The Clipboard: The Strange Allure of Iraq

From an article¹:

There is one flaw in this strategy, which most Americans have swallowed whole. The country that is the all-time world-class champion at failing to obey and at defying U.N. resolutions is Mr. Bush's favorite country, Israel. There is no way you can logically argue that failure to enforce about 70 resolutions against Israel does not jeopardize the United Nations, but failure to enforce 16 resolutions directed at Iraq would and is a just cause for war. The reason the United Nations has never tried to enforce its resolutions directed at Israel is that the United States prevents it from doing so. (link)

I wonder if the Bush administration and the war hawks will ever answer the question posed by Charley Reese here.

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Complete text of the article, The Mystique of Iraq, by Charley Reese

For some reason unknown to me, Iraq casts a strange spell on the members of the Bush family when they occupy the White House. It seems to corrupt them so that they resort to lies and elaborate deceptions as their frenzy for war grows feverish.

The original Gulf War was based largely on lies. There was the outright lie that Iraqi soldiers had snatched Kuwaiti babies out of incubators to steal the incubators. The second big lie was the claim that Iraq was massing troops for an invasion of Saudi Arabia. Totally false.

Now, another Bush is misleading the American people in order to dupe them into a war with Iraq. Let me trace the deceptions of the Bush team. In the first place, Republican campaign advisers argued that war was better for Republican chances in November than trying to campaign on domestic issues. It's quite clear that Mr. Bush was in somewhat of a fog prior to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. He has blossomed into a war leader and seems determined to make sure he never runs out of wars.

The first ploy used to justify war was the claim that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and therefore posed an imminent threat to the United States and, indeed, the world itself. It's important to understand that in the past, a policy of containment worked with an enemy that had thousands of weapons of mass destruction and, unlike Iraq, the means of delivering them. Yet Bush claims that Iraq, with one or two nuclear warheads, could blackmail the world. That, of course, is patent nonsense. It couldn't even blackmail Israel, which has a nuclear force of 200 warheads and the rockets and the planes with which to deliver them.

That aside, however, Bush was unable to produce any new evidence that would support the claim that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. Everything the administration tossed out as "evidence" was old stuff. It was flatly unable to prove that Iraq was on the verge of some new, dangerous venture. So the strategy shifted.

Bush goes to the United Nations. He has to, since it was obvious no country except Great Britain was going to support a unilateral invasion by the United States. Here the ploy is that Saddam Hussein, by failing to obey U.N. resolutions, has put the world body in the position of either enforcing its resolutions or becoming "irrelevant." What Bush really is saying is, give me a U.N. cover to attack Iraq, or I'll call you a League of Nations.

There is one flaw in this strategy, which most Americans have swallowed whole. The country that is the all-time world-class champion at failing to obey and at defying U.N. resolutions is Mr. Bush's favorite country, Israel. There is no way you can logically argue that failure to enforce about 70 resolutions against Israel does not jeopardize the United Nations, but failure to enforce 16 resolutions directed at Iraq would and is a just cause for war. The reason the United Nations has never tried to enforce its resolutions directed at Israel is that the United States prevents it from doing so.

Now, much to President Bush's discomfort, Iraq has said the weapons inspectors can come back without conditions. This throws a monkey wrench into Bush's war plans. True, it might be just a trick by Saddam Hussein, but nothing will be lost or threatened by giving peace a chance. The truth is that the original inspectors oversaw the destruction of 90 percent to 95 percent of Iraq's weapons. It is also true that the United States kept raising the bar and had furthermore corrupted the inspection process by using it as a cover for spying.

Finally, let me point out another obvious fact: All over the world, the United States advocates dialogue as an alternative to war to settle disputes. Yet not one time since the Gulf War has the United States even attempted to conduct a diplomatic dialogue with Iraq. There is no justification for war with Iraq. The Bushes would waste every American life lost in an attempt to satisfy their sick obsession with Iraq.

reference=http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20020925/index.php