Shyrley

Randolph T. Holhut: 'Searching for
truth about this war'
Posted on Monday, February 03 @ 09:37:44 EST

By Randolph T. Holhut, American
Reporter Correspondent

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Sam Smith, editor of The Progressive
Review (prorev.com), recently offered what he called the
"Standardized Conflagration Competency Exam."

His 10 questions should be asked of everyone in the Bush
administration.

1. In order to get rid of Saddam Hussein it is likely that
some Americans will be killed as well. How many do
you think is a reasonable number? How many is too
many?

2. Some reports indicate that there are other people
living in Iraq besides Saddam Hussein. How many
would be worth killing in order to get rid of Hussein?
How many is too many? Does this also apply to those
who have no weapons of mass destruction in their
homes?



3. When will the Afghan invasion be over? How can we
tell?

4. If we bomb Baghdad, some targets in the U.S. may be
hit in retaliation. Which of the following are
expendable in order to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein?
The Sears Tower;

The New York Stock Exchange;

Hoover Dam;

New York City;

New York City excluding Manhattan;

The New York Times and Washington Post
editorial offices; or

The headquarters of the Council on Foreign
Relations
5. List the names of all relatives you consider
expendable in the effort to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein.

6. List those cities that could be damaged by chemical,
biological, or nuclear attack without discommoding
the New American Century.

7. After we obliterate Iraq, how many more countries
do we need to invade?

8. Are the people selling their stocks in the various
markets appeasers, hippies, and Stalinists? If not, why
are they so worried about war?

9. How did you get to be so smart about military
operations?

10. What can high level military doubters do to reach
your level of proficiency in these matters?

Smith may be arch in the extreme with this little quiz, but the
essential truth of this exercise is undeniable; namely, how
much are the people who are gung ho for war willing to
sacrifice?

As has been pointed out many times in the past few months,
the architects of this war - President Bush, Vice President
Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State
Powell, National Security Advisor Rice and foreign policy
underlings Wolfowitz, Perle and Armitage - have, with the
exception of Powell, no direct experience with war. None of
them have family members in the military. None of them
have made any visible sacrifice in the "war on terror." Yet,
they are determined to plunge this nation into war.

Yes, Saddam Hussein is evil and the world would be better off
without him. But how many American and Iraqis will have to
die in a preemptive, unprovoked war based on a threat that
the U.S. created?

A reminder of the nonsense that was fed to us during the
runup to the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 is needed here.

Begin with the unpleasant facts regarding relationship
between the U.S. and Iraq in the 1980s. There was a reason
why the U.S. decided to remove 8,000 pages from the dossier
that Iraq presented to the UN Security Council before sharing
it with the council's non-permanent members.

As reported in December by the German newspaper Die
Tageszeitung, dozens of American companies and the U.S.
government itself provided assistance to Iraq in developing
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. When Iraq used
chemical weapons during its 1980-88 war with Iran, the U.S.
looked the other way since the U.S. was hoping Iraq would
destroy Iran, or even better, both sides would destroy each
other.

There also wasn't much concern at first in the summer of
1990 when Iraq threatened to invade Kuwait. April Glaspie,
the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein in July
1990 that the U.S. had "no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts,
like your border agreement with Kuwait." Not surprisingly,
Saddam welcomed that statement and invaded Kuwait the
following month.

President George H.W. Bush's national security team at first
didn't make much of a fuss about Saddam's actions. But the
hawk faction, led by then-Defense Secretary Cheney,
recognized an opportunity. It had only been a few months
after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet control of
Eastern Europe. With the Cold War ending, a war with Iraq
would be the first step toward creating a "new world order"
where the U.S. would be the unquestioned leader.

This meant two things had to happen. One was that any
attempts at a diplomatic solution that would avert war must
be discouraged. The other was that Saddam Hussein had to be
demonized to the extent of becoming a second Adolf Hitler.

