New Republic Editor-In-Chief tells Bush to bomb Iraq
By Jason Leopold
February 21, 2003

The New Republic, the 89 year-old “liberal” journal of politics and the arts, has shifted its editorial stance recently by publishing stories that supports a war with Iraq and criticizes the Democratic party for its weakness, according to a story in Wednesday’s New York Observer.

Moreover, the weekly magazine will unveil a new redesign with the publication of Friday’s issue. But putting the magazine through a makeover is a cheap way to conceal from its subscribers Editor-in-Chief and co-owner Martin Peretz’s personal stance on Iraq. In a recent press release, The New Republic says its coverage as of late represents “several daring political stances” on issues such as the U.S. going to war with Iraq without the support of the United Nations.

This is misleading. The only thing that’s daring about the “new” New Republic is how Peretz is fooling readers of the magazine into believing that The New Republic’s editorial stance does not represent the personal politics of its editors. Many of The New Republic’s readers are unaware that Peretz, along with several other journalists and right-wing lawmakers, lobbied President Bush nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks to start a war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming that Iraq may be linked to the attacks, an allegation that the Bush Administration has made many times without a shred of evidence to back it up.

“We agree with Secretary of State Powell’s recent statement that Saddam Hussein “is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the Earth,” the letter says. “It may be that the Iraqi government provided assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United States. But even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism. The United States must therefore provide full military and financial support to the Iraqi opposition. American military force should be used to provide a “safe zone” in Iraq from which the opposition can operate. And American forces must be prepared to back up our commitment to the Iraqi opposition by all necessary means,” says the letter.

What’s most troubling about the letter to Bush is that it was written by The Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think tank that has been instrumental in advising Bush what America’s foreign policy should look like. It’s founder and chairman is William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, and its former members have included Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Kristol also signed the letter to Bush. It can be viewed at http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm

Peretz has been the top editor at The New Republic since 1974 and was co-founder with CNBC pundit and former hedge fund guru James Kramer of The Street.com. Peretz was former Vice President Al Gore’s professor at Harvard and helped Gore on his initial run for Congress and the Senate and was also instrumental in Gore’s run for the presidency.

Peretz said in an interview that “there are other editors around here” and that his personal views on Iraq are not represented in the pages of The New Republic. He said the magazine’s views on foreign policy have been consistent for 25 years.

“We were for the last Gulf War and for aid to the Contras,” Peretz said. Comparing The New Republic to its close competitor The Nation, Peretz said, “Whatever The Nation was for we were against. Whatever The Nation was against we were for. The only thing we share was we were rather soft on Stalin in the late 1930s.”

Still, when journalists become personally involved in the issues they cover there is no way readers can be sure they are getting their news delivered accurately. Being an opinion-oriented publication doesn’t excuse that. Look at how New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman and Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Peggy Noonan were attacked by the media when they wrote critically about the financial machinations of Enron Corporation and how it was later revealed that both were paid speechwriters and consultants for the company. Krugman wasn’t even writing for The New York Times or any other publication when Enron hired him and he was still taken to task. Business journalists, as a general rule, aren’t allowed to own stock in company’s they write about because their coverage could be deemed bias. The Street.com’s reporters are the exception, but the online publication still requires its reporters to disclose to readers whether they own stock in the companies t the exception, but the online publication still requires its reporters to disclose to readers whether they own stock in the companies they write about. Peretz should be held to the same principles. If he were to simply disclose to The New Republic’s subscribers that he offered the President some advice about his views on how the Administration should deal with Iraq at least his subscribers could decide whether The New Republic is still worth reading.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior scholar of the University of Southern California’s school of Policy, Planning and Development and an expert on the media, said she doesn’t believe journalists should get involved in activism, but if they do it should be disclosed to the reader.

“ I know journalists who walked in abortion rights marches, but that’s not something I would do,” Jeffe said. “It’s an individual decision. A reporter or editor may believe they can still be objective despite it. I would expect a journalist who does that should write a letter to his or her readers and let readers judge. It’s a more honest way to handle it”.

I subscribe to The New Republic. While researching a story I wrote this week about how Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wrote a letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging Clinton to start a war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, I came across another the letter that Peretz and others wrote to Bush after 9-11. I felt cheated and betrayed. I was lead to believe that the magazine I read every week was providing me with its point of view, not Peretz’s. I haven’t decided yet whether to cancel my subscription.

close item

 

 

Powell Warned Bush Last Year Of Bloody War With Iraq Without UN Suport
By Jason Leopold
February 25, 2003

If the United States decides to wage a war with Iraq without the full support of the United Nations it will be “much more complicated and bloody” than the siege in Afghanistan after 9-11 and the first Gulf War combined, Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President Bush privately early last year, Bob Woodward wrote in the book “Bush at War.”

“It’s nice to say you can do it unilaterally,” Powell said to Bush about attacking Iraq, Woodward wrote. “Except you can’t. A successful military plan would require we need allies… International support has to be garnered.”

So what has changed between the time Powell warned Bush about alienating a majority of our allies in the United Nations and now, when Powell’s rhetoric before the U.N. Security Council this month is understood to mean that if the U.N. doesn’t back a full-scale war with Iraq the U.S. and Britain will attack Iraq alone if necessary?

Absolutely nothing. Despite the fact that Powell has recently changed his tone before the U.N., he knows full well that if the U.S. made good on its threats it will face a bloody battle in the Iraqi desert or on the streets of Baghdad.

A “unilateral war would be tough, close to impossible” Powell told Bush, according to Woodward’s book.

One can only assume that Powell’s sudden departure from the earlier warnings he made to the President is just Powell being a team player and agreeing with the “hawks” even though he knows better, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political and media analyst at the University of Southern California’s school of Public Policy and Development.

“If anything, international support for a war in Iraq has eroded over the past five months,” Jeffe said. “So it’s likely that those risks Powell presented to President Bush last year still exist. Powell’s rhetoric is just that. He knows better having spent most of his life in the military that without international support the U.S. is facing a dangerous situation if it decides to go to war alone.”

