Jay Bookman
Lies about Iraq rise to level of the absurd
Wed Oct 15 23:40:36 2003
64.140.158.125


[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 10/16/03 ]

Lies about Iraq rise to level of the absurd

Lies beget more lies; a policy built on deception will always require further deception to sustain itself.

Case in point: The campaign by leading members of the Bush administration to rebuild faltering support for their invasion of Iraq. To hear them tell it, everything that has happened since last March has just proved how right they've been all along.

To cite just one example, consider a recent speech by Vice President Dick Cheney to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. Cheney is credited by many for having led President Bush, and by extension this country, into invading Iraq. So it's no surprise that he has been unflinching in defending that policy.

As he explained the rationale:

"We could not accept the grave danger of Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies turning weapons of mass destruction against us or our friends and allies."

Of course, no such grave danger existed. Having failed to find any WMD, we know that now. More importantly, we knew it in the fall of 2002, when this push for war began. Even back then, the CIA was using terms such as "unlikely" and "low probability" to describe the odds of Saddam handing WMD to terrorists.

Somehow, "low probability" and "unlikely" were transformed into "grave danger." Claims about Saddam's nuclear program have followed a similar trajectory.

In January 2002, the CIA reported that Iraq's nuclear weapons program consisted of no more than low-level theoretical work, an assessment that time has proved quite accurate. Yet eight months later, Cheney was somehow claiming that Iraq was close to completing The Bomb.

In his Heritage speech, Cheney also described the prewar efforts to contain Saddam -- "12 years of diplomacy, more than a dozen Security Council resolutions, hundreds of U.N. weapons inspectors, thousands of flights to enforce the no-fly zones and even strikes against military targets in Iraq" -- and dismissed them as failures.

That too denies reality. In fact, multilateral efforts to contain and disarm Saddam had succeeded to a degree that few had imagined possible.

In 1991, Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, production facilities to produce still more, and a maturing nuclear weapons program. By 1998, and certainly by 2003, he had none of those things.

Sanctions worked. Inspections worked.

Then Cheney got to the core of his argument:

"Another criticism we hear is that the United States, when its security is threatened, may not act without unanimous international consent. Under this view, even in the face of a specific agreed-upon danger, the mere objection of even one foreign government would be sufficient to prevent us from acting."

With that statement, Cheney abandons deception and traipses merrily into the Land of the Completely Absurd. Nobody -- not the Democrats, not the United Nations, not even the French -- makes the argument that he describes. It would be insane to do so.

Cheney invents that argument to support his larger point: After Sept. 11, the Bush administration at least did something, while its less-than-manly critics would have done nothing.

And that is the ultimate falsehood.

The true policy choice is between actions that make things better for the United States and actions that make things worse. If we were to assess the invasion of Iraq on those grounds, the outcome would be something like this:

Saddam had no WMD, no nuclear program and no ties to al-Qaida. So invading Iraq did little or nothing to improve our security. It did, however, come at a cost that may take decades to fully tally.

The invasion has strained our alliances and international standing, making it difficult to draw support against real threats in North Korea and Iran. Our military is overextended. The financial toll is $150 billion and counting; the toll in U.S. lives continues to mount as well.

If the administration truly did expect all that, they are bigger fools than even their harshest critics have claimed.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor
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IRAQI PEOPLE NEED TO STEP UP TO THE PLATE TO REBUILD THEIR NATION...THE SAME HOLDS
TRUE FOR THE MIDEAST REGION TO STEP INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

September 21, 2003
By Alyce Vrba

We as Americans are increasingly questioning and demanding accountability and full disclosure regarding every American tax dollar that is being allocated and spent in Iraq and the MiddleEast. Who or what entities are receiving the BIG BUCKS? This scrutiny will continue. This reflects our strength as a democracy and our responsibility as citizens.

Why will this scrutiny continue? It will continue because WE as Americans need to use our financial and human resources to rebuild our own infrastructure and to meet our own needs. Our needs are many. The laundry list includes: universal health insurance and meaningful access to healthcare for all with an emphasis on proactive versus reactive care and research; building and maintaining affordable housing; training and retraining our human resources; creating jobs and opportunities that are consistent with our longterm goals and needs; fighting and prosecuting "white-collar" crime; systematically lowering our dependency on fossil fuels while developing and utilizing renewable energy sources; rebuilding our transit lines and systems to effectively and efficiently move our PEOPLE and our goods in the 21st Century; restructuring our State-Court systems to provide meaningful access and justice for the POOR and the MiddleClass on both civil and criminal cases;...

This scrutiny undoubtedly will extend and continue regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict
as a resolution needs to happen. It is long overdue.

From a global standpoint, evidently there is a misperception regarding the lives and wealth of everyday Americans. An example of this is our increased homelessness and near-homelessness in all of our major cities. Many of our homeless are U.S. citizens, the elderly, the disabled, veterans...that paid into the system or their families continue to do such...yet were left without permanent housing, a fundamental need. For an glaring example of our failure to address these problems take a "ride-through"
SkidRow in Los Angeles at night...a ride that is even more scary and disillusioning then experiencing it in the daytime.

