Do not fear the lack of knowledge, fear false knowledge. All evil in this world comes from false knowledge. Leo Tolstoy

New Idea for the Antiwar Party: Aid the Enemy

In the Iraq war so far, the U.S. military has deposed a dictator who had already used weapons of mass destruction and would have used them again. As we now know, Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaeda and was trying to acquire long-range missiles from North Korea and enriched uranium from Niger. Ann Coulter 11/25/2005

Truth, lies, and intelligence
By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist | November 25, 2005

YOU KNOW Dick Cheney is feeling the heat when he hides behind John McCain.

This week, the man lobbying to exempt the CIA from Senator McCain's antitorture amendment used the popular Arizona senator as a shield against renewed questions about the administration's characterization of prewar intelligence.

''The flaws in the intelligence are plain enough in hindsight, but any suggestion that prewar information was distorted, hyped, or fabricated by the leader of the nation is utterly false," Cheney said in a Monday speech. ''Senator McCain put it best: 'It is a lie to say that the president lied to the American people.' "

At a press availability later that day, US Senator John Kerry shied away from the term lie. ''I've never used that word," Kerry said. ''I've said they misled America. . . . They are still misleading America."

Certainly much that wouldn't necessarily fit the definition of a lie would undoubtedly fall into the category of a misleading, irresponsible, or reckless use of intelligence in pursuit of a predetermined conclusion. And of that, this administration is surely guilty.

The Massachusetts senator underscored this important point: The vice president was wrong in suggesting that Congress had access to the same intelligence as the administration.

''That is just plain flat not true," said Kerry, stepping through five instances where Congress hadn't been informed of intelligence agency doubts on key administration claims about Iraq.

Bush's now discredited assertion in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium from Niger -- an assertion a dubious CIA had previously warned the White House not to make -- is well known.

To revisit two others: Cheney himself claimed several times that lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service that spring in Prague. Cheney repeated that claim in a Sept. 8, 2002, appearance on ''Meet the Press," insisting it was credible, and again in January of 2004. We now know that the CIA raised doubts about such a meeting in both June of 2002 and January of 2003.

Several times in September of 2002, Bush, citing information from the British government, said Iraq could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes.

''They made that statement, and it was influential to us, without clearing it with the CIA, which mistrusted the source so much that they refused to include it in the [October 2002] national intelligence estimate," Kerry noted. ''Congress was not told that."

Certainly if Republicans believed the record would vindicate the administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee wouldn't have dragged its feet for so long on examining how administration figures used prewar intelligence. Only because of shrewd parliamentary maneuvering by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has the committee's dilatory Republican chairman finally been forced to make that a priority.

To date, some of the best work on the use of prewar intelligence has been done by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan think tank. Its painstaking study, from January 2004, compared what the various intelligence agencies were estimating about Iraq in the runup to the war to what administration officials were saying.

The authors arrived at this conclusion: ''Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon programs and ballistic missile programs."

In his Monday speech, Cheney labeled ''dishonest and reprehensible" the suggestion ''that the president of the United States or any member of his administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence."

But in a finding that speaks to that very point, the Carnegie Endowment report offered a detailed examination of the way the administration officials distorted intelligence by ''the wholesale dropping of caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments" from their public statements.

In an interview this week, Joseph Cirincione, the endowment's director for nonproliferation and the lead author of that important study, made the same essential point that Kerry did on Monday.

''We don't use the word 'lie' because it is hard to prove intent or the knowledge of the individual at the time, but it is clear that senior administration officials systematically misled the Congress and the American public about the nature and the immediacy of the threat," he said.

No matter how many speeches Cheney and Bush give, no matter how hard they deflect or whom they try to blame or hide behind, that's a truth they can't escape.

The last thing we need in the increasingly bitter Iraq debate is a gutless, draft-dodging coward like Dick Cheney criticizing those who did serve their country.

The Vice President, who used multiple deferments to avoid serving his country during the Vietnam conflict, jumped into the fray big time last week and again on Monday with an acrid broadside against those who properly question the President’s motives for dragging the country into the bloody dead-end called Iraq.

“This is revisionism of the most corrupt and shameless variety,” Cheney said yesterday. “It has no place anywhere in American politics.”

Sorry, Dickie boy, but it is you and your cronies at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who have “no place anywhere in American politics.” It is hypocrites like you--you shameless, cowardly son-of-a-bitch--who should be led from the White House in chains and locked away in some hellhole to rot for eternity.

American politics is cursed with chicken-hawk politicians who do everything in their power to avoid serving their country and then vote to send other Americans to fight and die for their questionable wars. Bill Clinton used falsified documents to secure and keep his student deferments in place. Congress is littered with false patriots, Republican and Democrat alike, who avoided military service. And the biggest warmonger of them all, George W. Bush, needed daddy’s connections to ride out the war at home in the safety of the Texas Air National Guard and couldn’t even complete that service.

But Cheney’s hypocrisy goes even further because his tirade on Monday was aimed primarily at Congressman John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who did serve his country, spending 37 years in the Marines before retiring as a colonel from the reserves and earning a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts in Vietnam.

Murtha, one of the most hawkish Democrats in Congress, has – like so many other Americans – realized he was had by the many deceptions of the Bush administration leading up to the invasion of Iraq and has called for immediate withdrawal of our troops from the debacle that has cost more than 2,000 Americans, and countless Iraqi civilians, their lives.

