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Al Jazeera (English)
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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

An engineered crisis
(Brian Whitaker, The Guardian, January 27, 2003)
How has it come about? And why now? . . . In 1990 at least, the issue was clear: Iraq had invaded a sovereign state (Kuwait) and could not be allowed to get away with it. . . . Since then, Iraq has done little to cause offence, though there are many things that it might have done to redeem itself. . . . Overall, whatever military threat Iraq presents, it is no greater now than it was when UN weapons inspectors first started their work in the early 1990s and is almost certainly a great deal less. Essentially, the weapons at the centre of the current furore are the relatively small number of items that were still unaccounted for when the inspectors pulled out under pressure from Iraq in 1998. On the nuclear front, the best that the White House website can come up with is a one-line statement that Iraq's declaration to the UN last month "ignores efforts to procure uranium from abroad". . . . Until quite recently the prevailing view in Washington was that any danger from Iraq could be effectively contained - as, indeed, it has been for the last decade or so. . . . What this amounts to is an engineered crisis that is driven from Washington rather than Baghdad. It began with the election of George Bush and a noticeably harder line on Iraq almost from the moment he took office. Since then it has hardened further as the neo-conservative hawks have gained predominance . . . Those who say that oil lies at the root of it are right up to a point, but it is not simply a matter of grabbing Iraqi oil. The neo-conservatives see Iraqi oil as a political weapon which can be used to undermine Saudi Arabia's influence and thus promote their grand design for reshaping the entire Middle East. . . . "I don't see how this administration thinks it can build a policy for war, preventive war, that would be accepted by our allies and by American citizens on the basis of 'We've got the info; we can't tell you how we got it or where we got it; we've got it, trust us.' And isn't that a foolish and ultimately self-destructive way for this administration to proceed?" . Mr Wolfowitz answered: "I must say I sort of find it astonishing that the issue is whether you can trust the US government. The real issue is, can you trust Saddam Hussein?" . . . Certainly no one in their right mind would trust the Iraqi leader. But that does not mean they have to trust Mr Wolfowitz and the US government either.

posted by LoZo 12:20 PM