-Caveat Lector-
THE BIG LIE: So Big, So Bold, So Often Told, Masses Believe it!
The twenty lies of George W. Bush
By Patrick Martin
20 March 2003
Monday night's 15-minute speech by President Bush, setting a 48-hour
deadline for war against Iraq, went beyond the usual distortions,
half-truths, and appeals to fear and backwardness to include a remarkable
number of barefaced, easily refuted lies.
The enormous scale of the lying suggests two political conclusions: the
Bush administration is going to war against Iraq with utter contempt for
democracy and public opinion, and its war propaganda counts heavily on
the support of the American media, which not only fails to challenge the
lies, but repeats and reinforces them endlessly.
Without attempting to be exhaustive, it is worthwhile listing some of the
most important lies and contrasting Bush's assertions with the public
record. All of the false statements listed below are directly quoted from
the verbatim transcript of Bush's remarks published on the Internet.
Lie No. 1: "My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final
days of decision."
The decision for war with Iraq was made long ago, the intervening time
having been spent in an attempt to create the political climate in which
US troops could be deployed for an attack. According to press reports,
most recently March 16 in the Baltimore Sun, at one of the first National
Security Council meetings of his presidency, months before the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Bush expressed his
determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his willingness to commit
US ground troops to an attack on Iraq for that purpose. All that was
required was the appropriate pretext - supplied by September 11, 2001.
Lie No. 2: "For more than a decade, the United States and other nations
have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime
without war."
The US-led United Nations regime of sanctions against Iraq, combined with
"no-fly" zones and provocative weapons inspections, is one of brutal
oppression. The deliberate withholding of food, medical supplies and
other vital necessities is responsible for the death of more than a
million Iraqis, half of them children. Two UN officials who headed the
oil-for-food program resigned in protest over the conditions created in
Iraq by the sanctions. The CIA used the inspectors as a front,
infiltrating agents into UNSCOM, the original inspections program. The
CIA's aim was to spy on Iraq's top officials and target Saddam Hussein
for assassination.
Lie No. 3: "The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time
and advantage. It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions
demanding full disarmament..."
Iraq has never "defied" a Security Council resolution since the end of
the Persian Gulf War in 1991. It has generally cooperated with the
dictates of the UN body, although frequently under protest or with
reservations, because many of the resolutions involve gross violations of
Iraqi sovereignty. From 1991 to 1998, UN inspectors supervised the
destruction of the vast bulk of the chemical and biological weapons, as
well as delivery systems, which Iraq accumulated (with the assistance of
the US) during the Iran-Iraq war, and they also destroyed all of Iraq's
facilities for making new weapons.
Lie No. 4: "Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again
and again because we are not dealing with peaceful men."
According to the Washington Post of March 16, referring to the 1991- 1998
inspection period: "[U]nder UN supervision, Iraq destroyed 817 of 819
proscribed medium-range missiles, 14 launchers, 9 trailers and 56 fixed
missile-launch sites. It also destroyed 73 of 75 chemical or biological
warheads and 163 warheads for conventional explosives. UN inspectors also
supervised destruction of 88,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions,
more than 600 tons of weaponized and bulk chemical weapons agents, 4,000
tons of precursor chemicals and 980 pieces of equipment considered key to
production of such weapons."
Lie No. 5: "The Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the
most lethal weapons ever devised."
The Washington Post article cited above noted that CIA officials were
concerned "about whether administration officials have exaggerated
intelligence in a desire to convince the American public and foreign
governments that Iraq is violating United Nations prohibitions against
chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and long-range missile systems."
The article quoted "a senior intelligence analyst" who said the
inspectors could not locate weapons caches "because there may not be much
of a stockpile."
Former British Foreign Minister Robin Cook, who resigned from the Blair
government Monday in protest over the decision to go to war without UN
authorization, declared, "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass
destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term." Even if Iraq
is concealing some remnants of its 1980s arsenal, these would hardly
deserve Bush's lurid description, since they are primitive and relatively
ineffective. "Some of the most lethal weapons ever devised" are those
being unleashed by the United States on Iraq: cruise missiles, smart
bombs, fuel-air explosives, the 10,000- pound "daisy-cutter" bomb, the
20,000-pound MOAB just tested in Florida. In addition, the US has
explicitly refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons.
