WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION – CLINTON'S SEPTEMBER SURPRISE?
By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com
With Gore trailing badly in the polls, will the White House wag the
dog? Scott Ritter thinks so. Ritter is the former UN arms inspector
who quit after discovering that information covertly gathered by the
UN was turned over to the US by the team's chief, Richard Butler. In
London for a meeting of the Great Britain Iraq Society, he told the
Independent that
"The new commission, Unmovic, will not be allowed into Iraq in
August, three months away from the election. You have got a
Vice-President, Al Gore, trailing behind in the polls and what better
way to appear tough and switch attention away to a so-called foreign
threat. The UN Security Council did not vote on Desert Fox and we can
expect the same thing to happen again. The US would not like to take
unilateral action, it needs Britain to give it in appearance of something
multilateral. And sadly, when the US says jump, Tony Blair asks 'how
high?'"
GET OUT THE BIG GUNS
It's not like it hasn't happened before. Weapons of
mass distraction are the biggest guns in any sitting
President's arsenal, and if you think the most
ravenously opportunistic politician in American
history would balk at such a ruthless act of pure
political calculation, then just ask the relatives of the
poor night watchman killed when Clinton bombed
that pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. Remember
when the CIA was swearing up and down that the El
Shifa factory outside of Khartoum was the focal point
of a nefarious terrorist plot – naturally spearheaded
by all-purpose villain Osama bin Laden – to wreak
biological and chemical havoc on the region? A year
later, they admitted that it was all a "mistake" – and of
course it was just a coincidence that Clinton gave the
order to bomb on the night of Monica Lewinsky's
return to the grand jury. Are we in for a repeat of those
halcyon days?
PERLE OF WISDOM
With trouble for Gore brewing on the domestic
front – at least until Larry Flynt releases those photos
– both the Democratic and Republican presidential
candidates are seemingly engaged in a chest-beating
contest over the prostrate body politic of Iraq. Richard
Perle, prominent neoconservative foreign policy
maven and a Bush advisor, averred that
"Governor Bush has said ... he would fully implement
the Iraq Liberation Act. We all understand what that
means. It means a serious and sustained effort to
assist the opposition with a view to bringing down
Saddam's regime. In 31 years in Washington, I have
not seen a sustained hypocrisy that parallels the
current administration's public embrace of the Iraq
Liberation Act and its dilatory tactics aimed at
preventing any progress taking place under the act.
That will not be the case in a Bush administration."
CLINTON IN
HELL
What better way
to respond than to
escalate the almost
daily bombing of
Iraq? Over a million
Iraqis – most of
them children –
have died since the
imposition of
draconian sanctions,
but this cannot
matter to Bill Clinton – since he will burn in the
deepest darkest province of Hell no matter what he
does. After all, what difference will a few more dead
Iraqis make to our sociopathic chief executive?
LIBERATION THROUGH
STARVATION
Perle
understands the
"Iraq Liberation Act"
– but most ordinary
Americans have
never even heard of
it. If they had, it
might never have
passed to begin with.
For this is just
another foreign aid
boondoggle, a $97
million subsidy to
the fractured and
fractious Iraqi
"opposition" – a
motley crew of
Islamic fundamentalists, revolutionary Marxists,
professional opportunists, and frustrated democrats
in exile who recently split into pro-US and anti-US
factions. The Iraqi National Accord, made up of Iraqi
military and dissident Baathist party cadre, broke
away from the US-funded Iraqi National Congress
(INC), the umbrella opposition group, on strategic
grounds: the INC has no support inside Iraq because
it is widely and accurately seen as the cat's-paw of a
hostile foreign power. As a mother cradles her dying
infant in her arms, cursing Uncle Sam for starving a
baby to death, the father is unlikely to take up arms in
the service of his child's killers. This is a public
relations challenge that not even the Clintonian
masters of "spin" have been able to surmount, but it
hasn't stopped the Republicans from complaining that
the Clinton administration has disbursed only
$20,000 of the appropriations authorized by the Iraqi
Liberation Act. A recent news item, however, has me
wondering. . . .
OF COURSE I BELIEVE YOU. . . .
