[led] every western attack on Arabs, from Churchill's preference in 1921 for using poison gas on uncivilised tribes to the use of depleted uranium in the 1991 Gulf slaughter. This racism applies, quintessentially, to [Ghada Karmis] homeland, Palestine. While the Iraq pantomime plays, America's proxy, Israel, has begun the next stage of its historic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. On 21 January, the town of Naziat Iza in the northern West Bank was invaded by a force of armoured personnel carriers, tanks and 60-ton, American-made Israeli bulldozers. Sixty-three shops were demolished, along with countless homes and olive groves. Little of this was reported outside the Arab world. Some parts of the West Bank have been under curfew for a total of 214 days. Whole villages are under house arrest. People cannot get medical care; ambulances have been prevented from reaching hospitals; women have lost their newborn babies in agony and pools of blood at military checkpoints. Fresh water is permanently scarce, and food; in some areas, more than half the children are seriously undernourished. One image unforgettable to me is the sight of children's kites ying from the windows and yards of their prison-homes. Then there is the slaughter. During the month of November, more than 50 Palestinian civilians were killed by the Israelisa record by one calculation. These included a 95-year-old woman, 14 young children and a British UN worker, shot in the back by an Israeli sniper. Human rights groups say the deaths occurred mostly in circumstances in which there was no exchange of gunre. The Israelis have killed 16 Palestinians within 49 hours, said Dr Mustafa Barghouti in Ramallah on 27 January. Thats an average of one Palestinian every three hours. The silence about this is simply unconscionable. While Blair damns Iraq for the chemical weapons that a swarm of inspectors cannot nd, he has quietly approved the sale of chemical weapons to Israel, a terrorist and rogue state by any dictionary meaning of those words. While he accuses Iraq of defying the United Nations, he is silent about the 64 UN resolutions Israel has ignoreda world record.

92 The Israeli terrorists, who subjugate and brutalise a whole nation, demolishing homes and shops, expelling and killing and systematically torturing (Amnesty) day after day, are not mentioned in the Observer editorial [of January 19, 2003, in which that newspaper announced its support for an attack on Iraq]. No decisive action (the Observer's words) is required against the prima facie war criminals Ariel Sharon and General Shaul Mofaz, who, along with their predecessors, have caused a degree of suffering of which Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda can only dream. There is no suggestion that the British force heading for the Middle East should intervene in the republic of fear that Israel has created in Palestine in deance of the world, and displace them. There is not a word about the weapons of mass destruction that Sharon repeatedly aunts (the Arabs may have the oil, but we have the matches). To most people in Europe, and across the world, these double standards offend common decency.
John Pilger, Betrayal of a Noble Legacy, ZNet (February 1, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=2943.

The only road to a decent future for everyone in the region is paved with the recognition that their future is one. Israeli leaders must recognize that the occupation has not only spilled a river of blood, the majority of it Palestinian; has not only destroyed what was left of Palestinian infrastructure, and many Palestinian homes and families; it has also done enormous damage to the Israeli economy and the Israeli social fabric. It is Israel, as the occupier, that must recognize that the only peaceful and just future is one where they are living with the Palestinians, as part of the Middle East, as a neighbor among equals, rather than as a dominating force and military base for the United States. And it is Israel that must realize that the only way to start toward that future is to end the occupation.
Mitchell Plitnick, Scandalous Diversions, Jewish Voice for Peace Newsletter (January 14, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=22&ItemID=2865.

12. Larger Contexts of the Attack on Iraq: Some Recent Studies

The titles listed here can serve as a reminder that the monstrous events that are now under way cry out for forms of historical explanation that can be both alert to patterns of cultural and material causation and also, in the deepest sense, ethically responsible. Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity. London: Verso, 2002. Arnove, Anthony, ed. Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War. 2nd ed., London: Pluto, 2003. Brenner, Robert. The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy. London Review of Books, vol. 25, no. 3 (February 6, 2003): 18-23.

