Flash! Just posted at the Guardian website, Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s fiercest hawk and largest mouth, only recently explained our decision to use weapons of mass destruction as the excuse for invading Iraq. In a Vanity Fair interview, he said, ” for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction.” Along with wmd comments by his boss Don Rumsfeld, this has caused a serious firestorm of criticism of Tony Blair in England.
In the Washington Post today, Howard Kurtz, their media columnist, reports,
“Tony Blair failed today to quiet the roar of criticism over his insistence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, with the opposition leader declaring that ‘nobody believes a word now that the prime minister is saying.’ More than 70 Labor members in the House of Commons have signed a petition demanding that Blair publish his evidence, with one, Malcolm Savidge, calling the issue ‘potentially more serious than Watergate.’ A key Commons committee, brushing aside Blair’s objections, approved an investigation late Tuesday.”
Now Wolfowitz has evidently added fuel to the flames by confirming the claim of antiwar critics that was most derided (or ignored) before the war — that it was the oil, stupid. If one were of a conspiratorial turn of mind, it might almost be possible to imagine that Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had turned their regime-change missiles on Tony Blair. (I won’t hold my breath waiting for this latest Wolfowitz quote to be posted on the websites of major American papers.) The Guardian piece reads in part:
“The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz – who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a “bureaucratic” excuse for war – has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is ‘swimming’ in oil.
“The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
Now Wolfowitz has evidently added fuel to the flames by confirming the claim of antiwar critics that was most derided (or ignored) before the war — that it was the oil, stupid. If one were of a conspiratorial turn of mind, it might almost be possible to imagine that Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had turned their regime-change missiles on Tony Blair. (I won’t hold my breath waiting for this latest Wolfowitz quote to be posted on the websites of major American papers.) The Guardian piece reads in part:
“The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz – who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a “bureaucratic” excuse for war – has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is ‘swimming’ in oil.
“The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
“Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: ‘Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.’ “
By the way, check out the fascinating tour de farce of the full, raw text of Wolfowitz’s Vanity Fair interview. In it, he explains the real linkage between the Iraq War and Al Qaeda — and it has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. The war, he claims, allowed us essentially to fulfill Osama Bin Laden’s greatest demand and withdraw our forces from Saudi Arabia (while, of course, repositioning most of them in Iraq and elsewhere in the area): “There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed–but it’s huge–is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.”
As for those vanishing weapons of mass destruction, despite the fact that we’re sending in a new team of 1300 military inspectors, they continue to vanish. Take a look today, for instance, at a Los Angeles Times piece whose headline and subhead say it all: Iraqi Weapons Expert Insists Search Is Futile: As a new hunt for banned arms begins, a military scientist says the chemical agents he helped develop have been gone for years.
So, weapons of mass destruction as a fraudulent explanation for Bush’s war have finally made the news. I’m just waiting for someone out there to steal a famed line or two from Casablanca and be “shocked, shocked” by this turn of events and then suggest that we “round up the usual suspects.” I mean, all of a sudden our media is shocked, shocked, and it’s a front- page or magazine-cover story, as Jim Lobe reports today at the Foreign Policy in Focus website, in Credibility Gap over Iraq WMD looms larger:
“When all three major U.S. newsweeklies–Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report–run major features on the same day on possible government lying, you can bet you have the makings of a major scandal.
“And when the two most important outlets of neo-conservative opinion–The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal–come out on the same day with lead editorials spluttering outrage about suggestions of government lying, you can bet that things are going to get very hot as summer approaches in Washington.
“The controversy over whether the administration of President George W. Bush either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion has mushroomed over the past week.
“‘This is potentially very serious,’ said one Congressional aide. ‘If it’s shown we went to war because of intelligence that was ‘cooked'”by the administration, heads will have to roll–and not just little heads, big ones.'”
So let’s take a breath here (gasp) actually you’re not going to believe this it’s official. the Bush administration may have taken us to war on a lie! They may (gasp again) have cooked the intelligence books on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction! And now there will be congressional hearings and our suddenly horrified representatives will, if it looks like there’s mileage in this, undoubtedly tsk-tsk away. Honestly, though, while our Pentagon “Don” was organizing his own take-out intelligence service (“you order and we deliver”) and pressuring the CIA and DIA, while the Brits were concocting “intelligence” out of old term papers, and we were presenting documents at the UN on Niger’s uranium sales to Saddam that were known to be forged, and given that all of this was published here (some admittedly way late and deep inside our major papers), if you were a responsible journalist, you’d have to have been in cryogenic suspension to find yourself shocked now.
Yes, let’s be brave and say it: This is a complete no-brainer. They cooked the books and took a leap, hoping that Saddam would indeed be stupid enough to store the offending weapons until U.S. teams could arrive in the country and uncover them; or, more likely, they simply believed that when the war was over and the country “liberated” no one would give a damn.