In Amman, Jordan, a curious advertisement
appeared in local newspapers: the US Army Corps of
Engineers is soliciting bids for a "well" near the border
town of Treibel, but a few miles from Iraqi territory.
Printed in small type, it caused a large outcry as
Islamic and leftist parties issued a joint declaration
condemning the plan: "Digging an artesian well for the
U.S. army usually happens on US territory or a US
base. As Jordan is a sovereign Arab country, digging a
well on its soil for US forces is a diminution of
sovereignty." What a charmingly archaic conception
these guys have: they actually believe that respect for
Jordan's alleged "sovereignty" will in any way deter
the US government from doing what it damn well
wants to in that or any other region of the world. Now
the exact need for a well in the middle of the desert,
especially one so close to Iraq, may seem somewhat
suspicious to inveterate conspiracy theorists and other
paranoids, but you and I believe the explanation
proffered by US embassy spokeswoman Danna Shell,
who told Reuters the well project "was tied to funding
of a clinic under a worldwide humanitarian assistance
program by the US Department of Defense to the tune
of $55 million" – don't we?
A VASSAL STATE
Like hell we do. The report also cited an unnamed
diplomat, who remarked that "if the US was going to
build a military installation on the Iraq border they
would not advertise it in the papers." But why not
advertise what everyone already knows anyway – that
Jordan is a vassal state of the Americans, with no
more right to assert its so-called "sovereignty" than it
had under the Ottoman Turks, the Seljuks, the
Parthian empire, or the Romans? Shell claims that
this "humanitarian project" is being carried out "in
cooperation with the Jordanian army," as it no doubt
is, and it looks like some of that Iraqi "liberation"
money is being spent – on Clinton's September
surprise.
RITTER'S REVISIONISM
Ritter, previously demonized by the Iraqis as
American arrogance incarnate – a man who wanted to
"kick down doors" to get the goods on Iraq's alleged
weapons stockpile – has done a complete about-face
since stepping down from his official duties. Here is a
man who was at the very core of the American effort to
disarm Saddam Hussein saying that it is time to not
only lift the sanctions, but to rethink our entire policy
toward Iraq's disarmament, and his recent article in
Arms Control Today has caused a sensation. Ritter
exposes how the US-British insistence on Iraq's
complete and utter prostration has led, ironically, to a
period of completely unmonitored Iraqi rearmament
– setting up Saddam for another round of attacks.
This is the self-perpetuating fraud at the very heart of
the US-British policy: Iraq is a convenient punching
bag, which is being pummeled more or less
constantly, the punches coming faster and harder as
Election Day 2000 approaches. As Ritter put it to the
Independent:
"The ironic thing is that the longer the inspectors stay
away from Iraq, the more time the hardliners there
have to rebuild their weaponry. The intelligence
services of the US, Britain and Israel realise, but there
is nothing they can do while the US Administration
wants to keep Iraq as the whipping boy they can
wheel out at times of domestic difficulties."
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL –
BUT NOT FOR RITTER?
Ritter, by the way, is facing an investigation into
allegations that he passed on secret information to the
Israelis. Naturally, his very public criticism of the
Clinton's administration's Iraq policy has nothing to
do with the FBI investigation, ongoing since 1996. It
has cost him $120,000 so far. "I have nothing to
hide," he says: on the other hand, his Clintonian
pursuers have plenty to hide – but chances are they
will never get called on it. Why aren't conservatives
wearing "we believe you, Scott" buttons and starting
up a defense fund – do you have to be involved in a
sex scandal to get any sympathy around here?
