War
on Iraq Archives War
on Iraq [Home]
What Bush wants us to forget (Robert Fisk, The Independent 09 October 2002) In 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds – when he "used gas against his own people" in the words of Messrs Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al –President Bush senior provided him with $500m in US government subsidies to buy American farm products. We must forget that in the following year, after Saddam's genocide was complete, President Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1bn, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious "dual-use" material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons. . . . We must forget how President Bush junior promised to "stand by" Afghanistan before he began his bombings last year – and has left it now an economic shambles of drug barons, warlords, anarchy and fear. He boasted yesterday that the people of Afghanistan have been "liberated" – this after he has failed to catch bin Laden, failed to catch Mullah Omar, and while his troops are coming under daily attack. We must forget, as we listen to the need to reinsert arms inspectors, that the CIA covertly used UN weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq. . . . Indeed, oil is the one commodity – and one of the few things which George Bush junior knows something about, along with his ex-oil cronies Cheney and Rice and countless others in the administration – which is never mentioned. . . . there wasn't a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war. We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget.
posted by LoZo 5:14 PM
|