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Chapter 21

Iraq must die

According to notes obtained by David Martin, correspondent on the National Security Council for CBS News, only five hours after the explosion at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld asked his assistants gathered in the National Military Command Center to provide “all and any information” to target Iraq: “Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit Saddam Hussein at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not”. Richard Clarke, head of counter-terrorism within the National Security Council, revealed in his book Against All Enemies that on September 12th, President Bush personally asked him to provide evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks. When he submitted a report concluding that there was no connection, the report was returned marked: “Please update and resubmit”. From September 19th and 20th, Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board met in the company of Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis (inventor before Huntington of the self-fulfilling prophecy of the “clash of civilizations”), but in the absence of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Those assembled agreed on the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein at the end of the initial phase of the war in Afghanistan. They prepared a letter to Bush, written in PNAC letterhead and reminding him of his historic mission, “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism”. The argument of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda is here only generally inferred, and in the summer of 2002, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair would merely discuss “broad linkages” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Perle, on the other hand, unswayed in his convictions, claimed against all evidence that Mohamed Atta, the alleged terrorist leader of the September 11th attacks, had met with Iraqi diplomat Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir in Prague in 1999. On September 8th, 2002, in Milan, Perle dished the same “scoop” to the Italian daily Il Sole, “Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September 11. We have proof of that”, and would keep repeating this ridiculous claim in the United States.



The rumors of a link between Saddam and al-Qaeda were finally abandoned in favor of a more elaborate casus belli: the world threat posed by Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”. To concoct this next lie, Cheney and Rumsfeld had to circumvent CIA director George Tenet, who knew well (thanks in part to information given by Saddam’s son Kamel Hussein, who had fled Iraq in 1995 after having been in charge of its military industry) that Saddam was no longer in possession of weapons of that magnitude. At the end of the summer of 2002, Cheney and Rumsfeld renewed their winning Team B strategy, essentially overtaking the CIA with a parallel structure set up to produce the alarmist report they needed: it will be called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a special unit within the Near East and South Asia (NESA) offices at the Pentagon. Nicknamed “the Cabal”, the OSP was controlled by neoconservatives William Luti, Abram Shulsky, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. It based its estimates on information provided by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi con artist sentenced to 22 years in prison in Jordan for bank fraud and having never set foot in Iraq since 1956; he was bribed with the promise for a seat at the top of the Iraqi state after the overthrow of Saddam. Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked for the NESA at this time, testified in 2004 to the incompetence of members of the OSP, whom she saw “usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president […] This was creatively produced propaganda”.



In September 2002, in preparation for the war, Bush signed the National Security Strategy report (NSS 2002), which defined what would be called the “Bush Doctrine”, despite being nothing other than an update to the 1992 “Wolfowitz doctrine”. In order to “deny, contain, and curtail our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies”, says the document, “America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed”. Assuming that “our best defense is a good offense” and that “the events of September 11th 2001 [...] open vast, new opportunities”, the authors recommend “taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively”. Thus was prepared the justification for a “pre-emptive” attack against Iraq. There only remained to convince the American public and Congress. October 7th, 2002, President Bush addressed the nation: “Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction”, who could at any time “provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists”. He further claimed that Saddam also possessed aircraft and drones necessary to “disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas [...], targeting the United States”, and even worse, “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program”. He asks rhetorically, “if we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?” The urgency lied, presumptively, in the idea that Saddam “could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. [...] Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud”.



No one doubts that the neoconservatives were the authors of Bush’s anti-Iraq rhetoric. Since the first Gulf War, neoconservatives have never ceased to vilify the regime of Saddam Hussein and call for his overthrow. During the 1990s, David Wurmser, for example, published virulent books against Muslim countries, including Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein (1999). In 2000, the American Enterprise Institute published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, whose author, Laurie Mylroie, thanked Scooter Libby, David Wurmser, John Bolton, Michael Ledeen, and above all Paul Wolfowitz and his wife Clare Wolfowitz (also a member of the AEI). Mylroie does not hesitate to denounce Saddam Hussein as the brain behind worldwide anti-American terrorism, attributing to him without evidence the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the attack against the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. According to her, what most threatens the U.S. is “an undercover war of terrorism, waged by Saddam Hussein”, which is nothing more than “a phase in a conflict that began in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and that has not ended”. Richard Perle has described this book as “splendid and wholly convincing”.

Support for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, however, was not unanimous. Among the prominent men who, in the emotion of Sept. 11th, had supported the war in Afghanistan without worrying about the lack of evidence against bin Laden, were some who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Even Brzezinski, who had implicitly called for some new “Pearl Harbor”, refused to support the war in Iraq and criticized the effort with increasing severity. Bush Sr., of course, objected, but remained discreet. Hope of avoiding the oncoming catastrophe rested on Secretary of State Colin Powell. He had clearly stated on February 24th, 2001, that the sanctions against Iraq had been sufficient to prevent it from developing weapons of mass destruction. Yet, for reasons that remain largely unexplained, Powell played along; on February 5th, 2003, he declared to the General Assembly of the United Nations: “there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction”. As former National Security Advisor under Reagan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush Sr., and the commander leading American troops to victory in the first Gulf War, Powell’s support for the war carried considerable weight but failed to win approval from the UN Security Council, thanks in part to French Foreign Minister Philippe de Villepin.