Dr. Hussein Shahristani, once Iraq’s top nuclear scientist who spent 11 years in solitary confinement for refusing Saddam Hussein’s order to build an atomic bomb, said in an interview Sunday on 60 Minutes that he believes the U.S. is rushing into a war without fully understanding the threat it faces. Shahristani was tortured for refusing to comply with the Saddam’s order and fled Iraq during the first Gulf War. He said would like nothing more than to see Saddam removed from power but he warned the Bush Administration not to start a war with Iraq without the support of the U.N.

As the U.S. moves closer to war it’s important to take another look at how the Bush Administration got here and how through lying, manipulation and with the events that brought this country to its knees, the Bush Administration has used this in attempt to make a case for war.

Of the half-dozen books that have been written about Bush since he was sworn into office two years ago, the recurring theme throughout all of them is the strong desire by the Administration to find a reason to start a war with Iraq—be it allegations that the country is concealing weapons of mass destruction or using 9-11 as an excuse to launch an immediate assault—without caring about how such a war would alienate the U.N. and the public or the fact that the U.S. cannot make a good case to justify a war with Iraq.

Woodward wrote in “Bush at War” that Vice President Dick Cheney was “hell bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed.”

Following the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, Woodward wrote that Rumsfeld “could take advantage of the terrorist attacks and make Iraq a target immediately.”

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said, without a shred of evidence to back it up, that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11, Woodward wrote.

David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil,” wrote in “The Right Man,” his book about the year he spent in the Bush Administration, that the U.S. received intelligence information from Czechoslovakia that it could not confirm that a meeting took place between Mohammed Atta, the lead 9-11 hijacker, and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001 “suggesting some degree of cooperation between the al-Qaeda and the Iraqi dictator.”

That information, which has never been confirmed by U.S. intelligence, according to Frum, became the excuse the Bush Administration would use to attack Iraq and link 9-11 to Saddam Hussein. But according to Woodward, who spent ample time with Bush before writing his book, the President had no evidence that Iraq was involved in 9-11. He only had a gut feeling.

“I believe Iraq was involved but I am not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point,” Bush said to his war cabinet, which includes Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Wolfowitz, Woodward wrote.

Hard evidence linking Iraq to 9-11 never materialized. Still, the Bush Administration debated the idea of using 9-11 as an excuse to attack Iraq and remove Saddam from power, which Frum wrote in his book “was quite a gamble but also quite a prize.”

But it was Powell who was the lone dissenter and told Bush that he must put Iraq on the backburner and focus on dismantling al-Qaeda cells because “Americans were focused on al-Qaeda, Woodward’s book says.

Moreover, Powell told Bush that if he does consider attacking Iraq it’s crucial that he gets the public’s support first. Bush said recently, in response to the millions of anti-war protestors who marched in opposition to a war with Iraq last week, that the anti-war movement will not sway his efforts to use military force against Iraq if necessary.

“Any action needs public support,” Powell told Bush, Woodward wrote in his book. “It’s not what the international coalition supports it’s what the American people want to support.”

The American people have spoken.



close this item

With War Looming, Iraqi Oil Imports May Be Strained
Time To Open Up ANWR, GOP Says
By Jason Leopold
published here March 10, 2003
In the coming weeks, the Senate will attempt to make a compelling argument for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. It turns out that tapping into ANWR’s resources would produce an immediate 600,000 barrels per day of oil—exactly the same amount of oil the U.S. currently purchases from Iraq under the United Nations oil for food program.

The U.N. Security Council set up the oil-for-food program in August 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the U.N then imposed comprehensive sanctions on the country. The program was aimed at removing some of the hardships placed on Iraqi civilians as a result of the sanctions. Since then, the U.S. has resented the fact that it has had to purchase Iraqi oil, which is crucial to our country’s overall supply, from Saddam Hussein who Bush Administration officials claim uses the money to fund his military and uses very little to reduce the suffering of innocent Iraqi’s affected by the sanctions.

If the U.S. does invade Iraq, which at this point seems inevitable, the Bush Administration is concerned that shortages will persist here forcing oil prices to skyrocket to unprecedented levels, putting further strain on the nation’s troubled economy. Oil prices in the past few weeks have come within a hair of $40 per barrel and analysts said that prices could reach as high as $70 if the U.S. goes to war with Iraq.

There is as much as 10 billion barrels of oil in more than 1 million acres surrounding ANWR. The United States uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day, and relies heavily on imports from the Middle East, Canada, Venezeula and Mexico. Environmentalists, who say drilling will hurt oxen, polar bears, the caribou population and other wildlife, will no doubt play an important role in the process.

At this point, according to key Republican lawmakers, it’s unclear whether the U.S. would be able to continue to import Iraqi oil if a war breaks out largely because there is concern among Bush Administration officials that Saddam Hussein may set fire to oil wells in the country. Moreover, these lawmakers said, it’s unlikely other Oil Petroleum Exporting Countries would increase output to help the U.S. because they don’t back the U.S. in a war against Iraq.

Since the United Nations embargo on Iraqi oil in August 1990, some 5 million barrels per day of oil has been removed from the market. Other OPEC countries increased their production capacity to make up the shortfall but they have already said they will not increase output in the event of a war.

So the lawmakers plan to argue that a decrease in oil imports is a national security issue and that ANWR should be opened up to drilling immediately, according to several Republican lawmakers in Washington who spoke to me off the record.

But much in the way the Bush Administration has tried to link the 9-11 terrorist attacks to Iraq, which so far have been unproven, as a way to justify a war the same is being done in the case of drilling in ANWR. The argument is that a war with Iraq will cut off much needed imports so the U.S. has no choice but to tap into its own resources. The truth is, according to Republican lawmakers, no one knows what to expect in the event of a war or how it will affect our ability to import oil. .

However, Bush made it clear before he took office that tapping into ANWR was a priority for his administration because the U.S. is “at the mercy of foreign governments and cartels” when it comes to our oil needs. A month before the 2000 presidential election, Bush gave a speech in Michigan and said, “oil consumption is increasing, our production is dropping and our imports of foreign oil is skyrocketing,” according to the book “The Right Man,” written by Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum.