93 Chomsky, Noam. Class Warfare: Noam Chomsky in Conversation, 19921996. Interviewed by David Barsamian. Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997. ----. 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. ----. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. Ed. Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel. New York: The New Press, 2002. ----. Power and Terror: Post-9/11 Talks and Interviews. Ed. John Junkerman and Takei Masakazu. New York: Seven Stories Press, Tokyo: Little More, 2003. Chossudovsky, Michel. War and Globalisation: The Truth Behind September 11. Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global OutlookTM, 2002. Cockburn, Andrew, and Patrick Cockburn. Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein. 1999; rpt. New York: HarperPerennial, 2000. ----. Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession. London: Verso, 2002. Dyer, Gwynne. Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003. Fisk, Robert. Tired of being lied to. The Independent (February 15, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=51&ItemID=3502. Hiro, Dilip. Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002. McMurtry, John. The Cancer Stage of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 1999. ----. Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Miller, Mark Crispin. The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder. New York: Norton, 2002. Mokhiber, Russell, and Robert Weissman. Corporations, War, You. ZNet (February 7, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=40&ItemID=2992. Monbiot, George. Too much of a good thing: Underlying the US drive to war is a thirst to open up new opportunities for surplus capital. The Guardian (February 18, 2003): 17. ----. Left Behind to Starve: A humanitarian disaster is engulng Africa as cash is poured into the war with Iraq and its aftermath. ZNet (March 18, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=3259. Nitzan, Jonathan, and Shimson Bichler. The Global Political Economy of Israel. London: Pluto Press, 2002. Parenti, Michael. America Besieged. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998. Petras, James, and Henry Veltmayer. Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century. New York and London: Zed Books; Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2001. Petras, James. Nine Eleven: One year of empire building. Rebelin (August 12, 2002). http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/1yrEmpBlding.html. Pilger, John. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso, 2002. Pitt, William Rivers, with Scott Ritter. War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know. New York: Context Books, 2002. Rai, Milan. War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq. London: Verso, 2002.

94 Ritter, Scott. Endgame: Solving the Iraq Crisis. 2nd ed., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Solomon, Norman, and Reese Erlich. Target Iraq: What the News Media Don't Tell You. New York: Context Books, 2003. Stich, Rodney. Drugging America: A Trojan Horse. Alamo, California: Diablo Western Press, 1999. Vidal, Gore. Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated. New York: Thunders Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002. ----. The Enemy Within. The Observer (October 27, 2002), Review Section, 1-4, http://burningbush.netrms.com/Vidal.html.

13. What Is To Be Done?

The excerpts here are from writings by Michael Albert, Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom, Noam Chomsky, Subcomandante Marcos, Ken Nichols OKeefe, John Pilger, Justin Podur, and Arundhati Roy. Resolution 1441 [of the UN Security Council] shows that the US has the diplomatic support it needs to go to war. But diplomatic support from governments and elites will not be enough if there is enough resistance and protest from ordinary people. In September 2002, George W Bush threatened the United Nations with irrelevance if it didnt support his war. The reverse is true: the UN demonstrates its irrelevance when it takes decisions that the people of the world are against. Whatever the UN Security Council does, the people of the world are not irrelevant. People who cannot be persuaded to trade human lives for oil concessions, who wont accept a slaughter of civilians simply because the elites of the states who vote in the United Nations were bribed and threatened into signing off on the war, can mobilize to stop the war. If US plans have been slowed at all, it is because of themthe tens of thousands mobilizing in the US, the hundreds of thousands mobilizing in Europe and all over the world.
Justin Podur, Resolution 1441, Znet (Nov. 11, 2002), http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItenID=2613.

[T]he intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth. [.] it is a moral imperative to nd out and tell the truth as best one can, about things that matter, to the right audience. [.] To speak truth to power is not a particularly honorable vocation. One should seek out an audience that mattersand furthermore (another important qualication), it should not be seen as an audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively.
Noam Chomsky, Writers and Intellectual Responsibility, in Perspectives on Power (Montral: Black Rose Books, 1997), pp. 55, 61.

Effective activism raises the social cost to elites of policies that activists wish to reverse. When that cost is raised high enough, elites begin to switch

95 their positions to try to reduce the social costs, no longer favoring but now opposing the policy. If enough members of elite corporate and political sectors switch their priority, the policy changes. During the war on Vietnam, many elite guresincluding politicians, prominent media people, intellectuals, CEOs, and so onmoved from being advocates of the war to opponents of it. Of course working people and students also switched sides, for moral reasons. But with very few exceptions (such as Daniel Ellsberg or William Fulbright) when these elite gures switched from support to opposition, they did so for reasons of social cost. [.] That change of mind due to rising social costs is the aim of critical dissent. We need a movement broad and committed enough so its continued growth is sufciently threatening that elites decide it is better to give in and hope that doing so dissolves the impetus to movement growth, rather than to continue with their war risking what the movement might unleash. To switch from pro- to antiwar in sufcient numbers to cause a policy change, elites must be more threatened by the movement than they are in love with their war.
Michael Albert and Stephen R. Shalom, Ten Q & A On Antiwar Organizing (October 24, 2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? sectionID=15&ItemID=2527.