THE CLOUD OF MYSTERY
Ritter makes a
convincing and
technically detailed
argument that Iraqi
weapons facilities
have not only been
largely destroyed
but are beyond the
possibility of
regeneration any
time in the
foreseeable future. In the face of Ritter's inside
knowledge of the subject, combined with a heroic
determination to get the truth out, the US State
Department is stepping up its propaganda campaign,
whipping up a war scare over renewed accusations of
Iraqi rearmament. While not disputing the perfect
legality of Iraq testing short-range missiles – allowed
under the terms of the UN's disarmament mandate –
Washington clouds the issue with murky accusations
about possible military applications of ordinary
materials that have civilian uses. As long as the
Americans reserve the unilateral right to invade Iraqi
territory at will, and insist on utterly destroying not
only Saddam but a whole generation of Iraqis who are
being devastated by the murderous sanctions, then no
arms inspection regime is possible. Ritter and his
Unscom colleagues succeeded in defusing the threat
of another war in Iraq as long as they had access – but
American and British arrogance has prevented any
resumption of the process begun by Ritter. This
enables the US to maintain a cloud of mystery and
suspicion over Iraq as a potential repository of
biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons. As a
recent wire story put it: "The State Department . . .
said that in the absence of United Nations inspectors
on the ground in Iraq, uncertainties about the
significance of these activities will persist," said the US
State Department in a written response to a New York
Times report about Iraqi rearmament. "As time passes
our concerns will increase."
THE TEST
These "concerns" are increasing exponentially as
Election Day looms larger. Sometime in August, Ritter
predicts, the US and Britain will demand that the arms
inspection regime return – without even offering to
discuss the lifting of sanctions. God help the Iraqis if
Gore is still down in the polls. This would be the real
test of the nominees this presidential election year, a
trial-by-fire that would reveal the true moral character
of the candidates, all four of them. We know what to
expect of Gore, but if and when Clinton exercises his
option to wag the dog, expect Dubya to wag his own
tail in unison, following doglike in the wake of the
conquering Democrats. Republicans always manage
to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory – it's the kind
of made-to-order opposition party that governments
everywhere like to have around.
WILL NADER COP OUT?
As for Ralph Nader, it is by no means certain that
the candidate of the Greens would reflect his own
party's antiwar stance; Nader has refused to join the
Green party, and tends to ignore the party platform
(for example: the party calls for a 50 percent reduction
in military spending, whereas Nader says 25 percent).
Nader has stubbornly evaded answered foreign policy
questions so far, and it would be interesting to see his
response to the question posed pointblank: War with
Iraq – are you for it or against it?
HE STOOD UP
There is only one visible candidate who has spoken
out consistently and eloquently on this question since
1990, when Bush the Elder proclaimed his "New
World Order" would rise over the shattered remnants
of a devastated Iraq – Patrick J. Buchanan. His
indictment of the murderous sanctions – which have
been condemned by the Pope, the parliaments of
Europe and Russia, and concerned people all over the
world – alone entitles him to the support of anyone
who doesn't care to be complicit with US war crimes. It
was Buchanan who stood up, virtually alone, against
the War Party during the first "Desert Storm"
unleashed on the Iraqi people. As Barry McCaffrey's
rampaging centurions were shooting down
surrendering Iraqis in cold bold, Buchanan braved the
war hysteria of the laptop bombardiers and dared to
say that we have no real national interest in preserving
the throne of Kuwait. Iraq threatened Israel, and the
decrepit and repressive Saudis most of all, but for
daring to point this out Buchanan became the favorite
hate object of politically correct conservatives – and
they spew their vitriol to this very day. Still, he bravely
holds the banner of peace aloft, and is a standing
reproach to the "amen corner" that says "yes" to every
US military intervention, no matter how farfetched or
far afield. The War Party is deathly afraid of this man,
and will stop at nothing – nothing – to prevent him
from gaining an audience. When I last saw Pat, in
Colorado, we walked down a hallway, talking, in the
company of two burly police officers, one on either
side of us: there were cops all over the place, adding
an ominous note to an otherwise festive occasion.
MEMO TO THE ELITES
Is war imminent? Lots of unpleasant events are
imminent, I fear, and we haven't seen the worst of it
yet, not by a long shot. But I'll tell you this: the
American people will not stand for it. Not this time.
Let them pull their September surprise. Let the two
major party candidates join hands in a war dance, and
let them try to shut out all opposition in the debates.
They are playing right into the hands of radicals like
myself. For we are just waiting for an opening such as
they will unwittingly provide, that will provoke a
backlash of popular resentment against the arrogance
of the elites. To the people that run this country – and
you know who you are – here is my entirely
unsolicited advice: don't do it in an election year.
Heed my warning: you'll be sorry.