I hardly ever disagree with Eric Margolies, far an away the best and most experienced foreign correspondents working today. Over the years he’s been everywhere, knows everybody worth knowing, and is impeccably honest and courageous.
But in his current syndicated column he lays out what he considers the case for the impeachment of George W. Bush for what he insists are the president’s alleged lies about the war in Iraq that were used to justify a U.S. attack on the Saddam Hussein regime.
Like many other critics of the war, he zeroes in on the infamous 16 words in the president’s State of the Union address and other instances where he says Mr. Bush misled the American people.
Here’s the nub of his argument: “A torrent of lies that would have made Dr Goebbels envious poured from the administration, all aimed at justifying a war of aggression, thwarting the UN Security Council, ending UN inspections in Iraq, crushing a foe of Israel, and grabbing Iraq’s oil riches.”
Let’s begin with his assertion that one of the real aims of the Bush administration was “grabbing Iraq’s oil riches.”
Unless we are being terribly misled, Iraq’s “oil riches” are being treated as the sole property of the Iraqi people – property that Saddam and his socialist Ba’ath party buddies were using to build multiple palaces for the dictator and his sons and immediate family, or to enrich his thuggish followers.
But for the moment, let’s say “what if” oil was one of the administration’s principal goals in affecting a regime change.
Iraq, we are told, floats on an ocean of petroleum, largely untapped and with a potential of giving a giant boost to the world’s oil supplies and slashing its price. Its geographical location puts it smack in the middle of what might be called the vast Middle Eastern oil storehouse, as well as placing it along the route of proposed pipe lines projected to carry huge amounts of Caspian Sea area oil to the world’s markets.
In case the fact that the world economy is fueled by oil has escaped the anti-fossil fuel crowd, let them be reminded that we, and the rest of the world would be in a hell of a pickle if the supply of oil were to be seriously disrupted. One only has to hark back to the days when that supply was disrupted by an OPEC embargo and motorists were stranded in miles-long lines waiting to fill their tanks to get a vague notion of the awful penalty we would pay if a nut case like Saddam were to set off a conflagration in his corner of the world, something he was always capable of doing.
We are dependent on the stuff to keep our cars running and the trucks that carry the goods we need tooling down the highways. And it’s important to remember that gasoline represents only a small part of petroleum consumption – it is mainly needed to make plastics and a host of other important products. Moreover, we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on foreign oil because the Marxists who masquerade as environmentalists have cowed our politicians into preventing exploitation of our own vast petroleum reserves in the ANWAR area of Alaska and elsewhere.
As I have written in the past, the Middle East has been in a state of barely contained turmoil for a long time. Because of our utter dependence upon the area’s oil supplies stability there is essential to the economic well-being of this nation and the world. Does anybody really doubt that Saddam Hussein represented a serious threat to stability in the Middle East?
What if the Bush administration recognized these facts and decided to take action to bring about stability and tranquility to the Middle East and thus assure a continued supply of oil to the U.S. and the world? Alone among the nations of the world, we have the power to achieve this goal. And if we didn’t who would?
What if the administration had decided to go the whole way, starting with Iraq and then seeking to bring order throughout the Middle East by helping to end the lethal standoff between Israel and the Palestinians – thus dealing with the two worst threats to stability and peace in the area.
What if the administration recognized that peace and stability in the Middle East could never be achieved as long as the Israelis and Palestinians were at each other’s throats and the rest of the area including Syria, Egypt and Iran were caught up in the struggle between the two Would not U.S. intervention in Iraq and then in the so-called “Roadmap” be justified?
What if the administration’s claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction is valid? We know that according to UN documents Iraq developed several biological weapons agents, : anthrax, aflatoxin (causes liver cancer), clostridium botulinum toxin, clostridium perfringens spores, ricin, and wheat smut (for destroying crops).
We know that in its final report to the Security Council, UNSCOM showed that Iraq had not accounted for 520 kilograms of yeast extract growth medium specifically for anthrax. This amount of growth medium is sufficient for the production of 26,000 liters of anthrax spores — more than three times the amount that Iraq declared before the UN. Iraq’s planned storage capacity for all its biological agents reached 80,000 to 100,000 liters. And we know that Iraq has never accounted for that arsenal of death which could easily be hidden away in a very small storehouse somewhere deep in Iraq.
I have yet to see any proof that Iraq was not the source of the anthrax used in the anthrax letter attacks in the U.S. If it were not for the F.B.I.’s idiot obsession with Dr. Steven Hatfill it might have been established by a more thorough investigation of the links in Florida between the 9/11 hijackers and the anthrax letter attacks.
What if Iraqi anthrax was used in the attacks? Would that alone not have justified an attack on Saddam’s regime?
Finally, President Bush is being savaged by his critics because Americans are being killed in Iraq by what appear to be Saddam’s die-hard loyalists and remnants of the deposed Ba’athist regime. But I do not recall the president or anyone else claiming that the war and its aftermath would be a cake-walk. Instead of encountering any meaningful resistance during the actual war, with the expected attendant casualties, we are encountering them now in what is nothing else but a continuation of hostilities. What would Bush’s critics have us do, act like Bill Clinton and cut and run?
What if we are now embarked on an effort to bring order to the world so that we and future generations can look forward to a stable world and live in peace? Are we to shrink from our responsibilities?
Just asking.