Day by day, the latest headlines tell us that we are moving ever closer to war with Iraq. So many people around the world are ashamed and outraged by this prospect and yet feel powerless to make their voices heard. Large rallies for peace have been held in cities around the world. Yet the bulletins quickly return to the war drums beating ever faster for what must be one of the most choreographed and longest-planned wars in history. Those who suffer most will of course be the innocent and victimized men, women and children in Iraq who are set to endure yet another war and unknown loss of life. Their crime? Simply to be the powerless citizens of an oil rich nation with a violent dictator who no longer fulls the needs of Western powers who supported and armed him in the past. Yet we need not be powerless. Gandhi said that peace will not come out of a clash of arms but out of justice lived and done by unarmed nations in the face of odds. So what would happen if several thousand Western citizens migrated to Iraq to stand side by side with the Iraqi people? Along with at rst just a few hundred peoplefrom hundreds of millions in the WestI will be going to Iraq to volunteer to act as a human shield in the interests of protecting human life. We will join our fellow citizens of the world in Iraq to bear witness for peace and justice. We will run the risk of being maimed or killedbut it is simply the same risk that innocent Iraqis will themselves face. I would rather die in defense of justice and pace than prosper in complicity with mass murder and war. This not about supporting Saddam Hussein, as our governments did in the past. It is about saving the lives of those in our human family. We will be expressing to the Iraqi people the reality that most people in the West do not support this criminal war. [.] For me, this is also an act of personal penance. In 1989, at the age of nineteen I committed the most ignorant act of my life, I joined the United States Marine Corps. In 1991 I went beyond ignorance into criminal participation in a war against the Iraqi people which ultimately included the

96 use of depleted uranium against the civilian population. My reward as an American Hero was to be used by Bush Sr. as a human guinea pig along with several hundred thousand other heroes. We have still not been told the full story about Gulf War syndrome or how many of my fellow soldiers died as a result, but we do know the value our leaders put on our lives. When a nations leaders do not even respect the lives of their own sons and daughters, the enemy will never enter into the realm of consideration. The hundreds of thousands killed by sanctions against Iraq are seen as a price worth paying. The human costs of another war in Iraq barely seem to register with our political leaders. [.] This War on Terror is becoming the ultimate War on Freedom, in the United States and around the world. George Bush has said that every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make: either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. But we do not only have two choices. For the record, I am not with George Bush or with the terrorists. And that is why, when this war nally begins, I will be in Iraqwith the people of Iraq. I invite everybody to join me in declaring themselves not citizens of nations but world citizens prepared to act in solidarity with the most wretched on our planet and join us or to support our efforts in other ways.
Ken Nichols OKeefe, Back to Iraq as a Human Shield, The Observer (December 29 (2002), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=51&ItemID=2806.

In 1946, Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said: The very essence of the Nuremberg charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience imposed by the state. With an attack on Iraq almost a certainty, the millions who lled London and other capitals on the weekend of 15-16 February, and the millions who cheered them on, now have these transcendent duties. The Bush gang, and Tony Blair, cannot be allowed to hold the rest of us captive to their obsessions and war plans. Speculation on Blairs political future is trivia; he and the robotic Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon must be stopped now, for the reasons long argued in these pages and on hundreds of platforms. And, incidentally, no one should be distracted by the latest opportunistic antics of [international development minister] Clare Short, whose routine hints of rebellion, followed by her predictable inaction, have helped to give Blair the time he wants to subvert the UN. There is only one form of opposition now: it is civil disobedience leading to what the police call civil unrest. The latter is feared by undemocratic governments of all stripes. The revolt has already begun. In January, Scottish train drivers refused to move munitions. In Italy, people have been blocking dozens of trains carrying American weapons and personnel, and dockers have refused to load arms shipments. US military bases have been blockaded in Germany, and thousands have demonstrated at Shannon which, despite Ireland's neutrality, is being used by the US military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq. We have become a threat, but can we deliver? asked Jessica Azulay and Brian Dominick of the American resistance movement. Policy-makers are debating right now whether or not they have to heed our dissent. Now we

