James van Luik
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Wednesday, February 15th,
2006
Volume 5, No. 2
1
Article, 13 Pages
THE AMERICAN WAR ON IRAN, BASED ON LIES, IS IN ITS FINAL STAGES OF PREPARATION
BY
SCOTT
RITTER
I
wish we were here to talk about how good things are happening in
the cause of peace, how congress has reversed course and they’re
bringing our boys and girls home, how the Bush administration has
woke up suddenly and said, ‘you know, this concept of global
domination through the unilateral application of military force
is not sound policy,’ and the Democrats woke up for the
first time in a long time and said, ‘you know, we
facilitated this war in Iraq. We’re as much to blame as
George W. Bush.’ But that’s not the case. We live in a
time where bad things are happening. .. .
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, we live in very sad times, and, if you reflect long and hard on the reality of the issue, as I’m sure everyone in this room does, not just sad times but depressing times. I’m not going to say much here tonight that’s going to give you hope because there’s not much to be hopeful about.
We
are in a war that shows no inclination of ever ending. Yes, there’s
a lot of rhetoric in congress now about ‘let’s create
new benchmarks that need to be fulfilled in Iraq so that we can
have a time table of bringing the troops home.’ But, ladies
and gentlemen, that’s just political rhetoric because the
benchmarks they talk about putting in place are unrealistic.
Therefore, there will never be a time line.
And
let’s keep in mind that this is a congress that voted for
the war, Republican and Democrat alike, and they are trapped by
that vote to the extent that they cannot meaningfully interfere
with the Bush administration’s plans on Iraq, and the plans
of the Bush administration regarding Iraq was most recently
articulated by Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, when she
told the congress of the United States that we will be in Iraq
for at least ten years.
All
right, this is the reality. See, I told you that it wasn’t
going to be very uplifting. This is the reality, and we have to
deal with the reality, because if we don’t deal with the
reality, if we don’t have a true grasp of what is happening
as we speak, there cannot be a solution. Now one of the things
that they pounded in my head early on when I joined the Marine
Corps was that, before we talk about finding an answer,
Lieutenant (because every Lieutenant has a solution to every
problem in the world. We were the smartest people on the face of
the Earth. I’m sure you businesspeople see that with your
young executives. High school teachers see that with every new
student that comes in. They’re the smartest, the brightest.
They have the answer to everything. ) we must ask which problem
are we solving?
Don’t
talk to me about a solution until you’ve defined the
problem, and right now, in Washington, D.C. and right across the
country, we’ve got a whole host of people now that suddenly
are anti-war. It’s amazing how many anti-war people have
come out of the woodwork now that President Bush’s
popularity ratings have plummeted down to an all-time low. Where
were these people of courage when we needed them? Where were they
when they could have made a difference, when they could have
stopped the war? Well, they weren’t anti-war back then
because it wasn’t convenient to be anti-war. You see, the
President had high popularity ratings.
People
were trapped by their own ignorance and the fear that is induced
by ignorance so that they could not stand up and speak truth to
power because, frankly speaking, most people didn’t know
what the truth was. We were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons
of mass destruction, massive stockpiles of weapons of mass
destruction, and, to be honest, most Americans didn’t have a
clue what a weapon of mass destruction was. They didn’t know
what chemical weapons were, biological weapons were, long-range
ballistic missiles. They might have a vague understanding of what
a nuclear weapon is, but not really, not what it takes to build a
nuclear weapon. They were so ignorant about nuclear weapons that
they bought into the argument that Iraq, a nation that is sitting
on many tons of yellow-cake uranium ore, would have to go to an
African country to buy new stockpiles. They were so ignorant
about nuclear weapons that they bought at face value Dick Cheney’s
proclamation that Iraq was acquiring aluminum tubes to build a
new family of centrifuges to enrich uranium when everybody who
deals with the enrichment of uranium using the centrifuge method
knows that aluminum tubes will never work. We don’t build
them with aluminum tubes. It doesn’t happen.
But,
no, the American people, informed as always about the
complexities of these very difficult issues, said ‘my gosh,
the President has said yellow cake, and Dick Cheney has said
aluminum tubes, and there must be a nuclear threat because
Condoleezza Rice has told us ‘we don’t want to wait for
the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.’ So like the
compliant little sheep that we are, we *bah, bah* get led down
the path towards a war that has been a disaster, an unmitigated
disaster, a war based on a lie, a war based on not just the
ignorance of the American public but the moral indifference of
those whom we elect to hire office to represent us in our name,
namely the congress of the United States of America.
A
lot of people want to call this George W. Bush’s war. It’s
a little convenient to say that, especially if you are a Democrat
or somebody who is not very fond of the Republican Party, either
a progressive, a Green, etc. It’s George W. Bush’s war.
Well, you know, if that’s what you’ve been calling it,
you’re wrong, and, remember, we’re looking for a
solution here tonight. We’re trying to find the way forward.
I already told you there’s not going to be a solution until
you’re honest about the problem, and, if you call this
George W. Bush’s war, you already have a problem of
definition because this isn’t George W. Bush’s war.
This is America’s war. This is Bill Clinton’s war. This
is the Congress of the United States’ war. This is an
indifferent American public’s war. This is our war. We’re
to blame. We’re responsible. We’re the ones that
facilitated this mad rush to insanity that has occurred in Iraq
today.