Murtha calls the Iraq war “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. The future of our country is at risk. We can not continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.”

Strong words from someone who voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq but words that come from someone who understands war a hell of a lot better than the cowards in the White House: Strong words from someone who has been there and faced death for his country – something that a draft dodger like Dick Cheney can never, ever understand.

It’s bad enough when Bush uses Veterans Day, a holiday where we are supposed to honor those who serve our country, to spread his Iraq invasion propaganda and criticize those who dare question his failed policies. As Americans we have the freedom to agree or disagree with war but it is our duty to serve her when she calls. Draft dodgers are the worst kind of traitors to our country. They avoided the call and are nothing but despicable.

Dick Cheney is a coward and a liar who represents an administration run by crooks and frauds. When I see someone like that criticizing someone who served their country in war, someone twice wounded on the field of battle, I consider the source.

And, in this case, the source is nothing more than white, lying, draft-dodging trash. To use one of your own favorite phrases, Mr. Vice President, we suggest you just "fuck off."

© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7679.shtml

Monday, 21 November 2005, 18:00:00 GMT: Watching Dick (6 Military Deferment) Cheney on C-SPAN..

Commander-in-Chief, Bush is solely responsible for taking the United States into an ILLEGAL WAR in Iraq and people are dying over "Nation Building"; something Mr. Bush claimed he was against in pursuit of his Supreme Court appointment as president.

Deferment Dick, due to his chickenhawk past, has no credibility and should not cast blame. Did you think we forgot your old company Halliburton has been stealing from the United States tax payer?

Shortly after Desert Storm, the Associated Press reported Cheney's desire to broaden the United States' military role in the region to hedge future threats to gulf oil resources. Cheney is CEO of Dallas-based Halliburton Co., the biggest oil-services company in the world. Because of the instability in the Persian Gulf, Cheney and his fellow oilmen have zeroed in on the world's other major source of oil--the Caspian Sea. Its rich oil and gas resources are estimated at $4 trillion by U.S. News and World Report.
http://www.flyingsnail.com/Dahbud/dahgasprices.html

Cheney's Black Gold: Oil Interests May Drive US Foreign Policy
http://www.bushwatch.com/oil.htm

THE WAR IN IRAQ WAS PRE PLANNED BY PEOPLE WHO ARE TRYING TO "PLUNGE US INTO THE DARKNESS OF ANNIHILATION"

Here are the Neocons who sent a letter to President Clinton dated January 26, 1998:

Elliott Abrams

Elliott Abrams -- Pleaded guilty October 7, 1991, to two misdemeanor charges of withholding information from Congress about secret government efforts to support the Nicaraguan contra rebels during a ban on such aid. U.S. District Chief Judge Aubrey E. Robinson, Jr., sentenced Abrams November 15, 1991, to two years probation and 100 hours community service. Abrams was pardoned December 24, 1992.
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/summpros.htm

Richard L. Armitage

A conspicuous exception was former deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage, whose office would only say, "We're not commenting." He was one of a handful of top officials who had access to the information. He is an old source and friend of Woodward's, and he fits Novak's description of his source as "not a partisan gunslinger." Woodward has indicated that he knows the identity of Novak's source, which further suggests his source and Novak's were one and the same.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10117465/site/newsweek/

William J. Bennett

Bill Bennett Tells 1.25 Million Listeners
"Abort Every Black Baby to Stop Crime"

109TH CONGRESS - H. RES. 473 - 1ST SESSION

Condemning the racist remarks of William Bennett.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES - SEPTEMBER 29, 2005
Mr. RUSH submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

RESOLUTION
Condemning the racist remarks of William Bennett.

Whereas William J. Bennett hosts a radio program, ``Morning in America'', which airs on approximately 115 radio stations with an estimated weekly audience of 1.25 mil lion listeners;

Whereas on September 28th, 2005, Mr. Bennett said on his radio program, ``But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.''; and

Whereas Mr. Bennett's remarks are outrageous and blatantly racist: Now, therefore, be it
1 Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
2
1 (1) condemns the comments made by William
2 J. Bennett on his radio program, ``Morning in
3 America'', as outrageous racism of the most bigoted
4 and ignorant kind; and
5 (2) condemns all manifestations and expres-
6 sions of racism and ethnic intolerance.
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr109-473

Jeffrey Bergner

Despite claims to the contrary, Iran is not seeking a peaceful nuclear energy program. Iran has no need of such a program, and its actions to date are not consistent with that end. Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability, and there is nothing the European trio can offer it to compensate for the perceived security benefits nuclear weapons would bring.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/301fkrie.asp

John Bolton

http://www.google.com/

Paula Dobriansky

Then there are the sisters Dobriansky. Larisa Dobriansky, currently the deputy assistant secretary for national energy policy at the Department of Energy—in which capacity she’s charged with managing the department’s Office of Climate Change Policy—was previously a lobbyist with the firm Akin Gump, where she worked on climate change for ExxonMobil. Her sister, Paula Dobriansky, currently serves as undersecretary for global affairs in the State Department. In that role, Paula Dobriansky recently headed the U.S. delegation to a United Nations meeting on the Kyoto Protocol in Buenos Aires, where she charged that “science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”

Indeed, the rhetoric of scientific uncertainty has been Paula Dobriansky’s stock-in-trade. At a November 2003 panel sponsored by the AEI, she declared, “the extent to which the man-made portion of greenhouse gases is causing temperatures to rise is still unknown, as are the long-term effects of this trend. Predicting what will happen 50 or 100 years in the future is difficult.”

