Arab silence over WMD scandal is perplexing
| By Ramzy Baroud, Special to Gulf News | 16-02-2004
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Weapons of mass destruction scandals are gaining momentum in the United States as well as Britain. The two major war allies, who violated Iraq's sovereignty without an international mandate last year, are now scrambling to show that they were simply behaving with honourable motives when they marched into Baghdad, leaving behind uncounted corpses of innocent Iraqis.
The intelligence was botched, tampered with and "sexed up". As a result, an inquiry in the US is about to unfold while new ones (aside from the baffling Hutton report that oddly enough exonerated British Prime Minister Tony Blair) are expected to be unleashed in Britain soon.
Analysts everywhere predict the scandals will persist for quite a while. Political scapegoats have either been located, or are in the making: The BBC is paying for Blair's inflated intelligence, while the CIA's George Tenet is likely candidate to be blamed for the Americans' own fraudulent war pretences.
Expectedly, the opposition in both countries is learning how to exploit the WMD sham in their favour. US Democratic presidential candidates' nit-picking obliged President Bush to agree to an independent inquiry. "I, too, want to know the facts," a suddenly doubtful Bush told reporters.
Meanwhile in Britain, despite his undeserved exoneration, one can hardly claim that Blair emerged from the tragic death of Dr. David Kelly unscathed; the prime minister's record is now dotted with discord.
The British public is little impressed with his performance, especially with people such as Robin Cook tailgating him. "Now that even the White House has admitted they may have got it wrong, it's embarrassing to watch our government still trying to deny reality. The game is up," the former foreign secretary said.
Every frivolous detail that was once seen as fleeting and inconsequential is likely to be brought up, time and again. I doubt if we've seen the last of BBC's Andrew Gilligan. But, it's almost certain that former US Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neil, who revealed Bush's intentions to oust Saddam Hussain from power even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, will make more informative TV appearances in the near future. The political consequences of his revelations are now more pertinent than ever before.
But still, justice is far from being served in Iraq. Little can be done to bring back those who so unjustly perished, the collateral damage of Bush's quest to rid the world of alleged WMDs.
Much is still at stake for this corroding Arab country, whose freedom from tyranny came at a more unbearable price, a vile occupation with an unmatched disregard for human rights. Not a day passes without Iraqi blood being shed, in the name of "liberty and freedom". Nonetheless, one can hardly hide an inner reverberation of moral vindication.
Those who genuinely opposed the war knew that all hell was about to break loose in Iraq, considering the many alarming factors already at play, including the fundamentalist mindset of Bush's ruling elite, rooted in a strange mix of religious zealots, ideologues and corporate interests.
This moral vindication must be used to re-charge efforts to bring an end to the international crisis created by this band, which shrewdly employed the justified fear of terrorism to espouse re-calculated wars, evoking more anxiety and greater chances of violence.
Yet, what I find most disheartening, is the inability of Arab governments to assume any significant role in holding the American and British governments accountable for their deceit.
After all, long after the imminent departure of the invading armies, it's the Arab world that will be left with the responsibility of patching up the future of the region, of which Iraq is key.
Allowing the US and Britain to maintain their pre-emptive logic will keep Arab countries at the centre of Washington and London's wargames. What it greatly needed is a collective and robust international stand, centred in the Arab world, aimed at countering the seemingly unchallenged US foreign policy and imperial designs.
To achieve this, Arabs must cease falling into their reactive role, only rejecting accusations of aiding or harbouring terrorists but never pro-actively confronting Washington and its neo-conservative band. Destabilising the US and British administrations in this particular time is essential, but only useful as a short-term strategy.
For the long run, a more concrete and viable alliance must be forged, where countries that oppose such unwarranted military occupation as Iraq's, along with Arab countries, work to remove the shadow of war and uncertainty imposed by the US and its so-called coalition.
Arabs must abandon their standard position of simply fighting off accusations, and take part in mounting a pressure campaign against those who led an illegitimate war in the hunt for weapons that only seemed to exist only in "sexed up" intelligence reports.
Ramzy Baroud is an American-Arab journalist.
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