Jungle
Army.ca Veteran
- Reaction score
- 12
- Points
- 430
Interesting article on some recent information, found here:
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/496263.html
I always found it strange that al-qaeda was apparently absent from Iraq, but immediately after the fall of the regime, they appeared as an organised entity, conducting a large-scale guerilla war.
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/496263.html
Now we don't need the usual anti-war Bush-haters piling on with the usual arguments...Pro-war evidence keeps piling up
By PAUL SCHNEIDEREIT
FASCINATING.
Newly released audio-tapes of Saddam Hussein while in power, along with some of the thousands of Iraqi government documents seized in the invasion in 2003, now being declassified and translated, provide yet more reminders of the true nature and intentions of the former Baathist regime; at least, that is, for all those open to considering the evidence.
I say that not to provoke those in the anti-war movement, by the way, but merely to restate the obvious: Those diehards in the "Bush lied, people died" camp (otherwise known as the cult of the parrot) have been sadly oblivious, consciously or not, to all facts that tend to undermine those passionate, if misleading, chants. That’s highly unlikely to change.
According to media reports on the materials, the tapes and documents reveal Saddam and his officials openly gloating in the late ’90s about how easily they could mislead UN weapons inspectors; and as late as 2000, Saddam discussing ongoing plans for an Iraqi nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, other documents recount that Saddam’s regime held meetings with al-Qaida as early as 1995; the dictator later ordered his officials to form a "relationship" with Osama bin Laden; and Iraq provided financial aid to al-Qaida’s surrogate in the Philippines, Abu Sayyaf, in the summer of 2001. Yet another document, dated just before the war in March 2003, outlined an Iraqi plan to recruit suicide bombers for strikes against U.S. "interests."
Just a few weeks ago on, of all places, Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart show, former Iraqi general George Sada – who’s just released a book entitled Saddam’s Secrets – stated that the dictator moved materials for use in making weapons of mass destruction to Syria for safekeeping, months before the war. "Saddam wanted to rule that part of the world," Sada told Stewart. "He was always going to go for weapons, and of course he had weapons of mass destruction that he had managed to hide, and to mislead the United Nations countries."
This dovetails with what David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector and later director of the initial U.S. effort to find Iraq’s WMDs, speculated in his report; i.e., that some WMDs had been moved to Syria. Meanwhile, a Syrian journalist who defected in 2004 claimed that intelligence sources in his country had even told him the three underground locations where the WMD materials are now allegedly being stored.
The picture that emerges, for those paying attention and not otherwise welded to a conflicting agenda, is stark: a dangerous regime clearly bent on acquiring WMDs, having connections with, and an obvious interest in, terrorism, and exhibiting no compunction about misleading, or co-opting through graft of various forms, officials from the UN or countries – such as France or Russia – with extensive commercial ties with Iraq.
This much is certain: None of the aforementioned will do much to dissuade the anti-war (and thus pro-status quo, with all its implications) groups from continuing to churn out their populist misinformation. It’s sad that the same energy wouldn’t have gone into protesting Saddam’s genocidal attacks on his own people, the northern Kurds and southern Shiites, which killed hundreds of thousands. Or, for that matter, some of the many other atrocities committed, often while the UN and world preferred to look the other way, around the globe in the last decade or two.
But apparently the hypocrisy, as always, eludes them.
Speaking of the UN, the 2003 Iraq war, at its basest level, represents a complete – and, frankly, but the latest – failure of that so-called "protector" of international security. The first Gulf War ended only after Iraq promised, in a binding ceasefire agreement, to destroy all its WMD materials and, importantly, to allow for full UN inspections to be able to verify that result. Right.
What happened instead made a mockery of the UN and its most fundamental mandate. Iraq continually cheated on its obligations, provoking the Security Council to pass 16 different resolutions calling on Saddam to honour his ceasefire commitments. When he did not, there were no real consequences. In fact, under the urging of Secretary General Kofi Annan, the disastrous UN oil-for-food program was launched in the midst of this intransigence, enabling the Iraqi dictator to squirrel away billions undetected, for use on guns and palaces, while enriching friends of the regime, including, it turns out, many in the UN itself. Annan, of course, is a master of moral equivalence, even in the face of the most naked evil, as was amply underscored by his shocking inaction, despite desperate appeals by Canadian general Romeo Dallaire, during the Rwandan genocide. (Later investigations blamed Annan, and others, for not fully informing the Security Council about the reports he was receiving on the genocidal horror occurring in that central African nation. Annan, naturally, was later promoted to the UN’s top position.)
History, of course, frequently reveals popular opinion to be utterly, embarrassingly wrong about the issues of the day. As more and more information comes out about the Baathists and their ruthless leader, and with the hindsight of subsequent events, the U.S. invasion of Iraq will doubtlessly be seen for what it was: unfortunate, but necessary.
( pauls@herald.ca)
I always found it strange that al-qaeda was apparently absent from Iraq, but immediately after the fall of the regime, they appeared as an organised entity, conducting a large-scale guerilla war.