Given Paula Dobriansky’s approach to climate change, it will come as little surprise that memos uncovered by Greenpeace show that in 2001, within months of being confirmed by the Senate, Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil lobbyist Randy Randol and the Global Climate Coalition. For her meeting with the latter group, one of Dobriansky’s prepared talking points was “POTUS [President Bush in Secret Service parlance] rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you.” The documents also show that Dobriansky met with ExxonMobil executives to discuss climate policy just days after September 11, 2001. A State Department official confirmed that these meetings took place, but adds that Dobriansky “meets with pro-Kyoto groups as well.”
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html

Francis Fukuyama

Thus, in the view of the early Bush administration, the planet would come to be dominated more and more by the "universal homogenous state," a mixture of "liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic." The arid banality of that definition is matched by Fukuyama's dazzled tribute to "the spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infintely diverse consumer culture." Fukuyama, it turns out, is a resident of the privileged enclave for imperial functionaries that is northeast Virginia, and so has little understanding of the scope of US domestic poverty and immiseration: "This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality have less to do with the underlying legal and social strcutures of our society, which remain fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States, for example, is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the 'legacy of slavery and racism' which persisted long after the formal abolition fo slavery." For Fukuyama, writing at a moment when American class divisions were more pronounced that at any time in human memory, "the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisoned by Marx." As a purveyor of official doctrine for the Bush regime, Fukuyama is bound to ignore twenty years of increasing poverty and declining standards of living for all Americans which has caused an even greater retrogression for the black population; there is no way that this can be chalked up to the heritage of slavery.
http://tarpley.net/bush23.htm

Robert Kagan

Think about what the world will look like the day after the bombing ends. Mr. Hussein will still be in power -- if five weeks of heavy bombing in 1991 failed to knock him out, five days of bombing won't either. Can the air attacks insure that he will never be able to use weapons of mass destruction again? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Even our smart bombs cannot reliably hit and destroy every weapons and storage site in Iraq, for the simple reason that we do not know where all the sites are. After the bombing stops, Mr. Hussein will still be able to manufacture weapons of mass destruction. Pentagon officials admit this. [Bombing Iraq Isn't Enough, William Kristol & Robert Kagan, The New York Times, January 30, 1998
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraq-013098.htm

Zalmay Khalilzad

Washington's Neocon in Baghdad? Zalmay Khalilzad Nominated as U.S. Ambassador
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/07/1343234

William Kristol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kristol

Richard Perle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perle

Peter W. Rodman

FBI agents Sunday and Monday questioned senior officials in the Department of Defense as part of an investigation into allegations that a Pentagon analyst passed on classified documents to an Israeli lobbying group, which may have then passed them on to the government of Israel. The documents in question were papers on the US's stance towards Iran.

The Washington Post reports that Douglas Feith, undersecretary for policy for Defense, and Peter Rodman, assistant secretary for international security affairs, are among those whom the FBI interviewed about the contacts between Lawrence Franklin, a lower-level Pentagon analyst, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and an Israeli diplomat. The Post notes that Mr. Franklin, a Catholic, first came to the attention of the FBI more than a year ago when he appeared at a lunch between an AIPAC official and an Israeli diplomat. The FBI's counterintelligence unit was monitoring the meeting as part of another investigation that it has refused to comment on, although one FBI official said it is part of a broader investigation. [Ed. Note: "Part of a broader investigation," hummm... wonder what that is about.]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0831/dailyUpdate.html

Donald Rumsfeld

William Schneider, Jr.

William Schneider on CNN’s “American Morning” program today highlighted a talk given by former CIA Director James Woolsey’s, about “World War IV” (He counts the Cold War as number III). He says it will be between most of the Middle East and the so-called Western World. Speaking of the undesirable regimes in that area, he said (I paraphrase), “All these countries are going to feel threatened about our formula of democracy creeping in to their area. I say, ‘Good. We want them to feel threatened.’” Schneider then placed Woolsey as being closely allied with Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and others, and made the connection that many others have, that 9-11 was seized as an opportunity to carry out their pre-existing goals. He challenged Bush’s public assertion that this was not a clash of civilizations, pointing to the enormous global opposition to the U.S. and Britain’s Western agression.
http://pnac.info/index.php/2003/hints-of-pnac-on-cnn-world-war-iv/

Vin Weber

THE WELLSTONE MEMORIAL - Republicans, no longer able to say anything bad about the late Paul Wellstone, were reduced to criticizing his mass memorial service, in which thousands of people cheered Walter Mondale, booed Trent Lott, and were exhorted by one of the speakers to go out there and win the election.

Question 4 (Listen with Real Audio)
CARL: "What a complete, total, absolute sham."