“It’s not that we should use less energy but that we should import less,” Bush said, according to Frum’s book. “This has become a national security issue.”

Key Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, and Senator Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, said last week they will resist any attempt by Senate Republicans to open the ANWR for drilling.

GOP sources said they would deal with resistance by their Democratic counterparts to drilling in Northeastern Alaska by using a “filibuster-proof” legislative maneuver that would prevent Democrats from blocking passage of the energy policy with less than 50 votes. An aide to Senate Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, said getting the President’s energy policy approved is the first item on the Senate agenda if the United States engages in war with Iraq.

close

 

 

 

 

Bush Sr. – 1996 : War With Iraq `Would Turn Entire Arab World Against Us’
By Jason Leopold
March 6, 2003
Former President George Bush predicted in 1996 that if the United States were to engage in another war with Iraq, one aimed at overthrowing Saddam Hussein, the “entire Arab world would turn against us” and the U.S. would alienate its allies in the international community.

“To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero," Bush said in an interview with the BBC marking the five-year anniversary of the Gulf War.

Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney said at an energy conference six years ago that hundreds of thousands of United States soldiers and Iraqi civilians would die if a war in Iraq were ever fought on the streets of Baghdad.

“To have brought the (Gulf) war into the populous Iraqi capital of Baghdad where Hussein is based would have involved a different type of military operation than in the desert, and would have put large numbers of Iraqi civilians and hundreds of thousands of our troops at risk of being killed,” he said.

Cheney, the former chairman and chief executive of oil conglomerate Halliburton Co. and former defense secretary under the first President Bush, was referring to the 1991 Gulf War when the U.S. liberated Kuwait. Cheney also said in 1997 that if the U.S. were to engage in another war with Iraq and try to remove Saddam Hussein from power the international coalition “would come apart,” a situation currently in the making as U.S. relations with France, Germany and Russia are becoming increasingly strained because our allies will not back a U.S. led coalition to attack Iraq.

Despite the dire warnings Bush Sr. and Cheney made six years ago, the current Bush Administration appears to be on course to launch a full-scale war with Iraq, one that appears to be more about finding Saddam Hussein and assassinating the Iraqi President than destroying any weapons of mass destruction that may or may no be hidden somewhere in the country.

Until that goal is achieved, the U.S. and the rest of the world will never be safe or at peace; statements made repeatedly by Republican hawks since the end of the first Gulf War.

“Unless we can take out Saddam Hussein, we are going to have to live with Saddam Hussein (for a long time),” said James Schlesinger, former defense secretary under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, at a conference in 1998. Schlesinger noted however that the countries of the region “don’t want us to attack Iraq.”

“We keep getting waved off,” he said.


If the U.S. decides to attack Iraq this time around urban warfare appears to be inevitable, according to news reports that quoted senior defense officials.

Cheney said in 1997 that President Bush was not willing to sacrifice U.S. soldiers’ lives by allowing combat to spread to Baghdad in an effort to locate Saddam Hussein, a situation which the current Bush Administration seems willing to do now.

“From the standpoint of the president, the question was how many additional (U.S.) lives is Saddam Hussein worth? And his answer was, `Not very many,' “ Cheney said.

Cheney said six years ago that capturing the Iraqi president would be very difficult and would likely involve a large number of civilian casualties.

“The only way to make certain you could get him was to go occupy all of Iraq and start sorting through Iraqis until you find Saddam Hussein,” Cheney said in 1997.

If the U.S. does invade Iraq, the Bush Administration said the war won’t last more than two months and will not involve a large number of U.S. or civilian casualties.

But Secretary of State Colin Powell warned President Bush last year that if the U.S. starts a war in Iraq without the support of a majority of our allies in the international community, which is the case now, it would be “much more complicated and bloody” than the first Gulf War.

close

 

 

 

 

For Six Years, Right-Wing Think Tank ‘Hell-Bent For War’
By Jason Leopold
February 27, 2003

Never before in the history of the United States presidency has a think tank had such an impact on shaping U.S. foreign policy as the Project for the New American Century has on helping President George W. Bush set foreign policy goals for his Administration, particularly dictating exactly how Bush should deal with Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein.

For the past six years, PNAC has lobbied former President Clinton and Bush heavily to initiate a war in Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, claiming the country poses a serious threat to the U.S. and its allies because of its ability to develop weapons of mass destruction. Clinton rebuffed the advice by PNAC members during the last four years of his presidency, but Bush has virtually used, word for word, the written statements by PNAC members when he speaks publicly about Iraq crisis.

PNAC, which says its goal is to promote America's foreign and defence policies, has been written about in dribs and drabs over the past year in the foreign press, but has yet to crack any of the big mainstream newspapers and magazines here. It operated below the radar while Clinton was in office and has recently resurfaced because of the uncanny similarities between its policies and that of the Bush Administration on matters relating to national defence to Asia and the Middle East.

Most of its members cut their teeth in the Reagan and the first Bush Administrations. However, many of its former members, notably Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, are working in the current Bush Administration. William Kristol, the editor of the ultra-conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, heads PNAC.

In the past year, the organisation has succeeded in getting the Bush Administration to scrap the Army's Crusader Artillery Program and to ask Congress for a one-year increase of more than $48 billion for national defence. But it's PNAC's position to drive America into a war with Iraq that has influenced Bush the most.

Dozens of letters and reports by PNAC members concerning Iraq are posted on its website, www.newamericancentury.org, and lays out in startling detail how war is the only way to deal with the so-called threat that Iraq poses to the U.S. Bush has drawn upon many of these letters to publicly make a case for war. Reading through the letters, the impression it leaves is not that the U.S. is in imminent danger but that the people that run PNAC have been hell-bent for war for six years and they finally got a president who will listen to them.

Robert Kagan, co-chair of PNAC and a former Deputy for Policy in the State Department's Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during Reagan's presidency, wrote in 1999 that the U.S. should "complete the unfinished business of the 1991 Gulf War and get rid of Saddam."

