GEORGE BUSH, TONY BLAIR AND THE CENTURY’S GREATEST CRIME
What US and Britain did to Iraq is nothing short of state terrorism
By Linda S. Heard | Special to Gulf News
Published: 20:00 February 18, 2013
Image Credit: Niño Jose Heredia/©Gulf News
It’s been almost 10 years since the US and Britain unleashed ‘Shock and
Awe’ on the Iraqi capital Baghdad ostensibly to punish a rogue dictator
for hoarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in non-compliance with
binding UN Security Council resolutions. In reality, Saddam Hussain
had shut down his nuclear programme and destroyed Iraq’s chemical
and biological weapons more than a decade earlier.
UN weapons inspectors were almost certain of this fact and were on the
point of giving Iraq a clean bill of health until they were leant-on
by Uncle Sam. Indeed, the man who had supervised Iraq’s WMD programme
for a decade Saddam’s son-in-law Hussain Kamal confirmed as much to
CIA intelligence officers and UN officials following his defection
to Jordan in 1995.
What was done to Iraq was nothing short of state terrorism beginning
with 10 years of crippling sanctions that brought Iraq to its knees
and were believed to have been responsible for the deaths of up to
500,000 children who died from malnutrition, lack of medicine and
disease from polluted water supplies.
Rather than heed growing international calls to lift those sanctions,
George W. Bush and his neoconservative band chose war which they and
their British cohort Prime Minister Tony Blair then sold to gullible
Western populations on lies too numerous to list. They were aided by
a complicit right-wing media with Rupert Murdoch leading the charge,
according to the diaries of Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair
Campbell.
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Blair was aware that the war would be illegal in the absence of
an explicit UN resolution, as his legal advisor attorney general
Lord Goldsmith had determined, but he went ahead regardless even as
millions of anti-war protestors thronged London’s streets. He didn’t
hesitate to sign-off on an intelligence dossier for public consumption
falsely claiming that Iraq could deploy WMD against British interests
within 45 minutes of receiving the order to do so — and another
containing tracts from a student’s thesis published on the internet,
typos and all.
Credible insiders who dared to challenge such nonsense such as weapons
expert Dr David Kelly, who challenged the 45-minute claim, Ambassador
Joseph Wilson, who refuted Bush’s allegation that Iraq had sought to
purchase uranium from Niger, and British translator Katherine Gunn
who disclosed that the US was spying on UN Security Council members,
were discredited.
Kelly was found dead in suspicious circumstances; Wilson’s wife Valerie
Plame was exposed as a CIA agent by a US government media lackey. Gunn
was arrested for breaching the Official Secrets Act and sacked.
One of the most respected figures in America Colin Powell signed
the death of his own career when he spouted trumped up allegations
against Iraq in the UN, a presentation he was to bitterly regret,
calling it a painful blot on his record.
World’s greatest con
In short, the war was one of the world’s greatest cons. It had nothing
to do with Iraq’s WMD or the removal of a dictator; it was part of a
greater neoconservative plan to ensure America’s global domination
as General Wesley Clark confirmed in his book Winning Modern Wars:
Iraq, Terrorism and the American Empire.
“As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the
senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still
on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This
was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said,
and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq,
then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.”
Up to a million Iraqis lost their lives as a result of the war
and subsequent invasion and occupation; according to the respected
journal The Lancet, over 600,000 had been killed as of July 2006,
not to mention thousands of US and coalition military personnel.
Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz announced that
the war impacted the US economy to the tune of $3 trillion (Dh11.1
trillion). And for what! The only beneficiaries of this willful
blunder chiefly perpetrated by Bush and Blair have been Iran that
holds sway over the Shiite-dominated Nouri Al Maliki government and
various terror organisations that have used western crimes against
Iraq as a recruitment call. Today, Iraq is poised on the brink of
all out civil war.
The Conservative MP and Minister without Portfolio Kenneth Clarke
recently told the BBC that Iraq was “the most disastrous foreign
policy decision of my lifetime … worse than Suez”. You don’t need
Einstein’s IQ to realise that, but the Iraq Inquiry chaired by Sir
John Chilcot, and set up in 2009, has failed in its mission.
It’s been characterised by the British prime minister as “an
establishment stitch-up”.
Where’s the public anger? American newspapers are running stories
about the death of Bush’s pooch Barney and his penchant for painting
while a tanned Blair has been busy accepting a Polish Business Leaders’
Award and pontificating on David Cameron’s plan to hold a referendum
on Britain’s continued EU membership.
The deadly duo should be sharing a cell in The Hague awaiting trial
for war crimes, but as we see time and time again, victors’ justice
translates to no justice at all.
Linda S. Heard is a specialist writer onâ~@¨Middle East affairs. She
can be contacted at [email protected]