The Bush Administration’s case for war centers on two claims: One, Iraq has not destroyed its banned weapons and is a threat to us. Two, an invasion of Iraq to destroy these weapons will increase our security. Recent evidence suggests that both these claims are false.
Much of the evidence about Iraq’s weapons has been fabricated. The Washington Post reported on March 8 that documents linking Iraq to purchases of African uranium were forgeries and that U.N. inspectors “all but ruled out” that Iraq could use aluminum tubes for making nuclear weapons.
The U.N. inspectors’ report of March 6 proves that Iraq cannot have the 1.5 tons of VX nerve gas the U.S. claims it is hiding. The gas cannot still be dangerous because the method of its manufacture would lead to its decomposition within a few months. Iraq stopped producing VX in 1990, thus any stocks have long since become harmless.
A secret U.N. transcript, first reported in a March 3rd Newsweek article, apparently shows that Iraq destroyed its banned weapons. The transcript is from the interrogation of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law who defected in 1995. In this transcript he said “all weapons — biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed.” Kamel’s story is very credible because he had everything to gain from saying that Iraq was hiding weapons and everything to lose from saying it destroyed them. He was sent back to Iraq (where he was murdered by Saddam) because he wasn’t telling the right story for our government’s purposes, and would presumably have gained asylum if he claimed Iraq had banned weapons. It is of course possible that Iraq manufactured banned weapons after his defection, but the U.S. case centers on unaccounted weapons made before the Gulf War. The Kamel transcript, if truthful, casts doubt on this justification. (As a side note, the missiles fired at Kuwait by Iraq were not SCUDs, but shorter-ranged missiles Iraq is allowed to have, according to the March 21st Ha’aretz, Israel’s leading newspaper.)
FBI agent Colleen Rowley, the whistleblower during the investigation of Sept. 11, published a letter in the March 5 New York Times. In this letter, she says, “The diversion of attention from Al-Qaeda to our government’s plan to invade Iraq” weakens the “FBI’s top priority,” “the prevention of another terrorist attack.” She says an invasion “will, in all likelihood, bring an exponential increase in the terrorist threat to the U.S.” She goes on to say there is not “any way the FBI … will be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq.” She claims that neither Zacarias Moussaoui, believed to be the 20th Sept. 11th hijacker, nor Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber, have been interrogated by the FBI. This is shocking to me in light of the potential for, in her words, “a rash of 9-11s” following an attack on Iraq and the obvious fact that both Moussaoui and Reid had to have accomplices in our country and Europe.
In addition to the unpreparedness of our domestic security, our troops in Iraq are unprepared for chemical attack (assuming Iraq has any such weapons). The General Accounting Office said that “more than half” of the Army’s gas masks are either “completely broken or not fully operational,” according to the Dec. 26, 2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Some 250,000 defective suits were in the Pentagon’s inventory last year, but they don’t know how many they still have or where they are.
The hidden evidence contradicting the Administration and fabrication of other evidence supporting it is clear proof that someone — a foreign power, a faction within our government or an interest group outside it — is manipulating the facts to bring this nation into war. This is a war that we are unprepared to fight, and if the evidence I cited is correct, one we do not need to fight because Iraq’s weapons are far less potent than the government claims. I fear that, similar to the lead up to the Vietnam War, when attacks on U.S. ships were falsified, the weapons scare was manufactured and like in that conflict, it will take years and many dead Americans before we know the real reasons for war.