But, to be completely fair, we need to add another element to this mix. Until more or less yesterday, TV and press coverage of this issue in this country has been truly dreadful — and I don’t just mean the New York Times‘ Judith Miller, traveling Iraq writing ridiculous scare stories based in one case on the testimony of a “scientist” she never laid eyes on. If the American people believe — as they seem to — that the wmd is there, it’s not surprising. While the war was still on, I myself saw the dramatic televised scenes of American soldiers scrubbing down after they discovered suspicious barrels of who knew what — and, though this story and each of the ones that followed were discredited, they all made far more of an impression than the fact that they weren’t accurate. Actually, Linda Rothstein of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has put together a calendar of errors, that if this weren’t so serious would indeed be hilarious:
“This one’s for the history books, folks. While it’s always possible that some Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or WMD-which posed such an immediate threat to the United States that the Bush administration was compelled to invade that country-may some day be found, so far the weapons have proved elusive. Just for the record, (and in case in a few years no one can believe what happened, or the story becomes confused with the plot of a Marx Brothers movie), here’s a representative sample of reports from the U.S. and British news media since the search for Iraq’s WMD began:
“April 7: The Washington Post relays the Pentagon announcement that it has found the ‘smoking gun’-the 101st Airborne has located a large cache of chemical weapon-laden missiles southwest of Baghdad; buried ‘bioweapons labs’ are also reported found.
“April 10: U.S. military commanders announce they have secured the Tuwaitha nuclear facility.”
Let me just add today, a fine piece by Robert Fisk (off the Commondreams website, now that the British Independent makes you pay to read him) on what the president might see next week on his visit to Iraq. (Hint: not weapons of mass destruction) In the meantime, Bush has managed to emerge from the G-8 Summit with a threatening statement about nuclear proliferation. (This is how the Europeans evidently decided to make up with him.) We threaten force and future disarmament wars, the possibility of stopping proliferation by boarding ships on the high seas and the like; and in the meantime, no peaceable multinational actions involving disarmament are even considered. As Michele Ciarrocca points out below, our policy is simply to proliferate away with whole new generations of nuclear weapons.
Finally, I include a Guardian piece which again would be hilarious if it weren’t horrific, about a man in New Zealand building a cruise missile in his garage. Whether he’s really done so or not, it’s a handy reminder that in our world the materials for the most horrific acts possible are getting ever cheaper and easier to produce. Bargain-basement proliferation is within reach. Maybe the Bush admnistration will use one of the new, smaller nukes they’re planning to develop to take out his garage. That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it? Tom
… And The Truth The Victors Refuse To See
Mr Blair Paid a Flying Visit Last Week; Next Week it’s the Turn of President Bush. Reporting from Baghdad, Robert Fisk Suggests an Itinerary That Would Open Their Eyes to What’s Really Going on in Iraq
By Robert Fisk
The Daily Times/Pakistan (Commondreams)
June 3, 2003Iraqis, it now seems certain, are to be blessed this week with a visit from their Liberator-in-Chief, George Bush Jr. While Washington has been avoiding all mention of the trip, the new Iraqi newspapers – one of the few positive results of “liberation” here – have been happily speculating for days on Bush’s arrival.
And we all know what the American President would like to do when he arrives: to be filmed inspecting Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the purported reason for the Anglo-American invasion illegally launched against Iraq. The problem, of course, is that there don’t appear to be any.
So how will the Bush public relations boys manage this particular piece of theatre? Here’s an idea of what they are preparing, the stage-managed “victory” tour of George W Bush.
“Do as I say, not as I do” Nuclear Policy
By Michelle Ciarrocca
Foreign Policy in Focus
May 27, 2003The Bush administration has its foreign policy hands full with each nation in its “Axis of Evil.” From the ongoing search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to the appearance of negotiations with North Korea, and the push to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, President Bush is following through with his promise to make certain these “dangerous regimes and terrorists” can not threaten the U.S. with the world’s most destructive weapons.
But he’s going about it in a way that will actually increase the nuclear threat to the U.S. and the world.
Buried in the President’s 2004 defense budget are two particularly troubling requests. The first seeks to repeal a 10-year-old ban on the development of smaller, lower-yield nuclear weapons, also known as mini-nukes. The second is a $15.5 million request to conduct research on a new bunker buster bomb called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
Michelle Ciarrocca <[email protected]> is a research associate at the World Policy Institute and writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).p>
To read more Ciarrocca click here
A DIY cruise missile: yours for £3,000
By David Fickling
The Guardian
June 4, 2003Don’t worry about Russia’s bioweapon laboratories and North Korea’s nuclear programme: the greatest threat to world security is sitting in a shed in New Zealand.
A model aircraft enthusiast from North Island claims to have made a cruise missile in his shed for £3,000, and plans to publish instructions for making it online.
Bruce Simpson bought his missile’s GPS positioning system on eBay for £75 and its flight control system mostly from online hobby stores for less than £300.
He says it will have a range of 100km, travel at up to 800km per hour and be able to carry a 10kg warhead to within 100m of its target.
Using a pulse jet engine similar to those used by German V1 rockets during the second world war, he believes the missile could be carried around in a pick-up truck and launched from a roadside.