Lie No. 6: "[Iraq] has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including
operatives of Al Qaeda."
No one, not even US government, seriously believes there is a significant
connection between the Islamic fundamentalists and the secular
nationalist Ba'athist regime in Iraq, which have been mortal enemies for
decades. The continued assertion of an Al Qaeda-Iraq alliance is a
desperate attempt to link Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks.
It also serves to cover up the responsibility of American imperialism for
sponsoring Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The forces that now comprise
Al Qaeda were largely recruited, trained, armed and set in motion by the
CIA itself, as part of a long-term policy of using Islamic
fundamentalists as a weapon against left-wing movements in the Muslim
countries. This policy was pursued from the 1950s and was escalated prior
to and during the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which ended in
1989. Osama bin Laden himself was part of the CIA- backed mujaheddin
forces in Afghanistan before he turned against Washington in the 1990s.
Lie No. 7: "America tried to work with the United Nations to address this
threat because we wanted to resolve the issue peacefully."
The Bush administration went to the United Nations because it wanted UN
sanction for military action and it wanted UN member states to cough up
funds for postwar operations, along the lines of its financial shakedown
operation for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Bush's most hawkish advisors,
such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney,
initially opposed going to the UN because they did not want diplomacy to
slow down the drive to war. They only agreed after Secretary of State
Colin Powell argued that the pace of the US military buildup in the
Persian Gulf gave enough time to get the UN to rubber-stamp the war.
Lie No. 8: "These governments [the Security Council majority] share our
assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it."
This is belied by virtually every statement on Iraq issued by the
governments of France, Russia, China, Germany and other countries opposed
to military action, which have repeatedly declared that they see no
imminent threat from Iraq. Bush brands his opponents on the Security
Council as cowards, as though they were afraid to take action against
Saddam Hussein. These countries were, in fact, increasingly alarmed - by
the United States, not Iraq. Insofar as they summoned up resolve, to the
shock of the Bush administration, it was to deny UN support for the war
that Washington had already decided to wage.
Lie No. 9: "Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to
act against this threat to peace, and a broad coalition is now gathering
to enforce the just demands of the world."
Only three nations are contributing military forces to the war: 250,000
from the US, 40,000 from Britain, and 2,000 from Australia. The other
members of the "broad coalition" are those which have been bribed or
browbeaten to allow the US to fly over their countries to bomb Iraq, to
station troops, ships or warplanes on their territory, or provide
technical assistance or other material aid to the war. None will do any
fighting. All are acting against the expressed desire of their own
population.
Lie No. 10: "The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its
responsibilities, so we will rise to ours."
Bush defines the UN body's responsibility as serving as a rubber stamp
for whatever action the United States government demands. In relation to
the UN, however, the United States does have definite responsibilities,
including refraining from waging war without Security Council
authorization, except in the case of immediate self- defense. Under
Article 42 of the UN Charter, it is for the Security Council, not the US
or Britain, to decide how Security Council resolutions such as 1441 are
to be enforced. The US decision to "enforce" its interpretation of 1441
regardless of the will of the Security Council is a violation of
international law.
Lie No. 11: "If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed
against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you."
The widely reported US military strategy is to conduct an aerial
bombardment of Iraq so devastating that it will "shock and awe" the Iraqi
people and compel the Iraqi armed forces to surrender en masse. According
to one press preview, US and British forces "plan to launch the deadliest
first night of air strikes on a single country in the history of air
power. Hundreds of targets in every region of Iraq will be hit
simultaneously." Estimates of likely Iraqi civilian casualties from the
immediate impact of bombs and missiles range from thousands to hundreds
of thousands, and even higher when the long- term effects are included.
Lie No. 12: "As our coalition takes their power, we will deliver the food
and medicine you need."
This is particularly cynical, since the immediate consequence of Bush's
48-hour ultimatum was the withdrawal of all UN humanitarian aid workers
and the shutdown of the oil-for-food program, which underwrites the
feeding of 60 percent of Iraq's population. As for medicine, the US has
systematically deprived the Iraqi people of needed medicine for the past
12 years, insisting that even the most basic medical supplies, like
antibiotics and syringes, be banned as "dual-use" items that could be
used in a program of biological warfare.
