|
CounterPunch
November
4, 2002
The Rush to
War
Should We Attack Iraq Because We Can?
by ANDREW COCKBURN
Faced with Saddam Hussein, the former teenage
hit man from Tikrit, our government appears to feel the need
to talk as tough as any Tikriti. Ari Fleischer, speaking from
the White House briefing room, calls for "one bullet"
to take care of the Iraqi leader; George Bush talks blithely
of "taking him out"; and Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat
on the House International Relations Committee, recently, according
to Ha'aretz, assured a visiting Israeli lawmaker: "We'll
be rid of the bastard soon enough, and in his place we'll install
a pro-Western dictator, who will be good for us and for you."
Such violent sentiments are not necessarily
a reaction to Hussein's well-documented cruelty. We can, after
all, be understanding about such foibles among our friends. The
gassing of the Kurds was greeted with barely more than a bleat
of protest from Washington, as was his earlier use of chemical
weapons in the war with Iran, but we were allies then. It took
Hussein's apparent bid for control of the world oil market by
invading Kuwait to turn him into "Hitler," capable,
as was faithfully reported in the propaganda buildup to the last
Gulf War, of tossing Kuwaiti babies out of hospital incubators.
That myth, dreamed up by the PR firm Hill and Knowlton, was exposed
soon after it had served its purpose. Others, such as the notion
that Hussein is both ready and able to unleash some super-weapon
on the United States, have proved more enduring.
Now more than ever, myth looms larger
than reality when it comes to Iraq, which may be why Iraqi Vice
President Taha Yassin Ramadan has suggested that the dispute
be settled in an OK Corral shootout between Bush and Hussein,
flanked by their respective veeps and umpired by U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan.
In the prologue to "Saddam:
King of Terror," Con Coughlin strikes a no less
mythic note, citing as part of the indictment against the Iraqi
leader his links to Osama bin Laden and an alleged meeting in
Prague between hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence
officer, a story now effectively discredited by the Czech intelligence
service that spread it in the first place. Once past the obligatory
threat-mongering, however, Coughlin, a British journalist well-versed
in Middle Eastern affairs, deploys more credible sources, especially
the reminiscences of former Baathists who once worked closely
with Hussein, to present an engrossing account of how this semi-educated
peasant boy advanced to power through the bloodstained shoals
of Iraqi revolutionary politics.
While accounts of his subject's brutality
and ruthlessness are familiar, though no less chilling for that,
Coughlin reminds us that Hussein did not achieve his eminence
through terror alone. Not only was he extremely skillful politically
-- steadily accumulating power through the 1970s while maintaining
a low profile in the shadow of his cousin, President Ahmad Hassan
Bakr -- he also displayed considerable constructive talents as
an administrator.
Iraqi leaders, for example, had long
chafed at the control of the country's oil resources by the cartel
of foreign oil corporations that made up the Iraq Petroleum Co.
Efforts by various regimes to alter this colonial relationship
by taking over those oilfields that the IPC refused to develop
had proved fruitless: Among other disciplinary measures, the
international oil companies simply refused to supply oil to any
country that bought oil directly from the Iraqi government rather
than from the IPC.
Beginning in 1971, Hussein (then deputy
to Bakr but already the key power in the country), advised by
the gifted oil minister Murtada Hadithi, took the initiative
in outmaneuvering the cartel. After first securing the Soviet
Union as a great-power sponsor (despite a career built on persecuting
Communists), he induced the French to break ranks with the consortium
by promising them lucrative contracts and discounted oil prices.
The scheme worked, finally allowing Iraq unfettered access to
its own fabulous oil riches. It was, says Coughlin, "the
single most revolutionary event to take place in Iraq since its
establishment" -- one which has doubtless not been forgotten
or forgiven by the oil companies -- generating a tidal wave of
cash, which the Baath used "to turn the country into a modern
state, and to raise the living standards of ordinary Iraqis."
Carrying out this vast undertaking required
skilled assistance. Hussein has always drawn a distinction between
"those who are loyal" and "those who are expert,"
the former being those very few trusted individuals -- first
and foremost his immediate family -- through whom he maintains
his grip on power. When it comes to experts, however, Hussein
always displayed an eager eye for, as one former apparatchik
recalls, "young people with good qualifications who were
intelligent and courageous." Even today, anyone who encounters
his officials -- such as oil minister Amer Rashid; Amir Sadi,
chief negotiator on the weapon inspection issue; or Foreign Minister
Naji Sabri -- can see that Hussein is served by an impressively
accomplished team. Of course, as the charming Sabri could explain,
competence does not guarantee a long life in Hussein's Baghdad.
His cousin was Hadithi, the former oil minister who later became
ambassador to Moscow. Hadithi was summoned home soon after Hussein
took supreme power in 1979 and executed (perhaps because the
newly enthroned leader did not want anyone around sharing credit
for the oil coup). Sabri's brother was killed as well, and rumor
has it that Sabri himself was on the list until an attentive
Hussein struck it off with the words "not him, he can be
useful."