It's simply not enough to increase inspections by the United Nations, PNAC says, or to think "we can contain Saddam inside a box" to ensure the safety of the U.S. and our allies. It has to be war.

"Above all, only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq whose intentions can safely be assumed to be benign," Kristol said in a PNAC report in 1997. Kristol also said that containment and inspections won't work.

Consider the impact Kristol had on Cheney when the Vice President spoke about Iraq before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville last August.

"This is the same dictator who dispatched a team of assassins to murder former President Bush as he travelled abroad," said Cheney.

"A person would be right to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected the game of cheat and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow back in his box."

"Meanwhile, he would continue to plot. Nothing in the last dozen years has stopped him -- not his agreements; not the discoveries of the inspectors; not the revelations by defectors; not criticism or ostracism by the international community; and not four days of bombings by the U.S. in 1998. What he wants is time and more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms," said Cheney.

But the mere fact that many of these letters and policy statements about Iraq were drafted while Clinton was President raises a number of serious questions: for one, where's the evidence that suggests the U.S. is in imminent danger of being attacked by Iraq?

No one at PNAC would respond to these or other questions about the organisation. The one thing that is crystal clear, however, is that neither PNAC nor the Bush Administration has been able to produce a shred of evidence that justifies the U.S. going to war with Iraq. Only through a co-ordinated effort of injecting fear into the minds of Americans has PNAC and the Bush Administration been able to win the little support it has to start a war.

close

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is the United States headed for World War III?
U.S. Could Launch Attack Against North Korea While Troops Fight In Iraq—Rumsfeld
By Jason Leopold
March 11, 2003
Last week, at a Pentagon “town hall” meeting between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and members of the U.S. armed forces someone asked Rumsfeld if the U.S. decides to invade Iraq, what would the U.S. do if the situation in North Korea boils over while troops are fighting a war in Iraq?

Rumsfeld responded by saying that the U.S., if need be, would wage a simultaneous war with North Korea. North Korea is part of the “axis of evil” President Bush referred to in his State of the Union address in 2002.

“That question was asked recently at a meeting that General Myers and I were having, and that was his answer, `yes,’” Rumsfeld said. The U.S. “would wage a major conflict in a theater and occupy a country, and near simultaneously swiftly defeat in another theater, and in addition be capable of conducting a variety of lesser contingencies such as things like Bosnia or Kosovo or what's currently going on in Afghanistan.

“The reason I say that is it is a big order, let there be no doubt. But we've spent a great deal of time over the past two years fashioning a new defense strategy,” Rumsfeld said. “We then had that tested in the tank by the chiefs, and they conducted a table-top -- series of, I guess there were two exercises to look at it and analyze it and make judgments about it as to whether or not we would in fact be able to fulfill that assignment; specifically, and the answer was that in any exercise like that or activity like that or analysis you obviously see things that you wish were somewhat better than they are…I think if you asked any of the gentlemen here who were involved in it they would say that we are well arranged and we feel good about the deterrent and the defensive capability that the United States has. “

According to the latest Gallup Poll, most Americans believe that North Korea poses a greater threat to the U.S. than Iraq because of the country’s ability, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, to launch ballistic missiles onto U.S. soil.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that the U.S. could deal with North Korea’s President Kim Jong Il and the threat the country poses peacefully by asking other countries, including Japan and China, to help broker a solution to the crisis there. With the U.S. focusing on overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, North Korea has restarted its nuclear reactor and has made repeated threats that it would launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. if any attempt were made to shut down the facility.

Rumsfeld said last week that the U.S. might withdraw 37,000 troops from South Korea, part of the rethink of a deployment in place since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

“Whether the forces come home or whether they will move further south of the [Korean] peninsula or whether to some neighboring area are the kinds of things that are being sorted out,” Rumsfeld said.

But Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that if the situation in North Korea heats up while troops are fighting a war in Iraq “Secretary Rumsfeld has contingencies in place to deal with North Korea using military force.”

The so-called “major theater war,” which means that the U.S. could wage two simultaneous wars, was designed specifically so the U.S. would be in a position to launch attacks on the Iraq and North Korea, according to the September 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defense Strategy,” released by the right-wing think tank Project for the New American Century. The full report, which names North Korea, Iraq and Iran as threats to U.S. interests, can be viewed at http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

Rumsfeld, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others, were involved with PNAC in the 1990s before becoming members of the Bush Administration. The think-tank has been a major influence on Bush’s foreign and defense policies and was successful in getting the administration to cancel the Army’s multibillion dollar Crusader Artillery project and recommending that Bush ask Congress for an additional $48 billion for defense, which he did.

The 76-page PNAC report calls for the United States to wage “a series of multiple, simultaneous major theater wars," beginning with the occupation of Iraq.

“The United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces,” the report says. “The theater-war analysis assumed that Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein each could begin a war—perhaps while employing chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. “In the past, Pentagon wargames have given little or no consideration to the force requirements necessary not only to defeat an attack but to remove these regimes from power.”

PNAC’s influence over the Bush Administration is undeniable. The think-tank has a long history of lobbying the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration to start a war with Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, which at this point seems inevitable. But judging from Rumsfeld’s comments to the soldiers at the town hall meeting North Korea may be next.

close

 

 

Rumsfeld, Bush Sr. Refused To Back 1989 UN Resolution On Iraq Human Rights Abuses
Jason Leopold looks back at earlier US, Iraq and UN relations and finds disquiet in the aisles
published here March 13, 2003
In 1989, the State Department released a report that described in gruesome detail Iraq's violation of human rights, specifically how Iraq's President Saddam Hussein tortured his own people for allegedly being disloyal. , writes Jason Leopold.

But despite the atrocities outlined in the report, which President Bush now refers to when speaking about his desire to remove Hussein from power, the United States, under the first Bush Administration, refused to vote in favor of a United Nations resolution calling for an inquiry into Iraq's treatment of its population and possibly indicting Hussein for war crimes and human rights abuses.

