| http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2001/10/19/107.html
Friday, Oct. 19, 2001. Page VIII Global Eye -- Idiot Wind By Chris Floyd Anthrax is riding the autumn winds in America. Where does it come from? Some say from bin Laden's terrorists -- although for people who can murder 7,000 victims in a matter of minutes, this parceling out of spores seems a bit on the retail side. Then again, why expect consistency from such disordered minds? Others say it's those right-wing "Heartland" militants who dabble in toxins and have been celebrating Sept. 11 as a blow against the cities they hate most, or the "Army of God" anti-abortion terrorists who have used similar tactics to spread the Lord's word in the form of deadly chemicals. But savvy White House hard-liners increasingly point the finger at Saddam Hussein. "There's no question that the leader of Iraq is an evil man," one hard-liner said last week. "After all, he gassed his own people. We know he's been developing weapons of mass destruction." Thus U.S. President George W. Bush fires his first shot across Baghdad's bow, warming up the homefolks for the big grudge match ahead -- "Gulf War II: The Empire Strikes Back." Bush's words are accurate -- but even here, right-wing white man speak with forked tongue. For it's true that the Iraqi despot gassed his own people, and that for 20 years he's been developing weapons of mass destruction. But what Bush's statement elides is that Saddam's development and use of these weapons was enthusiastically abetted and countenanced by a previous occupant of the Oval Office named George Bush. For years, Pa Bush and Ronald Reagan shoveled money, weapons and "dual-use" technology at Saddam -- ignoring warnings from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and others that the dictator was using this technology to develop ballistic missiles and augment his arsenal of unconventional weapons. Some of the materials sent to Iraq with the OK of the Reagan and Bush administrations included the chemical agents for botulism, tetanus, West Nile Fever and anthrax. The atrocity that Bush Jr. mentioned last week occurred in 1988, when Saddam murdered some 4,000 Iraqi Kurds with poison gas. This was carried out with helicopters purchased from the United States. The next year, with Pa firmly in the Oval cockpit, the CIA informed the White House that Iraq was greatly accelerating its secret nuclear program -- and had become the world's leading producer of chemical weapons. So what did Pa do? Why, he signed a National Security Directive ordering even closer ties to the poisoner. He also overrode his own Cabinet to force through $1 billion in agricultural credits to Saddam, after international banks had stopped giving him loans. Once again, Bush was shown evidence that the aid was being diverted to military uses -- but Pa had faith in his old ally. There was too much oil and backdoor money binding the two leaders: an alliance sealed with the blood of Saddam's many victims. No need to worry. By the summer of 1990, Saddam was clearly gunning for Kuwait and openly threatening to "burn half of Israel" with his biochemical weapons. But Pa was indulgent with his frisky prot?g?: In the two weeks before the invasion of Kuwait, Bush approved the sale of an additional $4.8 million in "dual-use" technology to factories identified by the CIA as linchpins of Saddam's illicit nuclear and biochemical programs. Shortly before Saddam sent his tanks across the border, Pa obligingly sold him more than $600 million worth of advanced communication technology. Then came the war -- and the messy divorce of the Bush-Saddam union. Nowadays, apologists for Bush's prolonged appeasement of the bloodthirsty megalomaniac like to say that he was simply practicing realpolitik: supporting Saddam in order to thwart Iran -- who was America's designated "Great Satan" at the time. Saddam, say the apologists, was a bulwark against the spread of Islamic fundamentalism; by wooing him, Bush could prevent Islamic extremists from becoming powerful enough to attack the United States. That was an effective strategy, wasn't it? Now another George Bush has launched another war against former allies in the volatile region, with the same kind of secret deals and wink-wink mollycoddling of despots and kleptocracies from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. Is he, like his father before him, also sending dangerous chemicals and missile components to budding maniacs he finds useful? What form will the inevitable blowback take next time? How many more rough beasts are even now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind -- along with all those anthrax spores. |