97 must make it clear to them that there will be political and economic consequences if they decide to ignore us. My own view is that if the protest movement sees itself as a world power, as an expression of true internationalism, then success need not be a dream. That depends on how far people are prepared to go. The young female employee of the Gloucestershire-based top-secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), who was charged this month with leaking information about America's dirty tricks operation on members of the Security Council, shows us the courage required. In the meantime, the new Mussolinis are on their balconies, with their virtuoso rants and impassioned insincerity. Reduced to wagging their ngers in a futile attempt to silence us, they see millions of us for the rst time, knowing and fearing that we cannot be silenced.
John Pilger, Civil disobedience is the sole path left for those who cannot support the Bush-Blair act of aggression. Only then will politicians on both sides of the Atlantic be forced to recognise the folly of their ways (March 13, 2003), http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132798.

[] I intend to reply to the demand to support our troops by saying that yes, I too support our troops. I will reply that I support our troops not having to kill people in Iraq. I support our troops not being ordered to assault defenseless populations, towns, farms, and the infrastructural sinews of life that sustain a whole country's citizenry. I support our troops not having to carry out orders from Commander in Chief George Bush and then having to live the rest of their lives wondering why they obeyed such a barbaric buffoon rather than resisting his illegitimate, immoral authority. [.] I support our troops not dying in Iraq guratively or literally, physically or psychologically. I support our troops coming home with their hearts not broken, retaining humanity and compassion essential to feeling true solidarity with those who confront tyrannical behaviour abroad, or right here in the U.S. with its 30 million tyrannized poor. I support our troops coming home with their minds ravenous to comprehend what is wrong with war for empire, what is wrong with war to obliterate international law, what is wrong with war to control oil and use it as a bludgeon against allies and enemies alike, what is wrong with war for prot, what is wrong with war to intimidate whole nations and continents, what is wrong with war to subordinate a planet and even to test and trumpet the tools of war. [.] I support our troops refusing to kill on behalf of politicians and proteers. I support our troops rebelling against orders, not obeying them. I support our troops rejecting reasons of state. And I support our troops coming home to where their real battle is. [.] What should we do about the U.S.? We should curtail its belligerency, change its regime, and fundamentally revolutionize its centers of wealth and power. Support our troops, bring them home. Support our troops, provide them housing. Support our troops, provide them health care. Support our troops, provide them socially valuable jobs. [.]

98 Support our troops, and one day they will join the ght for unlimited justice for all.
Michael Albert, Support our Troops, ZNet (March 17, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3255.

For us there is but one dignied word and one conscientious action in the face of this war. The word NO and the rebel action. That is why we must say NO to war. A NO without conditions or excuses. A NO without half measures. A NO untarnished by gray areas. A NO with all the colors which paint the world. A NO which is clear, categorical, resounding, denitive, worldwide. What is at stake in this war is the relationship between the powerful and the weak. The powerful is powerful because he makes us weak. He lives off our work, off our blood. That is how he grows fat while we languish. The powerful have invoked God at their side in this war, so that we will accept their power and our weakness as something that has been established by divine plan. But there is no god behind this war other than the god of money, nor any right other than the desire for death and destruction. The only strength of the weak is their dignity. That is what inspires them to ght in order to resist the powerful, in order to rebel. Today there is a NO which shall weaken the powerful and strengthen the weak: the NO to war. Some might ask whether the word which has convened so many throughout the world will be capable of preventing the war or, once it has begun, of stopping it. But the question is not whether we can change the murderous march of the powerful. No. The question we should be asking is: could we live with the shame of not having done everything possible to prevent and stop this war? No honest man or woman can remain silent and indifferent at this moment.
Subcomandante Marcos, No to war: A Letter to Rebel Italy, ZNet (February 16, 2003), http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=3057.

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will become worse and then better. Perhaps theres a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, shes on her way. Maybe many of us wont be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.
Arundhati Roy, Come September, Lensic Performing Arts Center (September 29, 2002), ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm? SectionID=15&ItemID=2404.

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