The two people most vocal about refusing to go along with the U.N. investigation are now lobbying for a U.N. resolution authorizing an invasion of Iraq and are highly critical of the countries that refuse to back a U.S. led coalition to use military force to remove Hussein from power. Those men are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

But in 1989, the first Bush administration refused to join the U.N. in publicly protesting the forced relocation of at least half a million ethnic Kurds and Syrians in the late 1980s, even though the act violated principles of the 1948 Genocide Convention, according to Middle East Watch, a human rights organization.

The Bush and Reagan administrations also declined to punish Iraq when it used poison gas against Iranian soldiers in 1984 and Kurdish citizens in 1988. Moreover, the U.S. did not oppose the fact that Hussein bought 45 American helicopters, worth about $200 million, with assurances they were for civilian use, then transferred them to his military.

Armitage said in 1990 that that "in retrospect, it would have been much better at the time of their use of gas if we'd put our foot down," according to an August 1990 story in the Los Angeles Daily News.

Despite U.S. intelligence reports that showed Iraq's capability of building weapons of mass destruction and its inhumane treatment of its own civilians, the Bush Administration turned a blind eye and instead focused on improving U.S. relations with Hussein. The U.S. removed Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism in 1983, which reopened the door to federal subsidies and loans to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein "made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld said, who, as a Middle East envoy for the Regan Administration, reopened discussions with Saddam in 1983, according to the Daily News story. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship with him."

The current Bush Administration, many of whom served in the Reagan and the first Bush administrations, refuse to acknowledge that their policies toward Iraq at the time backfired and we may be paying a price for it now. But at this point, Iraq does not pose a threat to the U.S. and threats against the nation appear to be purely personal.

Under former Rumsfeld's watch during his years in the Reagan and Bush administrations, he and the former presidents allowed Hussein to build his army and a cache of chemical and nuclear weapons. In fact, many of the hawks that serve in the current Bush Administration assisted Hussein's regime in reaching these goals during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

For example, Judicial Watch said, according to the Daily News story, "that the U.S. extended $270 million in government-guaranteed credit from the Export-Import Bank to buy other American goods, despite repeated failures to make loan repayments on time. Since 1982, Baghdad has become one of the biggest buyers of U.S. rice and wheat, purchasing $5.5 billion in crops and livestock with federally guaranteed loans and agricultural subsidies and its own hard cash."

"Iraq benefited from a thriving grain trade with American farmers, cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies, oil sales to American refiners that helped finance its military, and muted White House criticism of its human rights and war atrocities," the Daily News story said.

Armitage admitted in 1990 that the Reagan and Bush administrations were well aware of Hussein's brutality, but still, the U.S. was more interested in maintaining a healthy relationship with Iraq because the country's vast oil reserves was beneficial to U.S. interests.

"We knew this wasn't the League of Women Voters," Armitage said, referring to Hussein's regime, according to the Daily News story.

 

close

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pres Bush Reminds World of Iraq's Crimes Against Humanity That His Father Failed To Punish
By Jason Leopold
published here March 17, 2003
President Bush started beating the war drums Saturday in an attempt to win support for a war that many people here and throughout the world believe is unjustified. In his weekly radio address Saturday, Bush dug deep into the past; reminding the public that last weekend marked the 15-year anniversary of the poison gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabia by Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.

The attack was indeed an act of brutality and a gross violation of human rights. But what Bush failed to tell the world in his radio address was that it was his father, the former President Bush Sr., who punished Saddam Hussein with a mere slap on the wrist because Bush Sr. did not want to jeopardize United States-Iraqi relations. Today, Iraq does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. Evidence to suggest otherwise is non-existent. Simply put, this is a case Bush tidying up unfinished business. It's these past crimes, that Bush's father turned a blind eye to, that the current president believes gives him the right to start a war with Iraq today. But there is no justification for waging such a war now.

Since Bush is so eager to sway public opinion in his favor by drudging up Saddam's past crimes in hopes of getting the public to back a war against Iraq, it's equally as important to highlight how his father's administration refused to hold Saddam accountable for his acts of aggression at a time when the Iraqi president was becoming a threat to countries in the Middle East.

The day before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs John Kelly was on the Hill trying to persuade Congress not to impose economic sanctions against Iraq for its human rights violations against the Kurds and threats to decimate Israel.

Two years earlier, in October 1988, a bill passed by both houses calling for economic sanctions against Iraq died in conference. An amendment added the following year to the annual foreign-aid bill by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) passed both houses after a rider was added allowing the president to waive the sanctions if he determined they were not in the "national interest." Former President Bush issued such a waiver in 1990, shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Saddam received more arms and more aid from the Reagan and Bush administrations, despite the fact that Saddam's regime systematically violated the Geneva Convention.

In February 1990, the human rights group, Middle East Watch, said despite findings by its group that showed Iraq's record of brutality, the Bush administration never raised with Iraqi authorities its own findings of murder, extralegal detention, torture and disappearances.

The report accused presidents Bush and Ronald Reagan of putting "the nurturing of newly friendly relations with Saddam Hussein's government well ahead of the violent and repressive nature of his regime."

Washington is reluctant to risk a break with Baghdad because of "Iraq's enormous oil wealth ... and the prospect of lucrative trade," the report said.


Several top-level Reagan and Bush administration officials also had strong ties to either Iraq or Saudi Arabia, which consistently backed Arab Iraq throughout the eight years of its war with Persian Iran.

Before he became secretary of state in 1982, George Shultz headed the Bechtel Corp., the largest construction company in the world, and won the contract to build a new oil pipeline from Iraq through Saudi Arabia.

In the Reagan administration, Shultz presided over the warming of relations with Iraq, including the reopening of a U.S. embassy there for the first time in more than 20 years.
Richard M. Fairbanks III, a former assistant secretary of state and special negotiator in the Middle East peace process, left the Reagan administration in 1985 to become a partner in the prestigious Washington law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, which, between December 1985 and March 1990, was a registered agent for the government of Iraq. Fairbanks was listed as personally handling the firm's Iraqi account.
President Bush took Fairbanks' views so seriously that he named him co-chairman of a group of Middle East experts to advise him during the 1988 presidential campaign.

