Hold the
Neocons Accountable
by Paul Craig Roberts
by Paul Craig Roberts
Will neoconservatives be held responsible for orchestrating a
war in order to pursue their Middle Eastern agenda? Will they get
away with inflicting death and injury on thousands of Iraqis and
Americans?
Powerful people have good reasons to hold the neocons
accountable. Secretary of State Colin Powell is one. Deceived into
lying to the United Nations when he presented the case for a
preemptive US attack on Iraq, Secretary Powell was ruthlessly used
by neocon administration officials.Colin Powell put his reputation
on the line when he gave the UN assurances that “every statement I
make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not
assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on
solid intelligence.”
There was not a word of truth or intelligence in what Powell
told the UN. Iraq most certainly was NOT developing chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was NOT
involved with al Qaida and the September 11 attacks on the US.
Saddam Hussein had NO weapons of mass destruction to give to
terrorists.
President Bush also has good reason to hold the neocons
responsible. Deceived and trapped in a war of attrition that can
have no successful outcome, Bush’s credibility is burdened with
speeches even more egregious than Powell’s UN speech.
Fed
disinformation, Bush dutifully regurgitated neocon fabrications that
Iraq possessed 500 tons of chemical weapons, 25,000 liters of
anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 30,000 prohibited
warheads, and uranium from Niger. America had to attack Iraq, Bush
said, before these fearsome weapons could be used against us.
Vice
President Cheney’s fear mongering was more extreme than Bush’s.
Cheney claimed that Iraq had “reconstituted nuclear weapons.”
References to “mushroom clouds” over American cities made ears deaf
to voices of reason.
Congress has an incentive to hold the neocons accountable.
Fear created by neocon lies caused Congress to emasculate itself, to
give up its war powers and to agree to massive sums of money being
wasted on a pointless war.
The
US media has good cause to hold the neocons accountable. Neocons
manipulated the media and turned reporters, news networks and
publications into war propagandists. Uncritical acceptance of neocon
propaganda has made laughingstocks out of “conservative” media, such
as Fox News, the Weekly Standard, National Review and
the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
For
example, the current issue (Nov. 24) of the Weekly
Standard
confidently reports that a “top secret U.S. government
memorandum” leaked to the magazine proves beyond any doubt that
“Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship
from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives
and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist
attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi
financial support for al Qaeda – perhaps even for Mohammed Atta.”
These improbable revelations raised no suspicions at the
Weekly Standard or Fox News, which fed the story to the
public without checking it out.
The
US
Department of Defense repudiated the story in a November 15, 2003
press release: “News reports that the Defense Department
recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between
al Qaida and Iraq in a letter [from Undersecretary Douglas Feith] to
the Senate Intelligence Committee are inaccurate.”
All
the Weekly Standard has is a “classified annex” containing
“raw reports” or unsupported claims such as those made by
self-serving Iraqi exiles. The Defense Department news release says
that “the classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive
issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida, and it drew no
conclusions.”
 But the propagandists at the Weekly Standard were
not deterred by facts.
Neoconservatives have made as big a fool of the American
public as they have of President Bush. The US has been tricked into
waging a war that already has cost us $200 billion and the sympathy
of the world, a war that disrupts the lives of tens of thousands of
reserve and national guard families, kills and maims our troops and
Iraqi civilians, destroys our alliances and foreign policy, and
recruits terrorists for bin Laden.
 We went to war for false reasons. The costs are
enormous. Will the perpetrators be held accountable?
November 17, 2003
Dr. Roberts [send him mail] is John M.
Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research
Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research
Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor
of the Wall
Street Journal and a former assistant secretary of the U.S.
Treasury. He is the co-author of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.
Copyright © 2003 Creators Syndicate
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