In
defense of Bill Clinton, and I don’t often speak in defense
of Bill Clinton, but, in defense of Bill Clinton, he inherited a
problem. You see, the Iraq problem wasn’t something that
Bill Clinton made up. When he came into office in 1993, we
already had an Iraq policy in place, the Iraq policy of George
Herbert Walker Bush, Papa Bush. You know, the big Bush as opposed
to the Shrub. And Papa Bush had a policy that, in itself, was a
reactive policy on Iraq. See, this is one of the problems that we
face, not just in terms of foreign policy, but I’ll tell you
it’s a problem we face as an anti-war movement, and I call
myself part of the anti-war movement even though I’m not a
pacifist. I’m anti-war, and I’ve been to war. I know
what war is about. War is the most horrible thing mankind can
inflict on mankind because war is only about man killing man.
There’s nothing else. That’s what it does. What happens
when you go to war? I’m anti-war, and here we are reacting.
Where’s
the proactive thought in the peace movement? We’re reacting.
Bush does this; let’s have a demonstration against what Bush
does. Congress does this; let’s have a demonstration against
what congress does. Well, what the hell do we stand for? I know
what we’re against, but what do we stand for? Where’s
our proactive policy? But this isn’t just a problem of the
peace movement. It’s a problem of the United States. This is
how we got into Iraq to begin with, because we’re reacting.
We’re not proactive.
When
we first started with Saddam Hussein’s government, he was a
terrorist sponsor. He was a client of the Soviet Union. He was an
enemy of the United States of America. This was in the 1970’s.
He was somebody who gave safe haven to the Peoples’
Liberation Organization of the Palestinians, and then, in 1979,
the good ally of America, the Shah suddenly isn’t in power
in Iran, Iraq’s neighbor, anymore. Someone named Ayatollah
Khomeini takes over, and Iran, instead of being a bastion of
western-style, American thinking and defense against the Soviet
Union, becomes this festering cesspool of anti-American
sentiment, and Iraq, which was a state sponsor of terror,
suddenly becomes an ally of convenience, a secular bulwark
against the expansion of Islamic fundamentalism coming out of
Iran, and Saddam Hussein, a state sponsor of terror, now becomes
a critical ally of the United States.
So
critical, in fact, that we turned a blind eye to Iraq’s
policies against the state of Israel. We turned a blind eye
against Iraq’s oppressive policies at home. We turned a
blind eye to Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of chemical
weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, and long-range
ballistic missiles. So long as Iraq is in the business of killing
Iranians and holding the Iranians in check, Saddam’s a good
guy, so good, in fact, that George Herbert Walker Bush sends a
delegation to Iraq in the spring of 1990, led by a Republican
Senator named Bob Dole, who embraces Saddam Hussein and calls him
a true friend of the American people. A true friend of the
American People. This state sponsor of terror in the 1970’s
now, in March of 1990, is a true friend of the American people.
And
most Americans turn on their TV, take a look at the news, read
the headlines, and go ‘that’s Saddam. Good guy. Two
thumbs up for Saddam. He’s a true friend of the American
people.’ Except in August 1990, this true friend of the
American people invades Kuwait, and now the President of the
United States has to convince the American people that it’s
in the national interest to mobilize 700,000 American troops to
go off and fight in a war against this true friend of the
American people. Now how does he explain the shift? Is the
President going to be honest and talk about the complexities of
the relationship? Is he going to talk about the fact that we had
a policy of constructive engagement with Saddam, that, yes, we
recognized how bad this man was, but we needed him to stand up
against the Iranians, and, now that the Iran-Iraq war is over, we
need to make sure that Saddam doesn’t depart out of the
fold, so we constructively engaged with him.
We
gave him billions of dollars of agricultural loans that he
diverted to acquire chemical and biological weapons, and we knew
this but we didn’t do anything to stop it, that we knew that
he was building weapons that threatened the state of Israel,
which was why Israel threatened to attack Iraq, which was why
Iraq threatened to burn half the state of Israel? Do we get into
the honesty and the complexity of this problem? Is that the kind
of relationship we have with our politicians? Of course not. A
general once told me, “when you’re explaining, you’re
losing, son. It doesn’t matter if you’re right. If you’re
explaining, you’re losing.”
And
to have the President to stand up before the American people and
explain why we’re going to war, he’s losing
politically. I’ll give you a little insight into how
politicians really interact with the people of the United States
of America. They think we’re stupid. They think we’re
dumb. They don’t think we understand complex issues. And as
a result, they treat us like simple little children. That’s
why the President got up in October 1990 in an effort to convince
the American people that Saddam was no longer a true friend.
He
said Saddam Hussein’s now a personification of evil, one of
the most amazing transformations that’s taken place in
modern history. A man went from being a true friend of the United
States in March of 1990 to being the personification of evil in
October of 1990. Had the President left it at that, we would not
be at war with Iraq today. He took the next step, and he was on a
roll, you see.
He
was explaining things now to the American people. Saddam Hussein
is not just a personification of evil. He is the Middle East
equivalent of Adolph Hitler, requiring a Nuremburg-like
retribution for the crime of invading Kuwait and occupying
Kuwait.
Once
the President uses that language, he has eliminated any
possibility of a diplomatic solution, because, once you invoke
Hitler, you have invoked evil itself, and no American politician
can ever talk about negotiating with evil. Ladies and gentlemen,
the policy of regime change against Iraq began in October of 1990
when President George Herbert Walker Bush trapped himself with
his own rhetoric.
Now
how did he trap himself? Because we, the people of the United
States of America, are too stupid to say, ‘excuse me, Mr.
President, you used the term “Hitler” too loosely.