"The first Bush administration came to office convinced that Saddam could change. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the State Department offered the view that Bush could persuade Saddam to become a useful citizen of the world," wrote Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post in April 1990.

The administration provided Baghdad with $1 billion in guaranteed credits in 1989 to enable Iraq to buy U.S. food supplies while pouring money into missiles, chemical weapons production and the search for an atomic bomb. After Congress voted at the end of 1989 to bar U.S. Export-Import Bank credits to Iraq, President Bush signed a waiver on Jan. 17. He said it was in America's national interest to continue providing Baghdad with $200 million a year in subsidized financing, Hoagland reported in the Post.

But once Iraq invaded Kuwait and threatened to dominate the world's oil supply everything changed. That's the reason behind the first Gulf War. Saddam's brutality during the Reagan-Bush era was small potatoes when compared with U.S. interests. How else could one explain why presidents Reagan and Bush turned the other cheek while innocent Iraqi's and Kurds were being wiped out?

Here's the proof that the coming war in Iraq is about cleaning up Bush Sr.'s mess.

Fast-forward to 1997. The far-right Republicans who served under former presidents Reagan and Bush and helped Saddam build an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and strengthen his military saw the monster they created that is Saddam Hussein-who at this point was well contained-and started lobbying President Clinton to attack Iraq and overthrow the regime. Those men, who include current Bush administration officials like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney, claimed that Saddam's regime needed to go and the only recourse for this action was through military force. Like today, they offered no evidence to justify starting a war and Clinton rebuffed the pleas saying that he was focusing on dismantling al-Qaeda cells.

In 1999, while President Bush was campaigning for the presidency, he said on "Meet the Press" that if elected one of his first orders of business would be to "take out" Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. The New York Times highlighted this point in an editorial on Dec. 12, 1999.

"Gov. George W. Bush of Texas talks about contingencies in which he would use American military power to ''take out'' Iraq's illegal weapons" if elected president, says the Times editorial.

In 2000, the right-wing think-tank Project for a New American Century, a influential group of neocons whose members included Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, issues a report called "Rebuilding America's Defense Strategies," which says that regime change in countries such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea would be difficult for the U.S. to achieve unless "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" took place in the U.S.

The terrorist attacks on 9-11 became the catalyst for a war against Iraq even though the U.S. did not have any intelligence information to link Iraq to 9-11. As recently as January, Bush has mentioned Iraq and 9-11 in the same sentence in an effort to lead the public to believe Saddam was involved.

Not one person will deny that Saddam is a brutal dictator and that Iraqi's are far better off without him. Bush Sr. failed miserably at holding Saddam accountable for crimes against humanity in the 1980s. President Bush and his administration have gone to great lengths to try and justify an attack now, even though Iraq does not pose an imminent threat to the U.S. But a war now, one that doesn't have the support of the public or the international community, is not the answer.

close

Even As Bombs Drop, Hypocrisy Prevails
March 19, 2003 It was only five years ago when Vice President Dick Cheney, as chief executive of the oil-field supply corporation, Halliburton Co., was engaged in secret business dealings with Saddam’s regime by selling Iraq oil production equipment and spare parts to get the Iraqi oil fields up and running, according to confidential United Nations records.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney adamantly denied such dealings. While he acknowledged that his company did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, “Iraq’s different.” He claimed that he imposed a “firm policy” prohibiting any unit of Halliburton against trading with Iraq.

"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program “This Week” on July 30, 2000. "We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."

But it turns out that Cheney was lying. It’s only through the sale of Iraqi oil that Saddam would be able to afford to obtain such weapons. If Saddam was in fact building nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which some news reports allege could be used against American and British troops, Cheney is partially responsible.

The Washington Post first reported Halliburton’s trade with Iraq in February 2000. But U.N. records obtained by The Post two years ago showed that the dealings were more extensive than originally reported and than Vice President Cheney has acknowledged.

As secretary of defence in the first Bush administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein's government. After Cheney was named chief executive of Halliburton in 1995, he promised to maintain a hard line against Baghdad.

But his stance changed when it appeared that Halliburton was headed for financial disaster in the mid-1990s.
Cheney said sanctions against countries such as Iraq were hurting corporations such as Halliburton.
"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government,” Cheney said at an energy conference in April 1996, reported in the oil industry publication Petroleum Finance Week. “The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments," he observed during his conference presentation.
Sanctions make U.S. businesses "the bystander who gets hit when a train wreck occurs," Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. “While virtually every other country sees the need for sanctions against Iraq and Saddam Hussein's regime there, Cheney sees general agreement that the measures have not been very effective despite their having most of the international community's support. An individual country's embargo, such as that of the United States against Iran, has virtually no effect since the target country simply signs a contract with a non- U.S. business,” the publication reported

“That's exactly what happened when the government told Conoco Inc. that it could not develop an oil field there," Cheney told Petroleum Finance Week. Total S.A. "simply took it over."

In 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton's acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc., the unit that sold oil equipment to Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large U.S. equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.

The Halliburton subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show. Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts -- later blocked by the United States -- to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led military forces destroyed in the Gulf War, the Post reported in a June 2001 story.

The Halliburton subsidiaries and several other American and foreign oil supply companies helped Iraq increase its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in 2000. Since the program began, Iraq has exported oil worth more than $40 billion.

U.S. and European officials have argued that the increase in production also expanded Saddam’s ability to use some of that money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program, according to the Post.

During his tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Cheney pushed the U.N. Security Council, after he became vice president; to end an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil related equipment, to Iraq. Cheney has said sanctions against countries like Iraq unfairly punish US companies.

Earlier this year, Halliburton was chosen as one of the companies to rebuild Iraq’s dilapidated oil fields following a US led attack on the country.

UN documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had controversial, dealings with the Iraqi regime during Cheney’s tenure at the company. The Clinton administration blocked one of the deals Halliburton was trying to push through. That deal, between Halliburton subsidiary Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq, included agreements by the firm to sell $760,000 in spare parts, compressors and firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al Amaya.

