From Toronto yet! You don't have to dig deep to justify the war in Iraq
Jun. 2, 2003. 01:00 AM
ROSIE DIMANNO
thestar.com
The purported lies of war in Iraq are a source of embarrassment and exhaustive examination. But the truth of it, of war's justification, is being daily unearthed.
Thousands upon thousands of rotting corpses and blanched bones dug up from mass graves throughout the country.
Slaughtered human beings. Men and women and youths. Political prisoners, their hands bound behind their backs, dispatched with a bullet to the head. Others apparently buried alive. Shiite and Sufi and Christian. Suspected dissidents, irritants to the barbaric Saddam Hussein regime, those merely guilty by association or tittle-tattle accusation. Intellectuals. Poets and artists. Clergy.
Three thousand of them outside the village of Mahawil in central Iraq, victims of the brutally suppressed Shiite revolution in 1991, when coalition forces stood by, on Washington's orders, however disgusted those troops were by their own forced paralysis, as government death squads wiped out the opposition.
In Muhammad Sakran, 40 kilometres north of Baghdad: 1,000 executed prisoners. In Basra, Iraq's second-largest city and a Shiite stronghold: 150 corpses retrieved. In Hilla, southeast of Karbala: 3,000 bodies pulled from the soil.
Outside Block 5 at Abu Ghraid prison, 14 kilometres from the capital, maddened relatives clawed at the ground of a shallow pit searching for remains of their loved ones.
Some six weeks ago, I had wandered by myself through the vast, spooky complex, trying to avoid numerous feral dogs padding along the corridors. I should have followed the dogs instead. It was their power of scent that only a few days later discovered the sloppy grave behind Block 5. Those victims, as forensic examination would reveal, had been murdered just a fortnight earlier. Even as American troops were advancing upon Abu Ghraid, Iraq continued to execute its own people, this final batch of suspected spies all the inmates that remained in a prison that once housed more than 10,000.
The killing never stopped. Not at Abu Ghraid, not anywhere else in Iraq. Some 300,000 Iraqis disappeared during 35 years of Baath party misrule. It was a self-inflicted genocide, Iraqi upon Iraqi. No one knows yet and probably ever will how many were thus slaughtered, methodically and on an epic scale, to say nothing of the much larger number who were jailed, tortured and ultimately released, forever carrying the physical and psychological scars.
American teams of investigators assigned to the task have discovered and excavated numerous mass graves since the liberation of Iraq. Yet these represent only a fraction, undoubtedly, of the killing and internment fields. The evidence is scattered throughout a country the size of France, in unmarked death pits, even as cattle and goats now graze across the stubbly pastures grown over the terrain above.
What lies beneath are not weapons of mass destruction — the catalyst for an Anglo-American invasion and liberation of Iraq. But this is the pith and grotesquerie of Saddam's Iraq and always, always, the most compelling reason for invading that country. Because these were a brutalized people, ravaged and savaged. And for 35 years — even through Gulf War I, after the targeting gassing of ethnic Kurds — the international community did almost nothing about it. Only belatedly did the West even establish protected no-fly zones for the endlessly persecuted Kurds.
I do not understand why. Because the geopolitics weren't right? Because Saddam was once an ally of the West and a putative bulwark against revolutionary Islam as triumphant in neighbouring Iran, thus a threat to Western interests? Because they were Muslims and Arabs, not people of our tribe? All have been cited as reasons for turning a blind eye and tolerating the intolerable.
It is our disgrace, the West's disgrace, that we didn't stop it, didn't intervene during all those years when Saddam's murderous apparatus inflicted such sweeping cruelties on Iraqis. He took a functioning country, with vast resources and tremendous potential, with a skilled and educated populace, and incapacitated it, rendered it utterly deranged, bled it of all spirit.
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It is our disgrace, the West's disgrace, that we didn't step in sooner to stop Saddam
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It is our disgrace too that only the spectre of apocalyptic weapons — a potential threat against us — proved sufficient motivation for a commitment to regime change.
Did Washington and London lie about the extent or imminence of that threat? Were they misinformed by their own intelligence network? No to the former, perhaps to the latter. But Saddam Hussein never acted like a man who didn't have weapons of mass destruction to hide with his nose-thumbing of United Nations disarmament.
Those catastrophic weapons might still be there — I believe they are — as yet undiscovered by investigators. They may have been destroyed — as some Iraqi scientists now in American hands have claimed — just prior to the U.S.-led invasion. They may be store-housed elsewhere, perhaps Syria, although that seems singularly unwise.
Does it matter greatly if no such weapons are ever found? It shouldn't. Because fear of those weapons was never a flimsy fig-leaf cover for invasion and no amount of revisionist argument will ever render it so.
There has been much controversy in recent days over a remark made by U.S. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vanity Fair for an article in its upcoming issue. Wolfowitz is an unusually candid member of President George W. Bush's inner coterie and purported architect of America's bold, democratizing vision of the Middle East (for which an Iraqi invasion was a vital component).
In discussing the justification for war, Wolfowitz is quoted as offering this incendiary observation: "For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."
On the surface, a high-level contradiction of the administration's reasons for waging war. Guaranteed to elicit howls of outrage from the peaceniks, conspiracy theorists and vehemently anti-U.S. factions, precious few of whom have acknowledged that anything good came of the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, despite overwhelming evidence that Iraqis were hugely grateful for it.
But in a TV interview the other night, the magazine article's author, Sam Tanenhaus, admitted — with nary a trace of discomfort — that the quote was not reported in its entirety. He could hardly do otherwise, given that the tape-recorded transcript of the telephone interview is posted on the Pentagon's Web site. What Wolfowitz said:
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason."
After breaking off to take another call, Wolfowitz returned to Tanenhaus and continued: "There have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually, I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one, which is the connection between the first two."
That strikes me as an unforgivable journalistic omission — selective, abbreviated quoting. Deliberately or otherwise, the writer has misrepresented the comment.
Wolfowitz let no snarling cat out of the bag. There was always a slate of reasons for invading Iraq, some more compelling than others, some more publicly palatable than others. How shameful that the most compelling reason of all — the suffering and slaughter of Iraqis — still has such feeble merit among those who presume to care most about peace and human rights.
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Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. E-mail: dimanno@hotstar.net
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