[Peace-discuss] Truth on Iraq Seeps Through

[patton paul]

Published on Tuesday, October 8, 2002 by the Los Angeles Times
Truth on Iraq Seeps Through
by Robert Scheer


In a speech intended to frighten the American people into supporting a
war, the president Monday again trotted out his grim depiction of Saddam
Hussein as a terrifying boogeyman haunting the world. However, a CIA
report released late last week and designed to bolster Bush's case for
preemptive invasion instead provided clear evidence that Iraq poses less
of a threat to the world than at any other time in the past decade.

In its report, the CIA concludes that years of U.N. inspections combined
with U.S. and British bombing of selected targets have left Iraq far
weaker militarily than in the 1980s, when it was supported in its war
against Iran by the United States.

The CIA report also concedes that the agency has no evidence that Iraq
possesses nuclear weapons, although it lamely attempts to put the worst
spin on that embarrassing fact: "Although Saddam probably does not yet
have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent
on acquiring them."

Of course, that is a statement about intent, not capability, and one that
can be made about dozens of the world's nations, many of them run by
dictators as brutal as Hussein.

None of the unstable nations already possessing deliverable nuclear
weapons are targets of Bush's wrath. And in the case of the military
dictatorship of Pakistan, which at some point is likely to use such
weapons in a war with India, we have even eliminated the sanctions imposed
as punishment for developing those nuclear arms.

More important than its psychoanalyzing of Iraq's megalomaniacal leader is
the CIA's concession that the much-maligned inspections done by teams of
experts organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency actually
worked quite well: "More than 10 years of sanctions and the loss of much
of Iraq's physical nuclear infrastructure under IAEA oversight have not
diminished Saddam's interest in acquiring or developing nuclear weapons."

Similarly, the report concludes that Iraq's chemical weapons "capability
was reduced during the UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission]
inspections and is probably more limited now than it was at the time of
the Gulf War."

The report also notes that all cases of documented use of chemical weapons
by Iraq occurred on or before March 1988, primarily against Iranian troops
in a war covertly supported by the U.S., and that neither chemical nor
biological weapons were used against the United States during or after the
Gulf War.

So what we have here is our top intelligence agency endorsing the past
success of a peaceful, enforceable disarmament technique that our allies
and the United Nations support, while our president and his Cabinet
repeatedly belittle it as a sham.

In fact, if the CIA is to be believed, the inspections that were broken
off four years ago amid bombing of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies should
be reinstated immediately, even ahead of a tougher U.N. resolution.

If Iraq thwarts the resumption of effective inspections, the CIA report
also makes obvious that continued airstrikes targeting suspected armaments
facilities would make far more sense than a costly, risky full-fledged
invasion.

"UNSCOM inspection activities and coalition military strikes destroyed
most of [Iraq's] prohibited ballistic missiles and some Gulf War-era
chemical and biological munitions," the CIA report says, but "Iraq still
has a small force of extended-range Scud-variant missiles, chemical
precursors, biological seed stock, and thousands of munitions suitable for
chemical and biological agents."

The report claims that Iraq may have converted some of its "legitimate
vaccine and biopesticide plants to biological warfare." But since the CIA
report provides maps pinpointing suspect Iraqi weapons sites, they could
easily be taken out short of the antiseptic-sounding "regime change" the
Bush administration is aching to achieve.

In truth, the invasion is required not to meet a pressing threat to our
security but rather to meet the threat to GOP control of Congress posed by
a sagging U.S. economy and a stock market that has wiped out the savings
of many Americans. That and the pent-up desire of frustrated wannabe
imperialists among top Bush advisors to find a way to use our high-tech
weaponry to micromanage the world. The CIA report makes it clear there is
no plausible national security reason for pushing for war with Iraq at
this time, other than the ill-advised imperial goal of directly
controlling the world's oil supplies.

That's why the president in his speech Monday was reduced to scaring
Americans with more tales of Hussein the Boogeyman.

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times

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Dr. Paul Patton
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-328-4064
homepage: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ppatton/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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