The Clinton administration blocked the sale because it was "not authorised under the oil-for-food deal," according to UN documents. Under the oil-for-food program, Iraq is allowed to export crude oil and the money is supposed to be used to help remove some of the hardships on Iraqi civilians affected by the UN sanctions.

close

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Enterprising Hawk
By Jason Leopold
March 28, 2003
Richard Perle’s resignation Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, is long overdue. Perle quit the board because he was hired to help bankrupt telecommunications firm Global Crossing win approval from the Department of Defense to sell the company to a Hong Kong billionaire and lawmakers questioned whether Perle’s dual roles was a conflict-of-interest.

Presumably, Global Crossing hired Perle, who served as assistant secretary of defense under former President Ronald Reagan, as a lobbyist because he wields an enormous amount of power around the Pentagon and would likely get the job done. Perle is a key adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a leading architect in the Bush administration’s policies toward Iraq.

The Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation objected to Global Crossing’s sale to Asian investors last year because the government uses Global Crossing’s fiber optics networks and a sale would put the networks under control of the Chinese government. Global Crossing said it would pay Perle $125,000 and an additional $600,000 if the deal went through.

Perle denied Thursday that his unpaid advisory role on the policy board would have interfered with his lobbying on behalf of Global Crossing, which is mired in shareholder lawsuits as a result of its questionable accounting practices. But Perle has a long history of using his influential role as a government adviser to line his pockets.

“Richard Perle…has made a lucrative career out of some bald conflicts of interest,” wrote Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University media professor, in the Free Press in 2000. “As an Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security under Ronald Reagan, he got in some slight trouble when he wrote a memorandum urging the department to consider buying equipment from a company that had paid him a $50,000 consulting fee (as the the New York Times noted back in 1984). As chairman and CEO of Hollinger Digital (owned by media titan Conrad Black), Perle maintains his close connections with the military industries. For example, as a non-executive director of Morgan Crucible, PLC (UK), which has done business with the Pentagon...”

Moreover, Perle was also a director of Memorex Corp., a defense contractor, in the 1990s while he was advising then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the first Bush administration. At the same time, Perle also was a paid consultant to a Turkish-hired lobbying firm in Washington and has been both an adviser to FMC Corp. and a director of an FMC-Turkish joint venture building military equipment. It should be noted that during Perle’s tenure in the Reagan administration he was a fierce proponent of aid to Turkey’s military.

In 1987, the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel opened an inquiry into whether Perle’s attempts to write a fictional novel based on classified intelligence information were a conflict-of-interest. At the time, Perle was offered a $300,000 advance for the novel, titled “Memoranda.”

The proposal for the novel described an inside look at the bureaucracy and promised a plot that seemed a thinly veiled account of Perle's long-running internecine struggle with former assistant secretary of state Richard R. Burt. It promised “an array of bureaucratic maneuvers recounted in the context of actual events altered only enough to make them publishable, to preserve the fiction in “Memoranda.”

In April of 1987, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the former ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote an angry letter to Reagan suggesting that Perle’s book “creates a climate encouraging disrespect for the protection of classified information” and might have “a chilling effect on the candor of {officials'} policy analysis and recommendations.” Nunn also raised questions about the propriety of the sale of the book during Perle's tenure in office.

In response to the inquiries, Perle resigned his post as assistant secretary of defense in April 1987 to write the book. The title was later changed to "Hard Line".

close

 

 

Rummy's Failed War Plan And The Casualties That May Result

By Jason Leopold
published here March 31, 2003

Last October, the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered the military’s regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence and speedier deployment in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq. That war plan, which Rumsfeld helped shape, has now failed and has led to deep divisions between military commanders and the defense secretary, according to news reports.

Despite Rumsfeld’s recent denials that he did not override requests by military brass to deploy more ground troops in Iraq, he told the Times last year that the cornerstone of the war plan against Iraq was to use fewer ground troops, a move that caused consternation among some in the military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical superiority to assure victory, the Times reported in its Oct. 13, 2002 edition.

These officers said they view Rumsfeld's approach as injecting too much risk into war planning and have said it could result in U.S. casualties that might be prevented by amassing larger forces.

But Rumsfeld refused to listen to his military commanders, Pentagon officials told the Washington Post Saturday.

Rumsfeld said last year that his plan would allow “the military to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops than thought possible -- or thought wise -- before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” the Times reported.

“Looking at what was overwhelming force a decade or two decades ago, today you can have overwhelming force, conceivably, with lesser numbers because the lethality is equal to or greater than before” Rumsfeld told the Times.

The speedier use of smaller and more agile forces also could provide the president with time to order an offensive against Iraq that could be carried out this winter, the optimal season for combat in the desert, which is exactly what President Bush did.

The new approach for how the U.S. might go to war, Rumsfeld said last year, reflects an assessment of the need after Sept. 11 to refresh war plans continuously and to respond faster to threats from terrorists and nations possessing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, according to the Times.

Rumsfeld first laid the groundwork for a U.S. led invasion of Iraq shortly after the Sept. 11. Like his well-known, “Rumsfeld’s rules,”--http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2001/rumsfeldsrules.pdf--a collection of wisdom he has compiled over three decades on how to succeed in Washington, Rumsfeld’s checklist used the same methodical approach to determining when U.S. military force should be used in the event of war against Iraq.

Rumsfeld kept the checklist tucked away in his desk drawer at the Pentagon. Since last March, when it became clear that the Bush administration was leaning toward using military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime, Rumsfeld added what he said were important elements to the checklist to ensure the U.S. would be prepared for a full-scale war. But Rumsfeld and the Bush administration never lived up to the promises laid out in the checklist when the U.S. military bombed Baghdad. For example:

Casualties. Rumsfeld says the public "should not be allowed to believe an engagement could be executed . . . with few casualties." Yet the president and Rumsfeld didn’t prepare Americans for major casualties. Bush warned in an Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati that "military action could be difficult" and that there is no "easy or risk-free course of action."