The assault against Iraq was launched in March 2003, following the Shock and Awe or Rapid Dominance method, a state of the art strategy dear to Rumsfeld, developed in 1996 by the National Defense University; the idea is to quickly crush the opponent and break its will through the use of heavy firepower intended to “paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels”. In May 2003, Bush rather hastily declared: “Mission accomplished” in Iraq. In reality, what was supposed to be a blitzkrieg, would prove worse than the Vietnam quagmire. What’s worse, there was no trace of Saddam’s so called “weapons of mass destruction”. From the summer of 2003, many criticisms of the OSP’s rigged data emerged; in 2004, George Tenet was forced to resign from the leadership of the CIA for his acceptance (however reluctant) of that faulty ONP intelligence (he was replaced by Porter Goss, a veteran from the Bay of Pigs, who would head to Ankara in December 2005 to prepare for future air strikes against Iran from Turkish soil). Colin Powell also left his post in 2004, giving way to Condoleezza Rice, and would soon regret publicly his speech to the UN, calling it “a blot on my record” and claiming to have been deceived. His Chief of Staff, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, likewise would confess in 2006: “My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council”.



It is in this context that in March 2006 Congress formed a bi-partisan commission, the Iraq Study Group, that was critical of government decisions and pessimistic in regards to the evolution of the conflict. The group was chaired by James Baker, who had been the campaign manager for George Bush Sr. and later his Chief of Staff and Secretary of State (at that time he had successfully opposed the neoconservatives pushing the invasion of Iraq). Robert Gates, CIA director under Bush Sr., was also involved. The Iraq Study Group is rightly seen as an attempt by the Bush family to save their now badly wounded legacy. In November of the same year, the parliamentary midterm elections brought severe popular sanctions against the war and forced Bush to demission Donald Rumsfeld and appoint Robert Gates in his place. The President, however, remained deaf to the democratic opposition and the advice of his original political family. Listening to his “Good Lord”, and especially his neoconservative advisers, he announced in January 2007 the deployment of 20,000 additional troops, and then in April 2008 named General David Petraeus the new commander of coalition forces in Iraq, with a mission to lead a new assault called “the Surge”.



Once admitted that the intelligence suggesting Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was nothing but a lie manufactured by the neoconservatives and sold to the American people by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, what was the real reason for the invasion of Iraq? In the 9/11 Truth Movement as well as amongst its detractors, the consensual answer seems to be: oil. Noam Chomsky dismisses even the need to argue: “Of course it was Iraq’s energy resources. It’s not even a question”. At the other end of the spectrum, Alan Greenspan, director of the Federal Reserve, likewise concedes “to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil” (The Age of Turbulence, 2007). Also among the supporters of the oil theory are environmentalists; but for them too it seems more of a personal conviction rather than a provable fact: “I personally believe that there is a deep relationship between the events of 9/11 and peak oil, but it’s not something I can prove”, admits Richard Heinberg, a specialist in energy depletion, in the documentary Oil, Smoke and Mirrors.

The problem is that there is no indication that the oil lobby has encouraged the military intervention in Iraq. What oil companies had asked, rather, was the lifting of sanctions that prohibited them from dealing with Saddam’s Iraq — the same they are now asking for Iran. Indeed, American Big Oil did not profit much from the regime change in Iraq. They tried, of course, to profit from the privatization and resource redistribution brought about by the Production-Sharing Agreements in 2003 (although they were be severely disappointed by the state of the infrastructure and the instability in the country). And when in 2009 the licences for exploitation were auctioned, it was Russia and China who grabbed the lion’s share, with even France coming ahead of the U.S.



Proponents of the oil thesis like to foreground Halliburton, which has doubled its business in becoming the largest private contractor working for U.S. forces in Iraq; they have reason to accuse Dick Cheney of having personally gained $50 million in promoting Halliburton, after having served as its CEO from 1995 to 2000. However, Halliburton and Cheney’s personal gains in Iraq have little to do with a national strategy for control of natural resources. Furthermore, Halliburton is not a petroleum company, but rather a civil engineering company that provides services to oil companies, as well as to armies. Besides, in the 1990s, even Halliburton (then under Cheney’s leadership) had called for the lifting of sanctions on Iraq, Iran and Libya, and had even been charged a $3.8 million fine for having bypassed said sanctions. Yes, Dick Cheney has blood on his bank account — and he is not alone — but the United States of America as a whole won nothing in the war in Iraq, which cost the American people a whopping $3 trillion, according to lowest estimates. As for the Bushes, renowned oil sharks, there is no indication that they stood to make personal financial gain, not to mention the fact that the aggressiveness of neoconservative rhetoric against Saudi Arabia has hurt their interests. No, the oil does not explain the war in Iraq, nor does it explain the war in Afghanistan, nor does it explain the planned war against Iran.

Le 5 février 2003, le Secrétaire d’État Colin Powell engage sa réputation en brandissant un tube d’anthrax dans l’espoir de convaincre l’Assemblée générale des Nations Unies de la menace que représentent les Armes de Destruction Massives de Saddam Hussein. Powell regrettera publiquement ce discours, le qualifiant de "une tache sur mon parcours" (a blot on my record), et accusant la CIA et le Pentagone de l’avoir trompé.

Paul Wolfowitz, nommé « le parrain de la guerre d’Irak » par Time Magazine. Et « la voix de faucon la plus pro-Israël de l’administration Bush  » par le quotidien juif The Forward. Il est l’inventeur en 1992 de la « guerre préemptive », qui deviendra en 2001 la « doctrine Bush ».

En 1983, Rumsfeld était l'envoyé spécial du président à Bagdad pour négocier avec Saddam Hussein le rétablissement des relations diplomatiques et économiques)

Kren Kwiatkowski, lieutenant-colonel démissionnaire de l'Air Force, whistleblower sur les manipulations du Renseignement par l'OSP. (extrait du documentaire Why we Fight)

50 ANS D'ETAT PROFOND

de l'assassinat de Kennedy au 11-Septembre

(comparaison et perspective)  

"Une pilule rouge pour Forrest Gump"​ ​ 

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