[Peace-discuss] bob fisk on iraq

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

Subject: [GSN] [Fisk]  Don't Say We Were Not Warned About This Chaos



 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4614.htm
Don't Say We Were Not Warned About This Chaos
By Robert Fisk
05 September 2003:

How arrogant was the path to war. As President Bush now desperately tries to
cajole the old UN donkey to rescue him from Iraq - he who warned us that the
UN was in danger of turning into a League of Nations "talking shop" if it
declined him legitimacy for his invasion - we are supposed to believe that
no one in Washington could have guessed the future.

Messrs Bush and Blair fantasised their way to war with all those mythical
weapons of mass destruction and "imminent threats" from Iraq - whether of
the 45-minute variety or not - and of the post-war "liberation", "democracy"
and map-changing they were going to bestow upon the region. But the record
shows just how many warnings the Bush administration received from sane and
decent men in the days before we plunged into this terrible adventure.

Take the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in Washington on the
eve of war. Assistant Under Secretary Douglas Feith, one of Rumsfeld's
"neo-cons", revealed that an office for "post-war planning" had only been
opened three weeks earlier. He and Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman
conceded that the Pentagon had been "thinking" about post-war Iraq for 10
months. "There are enormous uncertainties," Feith said. "The most you can do
in planning is develop concepts."

US senators at the time were highly suspicious of the "concept" bit. When
Democrat Joe Biden asked if anyone in the Bush administration had planned
the post-war government of Iraq, Grossman replied that "There are things in
our country we're not going to be able to do because of our commitment in
Iraq." Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman then asked: "Who will rule
Iraq and how? Who will provide security? How long might US troops
conceivably remain? Will the United Nations have a role?"

Ex-General Anthony Zinni, once the top man in US Central Command with
"peacekeeping" experience in Kosovo, Somalia and (in 1991) northern Iraq,
smelled a rat and said so in public. "Do we want to transform Iraq or just
transition it out from under the unacceptable regime of Saddam Hussein into
a reasonably stable nation? Transformation implies significant changes in
forms of governance... Certainly there will not be a spontaneous
democracy..."

Zinni spoke of the "long hard" journey towards reconstruction and added -
with ironic prescience - that "It isn't going to be a handful of people that
drive out of the Pentagon, catch a plane and fly in after the military peace
to try to pull this thing together."

But incredibly, that's exactly what happened. First it was Jay
"pull-your-stomach-in-and-say-you're-proud-to-be-an-American" Garner, and
then the famous "anti-terrorism" expert Paul Bremer who washed up in Baghdad
to hire and then re-hire the Iraqi army and then - faced with one dead
American a day (and 250 US troops wounded in August alone) - to rehire the
murderous thugs of Saddam's torture centres to help in the battle against
"terrorism". Iraq, Bremer blandly admitted last week, will need "several
tens of billions" of dollars next year alone.

No wonder Rumsfeld keeps telling us he has "enough" men in Iraq. Sixteen of
Americas's 33 combat brigades are now in the cauldron of Iraq - five others
are also deployed overseas - and the 82nd Airborne, only just out of
Afghanistan (where another five US troops were killed last weekend) is about
to be deployed north of Baghdad. "Bring 'em on," Bush taunted America's
guerrilla enemies last month. Well, they've taken him at his word. There is
so far not a shred of evidence that the latest Bush administration fantasy -
"thousands" of foreign Islamist "jihadi" fighters streaming into Iraq to
kill Americans - is true.

But it might soon be. And what will be told then? Wasn't Iraq invaded to
destroy terrorism rather than to recreate it? We were told Iraq was going to
be transformed into a democracy and suddenly it's to be a battleground for
more "war against terror". America, Bush now tells his people, "is
confronting terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan... so our people will not
have to confront terrorist violence in New York or... Los Angeles." So
that's it then. Draw all these nasty terrorists into our much-loved
"liberated" Iraq and they'll obligingly leave the "homeland" alone. I
wonder.

But notice, too, how everything is predicated to America's costs, to
American blood. An American commentator, Rosie DiManno, wrote this week that
in Iraq "There's also the other cost, the one measured in human lives... one
American a day slain since Bush declared the major fighting over." Note here
how the blood of Iraqis - whom we were so desperate to liberate six months
ago - has disappeared from the narrative. Up to 20 innocent Iraqi civilians
a day are now believed to be dying - in murders, revenge killings, at US
checkpoints - and yet they no longer count. No wonder journalists now have
to seek permission from the occupation authorities to visit Baghdad
hospitals. Who knows how many corpses they would find in the morgue?

"The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things are far
worse than we have been told... We are today not far short of a disaster."
The writer was describing the crumbling British occupation of Iraq, under
guerrilla attack in 1920. His name was Lawrence of Arabia.

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