Kenneth M. Pollack's purpose in "The
Threatening Storm" is less to tell a well-rounded story
than to argue the case, as declared in his subtitle, for invading
Iraq, displacing Hussein and building a new Iraq. Pollack, a
former CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer in the
Clinton administration, argues that such action is imperative
because Hussein is not only a bloodthirsty tyrant but a really
stupid one to boot, prone to irrational gambles such as the attack
on the Kurds in 1974 as well as the attacks on Iran in 1980 and
Kuwait in 1990. Such reckless adventurism, Pollack insists, is
a threat to us because Hussein is on the point of acquiring nuclear
weapons. Therefore, he and every aspect of his regime must be
eliminated as quickly as possible. This martial intervention
will ultimately reverse anti-Americanism in the Arab world once
the U.S. has built a "strong, prosperous, and inclusive
new Iraqi state."
Because so much of the "debate"
over war with Iraq has barely risen above the level of sloganeering,
Pollack's considered, empirical style and intellectually rigorous
tone is likely to strike a chord with many undecided observers.
Each stage in his argument comes buttressed with well-footnoted
facts and sources (albeit secondary and mostly non-Iraqi). Still,
this is probably the best presentation of their case that the
war party can hope for, especially because Pollack takes a hardheaded
approach to various postulated alternatives to a full-scale land
invasion, such as a bombing campaign a la Kosovo or a sponsored
assault by the Iraqi opposition with U.S. air support, along
the lines of the recent Afghan campaign. He is surely right in
deriding these latter notions, although I think he has been a
little naive about the opposition-based variant, which was most
likely crafted by the opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi with the
express design of drawing the United States into a full-scale
land war with Iraq.
As with any work of advocacy, facts and
viewpoints inconvenient to the basic thesis sometimes get short
shrift. His muddled account of Hussein's dealings with the Kurds
in the mid-'70s -- actually a masterful display of cunning by
"Mr. Deputy" that crushed the threat of Kurdish separatism
for a generation -- may be due to simple ignorance. However,
though he glosses over or fails to mention them, he must surely
be aware of the various covert U.S. interventions in Iraqi affairs,
including the CIA-supported 1963 coup that first put Hussein's
Baath Party in power, or the Carter administration's encouraging
support for Hussein's attack on Iran in 1980. He does concedes
that the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, might have
led Hussein to believe he had a green light to attack Kuwait,
but he discounts the significance of the encounter.
Similarly, Pollack refers delicately
to Israel's "purported" nuclear arsenal. This might
be dismissed as a mere quibble, save that the argument of his
book -- the case for invading Iraq and occupying Iraq -- rests
on the assumption that a dangerously reckless Hussein is about
to have the bomb, with no "purported" about it. It
is this threat alone -- biological and chemical weapons are not,
he persuasively suggests, instruments of mass destruction because
they are ineffective or at least unpredictable -- that justifies
war.
In late 1998, when the last United Nations
weapon inspection mission ended in debacle and a rain of American
bombs, the inspectors concerned with the Iraqi nuclear program
were fully satisfied that the program was dead and buried. One
U.S. official supervising the work of the International Atomic
Energy Agency, the institution charged with Iraqi nuclear disarmament,
said to me at the time, "The United States pushes the IAEA
to find little discrepancies in Iraq's nuclear accounting so
that the file can be kept open, but short of lobotomizing or
killing all the Iraqi nuclear scientists, the Iraqi nuclear program
is finished. We have closed down all their nuclear facilities
and activities." And in its October 1998 report to the U.N.,
the IAEA itself stated, "There are no indications that there
remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of
weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance."
Such assessments do not find favor with
Pollack, who regards Hussein's acquisition of nuclear weapons
as "probably inevitable." His major source for this
conclusion appears to be an exiled Iraqi nuclear physicist, Khidhir
Hamza, who is described without qualification as "the former
head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program." Hamza, who defected
in 1994, claims that Hussein will most likely be in possession
of three nuclear weapons by 2005 (though occasionally he amends
that to "a bomb" within "months"). This individual
is furthermore a key source for the suggestion that Hussein planned
to fire a nuclear warhead, should he have had one available in
time, at Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, thus inviting retaliatory
immolation from Israel. If true, this certainly bolsters the
case for Hussein's being impermissibly reckless.
However, not everyone takes Hamza at
his own estimation as "Saddam's
bombmaker." In his forceful debunking of the Iraqi
threat, former senior weapon inspector Scott Ritter states flatly
in "War
on Iraq," that Hamza "wasn't a designer and
he certainly wasn't head of the program.... [He] is not who he
says he is." David Albright, a Washington-based expert on
nuclear proliferation who helped give Hamza initial credibility,
recently claimed that Hamza exaggerated his own importance in
the Iraqi program and recycled information he had picked up from
the press, including specious revelations about biological and
chemical weapons, as his own firsthand knowledge. Despite such
reservations, Hamza still finds a respectful hearing among journalists
and Congress, despite the lack of confirmation from other sources.
It is telling that, while the United States detected a North
Korean uranium enrichment program in its early stages, the administration
has been unable, despite huge effort, to uncover hard evidence
-- which it would quite certainly broadcast -- of any similar
Iraqi activity.