Saddam may be a bad guy, but he’s not Hitler, and we
disagree with your analysis.’ No, the dumb American people
went, ‘yeah, Hitler, evil. Yeah, we accept that.’ And
now we trapped our politicians in congress, you see, because, if
the constituents buy into the notion of Adolph Hitler, the
congressmen and women can’t deviate from this policy. Even
if congress said, ‘wait a minute. This is stupid. This is
bad policy. We need to go back to the policy of constructive
engagement,’ and, even as bad as that was, it’s better
than this rush to war. Now they can’t, you see, because, if
a congressman or woman says, ‘hey, I want to have
constructive engagement with Iraq,’ the voters will say,
‘wait a minute. That means you want to have constructive
engagement with Hitler, and nobody has constructive engagement
with Hitler. We’ve got to go to war. We’ve got to get
rid of this guy,’ because that’s what we talked about,
going to war.
Even
as the Security Council talked about a war of liberating Kuwait,
when George Herbert Walker Bush compares Saddam Hussein with
Adolph Hitler, it becomes a war against evil, a struggle of good
versus evil of biblical proportions that can only be terminated
when George H. W. Bush delivers Saddam Hussein’s head on a
platter. That’s what he wanted. I fought in that war. Yeah,
we fought to liberate Kuwait, but we fought to do a heck of a lot
more than that. I was part of a targeting team that tried to
track down Saddam Hussein, put a bomb on the place where he was,
not because we called this assassination. We’re far too
civilized to assassinate leaders. We simply called it removing
critical national command authority targets.
We’re
cute with terminology. So we’re going to get rid of a
critical national command authority target, but we didn’t.
Saddam survived the war. We liberated Kuwait, a great success for
the international community that said that Saddam’s invasion
of Kuwait could not stand, that, by invading Kuwait, Saddam was
acting in flagrant violation of international law, the United
Nations charter. That’s why the UN supported the
multilateral approach to liberate Kuwait. That was law, after
all.
The
UN didn’t support the unilateral objectives of the Bush
administration, getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That was never on
the UN’s books. That’s why, when the war ended, because
it did end with the liberation of Kuwait, and the troops came
home, at first, everybody was wildly cheering. We had great
victory parades in New York City and Washington, D.C. Vietnam was
behind us. The American military had stood up to the test and had
passed the test, defeating the world’s forth largest
military in a decisive land battle, except the American people
maybe weren’t so dumb after all, because they’re
sitting there, scratching their heads, saying, ‘well, Mr.
President, you said this is a battle of good versus evil, and you
define evil as Saddam Hussein, and troops are home. We’re
declaring victory, but evil still resides in Baghdad.’
Ladies
and gentlemen, the President has a problem, not a problem of
national security, because Saddam Hussein does not pose a threat
to the United States of America, especially after the 1991 Gulf
War. No, what Saddam Hussein poses a threat to is the political
fortunes of George Herbert Walker Bush. Saddam Hussein’s
survival is a political embarrassment to George Herbert Walker
Bush, and George Herbert Walker Bush turns to the CIA and says
‘what do I do? We have to get rid of this character, Saddam.
He’s causing me some political problems here at home.’
The CIA said ‘don’t worry, Mr. President. Six months
max, and that guy’s gone. He can’t survive the war, the
devastation, the economic consequences of sanctions that were
imposed in 1990 that are squeezing the country.’ They said,
‘all we have to do is contain Saddam for six months, and he’s
out of here,’ which is one of the reasons the President said
that the Iraqi people must take things in their own hands, and
the Kurds rose up in the north, and the Shi’a rose up in the
south, we stood by and did nothing while Saddam Hussein turned
the surviving remnants of his military on the Kurds and on the
Shi’a and crushed them.
You
see, there was a calculation going on. Yeah, we didn’t want
Saddam Hussein in, and here’s the ultimate hypocrisy of
regime change. See, regime change means more than just getting
rid of a leader. It means getting rid of a system. When we speak
of regime change in Iraq, we’re talking about getting rid of
the Baathist party, the system of oppression that has the Sunni
minority holding in check through violence and coercion the
Kurdish and Shi’a majorities that exist in Iraq. That’s
regime change. We didn’t want regime change.
We
weren’t politically threatened by the Baathist, and they
didn’t pose a national security risk to us. In fact, the
Baathist Party was an asset to the national security of the
United States because we recognized that Iraq was a nation state
that was, in effect, a failed nation state, and, if you took away
the glue that was Saddam Hussein and the Baathist party, Iraq
would devolve into chaos and anarchy that would have the Shi’a
fighting the Sunnis, the Sunnis fighting the Kurds, the Shi’a
fighting each other, the Sunni fighting each other, the Kurds
fighting each other. No, we didn’t want regime change. We
wanted the Baathists to stay in power. We wanted Sunni domination
through military force and a police state.
Our
problem wasn’t the regime. Our problem was a political
problem because of the name Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein was
equated to Adolph Hitler. The Baath Party was not equated to
Nazism, so we could live with the Baath Party. We just couldn’t
live with Saddam Hussein. We had to get rid of him, get rid of a
man, because of political problems for a President. Isn’t
this already disturbing, that we’re talking about going to
war because some politician has a political problem, that
American boys and girls might be called upon to die in a foreign
land because of a politician’s political problem?
I
always thought, when I joined the military, that I took an oath
to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States
against enemies, foreign and domestic. It never once crossed my
mind that I might have to go out and fight and die in a foreign
land because of a President’s political problem. But that’s
what’s happened. This is what has occurred here. The
President has a political problem. He tells the CIA to get rid of
Saddam Hussein. The CIA says, ‘well, we could have helped
the Kurds. We could have helped the Shi’a,’ and they
say, ‘no, no, no. We don’t want the Kurds or the Shi’a
to win. We want the Baathists to be in power. We just want Saddam
gone.’
Ah.