That's former Republican House member Vin Weber giving the GOP take on a service that turned into a political rally. Republicans are so angry about this televised event that they're asking for equal air time to counter the free publicity that it gave to Democrats. What service?
http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/archquiz/2002/021102.html

Paul Wolfowitz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz

R. James Woolsey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._James_Woolsey

Robert B. Zoellick

Trade Hypocrisy: The Problem with Robert Zoellick
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/1220hypocrisy.htm

Here is the letter:

January 26, 1998

The Honorable William J. Clinton
President of the United States
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months. As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam’s secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons.

Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.

Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.

We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.

We urge you to act decisively. If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Sincerely, [Ed. Note: The signatures are the names in blue above]
http://www.flyingsnail.com/Dahbud/pnac26jan1998letter.htm

"If a president is willing to lie about the most basic governmental and political facts, civic debate becomes impossible, and the public becomes incapable of informed judgment. Because of the great weight that any president's words have with the public, the president of the United States must not be a liar." - Tony (Hypocritter) Blankley

What Goes Around, Comes Around
1992

Mr. Speaker, last week I showed that this administration, President Bush's administration, deliberately and not inadvertently helped to arm Iraq by allowing United States technology to be shipped to the Iraqi military and to the Iraqi weapons factories. Throughout the course of the Bush administration, United States and foreign firms were granted export licenses to ship United States technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities, despite ample evidence showing that these factories were producing weapons.

I also showed how the President misled the Congress and the public about the role United States firms played in arming Iraq.

Today I will show that the highest levels of the Bush administration, including the President himself, had specific knowledge of Iraq's military industrialization plans, and despite that knowledge, the President mandated the policy of coddling Saddam Hussein as spelled out in National Security Directive 26 (NSD-26) issued in October 1989. This policy was not changed until after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, by which time the Bush administration had sent Saddam Hussein billions of dollars in United States financial assistance, technology and useful military intelligence information.

I will also show how the President's policy of appeasing Saddam Hussein was at odds with those in the administration who saw Iraq as a major proliferation threat. This will help set the stage for next week's report which will discuss Iraq's clandestine technology procurement network and the Italian bank agency in Atlanta's role in funding that network.

Henry B. Gonzalez, (TX-20) - (House of Representatives - July 27, 1992)
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920727g.htm

The Iran-Contra Scandal in Perspective
http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/icessayx.htm

History 101.2 - Overcoming Short Attention Span
WHY IRAQ INVADED KUWAIT

On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and captured Kuwait.  Although this invasion and the accompanying human rights violations are inexcusable, it is helpful in understanding the Gulf War to know why Iraq invaded.

When Britain drew the national borders in the Persian Gulf in 1922, they deliberately deprived Iraq of a seaport in the Gulf in the hope that Iraq could never threaten British dominance in the Gulf.  Iraq has never recognized the British borders.

In 1975, the Kurdish rebellion in Iraq, with $16 million in U.S.-provided arms and supplies, forced Iraq to capitulate the Shaat al Arab waterway, Iraq's only access to its upriver port of Basra, to Iran. In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran in hopes of regaining control of the estuary, thus starting the eight-year war.

More recently, Iraq accused Kuwait of waging "economic war" with Iraq. Kuwait has nearly depleted the huge Rumailah oil field, 90% of which lies in Iraq, and 10% of which lies in a disputed border region which Kuwait invaded during the Iraq-Iran war.

Furthermore, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia gave Iraq massive financial assistance in the war against Iran, since they had much to lose if Iraq failed to block the spread of Islamic fundamentalism.  After the war, Kuwait's assistance became "loans," for which they demanded repayment.

Meanwhile, Kuwait (under U.S. pressure) continued oil production far beyond the limits established by OPEC, thus lowering the price of oil.  For Iraq, which relies on oil for 95% of its income, this made it very difficult to rebuild a near-bankrupt country with huge debts after years of war.  It is interesting to note that many Kuwaitis have investments in the U.S. - the Emir of Kuwait alone is rumored to have invested perhaps a quarter of a trillion dollars, far greater than his oil assets - and these investments tend to profit most when the price of oil is low.

Iraq has also accused Kuwait of using its enormous foreign reserves to manipulate and weaken Iraqi currency.  Iraq invaded Kuwait in response to these deliberate attempts by Kuwait to undermine the Iraqi economy.  Frighteningly, these acts by Kuwait were planned by the U.S., as demonstrated by a Kuwaiti memo describing a meeting between Brigadier Ahmad Al Fahd, head of Kuwaiti security, and CIA director William Webster in November of 1989:  "We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country's government to delineate our common border.  The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure, saying that broad cooperation should be initiated between us...."

HOW THE U.S. ENCOURAGED THE INVASION

In April, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, John Kelly, testified before Congress that the U.S. had no commitment to defend Kuwait.  On July 25, with Iraqi troops massed on the Kuwait border, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Hussein.  To the embarassment of the U.S., Iraq provided minutes of the meeting to the Washington Post, which have not been disputed by the State Department.

The Ambassador told Hussein that Secretary of State James Baker had instructed her to emphasize that the U.S. has "no opinion" on Iraqi-Kuwait border disputes.  She then asked him, in light of Iraqi troop movements, what his intentions were with respect to Kuwait.  Hussein replied that Kuwait's actions amounted to "an economic war" and "military action against us."  He said he hoped for a peaceful solution, but if not, he said, "it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death."  The Ambassador's response to this clear warning was, "I have a directive from the President personally that I should work to expand and deepen relations with Iraq."  She also apologized for the condemnation of Hussein's regime as a dictatorship by a journalist of the U.S. Information Agency.  Glaspie later made another remark: "What we don't have an opinion on are inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait...and James Baker has directed our official spokesman to reiterate this stand."

