Iraq Through The Looking Glass: Historical Repeats

BY JASON LAURITZEN

History has a habit of getting lost in the myriad of the prevalent news cycle that worships speed
over accuracy, content over context. A convoluted mess of news on Iraq is hurled at readers
everyday via television, radio, papers, magazines and Internet news. The topics are wide—
ranging from defense spending to civil war to kidnappings—but the ultimately, the fundamental
question of why the United States has been at war for the last 16 years is rarely answered.

A line can be drawn—foreign policy with Iraq has been continually based on deceit and intended
to fail from the very start. That line is not exclusive to the current Bush administration and the
current Iraq War. It extends to Bush’s Father, former President George H. W. Bush, and former
President Clinton.

The First Hyped Gulf Crisis

In August 1990, President George H. W. Bush sent American forces to the Persian Gulf to
reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The scope of the war quickly expanded and several in the
Bush administration—mainly the Pentagon—claimed that the Iraqis were threatening to roll into
Saudi Arabia next.

The source for this claim was a collection of satellite images that Pentagon officials said showed
250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks on the Iraq-Saudi Arabia border. The images were
classified and never shown to the public.

However, according to the St. Petersburg Times, two commercial Soviet satellites took pictures
of the same area of desert. The satellites found only empty desert—no troops, no tanks.

Ms. Heller, who broke the story for the St. Petersburg Times, said she contacted Dick Cheney—
then Secretary of Defense—on three occasions for evidence that the Soviet images were false
and offered to hold the story if the paper was wrong. She was told to by the Pentagon “Trust us.”

“That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just
didn't exist,” said Heller.

The other justification offered to people was a tale of sadistic Iraqi forces. A story floated in
London’s Daily Telegraph on September 5, 1990. It told of Iraqi soldiers invading a Kuwaiti
hospital, going to the premature babies ward and tossing the babies out of the incubators “onto
the cold floor to die.”

There was a problem with the story. There were no pictures and no interviews with the mothers
of the dead babies. There was a reason for these missing elements. The story was false. It never
happened.
PR company Hill & Knowlton inked a $10 million deal with an organization called Citizens for a
Free Kuwait to bring the tale to life, according to Phillip Knightley in a Guardian article. Hill &
Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old girl to testify before the Human Rights Caucus of the U.S.
Congress about the fake incident.

The girl, simply known as Nurse Nayirah, told the tale with tears streaming down her face.
Cameras panned to angered congressmen as she wept and the media did not question the
authenticity of the story.

In a column for London’s The Guardian Maggie O’Kane outlined that Amnesty International
admitted it “had been duped” and Middle East Watch “confirmed the fabrication.”

Not only was the story completely false, but so was the identity of the star actress. “Nurse
Nayirah” was not a nurse, but the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington. Sadly, the
truth came too late.

Knightley pointed out that President Bush referred to the story six times in the next five weeks
“as an example of the evil of Saddam’s regime” and seven senators specifically mentioned the
story in Senate debates on the war. Those senators proved to be a valuable number—“the final
margin for war was just five votes,” said Knightley.

The United Nations Goes To Work On Iraq

A result of the Persian Gulf War was that Iraq was saddled with U.N. sanctions. The sanctions
prohibited nearly all trade with Iraq and led to education, poverty and medical problems
throughout the country.

The convoluted reasoning for the sanctions was to starve the elite of Iraq, but the opposite
happened.

“The majority of middle class people in Iraq … now find themselves having to do all sorts of
mean and insecure jobs to survive,” said Anupama Rao Singh, country director for the U. N.
Children’s Fund.

According to Reuters, nutrition, which had not been a public health problem in Iraq in the 80s,
became serious and the infant mortality rate more than doubled.

“In absolute terms we estimate that perhaps about half a million children under 5 years of age
have died, who ordinarily would not have died had the decline in mortality that was prevalent
over the 70s and the 80s continued through the 90s,” said Rao Singh.

That extreme number—500,000 children—was not challenged when Lesley Stahl interviewed
Secretary of State Madeline Albright on the news program 60 Minutes in 1996.

“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it,” said Albright.
Aside from economics, the United States, England and Israel wanted to stop Iraq from building
up dangerous supplies of weapons systems, which included weapons of mass destruction,
chemical and biological agents and weapons delivery systems such as missiles.

The United Nation Special Commission (UNSCOM) was formed for that very purpose in 1991.
It was a team of inspectors who combed Iraqi sites to make sure Iraq was in compliance with
U.N. policies regarding weapons.

The Iraqis put up roadblocks, but UNSCOM made rapid progress inspecting potential weapons
sites in Iraq.