What we need to do then is to create the conditions in which the
Baathist Party turns on Saddam. They’re already unhappy
because the military was defeated in a war. They’re already
unhappy because the economy has been shut down because of
economic sanctions. If we can continue to squeeze Saddam’s
regime, somebody’s going to apply the 75-cent solution, the
cost of 1 9mm bullet in the back of Saddam’s brain. That’s
what we were hoping for. The best way to contain him? Economic
sanctions. They were in place as we speak in 1991, but they were
linked to the liberation of Kuwait, which has been achieved.
And
so now, many people are sitting here going ‘hey, you know,
Iraq’s sitting on the second largest proven reserves of oil
in the world. We’d like to gain access to that oil, because
oil means money, and money means that I get to buy a yacht and a
vacation in the Bahamas. I like oil, but I can’t get to the
oil as long as sanctions are in place. Let’s lift the
sanctions.’ But, if you lift the sanctions, you break
containment, and the CIA’s saying, ‘you can’t
break containment. We’ve got to squeeze Saddam for six
months.’ So we need a new justification for economic
sanctions.
A
justification comes in the form of weapons of mass destruction:
chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, long-range
ballistic missiles. Saddam’s got them. Prior to 1991, we
knew he had them. We didn’t view him as a threat to
international peace and security. It was a regional issue. If you’re
Israeli, you should be concerned. If you’re Kuwaiti, you
should be concerned. If you’re Saudi Arabian, you should be
concerned. If you’re Iranian, you should be concerned. If
you’re American, you’re yawning because it doesn’t
matter. It doesn’t impact you in a decisive fashion.
But,
suddenly, in March and April of 1991, Saddam’s weapons of
mass destruction become a threat to international peace and
security of such a great magnitude that the Security Council has
to pass a Chapter 7 resolution, the strongest kind of resolution,
saying that Iraq must be disarmed of these weapons.
Furthermore,
they say that economic sanctions imposed in August of 1990 linked
to the liberation of Kuwait will be continued until Iraq is found
to be disarmed, so the lifting of sanctions is now contingent
upon Iraq’s compliance with their obligation to disarm. Now
this is important. This is critical not only for what happened
historically but what I’m going to talk about in a little
while regarding Iran. What is the onus behind the sanctions, the
onus behind extending the sanctions? Would you say it was more
linked to disarmament or regime change, and the answer is regime
change.
Disarmament
was a vehicle used to facilitate regime change by creating the
framework for the continuation of economic sanctions that would
contain and squeeze Saddam Hussein. The United States was a
drafter of this resolution. The United States voted in favor of
this resolution, and the language of the resolution makes it
sound as if this is about disarmament. It says Iraq must declare
the totality of its weapons holding, turn them over to inspectors
for inspection and eventual dispossession, and then, and only
then, will economic sanctions be lifted. The United States voted
for this resolution in April of 1991.
Immediately,
members of congress came up and started whispering to Bush.
‘Hey, boss, what are you doing?’ ‘What do you
mean, what am I doing? I passed a resolution.’ ‘Yeah,
but that resolution holds within it the key for Saddam Hussein to
break out of containment. If he cooperates with the inspectors
and gives up his weapons, we’ve got to lift sanctions, and,
if we lift sanctions, we’ve broken containment, and Saddam
Hussein comes back into the fold of the international community
as the head of Iraq. That means that we’re letting Hitler
survive.’ And Bush said, ‘don’t worry.’
In
May of 1991, the Secretary of State, James Baker, issues a
speech. The speech goes along these lines. Even if Iraq complies
with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be
maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power.
Do you see the utter hypocrisy of the American position? While we
vote for a Security Council resolution to continue economic
sanctions based on Iraq’s obligation to disarm, and then we
turn around a month later and say it’s irrelevant, we’re
going to keep the sanctions in place forever, even if Iraq
disarms, until Saddam Hussein is removed from power.
Do
you understand why weapons inspections were never a valid,
legitimate process to begin with? It didn’t matter what the
weapons inspectors wanted. It only mattered what the policymakers
wanted. In fact, disarmament becomes the enemy, especially after
six months when Saddam Hussein continues to survive. The wildly
little crafty dictator didn’t just roll over and play dead.
He sustained his rule. He expanded his rule. He became more of a
viable leader in Iraq. And now Bush is stuck. What do you do? We
don’t have a plan. The plan was to wait six months, and
Saddam’s gone. So what do you do? So Bush reacts, ‘just
keep the sanctions in place, contain, and we’ll come up with
a solution here, but nothing dramatic.
Nothing
dramatic because I’ve got to run for re-election in 1992, so
I don’t want a new war. I don’t want a new war which
highlights the fact that I didn’t accomplish the mission in
the first war. I want to build on the notion that we won a grand
victory in the first war.’ That’s a hard notion to
sustain when you’ve got the Iraqi government at first
confronting the inspectors, not cooperating with them, and
thereby maintaining the impression that Saddam Hussein is
thumbing his nose at the United States.
It
didn’t matter that the weapons inspectors were actually on
the ground doing their job. It didn’t matter that the
weapons inspectors were actually succeeding in disarming Iraq. It
didn’t matter that, in June of 1991, after Iraq failed to
declare a nuclear weapons program, that weapons inspectors found
a convoy of 100 vehicles on the back of which was enrichment
equipment related to a nuclear weapons program, forcing the
Iraqis to admit they lied, forcing the Iraqis to turn over the
totality of their nuclear weapons program. It didn’t matter
that the weapons inspectors … with the fact that the Iraqis
had failed to declare almost a hundred missiles, through the
perseverance and tenacity of their work, compelled the Iraqis to
admit, oops, we lied, here’s your missiles. It didn’t
matter that the weapons inspectors were destroying more chemical
agent than people could shake a stick at. No, this was
irrelevant, you see, because disarmament was the enemy. If
inspectors succeeded, you create a political problem.