On the same day, John Kelly killed a Voice of America broadcast that would have warned Iraq that the U.S. was "strongly committed" to the defense of its friends in the Gulf.  During the following week, until the invasion, the Bush administration forbade any warning to Hussein against invading, or any warning to foreigners in Iraq.  According to Senator David Boren, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA predicted the invasion four days in advance. Two days before the invasion, John Kelly again testified before Congress that the U.S. had no commitment to defend Kuwait.  The U.S. made no attempt to put together international resistance to an invasion.

Ambassador Glaspie later remarked to the New York Times, "I didn't think - and nobody else did - that the Iraqis were going to take ALL of Kuwait."

IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF TO DEFEND FREEDOM?

When George Bush condemns Hussein for "naked aggression," he must think that the world has no memory of U.S. history.  Just a few weeks before the start of the war, while the attention of the press was averted, the U.S. took over sovereignty of Palau, a tiny country in the Pacific.  After many failed efforts by the U.S. to make Palau remove the anti-nuclear clause from its constitution, they simply moved in.  U.S. timing and hypocrisy were both perfect.

When Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, our response was to support Hussein with arms.  The U.N. remained strangely silent about Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran.

The U.S. has a bad habit of supporting cruel dictators when it is congruent with U.S. economic interests.  The U.S. occasionally helps an oppressive dictatorship overcome a popular democratic movement (Nicaragua and Chile are good recent examples,) because dictatorships are easier to control.  A U.S. supported dictator will receive aid while he cooperates, and will be replaced when he gets out of hand.  Witness Noriega in Panama, or Marcos in the Philippines. Saddam Hussein is just another chapter in a novel.

In 1974, the island of Cyprus was invaded by Turkey with the help of U.S. tax dollars.  The atrocities committed by Turkish soldiers resemble those committed by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait, and 2000 people were killed.  Forty percent of the island is still under Turkish domination.  Although the U.N. condemned the invasion, no action was taken.  Israel invaded Lebanon, killed 20,000 people, and still occupies southern Lebanon.  The U.N. condemned the invasion in numerous resolutions, but no action was taken.  In spite of overwhelming international support for the U.N. resolutions against Israel's occupation of the Palestinian and Arab territories, no action has been taken.  Every U.N. response to Indonesia's rape of East Timor was blocked by the U.S., although 200,000 people were slaughtered. The U.S. still gives Indonesia aid.  The list goes on and on.  U.S. justice is very selective.

History shows us that ethics have no weight in U.S. foreign policy, except as a line to convince U.S. citizens that a war is just.  The real motives of U.S. foreign policy are always economic.  To quote Dr. Joanna Santa Barbara, "This is how superpowers and regional powers operate, not in sporadic spasms of moral aberration, but all the time."

Historically, an almost infallible method of finding out which of two almost equally vile groups is the worst is to look for which one the U.S. government is supporting.  If this is not the case in the Gulf (and this is not clear,) then it is purely by chance.  Certainly, the governments of both Iraq and Kuwait are famous for their human rights abuses in their own countries.  Kuwait is a monarchy in which women are not accorded reasonable human rights, slavery still exists, and 70% of the residents are foreign labor who are poorly treated and are not given the opportunity to become citizens.

Of course, even if the Kuwaiti government were more oppressive than the Iraqi government, this would not justify Iraq's invasion and human rights abuses.  It is the residents of Kuwait who suffer most, and they are not usually to blame for their government's behavior.  (In any argument, it is important to separate a country's people from its government - witness George Bush' blindness when he refers to the carpetbombing of tens of thousands of relatively innocent Iraqi conscripts as "kicking Saddam's ass.")

Bush' claims that he is defending freedom (by reinstating a monarchy) is not taken seriously by any of the peoples of the Gulf.  For instance, Noha Ismail of the Arab Women's Council said in In Pittsburgh, "We know that America is not there out of love for the Kuwaitis and Saudis.  In fact, America's contempt for the Arab world is very evident.  We're not stupid; we may be Third World, but we're not stupid."

IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF TO DEFEND CHEAP OIL?

No.  The financial cost of the war is far, far greater than the cost of expensive oil.

In fact, expensive oil is not entirely bad.  High oil prices often accrue to U.S. firms.  Furthermore, the U.S. produces half the oil it consumes, and the collapse of oil prices left the U.S. oil states - Louisiana, Arizona, Alaska, and Texas - in financial trouble.  Both President Bush and Secretary of State Baker are oil men.  They like high oil prices.

Also, other industrialized economies like Europe and Japan are more dependent on foreign oil than the U.S., so high oil prices actually help the U.S. against its major competitors.

Bush is probably quite happy that most objectors to the war think the issue is cheap oil, because his real motives remain obscure.

IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF TO PREVENT ANOTHER HITLER?

Iraq is a country which just failed to win a long, depleting war with Iran. It is not comparable to WWII Germany.  Iraq has 17 million people, not 70 million.  Iraq is economically broke and in debt, not economically strong as Germany was Iraq only has power because the U.S. financed it over the past ten years.

