[Peace-discuss] AWARE commentary recorded for WILL-AM

[Randall Cotton]

I just got back from recording the (slightly revised) audio commentary below
for WILL:

Their editorial board will meet on Monday to decide on "placement".

On our web site (anti-war.net), I put an annotated version, with links to
source references (and I refer to this fact in the audio). I had to do most
of that research anyway to satisfy the "editorial board", which wanted cited
references. Yep, references. For an opinion/commentary piece =8-P

It took 3 1/2 weeks to get this far, though they say that future pieces
shouldn't take so long for them to handle.

We shall see...
R
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Do you remember the old justifications for invading Iraq? The claim that
they had a nuclear weapons program? That they had stockpiled weapons
of mass destruction? That Saddam was working with Al Qaeda? And the
insinuation that Iraq had something to do with 9/11?  Now, President Bush
has finally abandoned them all. Most folks listening to *this* broadcast
have probably learned by now that these claims are increasingly seen as
fraudulent and that even the Administration can see they're crumbling away.

So as belief that the war in Iraq was justified erodes in America and
the body count rises daily, our President now claims his purpose was
a humanitarian one - to save the world from Saddam Hussein, who, as he
tirelessly points out, killed countless Iraqis, invaded other countries
and used chemical weapons on his own people. This is all true, but Saddam
did nearly all his killing, invading and gassing more than ten years ago
when conditions were very different - in particular, the U.S. supported
him politically, financially and militarily, helping *enable* Saddam to
accomplish his worst atrocities. The administration always conveniently
ignores the fact that since the first Gulf War in 1991, conditions changed
dramatically for Saddam. He no longer enjoyed the support of the U.S. or
any other country and in 2003 before the war, even Saddam knew that any
such misbehavior on his part would likely seal his own doom. At that time,
there was no discernable prospect of Saddam committing mass atrocities or
invading anyone. Although Saddam's regime was always brutally repressive,
by the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam's most horrible atrocities
and his foreign invasions were historical data points far more than
contemporary dangers. A Human Rights Watch report released in January
addressed this by saying:

"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian
intervention... Saddam Hussein's atrocities should certainly be punished,
and his worst atrocities, such as the 1988 genocide against the Kurds,
would have justified humanitarian intervention then. But such interventions
should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They
should not be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in
the past."

Meanwhile, the most reliable estimates of innocent civilians killed in
this war range above 10,000. In particular, a detailed accounting by the
research group "Iraq Body Count" estimates civilian deaths as high as
10,430. And now, media reports say the country may be edging toward civil
war. Perhaps the administration could point to some individuals in Iraq
that they saved from the hands of Saddam, but given the damage we've done,
any claim that the people of Iraq as a whole will ultimately be better off
is, at best, conjecture. A guess. A hunch. An increasingly implausible
hunch. And you cannot justify starting a war that kills thousands of
innocents based on a hunch. What if your hunch is wrong?

For more information on this commentary, including factual references,
go to the AWARE website at anti-war.net.