- I see in the papers, John, that our government has decided
that we will maintain physical custody of Saddam Hussein even after the
June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government. An anonymous
official told Associated Press the reason is the Iraqis do not have a prison
safe enough to hold Saddam, and I suppose there may be some concern that
if the Iraqi interim government got their hands on him there may be no
need for a "trial." They might sooner have him "die of natural
causes" in his cell rather than have him answer the charges of war
crimes, which have yet to be brought against him. But I now wonder why
he is being held at all?
-
- If you think about it, 18 months ago Saddam Hussein was
sitting in his office, the duly constituted president and prime minister
of Iraq, minding his own business. The United States did not have diplomatic
relations with Iraq and so did not formally recognize him as head of state.
But most of the rest of the world did, and Iraq had a seat at the United
Nations and in its proper rotation could even take a seat on the Security
Council. It was at this point that President Bush decided Saddam had weapons
of destruction and was conspiring with Al Qaeda to menace peace-loving
nations like the United States. He took his assertions to the UN Security
Council and the Council agreed by a 15-to-0 vote to demand Saddam permit
UN inspectors back into Iraq to search for the WMD. If you followed the
U.N. proceedings over the following months, you will find that Baghdad
fully complied with every demand made upon it by the Security Council.
-
- Even if you missed the TV coverage, if you read the papers
carefully you would find no instance where Saddam thumbed his nose at the
Council. When he read of accounts from President Bush, Vice President Cheney
and Secretary of State Powell that he was still hiding stuff from the inspectors
that our CIA knew about, he said he would invite the CIA to come and look
in every nook and cranny. Remember? And when the UN inspectors were given
tips by the CIA on places to search for WMD, they did so and found no traces
of WMD. Not a teensy weensy bit of evidence. So when President Bush asked
the Security Council for a resolution backing a war with Iraq, the Council
turned him down. The other members pointed out that U.N. diplomacy had
indeed worked and that the inspectors could clean up the last bits and
pieces in a few months and certify that Iraq was absolutely clean.
-
- President Bush did have authorization from the U.S. Congress
to go to war with Iraq to get his WMD, but the resolution required that
before he committed troops he had to certify in letters to the House and
Senate that diplomacy had failed. Mr. Bush sent such letters to the House
and Senate two days before our generals led coalition troops into Iraq
from Kuwait. Some members of Congress objected, but what could they do
but sit back and wait for our troops to defeat the Iraqi army and then
locate the hidden WMD?
-
- As we now know, Saddam Hussein was telling the truth.
He had no WMD, had in fact gotten rid of them in 1991 when the U.N. passed
a resolution demanding that he do so. Well, the administration of which
you are the chief legal officer then insisted the war was justified because
of Al Qaeda connections to Saddam's regime. We don't need a permission
slip from the UNSC if we see there is a potential threat from a government
somewhere, anywhere, that might develop WMD and give them to Al Qaeda,
who would then sneak them into the United States and cause catastrophic
loss of life. But now we find Saddam was absolutely telling the truth that
he had no contact with Al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden and that the one overture
that came from Al Qaeda to an Iraqi official several years ago, asking
assistance from Baghdad, was rebuffed. Apparently our intelligence agencies
knew all this, as the 9-11 Commission has since discovered, but the administration
you serve chose to believe otherwise. The war went forward and the mission
was accomplished, at least in its formal military phase. Estimates of the
number of Iraqi military and militiamen killed in combat range as high
as 60,000 and estimates of the collateral damage to civilians range from
16,000 to 35,000 deaths.
-
- Saddam Hussein was eventually located in his spider hole
and whisked away, put under lock and key in a secure prison, with the idea
that he would eventually be turned over to a duly constituted court of
law and tried as a war criminal. President Bush on many occasions has pointed
out that Iraq is better off without Saddam because his regime was known
to have used "torture and rape rooms" at Al Ghraib prison. Now
you know President Bush did not order our military people to use those
same rooms to rape and torture Iraqi "detainees." He says so
and I believe him. But I wonder if you have evidence that Saddam ordered
the Iraqi state or local police to "torture and rape," or might
he also insist as Mr. Bush has that he was at the tippy top of the national
government and if he had known what excesses were committed by local cops,
he would have put a stop to it.
-
- To tell you the truth, John, as far as I can recall,
there have been no assertions of the "brutality" of Saddam's
regime from anyone but the Iraqi exiles associated with Ahmet Chalabi or
those Kurds who fought on the Iranian side in the Iran/Iraq war. There
are all kinds of anecdotes about Saddam doing dreadful things, entire books
written about them, but the source of all of them is the same pool of people
who have been feeding faked "evidence" of WMD and Al Qaeda connections
to our government. Can it be that there is nothing that Saddam has done
all these years that cannot be justified as the permissible acts of a head
of state acting in defense of his people. Yes, he invaded Kuwait in 1990,
but in retrospect that was a really easy war to justify, given the economic
warfare being conducted against Iraq by the Emir of Kuwait. I mean easy
in relation to now having to justify this American invasion and destruction
of good chunks of Iraq, on false premises.
-
- President Bush still has it in his head that Saddam tried
to assassinate his father in 1993, but if you did the smallest bit of digging
you would find this was a hoax perpetrated by the neo-cons. The President
also has it in his head that Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds
in 1988, killing tens of thousands of them with poison gas and/or machine
guns. If you lifted a little pinky to get to the bottom of this story,
you will find it is also made of neo-con whole cloth. I'm not making wild
assertions, John, because I have spent countless hours on this subject
and find no loopholes left. Just call Human Rights Watch and ask if they
have yet found the mass graves of those tens of thousands of Kurds and
they will sheepishly admit they are still looking.
-
- I'll have to admit there is no easy way out for the Bush
administration in explaining how it could have been snookered from first
to last about Saddam Hussein. I'm not suggesting you ask to meet with the
President and tell him he should go on TV and tell the American people
he made a Bigtime Boo-Boo. I'm only suggesting you go back to your law
books and, for your own good, get a good grip on why Saddam Hussein is
behind bars when it now turns out he doesn't seem to have done anything
wrong. You might then be in a better position to advise the President on
how to proceed in the best way to avoid further Bigtime Boo-Boos.
-
-
- All contents (c) 2000-2004 Wanniski.com
- http://wanniski.comhttp://wanniski.com
-
- Learn more about the Wanniski.com investment newsletter
- http://wanniski.com/info.asp http://wanniski.com/info.asp
-
- http://wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=3643
|