In any case, if the U.S. is serious about opposing Hitlerite territorialism, it should start with itself.

WHY IS THE U.S. IN THE GULF?

In part, the war is about control of oil.  Not necessarily cheap oil, mind you.  However, one of the few areas of worldwide economic control still maintained by the U.S. is oil.  Having the price of oil controlled by the governments of countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is as good as having it controlled from Wall Street.

The President's son, George Bush Jr., is director and major stockholder of Harken Energy Corporation of Dallas, which holds huge drilling rights in the Persian Gulf country of Bahrain, a small island nation just miles from where U.S. troops are stationed in Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, this isn't the full explanation.  After all, the U.S. already controlled Arab oil prices; why did they encourage Iraq to invade Kuwait?

Simply put, George Bush wanted a war from the beginning.  His attitude and behavior bear this out. He has refused to negotiate; he moved in a huge number of troops very quickly; he did not give economic sanctions a chance; and he expressed great concern that others might try to "defuse the crisis."  The U.S. went to a great deal of trouble to twist the U.N.'s arm enough to put forth a vaguely worded resolution which might conceivably authorize force in the Gulf. The objectives are further militarization of the U.S. economy, and prevention of the conversion of the economy to peaceful, human-oriented purposes.

Currently, 26% of the national budget is for defense; but if all defense related expenses are added, experts estimate the sum is between one-half and two-thirds of the budget.  This is a huge amount of money, and the military and defense-related industries are intent on keeping it.  Thus, the military went out of its way to cause this war.  The idea is to use enormous military expenditures to ease U.S. economic slumps, while reducing civilian and social programs as much as possible.  This helps draw in huge amounts of money from other nations, also.

In 1990, the global arms trade was $50 billion.  About $30 billion of this was provided by the U.S. and Soviet Union. More recently - less than six weeks after the invasion - the Pentagon proposed the largest sale of arms ever:  $21 billion of arms to Saudi Arabia.  This deal is affectionately known as the "Defense Industry Relief Act of 1990."

If one needs a sign that the U.S. is losing its superpower status, consider that the U.S., which traditionally has paid other countries to fight its wars, has changed roles and is now begging for payment.  On January 25, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) convened a press conference to publicly pressure U.S. allies to increase their donations, saying that the American people would judge them severely if they did not.  At the time of this writing, Kuwait has donated $7 billion to the war effort, and pledged an additional $13.5 billion; Saudi Arabia has donated $1.6 billion plus $1.2 billion a month in fuel and lubricants; Japan has donated $2.2 billion and pledged an additional $9 billion; Germany has donated $3.5 billion and pledged an additional $5.5 billion.  Many other countries have given smaller amounts.

Most of this money goes into the U.S. economy, and goes into the defense industry.

Operation Desert Shield cost an estimated $30 billion, and Desert Storm is costing about half a billion per day.  This money is in addition to the annual defense budget.  The administration is against a war tax, so whatever isn't paid for by other countries will likely be added to the deficit.

Readers who think it ludicrously cynical that the U.S. would invite a war solely for this purpose need only look as far as the Vietnam War, where the Johnson administration invented an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on an American destroyer as a justification to start a war.  That war, like the Gulf War, was characterized by a total unwillingness on the part of the U.S. to enter any negotiations, except the issuing of ultimatums.

The Korean War, where U.S. soldiers died defending one of the world's most barbaric police states against "naked aggression," gives us even more compelling evidence.  National Security Council document NSC-68, which was adopted in 1950 and accidentally released to the public in 1975, proposed to bolster the declining U.S. post-WWII economy by military expansion.  Unable to convince Congress to make massive military allocations, President Truman commanded U.S. and South Korean forces to invade and capture North Korea.  (The U.N. resolution under which U.S. forces were fighting called only for "repelling" aggression from the North.)  As expected, China entered the war to defend North Korea.  Truman declared a state of national emergency and claimed (falsely) that the danger was created by the Soviet Union.  Congress more than tripled the defense budget, and the resulting war economy has continued to this day (justified by the spectre of "International Communism.")

The problem with driving the U.S. economy this way is that it only benefits those who profit directly. Militarization of the economy means an end to many social programs, and a huge expansion of the third world that already exists right here in the U.S.  Of the industrialized nations, the U.S. has one of the worst rates of homelessness, poverty, illiteracy, and infant mortality.  These problems are the natural results of a war economy, and are much less prominent in countries like Japan and Germany, which have been demilitarized since WWII, and enjoy stronger economies than the U.S. as a result.

Of course, the president has other motives, like recovering from the bad press created by the Savings and Loan scandals before the next election.  War may be just the ticket.  After a three-day meeting of the Republican National Committee, Clarke Reed of Mississippi said, "Politically, it's gangbusters. The President has more support than I've ever seen."  In addition, the war will likely enable the U.S. to establish a permanent military presence in the Gulf.

WHERE DID IRAQ GET ALL THAT MILITARY POWER?

From us, of course.  The allies, most prominently the U.S., have given Iraq huge amounts of aid and arms.  Right now, our boys are being killed by the arms we manufactured with our factories and bought for Iraq with our tax dollars.

The U.S. gave extensive aid and arms to Iraq throughout the Iraq-Iran war, and was providing agricultural credits right up to the day of the invasion of Kuwait.  Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee, charged that one Atlanta-based bank along extended $3 billion in credit to Iraq.  "There is no question but those $3 billion are actually financing the invasion of Kuwait," he added.  Iraq has also received or purchased weapons and equipment from Germany, the U.K., France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and many others.