Lie No. 13: "We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help
you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free."
The goal of the Bush administration is to install a US puppet regime in
Baghdad, initially taking the form of an American military dictatorship.
It is no exaggeration to say that the US government has been the leading
promoter of dictatorships around from the world, from Pinochet of Chile
to Suharto of Indonesia to Saddam Hussein himself, who, according to one
recent report, got his political start as an anti-communist hit-man
working in a CIA-backed plot to assassinate Iraq's left-nationalist
President Qasem in 1959.
A classified State Department report described by the Los Angeles Times
of March 14 not only concluded that a democratic Iraq was unlikely to
arise from the devastation of war, it suggested that this was not even
desirable from the standpoint of American interests, because
"anti-American sentiment is so pervasive that elections in the short term
could lead to the rise of Islamic-controlled governments hostile to the
United States."
Lie No. 14: "Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American
people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war and every
measure will be taken to win it."
This combines a lie and a brutal truth. The Bush administration has taken
every possible measure to insure that war takes place, viewing the
resumption of UN weapons inspections with barely disguised hostility and
directing its venom against those countries that have suggested a
diplomatic settlement with Iraq is achievable. In prosecuting the war,
the Bush administration is indeed prepared to use "every measure," up to
an including nuclear weapons, in order to win it.
Lie No. 15: "War has no certainty except the certainty of sacrifice."
There will be colossal sacrifices for the Iraqi people, and sacrifices in
blood and economic well-being for the American people as well. But for
Bush's real constituency, the wealthiest layer at the top of American
society, there will be no sacrifices at all. Instead, the administration
is seeking a tax cut package of over $700 billion, including the
abolition of taxation on corporate dividends. Major US corporations are
in line to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the
rebuilding of Iraqi infrastructure shattered by the coming US assault.
These include the oil construction firm Halliburton, which Vice President
Cheney headed prior to joining the Bush administration, and which
continues to include Cheney on its payroll.
Lie No. 16: "[T]he only way to reduce the harm and duration of war is to
apply the full force and might of our military, and we are prepared to do
so."
Every aggressor claims to deplore the suffering of war and seeks to blame
the victim for resisting, and thus prolonging the agony. Bush is no
different. His hypocritical statements of "concern" for the Iraqi people
cannot disguise the fact that, as many administration apologists freely
admit, this is "a war of choice" - deliberately sought by the US
government to pursue its strategic agenda in the Middle East.
Lie No. 17: "The terrorist threat to America and the world will be
diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed."
No one, even in the American military-intelligence complex, seriously
believes this. US counter-terrorism officials have repeatedly said that a
US conquest and occupation of Iraq, by killing untold thousands of Arabs
and Muslims and inflaming public opinion in the Arab world and beyond,
will spark more terrorism, not less.
Lie No. 18: "We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far
greater. In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on
all free nations would be multiplied many times over."
This is belied by the record of the past twelve years, which has seen a
steady decline in Iraqi military power. Saddam Hussein has never been a
threat to any "free nation," if that term has any meaning, only to the
reactionary oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf and to neighboring Iran,
all ruled by regimes that are as repressive as his.
Lie No. 19: "As we enforce the just demands of the world, we will also
honor the deepest commitments of our country."
The demands of the world were expressed by the millions who marched in
cities throughout the world on February 15 and March 15 to oppose a
unilateral US attack on Iraq. Bush seeks to have it both ways - claiming
to enforce previous Security Council resolutions against Iraq ("the just
demands of the world"), while flagrantly defying the will of the majority
of the Security Council, the majority of the world's governments, and the
vast majority of the world's people.
Lie No. 20: "Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are
deserving and capable of human liberty... The United States with other
countries will work to advance liberty and peace in that region."
For "the Iraqi people," substitute "the Egyptian people," "the people of
the Arabian peninsula," "the Pakistani people" or those of other
US-backed dictatorships, not to mention the Palestinians who live under a
brutal Israeli occupation that is supported by Washington. Does the US
government believe that any of them are "deserving and capable of human
liberty?" When the parliament of Turkey, under the pressure of popular
opposition, voted to bar the US from using Turkish territory to invade
Iraq, the Bush administration appealed to the Turkish military to
pressure the government into overturning this democratic decision.
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