This
is why, when I went to the CIA in October of 1992 and briefed
them on the fact that we had succeeded in accounting for all of
Iraq’s ballistic missiles, instead of being greeted with
high-fives and cheers, I was greeted with stoic silence. You see,
because what I was telling them was that their policy of regime
change was on the brink of failure, because, if inspectors can
succeed in disarming Iraq, the world’s going to talk about
lifting the sanctions. This is why the Bush administration did
two things in October 1992. The first thing they did was issue a
rebuttal to the U.N. inspectors’ report saying, ‘no, we
disagree. We disagree with your finding.’
They
did an amazing thing, too. And we talk about the American public
and how they gain access to information. We gain access to
information by watching TV. Let me give you a little insight
here. We inspectors just finished doing, in a series of
inspections over the course of several months in 1992 where we
went to hundreds of sites in Iraq, we interviewed hundreds of
people, we did forensic investigation, and we came up with a
technically based determination that we could account for almost
all the missiles. The CIA, in disagreeing with us, and not only
were they disagreeing with us, but George Tenet [sic] got on
national TV before the United States Senate, and said that the
United States government’s position is that there’s up
to 200 missiles missing in Iraq.
That’s
mathematically impossible. It couldn’t happen. But, if you’re
an American citizen, you turn on the TV or you open the newspaper
and see on the front page of the New York Times, it wasn’t
George Tenet at that time, the CIA director says 200 missiles in
Iraq, you’re thinking there’s 200 missiles in Iraq. You’re
thinking that there’s a threat there. See, the CIA’s
job is not to disarm Iraq. They’d never received that task
from the President of the United States. The CIA’s job is to
get rid of Saddam Hussein, and one key aspect of getting rid of
Saddam Hussein was to contain him through the continuation of
sanctions.
The
continuation of sanctions required that the CIA maintain public
perception of a noncompliant Iraq. Ladies and gentlemen, what I
just told you should shock you. The CIA knew in 1992 that there
were no missiles left in Iraq. The CIA knew in 1992 that there
was no nuclear weapons capability in Iraq. The CIA knew in 1995
that all chemical weapons and all biological weapons were
accounted for. And, yet, here we are today, and it’s
amazing.
Turn
on the television, and listen to the President, and listen to the
Democrats. The President will say,’ we got it wrong on the
weapons. We thought they were there, and they weren’t. Oops.’
And then the Democrats said, ‘we were misled. The President
said that there were weapons there, so we voted for the war, but
now it turns out there weren’t. We went to war on the basis
of a lie. We were misled. Don’t blame us.’ Blame
everyone, ladies and gentlemen, because I’m here to tell you
they knew there were no weapons. They knew it. The CIA knew it.
The U.S. intelligence community knew it. Congress knew it. The
Senate knew it, especially those who sat on the oversight
committees and were cognizant of the intelligence information.
They
knew that the policy was regime change. They supported the policy
of regime change. They were part of the implementation of the
policy of regime change and the formulation of the policy of
regime change. There was a Republican controlled congress in 1994
that used Bill Clinton’s inability to deal with Saddam
Hussein as a political foil to put pressure on the Clinton
administration, thereby making Bill Clinton concerned about his
prospect for re-election in 1996, thereby having Bill Clinton
order the CIA to up the ante and go after Saddam in a very
aggressive fashion which culminated with a coup attempt in June
of 1996 which used the UN weapons inspection process not only as
a vehicle for the CIA to gather intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s
security but as a trigger for military action.
Don’t
tell me congress didn’t know. They knew. They knew it was
never about disarmament. They knew it was always about regime
change, and Bill Clinton’s inability to get rid of Saddam in
1996 empowered congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, to
unite in a bipartisan fashion, to pass what is called the Iraq
Liberation Act, which set aside $100,000,000 of U.S. taxpayers’
money to fund Iraqi opposition groups to overthrow Saddam
Hussein. Regime change not only became U.S. policy. It became
U.S. law, public law, and congress pretends they didn’t know
what was going on. How absurd is that?
You
know, we have a guy touring Washington, D.C. as we speak, a guy
named Ahmad Chalabi, and everyone likes to boo and hiss about
Ahmad Chalabi and say that he’s the man that sold the bad
information to the Bush administration. Well, you know what?
Ahmad Chalabi is a creation of the Clinton administration. Bill
Clinton created Ahmad Chalabi. Bill Clinton’s CIA funded
Ahmad Chalabi. Bill Clinton is the first administration to
swallow Ahmad Chalabi’s poison, but, you know, it wasn’t
Ahmad Chalabi’s poison. It was our poison.
We
created Ahmad Chalabi, created the poison that we would swallow,
to sustain the notion of a noncompliant Iraq. A lot of people
talk about the interim Iraqi government. You know, there’s
that guy Iyad Allawi who used to be the Prime Minister of Iraq,
but, before he embarked on a career of Iraqi politics, he was a
paid agent of the CIA. He’s the guy behind the 1996 coup
attempt, a product of Bill Clinton, briefed to the United States
congress. They knew what the facts were. Bill Clinton gets on TV
in December 1998 to sell the American people on a program of
action called Operation Desert Fox, a three-day bombing campaign
ostensibly against targets of weapons of mass destruction. Read
Bill Clinton’s speech. It’s available on the Internet.
Read it. Compare and contrast it to what George W. Bush said.
There
is no change. There is no difference. It’s the same speech.
Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The United States has no
choice but to act and bomb Iraq. The only difference was Bill
Clinton wasn’t sending in troops to invade. He was bombing,
but it was the same story, the same lies, and Bill Clinton knew
they were lies. In April of 1998, Bill Clinton appeared before
the United States congress to explain why inspectors might
believe that the United States wasn’t supporting the
inspection process, and Bill Clinton was aghast. He said, ‘no,
no. It’s the policy of the United States of America to give
the inspectors all of the support they need. We’re behind
the disarmament of Iraq 100%.’
He
came back from congress, turned to Madeleine Albright, his
Secretary of State, and Sandy Berger, his National Security
Advisor, and ordered them to have a secret meeting to redraft
American policy not to support the inspectors but to undermine
the inspectors, to disengage the United States away from the
inspectors because the inspectors were causing Bill Clinton a
huge problem. We were disarming Iraq. We were succeeding, and the
United States could never allow the inspectors to succeed, so the
United States put the brake on the inspectors, started
undermining the inspectors even more than they did, and, in
December, 1998, popular mythology may hold Saddam Hussein kicked
the weapons inspectors out of Iraq, but this is wrong, ladies and
gentlemen. They were ordered out by Bill Clinton.
He
ordered them out and then said that Iraq is not cooperating with
the inspectors, and that’s why we need to bomb. The purpose
of the bombing wasn’t to get rid of weapons of mass
destruction because there were none and they knew it. The purpose
of the bombing was two-fold. To target Saddam Hussein using
intelligence information gathered by weapons inspectors. The
first four cruise missiles that went into Iraq tried to knock out
Saddam Hussein because U.N. intelligence said he might be
sleeping either in Baghdad or in Tekrit. Of the 120 targets hit,
111 dealt with the security of Saddam Hussein.
The
others hit factories that we knew not to have any relation to
weapons of mass destruction. Now they didn’t get Saddam, but
what they did do is kill inspections because, when the Iraqis
woke up after three days and walked through all the targets that
were bombed, they realized that these targets were the exact same
places inspected by United Nations weapons inspectors. They
realized that the only way the United States could have received
precise coordinates of where to strike was through the
intelligence gathered by UN weapons inspectors.
The
Iraqis said the inspectors are not welcome back in, which is a
victory for the United States because, without weapons
inspectors, we can’t disarm Iraq. If you can’t disarm
Iraq, economic sanctions will not be lifted, and they’ll
continue. Now a lot of people like to talk about weapons
inspections and disarmament of Iraq as if it’s a big victory
for us. We weapons inspectors did a good thing, but let me
educate you on a couple of things, ladies and gentlemen.
Weapons
inspections do not exist in isolation. They didn’t just
happen. They were an outgrowth of a war. United Nations weapons
inspections were extensions of the war. We cannot treat them as
separate events. UN weapons inspectors may not have had guns, but
we actually inflicted more harm on Iraq than military weapons did
because we were responsible for the continuation of economic
sanctions, economic sanctions that devastated Iraq for a decade,
economic sanctions that killed between 700,000 and 2.5 million
Iraqi civilians, and yet we sit here and talk about disarmament
and weapons inspections as if it’s something neat.
Disarmament only works if you can isolate it from war.
Disarmament
is a proactive measure in its own right, but disarmament is
simply an extension of the war and war objectives using
disarmament as a cover. It’s not disarmament. Don’t be
fooled. Don’t be fooled. UN weapons inspections in Iraq were
not about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. They were
about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. They were about continuing
economic sanctions to destabilize Saddam Hussein. Why is this
important?
Well,
it’s important, first of all, because we’re talking
about our politicians today, our brave politicians who are taking
advantage of George W. Bush’s low popularity ratings to
suddenly come out of the woodwork like rats on a sinking ship and
declare how they’re against the war, but they’re not
really against the war, because talk to them in depth. They’re
against what’s happening now. They’re against the
quagmire we face today. They’re against the fact that the
Bush administration did not plan adequately for a post-Saddam
environment. They’re not against the war. They’re
political opportunists.
To
be against this war, you have to say that we shouldn’t be in
Iraq to begin with. To be against this war, you must say that
Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein in power than it was with
Saddam Hussein out of power. To be against this war, you must
recognize that the congressional vote for war in 2002 was a
complete abrogation of Constitutional responsibility. That’s
being against this war, and there isn’t a politician out
there today that is against this war using that terminology, or
very few politicians, none that aspire to national political
leadership. No, all the great politicians out there who say
‘I want to run for President’ are saying it’s good
to have gone to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein. They say it’s
just that we’ve done badly in the post-war phase. No, ladies
and gentlemen, you can’t be half against this war. You have
to be all against this war, and, sadly, there’s far too few
politicians who are all against this war.
It
is this type of political half-stepping that creates a quandary
not only for Iraq but for Iran. You see, a lot of people, when I
started talking, and Sunny knows this, in 2001 and 2002, we
traveled around the country and talked about the impending war
with Iraq. And everyone went, ‘well, there isn’t going
to be a war with Iraq. That’s insane. The President’s
embarked on diplomacy. There’s going to be a diplomatic
solution. They’re going to give inspectors a chance. There
will not be a war.’ I kept saying no, war has been decided
upon because it is the policy decided upon to remove Saddam
Hussein from power. No one wanted to recognize that policy.
Then
the war came. Then today there’s a growing recognition that
we were misled into this war. But now I’m mentioning the war
with Iran that’s already occurring, and everybody goes
‘no, there’s no war with Iran. Don’t be crazy. We
can’t go to war with Iran. We don’t have enough troops.
We’re bogged down in Iraq. No one would be crazy enough to
go to war with Iran.’