Don't judge everyday Americans by movies and television with visions of unlimited wealth, streets paved with gold, greed, and a compulsive need to acquire "things".

WE have spent our treasure in Iraq and the MiddleEast and it looks like we will spend more. WE have spent our human resources and lives in Iraq and the MiddleEast and it looks like we may spend more. Many of us as everyday Americans ask relevant questions like why can't the Wealthy pay their fair share and pick up part of the tab to help pay for the war in Iraq by eliminating the last rounds of taxcuts
and taxbreaks for the Wealthy. This questioning will continue as the current state of affairs appears to be fundamentally unfair and unwise. Many Americans question the wisdom of why and how WE ended up in Iraq, but the reality is that WE are there.

But now the PEOPLE of Iraq, the PEOPLE of the MiddleEast have to ask themselves individually and collectively, how do WE positively move into the 21st Century, how do WE rebuild our nations and our region, how do WE go past old tribal issues. Change is never easy, but it goes with the understanding that WE in a global community that is increasingly interconnected...are all in this together
and have many of the same needs.

Copyright 2003, POORPOWER, All rights reserved.
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OP-ED COLUMNIST
Worried Optimism on Iraq
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/opinion/21FRIE.html

I am an optimist by nature, and last week in Tel Aviv an Israeli friend told me he knew why. He said it was because I was short — and short people tend to be optimists because they can only see the part of the glass that is half full, not half empty.

These days, though, even someone at my eye level is having a hard time seeing the part of the glass in Iraq that is half full. I am still an optimist on Iraq, but a "worried optimist." My optimism is based on one big thing that has happened — and my worrying is based on two smaller things that have not.

The big thing that has happened in Iraq, which you can really feel when you're there, is that there is a 100 percent correlation of interests between America's aspirations for Iraq and the aspirations of Iraq's silent majority. We both want the same thing for Iraq — that it not become Iran, that it not become Saddam, but that it become a decent, modern-looking Iraqi alternative. This overlap of aspirations is hugely important. This is not Vietnam.

This also explains why the remnants of Saddam's order, who want all their old privileges and powers back, have had to go to such incredible lengths — bombing the U.N. office and the most holy mosque in Shiite Islam. It is not easy to break apart the overlap of interests between America and the Iraqi silent majority. It has real weight and inertia: the Iraqi Governing Council has appointed ministers, the ministers are getting the government running, normality is returning to many streets.

But here's what's worrying. The resistance from the Saddamists is getting stronger, not weaker. It is becoming so strong, I would argue, that a new war needs to be mounted against the Saddamist forces in the Sunni triangle near Baghdad. Two Republican Guard divisions just melted away in this area and they still have to be defeated. The war has to be finished, but we can't be the ones to finish it. This is a purely urban fight, and if we try to finish it alone what will happen is more of what's happened in the past two weeks — fatal blunders. We just accidentally killed 10 Iraqi policemen in one town and gunned down a 14-year-old Iraqi boy in another who was part of a wedding party firing guns in celebration. Non-Arabic-speaking Americans cannot fight an urban war in Iraq. Forget it. We must get off this course immediately.

If we have many more such "friendly fire" incidents, even the Iraqi silent majority will turn hostile. That is what the Saddamists want. Which is why I will stop worrying about this only when I see the new Iraqi government has formed its own robust internal security force (now being discussed), with its own intelligence assets, to fight the Saddamists by the local rules. That is the only way to root them out, and only Iraqis can fight this war. If Americans have to keep killing Iraqis, we're dead.

The other thing that will make me stop being a worried optimist, is when I not only see Iraqis fighting for the aspirations we have in common, but when I hear them speaking out to defend those aspirations in public — in Arabic. Whenever senior U.S. officials tell me about Iraqis who thanked them, with tears in their eyes, for getting rid of Saddam, I have a simple response: Could you please ask those Iraqis to say it in public, in Arabic, on Al Jazeera TV? There's been way too little of that.

In part, this is because many Iraqis are still afraid that we're going to leave and Saddam will come back and punish all who worked with us. In part, this is because America is so radioactive in the Arab-Muslim world that even an America that has come to Iraq with the sole intention of liberating its people cannot be openly embraced. In part this is because while we think we've "liberated" Iraq, and deserve applause, we forget the fact that Iraqis couldn't liberate themselves is deeply humiliating for them, and our mere presence there reminds them of that. And in part, it's because while we and the Iraqis share the same broad aspirations, it doesn't seem to them that we have a workable plan to achieve them.

We need to ease those doubts, and Iraqis need to get over them, because we can't stay as long as we need to, to get the job done, without Iraqis ready to defend the progressive outcome we both aspire to.

Friedman's first rule of Middle East reporting: What people tell you in private is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public. And when I see Iraqis defending our shared aspirations — with both their words and their lives — my optimism will know no bounds and every glass will look full.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Alyce Vrba, CEO
POORPOWER, Property Rights Power
P.O. BOX 351513
LOS ANGELES, CA 90035
(310)229-5252; (509)693-1335
http://www.poorpower.org
E-mail: justicewon@hotmail.com

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