March 18th, 2003

Dear Senator Smith,

Today I write to you blue-white with anger. We are told diplomacy has failed. We are told that Bush (no, I will not dignify him with the title of his office) has "gone the last mile for diplomacy." That is a load of crap. What we have seen over the last month has been the bullying and bribing by a rogue state, our country, looking for the political cover of legitimacy for an illegal act of aggression. And now it has come to pass that the U.S., possessing the most powerful military force on earth, will obliterate Iraq, on the basis of a lie: THEY ARE A DIRE THREAT TO US.

The facts are not well known in this country. And our media willingly reports the lies of the Bush administration. I will discuss the three big ones.

- Bush and Powell have repeatedly made the assertion that "we can't wait until the mushroom cloud rises over one of our cities." The fact is, you can't hide a nuclear weapons program, the infrastructure is too large. The Nigerian documents have been exposed as a forgery. The aluminum tubes Powell speaks gravely about have been reasonably proven to be intended for conventional arms. The head of the UN agency charged with finding nuclear weapons in Iraq has stated confidently and unequivocally that no significant nuclear threat exists, and that such a program could be found even if Iraq were not cooperative.

- Bush has asserted numerous times that Hussein is hiding biological and chemical weapons. Four months of inspections have produced scant evidence of these weapons, only the empty hulks of some overlooked warheads. The absurdist circular logic employed is that he must be hiding these weapons, because the UN can't find them. Powell appears before the UN, showing satellite photos of a truck depot that could be in the middle of Kansas for all that we know. The lab that he cites in northern Iraq, under the control of our allies, the Kurds, when examined by foreign journalists proves to be a deserted, run-down complex. Powell cited the testimony of defector Hussein Kamal concerning Iraq's weapons program, but he conveniently omitted the fact that General Kamal asserted that Iraq had in fact destroyed all stocks of bio-weapons following the first Gulf war. Tony Blair's fabled dossier turns out to be the 10 year old work of a graduate student, not even the true product of the vaunted MI5. The truth is one of two possibilities: either our intelligence services know where the goods are and are not telling the UN so as to sabotage the inspection process, or there simply are no weapons of mass destruction. Either case exposes the lie about this war.

- The link between Al-qaeda and Saddam remains unproven, despite much huffing and puffing on the part of Colin Powell. On the strength of these endlessly repeated lies, a clear majority of Americans have now linked Iraq to 9-11 in their minds, despite the fact that not a single hijacker came from that country. If you repeat the Big Lie often enough, it is reported as truth. Colin Powell seized on Osama Bin Laden's latest communique as evidence of the Iraq link, knowing that most of America won't bother to listen to the full text which castigates the infidel Saddam. A highly-placed intelligence official in Australia recently resigned rather than continue to live the lie that Al-qaeda was connected to Iraq. Our own CIA analyzed the situation a year ago, and concluded that Saddam was not a terrorist threat unless attacked.

The truth is, the cabal in the White House doesn't care whether diplomacy works or doesn't work. The truth is that they have wanted this war for at least five years, more than ten if you count Paul Wolfowitz' report from the Pentagon in 1992 that said, in effect, "we're the only superpower, let's rule the world." (Benevolently, of course). The truth is they don't care whether this war kills tens of thousands of Iraqi non-combatants, creating a first-class recruiting opportunity for Al-qaeda. The truth is that there won't be any democracy in Iraq after this is over; the three constituencies (Kurds, Shiite and Sunni) have always been at each other's throats, and we won't break the country into the three logical parts it should be because Iran would absorb the Shiite's and Turkey won't stand for a Kurdish state. The truth is that this war is about oil, it's about starting a global empire, it's about keeping this country in a continuous state of fear, pliable to the ruling party. That's your party, Senator.

The over-worked comparison to World War II applies, only not in the way that it is usually stated. Goering said it best:

"Of course the people don't want war... But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders... That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials, April 18, 1946

In 1939, the Nazi war machine dwarfed the Polish army. Nonetheless, Hitler whipped Germany into a frenzy over a phony threat, invaded the weaker nation, and plundered it. The "steady constancy" of Bush so praised by contemporary pundits is the same mania, and the rest of the world knows it. Only here in America does the blindness persist.



Kurt

Links:

• Six months after September 11th, as the foreign policy shift began to emerge in Washington, Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker interviewed members of the Bush administration about the Next World Order.
• Shortly after G.W. Bush issued his National Security Strategy in late September 2002, Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote this insightful article detailing the history of the men surrounding Bush and their aspirations. This is a must-read to understand why we have invaded Iraq.
• William Rivers Pitt has also examined and written eloquently about America as empire.
• I was amazed to see that even Newsweek is covering The Arrogant Empire.
• Yet another hidden to reason to invade and conquer Iraq has to do with oil politics: some OPEC members have switched to asking for payment in Euro currency, which threatens the global dominance of the U.S. dollar. W. Clark explores this angle in "The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War in Iraq."
• On the face of it, democracy in Iraq is an unlikely proposition. The war hawk theory espoused by Wolfowitz et al says that with a free Iraq in place, other repressive mideast regimes will give way to democracies. Maybe. Nearly all observers agree that regime change in Iraq is profoundly threatening to Mideast stability, and Joshua Micah Marshall argues that this is exactly the intended result: the war hawks in the White House want to "roll the table." You may want to re-think the decision to keep any money in your 401-k.