* Risks. Rumsfeld warns that the risks of taking action "must be carefully considered" along with the dangers of doing nothing. The administration has repeatedly made the case against inaction -- the possibility that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons and strike the U.S. But it has not been equally candid about the dangers of action.

* Honesty. Rumsfeld urges U.S. leadership to be "brutally honest with itself, Congress, the public and coalition partners." Yet the administration has not produced compelling evidence to support its claims that Saddam is linked to al-Qaeda terrorists, is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons or intends to strike the U.S. To the contrary, the CIA has played down Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda and a possible first strike.

Rumsfeld said too many of the military plans on the shelves of the regional war-fighting commanders were freighted with outdated assumptions and military requirements, which have changed with the advent of new weapons and doctrines.

It has been a mistake, he said, to measure the quantity of forces required for a mission and “fail to look at lethality, where you end up with precision-guided munitions, which can give you 10 times the lethality that a dumb weapon might, as an example,” according to the Times report.

Through a combination of pre-deployments, faster cargo ships and a larger fleet of transport aircraft, the military would be able to deliver "fewer troops but in a faster time that would allow you to have concentrated power that would have the same effect as waiting longer with what a bigger force might have” Rumsfeld said.

Critics in the military said last year there were several reasons to deploy a force of overwhelming numbers before starting any offensive with Iraq. Large numbers illustrate U.S. resolve and can intimidate Iraqi forces into laying down their arms or even turning against Hussein's government.

Large numbers in the region also would be required should the initial offensive go badly. Also, once victory is at hand, it might require an even larger force to pacify Iraq and search for weapons of mass destruction than it took to topple Hussein.

According to Defense Department sources, Rumsfeld at first insisted that vast air superiority and a degraded Iraqi military would enable 75,000 U.S. troops to win the war. Gen. Tommy Franks, the theater commander-in-chief, convinced Rumsfeld to send 250,000 (augmented by 45,000 British). However, the Army would have preferred a much deeper force, leading to anxiety inside the Pentagon in the first week of war, conservative columnist Bob Novak reported last week.

While Army officers would have preferred a larger commitment, even what was finally approved for Operation Iraqi Freedom was reduced when the 4th Infantry Division was denied Turkey as a base to invade northern Iraq. The Defense and State departments point fingers. Secretary of State Colin Powell is criticized for not flying to Ankara to convince the Turkish government. The Pentagon is criticized for not immediately dispatching the division via the Red Sea, Novak reported.

To the critics who said last year that Rumsfeld is accepting too much risk in U.S. war planning, Rumsfeld said he had ordered rigorous reviews and was satisfied. "We are prepared for the worst case,” he told the Times.

close

The Reality of War Sinks In With Casualties of U.S. and British Soldiers
By Jason Leopold
March 26, 2003
I hope the stock market gets hammered. I hope the Iraqis set fire to as many oil fields as possible. I hope oil prices in the United States surge and shortages persist. I hope the antiwar protestors become disobedient. I hope the economy never recovers. I hope Iraq doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction. I hope our troops make it home alive.

This is the only way to drive home the point that war is brutal no matter who the enemy is. After the bombs dropped on Baghdad and hundreds of Iraqi soldiers surrendered to U.S. and British troops, the pundits on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC reported that the war could end within a month.

“Nonsense,” I said.

This war would be an easy victory for the U.S. and its allies, the cable news outlets said. Kind of like watching the Los Angeles Lakers pummel the Los Angeles Clippers. Reaction here to the commentaries and the real-time images was swift. The stock market soared. Oil prices plummeted. It appears that the outcome of the war is measured by how well the Dow Jones Industrial Average performs

Since last Wednesday, I have been glued to the television, watching in shock and awe how the pundits on the cable news outlets reported on the conflict like it was some sort of sporting event. The television and print reporters covering the war failed to ask any questions about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and where they were hidden. It’s as if the media forgot the reasons the Bush administration said we were invading Iraq in the first place.

Then last weekend, the realities of war set. A few military helicopters crashed. U.S. and British soldiers died. On Saturday, a dozen American soldiers were captured and may have been executed in an ambush by Iraqi soldiers, which was aired on an Arab news station. President Bush warned that if U.S. soldiers were executed it would violate the Geneva Convention and that those responsible would be prosecuted for war crimes.

Excuse me for being cynical, but for a president who only last week promised to eradicate Saddam Hussein’s regime and everyone who fights on behalf of it, why would Iraqi soldiers abide by the rules of war? What’s the incentive? The way they see it they’re dead men walking.

Reaction here to the two-dozen U.S. and British casualties in the four-day war has been anger, frustration, even disbelief. And the ground war against Iraq’s elite Republican Guard—which promises to bring even more U.S. and British combat deaths—hasn’t even started yet.

What this proves is that the public can’t and won’t accept the loss of U.S. life in exchange for the Bush administration’s goal of overthrowing Saddam and liberating the Iraqi people. Nor should they.

Sure, the U.S. will prevail. We will win this war. Saddam will be history. Iraqi’s will be free. But it will come at a cost. Only when the reality of war sets in, when mothers lose their sons, wives lose their husbands and children lose their fathers and mothers will people start to question the motives of invading a country that so far has proved to be nothing more than a nuisance to the U.S., not a threat.

close

 

 

 

 

 

 

 More links to Jason Leopold on the web

By Jason Leopold : http://www.bigwig.net/softwaredesign/by_jason_leopold.htm

Scoop: Jason Leopold – Shafted By The New York Times

Jason Leopold: How Enron Helped the Secretary of the Army Build ... ... How Enron Helped Army Secretary Thomas White Build an $8 Million Fortress. by JASON LEOPOLD.

Jason Leopold 2/12/03 - It’s the Oil, Stupid ... By Jason Leopold. Why is it so difficult to accept the fact that America’s thirst for oil is the primary reason for waging a war against Iraq? ...

Column: Jason Leopold. The Year According To Bush. By Jason Leopold ...

close links

page content now loading — please wait