Ritter, meanwhile, a hero among the hawks,
is now vilified, when he is not ignored, because of his assertions,
backed up by detailed information from his days as a star weapon
inspector, that the former U.N. inspection effort effectively
destroyed all Hussein's weapons of mass destruction as well as
his means for constructing them. The very fact of Ritter's relative
obscurity nowadays, compared to people with more palatable messages,
such as Hamza, points to the lack of any real debate on the official
justifications for the proposed invasion.
But then, who needs justifications? In
December 1989, the U.S. attacked Panama on the flimsiest of pretexts
and overthrew its government, killing more than 300 Panamanians
in the process. The invasion was officially code-named "Operation
Just Cause." But, inside the Pentagon, cynics dubbed it
"Operation Just Because." As a former defense official
said to me recently, "we invaded Panama just because it
was there and we could."
Perhaps the same will be said of Iraq.
Andrew Cockburn is the co-author of "Out
of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein."
Yesterday's
Features
Alexander Cockburn
Blowback,
Wellstone and Hitchens
Michael Neumann
Memo to
Christians
Re: Activism and the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Fran Shor
Militarized Masculinity and Homegrown Terrorists
Mary Hughes-Thompson
Olive
Orchards and Armed Zealots
Susan Davis
Proverbial Wisdom:
Right Place, Wrong Time
Jason Leopold
False
Profits:
Sec of Army Thomas White and Enron's Cooked Books
Adam Engel
Samson Agonistes:
Confessions of a Terrorist/Martyr
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
A Day
at the American Enterprise Institute
John Stanton
Should States Secceed?
Gavin Keeney
Parting Shots
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: Episode 6. Talk Show Host
David Krieger
The Children
of Iraq Have Names
M. Junaid Alam
No to War Rap
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- The Shafts of Death: Bush, Coal Mines, and Death
in the Tunnels;
- Speak Memory!: Carter and the Draft;
- Daniel Pipes' World: Smearing Pro-Arab Academics;
- Ashcroft's Gays: the War on Free Speech;
- Saddam's Amnesty: Could It Happen Here?
- Criminalizing Dissent: a history and preview;
- Iraq 1987: When the Going Was Good;
- Egypt in Turmoil: an Anthropologist's Account;
- Green and Grounded: Profiled at the Gate.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
October 26
/ 27, 2002
Michael Wolff
A Place
of Tears
Ilija Trojanow
Bali Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
Crocodile Tears
Hope Shand and Silvia Ribeiro
The Great Containment:
GM Fallout from Mexico to Zambia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Wolf Who Cried Wolf:
Charging Anti-Semitism & Extending the Iron Wall
Gavin Keeney
The Fusion Thing:
Landscape + Architecture
Adam Engel
A Good Man is Hard to Misfit
Anis Shivani
Is America Becoming Fascist?
Jason Leopold
Is Thomas White Fit to Lead the Army?
Philip Farruggio
Let Them Eat (Crumb) Cake
Josh Frank
The Grassroots of Hope
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: episode 5
Night School
M. Shahid
Alam
The Civilizing Mission
October 25, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Pappy
Bush on Wellstone:
"Who Is This Chickenshit?"
Stuart Timmons
Harry
Hay Dead at 90:
He Paved the Way for Modern Gay Activism
Vanessa Jones
Australia
Votes Green:
Historic No Vote to US War Plans
Ben Terrall
Rep.
Tom Lantos' Big Lie
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Behind
the Drive for War:
The Escalating Bush Military Budget
Will Youmans
Israel's and Divestment
Norman Madarasz
Lula
on the Verge
October 24,
2002
Jo Freeman
How the
Christian Coalition Boosts Israel
Ben Tripp
George
W.: Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place
Harry Browne
Ireland's Dreary Yes to Nice
Anis Shivani
A Guide
for the Perplexed:
the Major Countries of the World as Defined by the Office of
Strategic Influence
T.W. Croft
America's
New Improved War
William Hughes
A Free
Press, But for Whom?
Alan Farago
Jeb Bush and the Environment
October 23,
2002
Daniel Wolff
Pataki,
Witt and the Indian Point Nuke
Wayne Madsen
A Saudiless
Arabia
Sam Bahour
and Paul de Rooij
Abritrary
Imprisonment
Chris White
Why I Oppose
the US War on Terror:
an ex-Marine Sergeant Speaks Out
Anthony Gancarski
Back to Bali
Adam Engel
Twilight
(of the Idols) Zone
Robert Fisk
How to Shut Up Your Critics
October 22,
2002
Jack McCarthy
A Letter
to C. Hitchens
Carol Norris
This Message
Brought to You by Breast Cancer, Inc.
Joanne Mariner
Just
Say "Not Until We're Married":
Legislating Morality and Understanding HIV/AIDS Prevention
Kathleen Christison
Excuse Me?
How Israel Justifies Killing Palestinians
Linda Heard
Iraq War
Mongering:
A Game of Chess with Lives at Stake
Roger Peacock
Marketing the War on Iraq
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|