CAN HUSSEIN BE NEGOTIATED WITH?

Yes, but Bush can't.  Iraq, and other Arab nations, have repeatedly attempted to initiate negotiations since the invasion. These offers have been repeatedly dismissed without discussion by Bush, and were rarely reported by the U.S. press. All evidence seems to suggest that Bush has been stubbornly intent on war from the beginning.  After the release of the hostages in Iraq, Bush chillingly remarked that Hussein's concession removed one more obstacle from the U.S. course of action.

Iraq wants their share of the Rumailah oil fields, and two islands giving it a port on the Gulf.  Says George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley, "President Bush has spoken of this as 'rewarding aggression,' using the Third-World-Countries-As-Children metaphor, where the great powers are grown-ups who have the obligation to reward or punish children so as to make them behave properly.  Instead of seeing Iraq as a sovereign nation that has taken military action for economic purposes, the President treats Iraq as if it were a child gone bad."

James Baker has stated that negotiations will take place only after Iraq physically withdraws from Kuwait.  This is not negotiation; this is an ultimatum.  This "formula for humiliation" of Hussein is another sign of Bush' desire for war.  In fact, before Bush attacked, Barbara Ehrenreich stated that she had found out that the Pentagon's "nightmare scenario" was that Saddam would back down and that war would be averted.

As recently as Jan. 28, the U.S. and U.K. flatly opposed, for the third time, requests by groups of Gulf countries to have peace discussed in the U.N. Security Council.

WHAT SHOULD WE HAVE DONE?

The consensus among the Gulf countries is that the invasion is an Arab dispute which would have been solved by the Arab countries without any need for U.S. involvement.  Contrary to the administration line, economic sanctions would likely have worked.  In fact, Bush was deathly afraid that they would. If sanctions had worked, they would have delegitimized militarism.  This is why it is the Pentagon's "nightmare scenario."  Every member of the U.S. military elite has a budget to defend, and has to justify his own existence.  (This is why foreign policy decisions should never be made by members of the military.)

We should take a lesson from history, namely Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, to which the newly formed League of Nations responded pathetically. Mussolini later confessed that, had the League made good on its threats to impose economic sanctions, he would have been forced to withdraw.

Some will argue that, even if the U.S. is liberating Kuwait for the wrong reasons, it is still the right thing to do.  My response is that, if the U.S. were to liberate every unfair conquest, it would go broke long before it succeeded, even if it restricted itself to those territories more deserving of liberation that Kuwait.

One cannot simply look at Iraq and Kuwait; one must look at the entire world. The U.S. image as global policeman is impractical because there are too many criminal states and too little money to attack them all.  Other methods, such as sanctions, are just as effective, far cheaper, and kill far fewer people.

Of course, the other thing we should have done is to demilitarize the economy and create a peace dividend.  U.S. tax dollars should be spent on U.S. citizens, not on other nations' wars.  This is the real point which peace activists should be making.  If the U.S. defense budget were used purely for defense, not offense, and if it were reduced to 10% of what it is now (still far more than the U.S. actually needs to defend itself,) and if we slowly switched from a military to a commercial economy, the amount of money available for social purposes would effectively double.  University education could be free, medical and day care would be available to everyone, housing and jobs would be plentiful, poverty and the accompanying violence would diminish, and we could again compete economically with Japan and Europe. Unfortunately, the military doesn't want to lose their affluence, and the military is calling all the shots.

THE MEDIA

"Naturally the common people don't want war...but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along....  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 danger." - Hermann Goering, 1936

Pentagon censorship of reporting from the Gulf has kept the war bloodless and antiseptic.  Reporters can only travel in pools, accompanied at all times by a military escort, and all battlefield dispatches and photographs must pass a security review.  This allows the Pentagon to break important information first, or to censor information entirely.  It also allows them to control the mood of the articles.

Jane Kirtley of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press told of an instance where "a military censor wanted to change the word 'giddy' to 'proud' in a story describing some pilots.  That has nothing to do with national security. That's spin control."  Similarly, a rule against televising soldiers in pain or disfigurement has nothing to do with security.  This rule is to prevent the press from undermining popular support for the war.

Nevertheless, in a country where 90% of newspapers are Republican-owned, it is not surprising that press self-censorship is as strong as military censorship.  NBC is owned by General Electric (a major defense contractor,) CBS is partly owned by Westinghouse (a major defense contractor,) and ABC is owned by Capital Cities, which has interlocking directorships with Texaco, ITT, and United Technologies.  Fred Gustafson of In Pittsburgh asks us why "so much of the visual coverage of the Gulf war looks like a series of advertisements for military hardware."  It is.

It is only natural that these companies do not want their broadcasts to show too much coverage of war objectors.  As a result, few U.S. citizens are aware of how large the anti-war movement is.  The news consists of lots of quotes from government officials, and very little opinion from those opposed. Television debates show conservatives arguing with ultra-conservatives.  If some of the facts in this article come as a surprise to you, it's because the mainstream media chose not to tell you.