Ladies
and gentlemen, the same man that got us involved in this war in
Iraq (I should say men, Clinton and Bush), got us involved with a
future war with Iran. The die has already been cast. The decision
has been made, and, as much as Bill Clinton facilitated war with
Iraq, he facilitated war with Iran by embarking on a policy of
dual containment in the 1990’s, putting unilateral U.S.
economic sanctions against Iran, creating the politics of
demonization where the American public on a daily basis has been
bombarded with nothing but negative visuals, negative information
about Iran, nothing positive.
According
to the U.S. media, Iran is populated by 50 million anti-American
whirling dervishes who want nothing more than to come out of the
country and cut off our heads. We don’t recognize the
cultural diversity of Iran. We don’t recognize the fact that
Iran is populated by human beings that care about life just as
much as we do. We don’t recognize that the Iranian mothers
want a good future for their children just as much as the
American mothers want a good future for their children. We don’t
recognize that Iranian men just want to have a job, a job that
pays the bills, so that they can go home and maybe have a nice
weekend with their family. That’s the reality of Iran, but
we don’t have that. You see, we’re told that Iran is a
threat.
We’re
told that the mad mullahs in Iran must be done away with in the
same way that the mad dictator in Baghdad was done away with. The
policy of regime change is in place today. This is why, when the
Bush administration speaks of regional transformation, it’s
not just hypothetical. They mean it, and, just like the Downing
Street Memo, that British document that refers to meetings that
took place in July, 2002, says that the United States had a
policy of regime change already in place that was not going to be
changed and they were fixing intelligence around the policy, I’m
here to tell you today that we have a policy of regime change in
place about Iran, and we are fixing the intelligence around the
policy.
We
have a congress that is unwilling to stand up and talk about the
reality of Iran. And listen to Hillary Clinton when she asks
ridiculous questions, when she has testimony about the Iranian
threat. She doesn’t have probing questions. She sits there
and reinforces the negativity. She sits there and reinforces the
notion of an Iranian threat, and the danger with that is that the
compliant beast we call the American public, these sheep that
allow themselves to be led to and fro, are listening to what she
says.
That’s
why I could be a pollster and ask the following question. Do you
think America should go to war with Iran? And most Americans say
no, it’s stupid, we’re already bogged down in Iraq, why
should we go to war with Iran? Put those polling numbers up, and
everybody will go ’see, there’s not going to be a war
with Iran, Scott. What are you worried about?’ Let me get a
little more tricky with you here. Do you think the Iranian
government poses a threat to the United States of America? 78% of
the American public says yes. How does the Iranian government
pose a threat? Do they pose a threat in terms of weapons of mass
destruction and nuclear weapons? The same numbers, 78%, yes, Iran
poses a threat in the form of nuclear weapons. Now comes the cute
part: how should we deal with this threat? Oh, we’re not
going to that war thing because it sort of went bad in Iraq. How
do you want to support? Ah, economic sanctions imposed by the
United Nations.
84%
of Americans believe that we should impose sanctions against Iran
through the United Nations as a manner to deal with the Iranian
nuclear weapons threat that threatens the security of the United
States. That’s why we’re going to war, ladies and
gentlemen, because we have bought into the notion that Iran is a
threat without question, without thinking. We just parrot back
what’s told to us by our elected officials. We bought into
the notion that Iran is a threat in the form of nuclear weapons,
even though no evidence has been put forward by anybody to
sustain this notion. In fact, all of the intelligence information
points to the reality that there is no nuclear weapons program in
Iran as we speak.
Every
case made by the Bush administration has fallen apart on
investigation of guess what, the eternal threat to peace and
security, United Nations weapons inspectors who had the audacity
to go to Iran and investigate baseless allegations and expose
them as baseless allegations. Well, they have nuclear weapons.
And, now that we’ve said there’s a threat, we say that
the only way to deal with this threat is to impose economic
sanctions, but you know what? They have to be imposed by the
United Nations Security Council. The United Nations Security
Council has members such as Russia, France, and China, not so
much France right now on the issue of Iran but Russia and China,
who have said ‘we will not allow economic sanctions to be
imposed because we have seen what you’ve done with the Iraqi
model, that this isn’t about getting rid of a nuclear
threat.
This
is about regime change, and we’re not going to let this
occur.’ But the United States is pushing hard to have the
issue brought to the Security Council knowing full well that
Russia and China will veto it. What does this mean, ladies and
gentlemen? It means that, when Russia and China veto it, as we
know they will, the President has no choice. His hands are tied.
He didn’t want to go to war, but he has no choice, you see,
because Iran is a threat, a nuclear threat, and the United
Nations will not do anything about this threat, and no President
is going to stand by and let a threat exist. No President is
going to allow the national security of the United States of
America to be held hostage by the United Nations, and, as
distasteful as war is, the President has no choice but to engage
in a war with Iran. That’s why we’re going to war,
ladies and gentlemen. The President wants it.
The
American people have been preconditioned to accept the terms of
conflict, and the vehicle for facilitating this is in place: John
Bolton, the United Nations ambassador, has already written his
speech that he will deliver before the Security Council when they
refuse to impose economic sanctions. That speech will be that
America will not allow itself to be held hostage by the United
Nations.
Then
the President will order bombing, and this is where it gets
really interesting, because one of the true things about the
Iranian threat is we do not have enough troops to invade and
occupy Iran. You see, the Bush administration is amazing. They
don’t believe in reality. They say this themselves. They say
that America has overwhelming economic, diplomatic, and political
strength that we can bring to bear on any given situation and
create our own reality, that the old rules of diplomacy no longer
apply, that we have such overwhelming force that we can shape
events so that a new reality is created. Now they sort of had a
hick-up, a bad one in Iraq where they thought the new reality
would be greeting us with songs and flowers.