One of the lasting images from the propaganda campaign was
the tearful testimony of a young Kuwaiti woman before a
Congressional committee that Iraqi soldiers had tossed
newborn babies out of hospital incubators in Kuwait and left
them to die. It was a riveting tale; it just wasn't true.

It wasn't until after the war that we found out the young
woman was really the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to
the U.S., and that her testimony was arranged by the
Washington-based public relations firm Hill & Knowlton as
part of a PR campaign funded by Kuwait to bring the U.S. into
the war.

But this was just the tip of the misinformation iceberg. You
may recall the stories of Iraqi troops - anywhere between
200,000 and 500,000, depending on whose account you
heard - that were massed on the Saudi Arabian border and
poised to strike.

The U.S. satellite photos that allegedly showed these troops
were part of the evidence used to justify a war with Iraq -
except that Russian satellite photos taken of the same area at
the same time showed no Iraqi troops. The U.S. photos are
still classified, and you can probably deduce the reason why.

When the shooting war finally began on Jan. 16, 1991, the
press was kept away and only a totally sanitized, heavily
censored version of events was shown. The dominant image
came from the gunsight cameras - video game-like footage of
laser guided "smart bombs" hitting their targets. The reality
was that more than 90 percent of the 142,000 tons of
ordinance dropped on Iraq were old-fashioned, unguided
dumb bombs.

One of those "dumb" bombs hit a factory in a Baghdad suburb
that produced infant formula. The U.S. claimed it was a
military installation. While the Iraqis may have been clumsy
in their counter-propaganda (like the big sign out front of the
plant that read "BABY MILK FACTORY" in English), the reality
- according to declassified U.S. State Department documents -
was that the plant did indeed produce baby milk.

But the U.S. won that propaganda battle and avoided the
scrutiny that should have come from deliberately and
systematically targeting civilian infrastructure in the
bombing campaign - something that's in total violation of the
Geneva Convention prohibitions.

Even the number of Iraqi causalities in Gulf War I have not
been truthfully reported. Part of it is U.S. reluctance to admit
the lopsidedness of the war. While there were only 79 U.S.
soldiers killed in action, it's estimated that more than 45,000
Iraqi soldiers and civilians died during the war.

Then throw in the 100,000 Iraqis who died from the
post-war violence and disease. Throw on top of that the more
than 500,000 Iraqi children that have died from starvation
and disease in the decade after the war. And don't forget the
five million refugees the war produced.

Most of the cast of characters that shaped Gulf War I are on
the national security team of George W. Bush and they have
been planning for Gulf War II almost since the first war
ended. And the lies from the first war are being amplified as
we head into the second.

Have we seen an honest accounting of the extent that the
U.S., Britain, Germany and other Western countries aided the
Iraqi weapons program? Or of how many Iraqis died in the
first Gulf War? Or of the extent of the damage done to Iraq by
the war and the 11 years of economic sanctions and periodic
bombings? Or why are there 160,000 U.S. veterans of Gulf
War I receiving medical treatment for a variety of ailments
related to the various toxins they were exposed to in the war?


The answer is no.

And then there are the fresh lies. For example, the Bush
administration recently lowered the estimated cost of Gulf
War II down to about $60 billion. Not because the cost has
gone down, mind you. The new lower cost of the war is pure
fiction dreamt up because the more realistic $200 billion
cost we heard a few months ago was deemed to be too scary.

There is little debate that the world is better off without
Saddam Hussein, but the big question remains unanswered
by the people who are rushing us off to war. Is the effort to
get rid of him is worth the price that other people - and not
the architects of this new war - will have to pay?

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for
more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader"
(Barricade Books).

Copyright 2003 Joe Shea The American Reporter.

Reprinted from The American Reporter:
http://www.american-reporter.com/
2031W/3.html

Fetteroll

Let's do our best not to bring up the subject of Iraq. There are families
here with loved ones who could be involved and the subject is a painful one
for them.

Thanks.

Joyce
Unschooling-dotcom moderator