DEAD PEOPLE

German General Manfred Opel claimed around January 23 that there were already 300,000 dead in Iraq.  This information is dubious and unconfirmable, but U.S. carpetbombing of Iraqi troops has probably brought the death count into the tens of thousands.  The true numbers are unpredictable, because the Pentagon will not release estimates. However, a British officer stated that the bombs dropped on Iraq in the first three weeks of war exceeded the total tonnage dropped by the allies during World War II.

The tendency to think of Iraq as a single entity - as when the President says "We have to get Saddam out of Kuwait" - ignores the reality that thousands of troops, most of whom are conscripts, and likely a greater number of citizens, will die. The fact that they are forced to take orders from a government which we currently consider to be the enemy does not make their lives any less valuable than the lives of U.S. troops.

The apparent success of the air war is illusory.  Since Iraq never had a significant air force or centralized communication system, the U.S. has accomplished little.  We can learn a lesson from the Korean war, which began similarly, with a complete U.S. air victory.  Yet when the ground war began, and the U.S. had complete domination of the air, the military was consistently surprised by how little effect their bombing had in biasing the ground war.

The U.S. ground troops will not have a sure victory.  The Iraqi troops' strength is in their ground forces, artillery, and engineering, which were accumulated and honed through the long war with Iran. They may lose, but they will likely kill tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.  furthermore, ex-CIA agent Philip Agee claims that "The Korean crisis was deliberately prolonged in order to establish military expenditures as the motor of the U.S. economy...we will probably see this with the Gulf."  U.S. expectations of a short war sound like those which accompanied the outset of the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

Of course, things will be far worse if other countries join Iraq.  Saddam Hussein has popular support of the people of Jordan, Pakistan, and various other Arab countries, though he is not supported by their respective governments.  If war spreads through the mideast, millions may die.

THE ENVIRONMENT

As of this writing, there have been three separate oil slicks in the Gulf. The first was caused by damage to oil facilities in the border town of Khafji, and is responsible for the TV pictures of dying cormorants washing up on Saudi beaches.  It also threatens a major Saudi desalinization plant.  U.S. and Saudi authorities have confirmed that U.S. shelling caused this damage.  The other two, and much larger, slicks were the deliberate work of Saddam Hussein. (Oddly enough, reports showing pictures of the dead birds only mention the Iraqi-caused slicks.)

The second spill is the largest in history, covering 350 square miles of the Gulf.  The environmental consequences of the spills will be terrible.  The exchange of water with the Indian Ocean, necessary to disperse the oil, is very slow. The oil will not disperse for years, and mud flats will be irreparably destroyed.  Much of the Gulf's marine life will disappear.

After the famous Exxon Valdez spill, which was small by comparison, Exxon hired over 11,000 workers to clean up the Alaskan shoreline, and even then the damage was extensive.  No such mobilization is considered feasible in the Gulf.

Nonetheless, this could soon seem relatively unimportant.  Dr. Abdullah Toukan, Secretary-General of the High Council of Science and Technology in Jordan demonstrated computer models of a "nuclear winter" scenario if Iraq were to set fire to up to 700 oil wells in Kuwait while retreating.  According to Environmental Engineer Dr. John Cox, "There are not more than four or five teams of firefighters in the world capable of putting out oil wells."  The fires could rage for years.

As a result of one burning well, "Black Rain" has already fallen on Iran. Dr. Toukan claims that the hydrocarbon cloud is deadlier than any of Hussein's biological or chemical weapons.  According to Dr. Matthew Meselson, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Modelling at Harvard, "If there was a temperature inversion and there was a big release, and if there was a slow wind driving that over a population center, then you would kill everything from insects on up that doesn't have a gas mask."

If enough wells were fired, Dr. Toukan claims that the resulting cloud will cover an area the size of the United States and circle the earth for months. Highly toxic acid rain could ruin crops and contaminate water worldwide. Dr. Carl Sagan, Dr. Paul Cruizen, Joe Farman, and Dr. Bernard Lown endorse Dr. Toukan's warning.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In January, a group of 14 international jurists decided that a U.N. Security Resolution authorizing force against Iraq was invalid because China, a permanent member, had abstained from voting.  The U.S. has also ignored the U.N.'s Military Staff Committee Article 46, which states that "plans for the application of armed force shall be made with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee." Furthermore, the U.S. has been accused of violating the Hague and Geneva Conventions.  Even when the war is won, the U.S. will have lost credibility as an international peacekeeper, and gained the long-term hatred of the Arab world.

Jonathan Shewchuk -"The Student Union" newspaper - Carnegie Mellon University

This article appeared in the February 14, 1991 issue of Carnegie Mellon University's alternative student paper, "The Student Union." This article summarizes a lot of important information from a large number of sources, and a useful education for those who haven't been able to follow the details of American foreign policy in the Gulf. Please feel free to reprint this article in student papers, leaflets, electronic media, or otherwise. I think that it is important to get this information out to as much of the public as possible, and I greatly appreciate all efforts to circulate it.

The Antichrist is variously understood as being a consummately evil system of government or leader.

The Antichrist will be a leader who deceives many people.

The Antichrist will divide the world and create war without end.

The Antichrist will declare that things which are evil to be good.

The Antichrist will refer to war as peace, death as a solution for justice, and serving the wealthy as a means of helping the poor.

Many nations will recognize that he is evil, but his own people will be inclined to believe his deceptions.