They
were a little wrong on that one, but they’ve modified their
formulation apparently because they believe that, if we bomb Iran
with a massive aerial bombardment, then the Iranian people will
rise up and remove the Mullahs from power, even though history
shows that it’s not very likely that a nation that’s
bombed is going to rise up and support those who are bombing
them. But, if that fails, the military has been told to be
prepared to send troops from Azerbaijan, along the Caspian Sea
coast, to the outskirts of Tehran where it would project a force
of 40-60,000. The Iranian people would be motivated by our
presence and rise up and overthrow the mad Mullahs of Tehran. We’ll
even put another 20-30,000 Marines on the coast where we can
control the Straits of Hormuz, preventing the Iranians from
shutting down that. .. oil shipping lane. What happens when that
doesn’t work?
And
it doesn’t take a mathematical whiz to figure that it’s
not going to work, ladies and gentlemen. Iran is a nation about
2.5 times the size of Iraq. Iran has a population of almost 50
million people, and we’re talking about putting 60-80,000
troops on the ground. We can’t control a nation of 25
million people with 161,000 troops. What makes us think we’re
going to control 50 million with 80,000? It’s not going to
happen.
Now
is where it gets really frightening, because the Bush
administration, if they go down this course of action, will have
no choice at that point in time but to use nuclear weapons, and
they have already developed the weapons — they call them
usable nukes. It’s funny that term, usable. This is not
about mutually assured destruction anymore. This is not about
deterrence. The Bush administration has radically departed from
past doctrine to say that we will have a family of nuclear
weapons that are usable nuclear weapons, meaning that we can
conceive of using them, and then they’ll say we could use
them preemptively in a non-nuclear environment, meaning that it’s
not about opposing somebody with nuclear weapons or biological
weapons or chemical weapons, it’s we can use them any time
we want to if it’s in the strategic national interest of the
United States.
This
war, ladies and gentlemen, has a good chance of beginning in
2007. What are you going to do, peace movement? What are you
going to do? Sit back and go, ‘oh my God, this is too much
to think about. I’m going to hit the delete button and
pretend that Ritter never spoke.’ Or do what others do?
‘Na, he’s a crazy wild man. Na, I’m not buying
into that garbage. We’re just going to move on thinking that
Iraq’s bad and they’ll never going on into Iran.’
Study
the facts I’ve just put on the table. You will not
contradict a single one of them. You cannot contradict a single
one of them because they are facts. I’m not making it up. It’s
all based on written and spoken statements made by Bush
administration officials, past and present.
What
are you going to do? Wait for congress to do the right thing?
Congress has already sold out. Congress isn’t going to
oppose this President. Congress has already bought into the
notion of the Iranian threat. What are you going to do? One thing
you can do is change congress, and you have a window of
opportunity. The 2006 election may well go down in history as one
of the most critical elections that this country has ever faced,
because, if I’m right, and I pray I’m not, I pray I’m
wrong, I pray I’m on drugs, I pray I’m having some
hallucinations, I pray that none of this is true. What if I’m
right and we don’t change congress in 2006?
We
will unleash forces that will devastate this country, not just
economically, not just politically, not just militarily, not just
morally. Physically, because, if we drop nuclear weapons on Iran,
we will have uncorked the genie, and that genie will not allow
itself to be recorked until an American city has been vaporized
in a radioactive cloud in a terrorist counterstrike to the
American initiation of nuclear holocaust, and that is the
statement of fact.
Right
now, when people talk about terrorism and nuclear weapons, I’m
not too worried about it because I still think that we have to be
concerned about it, but there’s enough sanity that prevails
in the world today where leaders such as Musharaf in Pakistan and
others will not transfer this technology to the terrorists out of
fear of the devastation that will be caused. If the United States
drops nuclear weapons, all bets are off.
The
Muslim world will not rest until the Americans pay a price
similar to the one that’s been inflicted on them. What can
you do? … Find a candidate worth supporting, and put all of
your resources into supporting that candidate and getting that
candidate in position, reaching out across the nation to other
states and say ‘we need to get effective checks and balances
in place in Washington, D.C. right now to hold this
administration in place, in check.’
History
shows us that, when an administration starts floundering in the
way that George W. Bush has, that they take on a fortress-like
mentality. Witness Richard Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate.
Things are going to get worse for George W. Bush before they get
better, if they ever get better. More allegations of misconduct,
more allegation of lies, deceit, distortion are going to be put
forward, and we already see how this President reacts, not with
an embrace that’s inclusive but to reject and be derisive
and to go on a counter-attack.
The
President, unable to generate any friction in terms of getting
his policies implemented here at home because congress is
starting to rise up and revolt, will look for distractions
overseas in the same way that Richard Nixon looked to create a
nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and the Middle East.
It’s
very dangerous times, ladies and gentlemen, very dangerous times,
and, therefore, it’s incumbent upon us to recognize that we
cannot wait for someone to give us the solution. We must re-read
the Constitution and take strength from the words in the preamble
that speak of we, the people of the United States of America.
The
only way we’re going to get a solution to this dual
deception that’s taken place today in Iraq and Iran is for
we, the people of the United States of America, to re-empower
ourselves as citizens, to break free of this cocoon of comfort,
this consumerism we trapped ourselves into so that we are
addicted to a lifestyle that can only be sustained by elected
representatives who will carry out aggressive policies.
We
got to elect good people, and that’s the thing. We’ve
got to elect. No one else is going to elect them. We’ve got
to nominate them. No one is going to nominate them. We’ve
got to support and sustain them because no one else is going to
do that. I hope I’ve put out enough challenging words and
thoughts to you, and now you can hold me accountable for every
single one of them.