“By the summer of 1995 we … were able to ascertain that 90 percent of it was accounted for and
when you're talking about weapons of mass destruction 90 percent means that you have
eliminated their ability to produce weapons—that they don't have any weapons left, and the final
percentages that remain are just the useless vestiges of a former or past programs, which in their
totality mean nothing, so we had fundamentally disarmed Iraq,” said UNSCOM weapon
inspector Scott Ritter, in the documentary “In Shifting Sands.”

A Defector’s Words Are Contorted To Fit The Policy

1995 was an important year in another respect. It produced a key witness that few expected—
General Hussein Kamel—Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law.

Kamel defected to Jordan and provided assistance to UNSCOM and the IAEA (International
Atomic Energy Agency). Kamel was important not only because of his relationship with Saddam
Hussein, but also because he was head of the Military Industrialization Commission and
supervised Iraq’s weapons development program.

Representatives from UNSCOM and the IAEA interviewed Kamel at length about Iraq’s
weapons programs. They uncovered two revelations: Iraq had not fully disclosed the status of its
weapons programs and that the majority of the programs were in shambles—most had been
disbanded or were ineffective.

FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) reported that these revelations pressured the Iraqi
government to give up millions of documents to inspectors.

In his UNSCOM/IAEA interview Kamel said he made “the decision to disclose everything so
that Iraq could return to normal.”

Kamel said that all missiles were destroyed and facilities that had been used to produce VX
nerve agent were turned into pesticide and medicine factories.

Toward the end of his interview Kamel gave a broad assessment of the totality of Iraq’s weapons
programs.

“We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons. I don’t remember resumption of
chemical weapons production before the Gulf War … I ordered destruction of all chemical
weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed,” said Kamel.

These revelations were used by the Bush administration to justify the current Iraq War. However,
they were not used in an accurate manner.

In an August 2002 speech, Vice President Dick Cheney cited Kamel: “Then Saddam’s son-in-
law suddenly defected and began sharing information … To the dismay of the inspectors, they in
time discovered that Saddam had kept them largely in the dark about the extent of his program to
mass produce VX … And far from having shut down Iraq’s prohibited missile programs, the
inspectors found that Saddam had continued to test such missiles, almost literally under the noses
of the U.N. inspectors.”

Not only did Cheney reference Kamel, but former Secretary of State Colin Powell did as well.

“It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent,
VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came
out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel,
Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law,” said Powell at his February 5 U.N. Security Council
presentation.

Both Cheney and Powell cited VX as a danger, when Kamel said that the VX program had been
abandoned and converted to producing medicine and pesticides. Cheney also referenced Iraq’s
missile program, which Kamel said had been destroyed.

Planning A Coup
UNSCOM had progressed in Iraq—90 percent of the weapons program was destroyed and the
defection of Hussein Kamel confirmed most of UNSCOM’s findings and forced Iraq to
cooperate on nearly every level.

But by 1998, control of UNSCOM started to slip. It “went from total UNSCOM control over
everything but data processing to no UNSCOM control over anything. The United States was
controlling every aspect,” said Ritter in a CNN article.

Ritter said he was ordered by UNSCOM Chief Richard Butler to install an eavesdropping device
in July 1998. The device was installed by a British intelligence team and provided data to the
CIA and the Israelis.

At the time, Ritter said he was grateful for the help, as it cut down on resources to process
information on Iraq’s weapons program. However, the purpose of the listening device and
British and U.S. intelligence agents was not meant to advance UNSCOM’s work, but set a
potential coup in motion.

According to Reuters, in January 1996, former President Clinton signed a secret order “directing
the CIA to provide weapons, organize some military training and install some intelligence-
gathering equipment for the fractious group seeking to unseat Saddam.”

The order may have been secret, but the plans were not. Ritter said that Mukhabarat—Iraqi’s
Intelligence Service—was well aware of the coup plan. According to Ritter, Mukhabarat took
control of several of the CIA’s secure satellite communications units and had several double
agents in the CIA’s defector camp.

By June 1996 Mukhabarat informed that CIA that “the game was up,” said Ritter and by
September Reuters reported that most of the CIA agents had fled the outskirts of Iraq and close
to 1,500 “opposition figures” were arrested in connection to the coup.

As a result of the intelligence controversy UNSCOM was dissolved in 1999.

Diplomacy cannot be shaped by internal policies and warfare ambitions. In the case of the Gulf
War, intelligence was faked and erroneous stories of brutality were lauded in front of the press.

During the next ten years, UNSCOM, the one element that was successful at keeping the United
States at bay and ensured the destruction of Iraq’s weapons program was sabotaged.

The parallels between the previous confrontations with Iraq and the current war are all too
familiar. According to the Downing Street memo the “facts were being fixed around the policy”
and CIA official Tyler Drumheller told CBS News that administration ignored “good
intelligence” on Iraq.

History has repeated itself too many times and ultimately the people that should not have to pay
—Iraqi civilians—have paid in grave numbers.