IRAQ

Truthout: How America Lost the War

Monday 14 April 2003

Television news stations, along with newspapers from coast to coast, have been showing scenes of celebration in Baghdad. The dictator, Saddam Hussein, has been removed from power. News anchors have likened this event to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the liberation of Paris by Allied forces during World War II. Never mind that the joyful crowds who tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last week numbered perhaps one hundred people, or that the entire event was a staged media scam. A wide angle shot of the square where this 'celebration' took place showed a deserted, ruined city with that one small clot of people. The true feelings of the Iraqi people in the aftermath of the invasion were best summed up by a woman who screamed at a reporter for the UK Independent: "Go back to your country. Get out of here. You are not wanted here. We hated Saddam and now we are hating Bush because he is destroying our city."

The war against Iraq was proffered and pursued by the Bush administration with two clear goals on the table. 1) We were, first and foremost, there to capture and destroy any and all weapons of mass destruction; 2) We were there to 'liberate' the Iraqi people and plant a seedcorn of democracy. Enveloping this entire scenario was the Bush administration's premise that what we were doing was just and moral.

We need, first of all, to get our terms straight so as to achieve a sense of clarity regarding the issue of America's moral standing on the matter. Saddam Hussein was not defeated. He was not overthrown, bested, beaten or destroyed. Saddam Hussein was fired, relieved of his position by a nation that hired him for a dirty job way back in 1979.

When the Shah of Iran, another employee of the United States, was overthrown by fundamentalist revolutionaries controlled by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, America lost a staunch ally against the rise of Soviet influence in the Middle East. That same year saw Saddam Hussein take control of Iraq, and America immediately leaped into his corner so as to maintain the bulwark against the USSR. In short, he was hired. On September 22, 1980, Hussein attacked Iran ostensibly to gain strategically important territory along with the rich oil fields around Khuzestan. At bottom, however, Hussein was acting as an instrument of American policy and attempting to overthrow Khomeini, so as to dissolve a dangerous Iranian/Soviet alliance.

The relationship between Iraq and America bloomed throughout the Reagan administration in the 1980s. We provided intelligence data to Iraqi forces that described, in detail, the order of battle of Iranian forces. American government and private industry interests provided Iraq with the means to create all of the terrible weapons Hussein was so covetous of. We knew Iraq was using chemical weapons during their fight with Iran, and continued to give them this intelligence data. In fact, Iran in 1984 brought a draft resolution before the United Nations Security Council condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Iraq petitioned the United States several times to make sure the international response to their chemical attacks was muted, and that no specific country was named regarding Iran's petition. The Iraqi/American version of the resolution carried the day.

That same year saw a public American condemnation of the use of these weapons. However, that same condemnation carried within it the following language: "The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims." (Emphasis added)