Presentation on the Iraq war in UWO

For societies that profess to be secular, one is surprised to find the large number of people who still believe in myths, magic, and miracles.

Myths about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction

Hammered in by the powerful magic wand that is the media

And the notion that Iraqis would welcome the coalition forces as liberators, which if it were true, would’ve been nothing short of miraculous.


Respected professor, ladies and gentlemen, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was a mistake, but not only a mistake. Strong evidence suggests a case of government dishonesty, the outcome of which was an illegal war, and a major foreign policy disaster.




The illegality of the war Illegality and its ramifications (the loss of credibility):




In May 2005, the Downing Street memos were leaked to the times of London. The memos revealed that two weeks before the war was launched, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, Blair’s chief legal advisor, counseled that regime change could not be the objective of military action. He further added that even if Britain were to limit its goal to ending the WMD program, it was still up to the UN Security Council to assess whether any such breach of those obligations had occurred, not individual states. Lord Goldsmith went on to add that the US had a rather different view: I quote “they maintain that the fact of whether Iraq is in breach is a matter of objective fact which may therefore be assessed by individual member states but I am not aware of any other states which support this view”.

In short, he advised Blair to show some respect for international law.

Given the patent criminality of regime change by invasion, Lord Goldsmith advised that conditions had to be created which would justify military action against Iraq. Despite bombing 391 targets in Iraq in the 9 month build-up to the war, London and Washington failed to provoke the desired reaction from Saddam and carried out the invasion regardless on the sole pretext of WMD’s.

A second official memo was from Blair’s meeting with top adviser’s in the July of 2002. It showed that Washington had already decided to go to war before hoodwinking US congress. In addition, the decision had been made prior to an invitation to the UN to either endorse Washington’s plan to use violence or become irrelevant.

Needless to say, occasions of such flagrant disregard for International Law and bodies like the UN which administer it, undermine and trivialize the very notion of Human Rights.



Evidence of Connivance on the part of the Bush administration:



According to National security and intelligence analyst, John Prados, Bush had a ‘ scheme to convince America and the world that war with Iraq was necessary and urgent”. He described it as a “case study in government dishonesty…that required patently untrue public statements and egregious manipulation of intelligence”. The planners knew, in his opinion, that Iraqi WMD’s were nascent, moribund, or non-existent—exactly the opposite of the presidents repeated massage to Americans. To carry out the deception, actual intelligence was consistently distorted, manipulated, and ignored---in service of a particular enterprise under false pretenses.


Reports have also found that had diplomacy been given a chance, UN weapons inspections teams led by Dr. Hans Blix, would have confirmed that Iraq did not in fact have weapons of WMD in around a month’s time.

Intelligence also confirmed, which the Bush administration admitted at the time, that there was no link between Iraq and the atrocities on 9/11.

It is important to note that here was no link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda prior to the war*.(revisit)

Interestingly enough, 8.8 billion dollars worth of Iraqi oil went missing in the first 14 months of invasion under American watch. The major benefactors from the invasion have been independent American companies that have largely assumed control of oil production in Iraq despite protesting local workers. Kellogg Brown and Root, which is the biggest of these companies, have strong ties with key officials, like Dick Cheney, in the Bush administration.






Foreign policy disaster:



Few still dispute today that Iraq is a foreign policy disaster. Since the start of the war, almost three quarters of a million Iraqis civilians have paid with their lives, 3.9 million have been made refugees, and 3000 continue to die every month. If this weren’t enough, more than 5 thousand collation troops have died and tens of thousands have been wounded or maimed. These figures are excluding the number of hired mercenaries, of which there are currently approximately 120, 000 operating in Iraq according to journalist Robert Fisk, who have been killed. It is interesting to note here that these mercenaries, a majority of whom are ex-British and American soldiers or nationals, are hired to protect the occupation troops and are almost equal in number to the coalition troops present in the country.



The presence of Al-Qaeda In Iraq and the spread of Islamic radicalism are also peculiar achievements of American foreign policy.

Before the war, the
-National Intelligence Council (NIC) advised that an “American led invasion of Iraq would increase support for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society prone to violent internal conflict”. That it would provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are ‘professionalized and for whom political violence becomes an end within itself”

Iraq has, since then, become a magnet for Islamic extremists and has replaced Afghanistan as the real-world laboratory for urban combat, destabilizing the whole region. This de-stabilization has seen a sharp increase in Islamic radicalism. Muslim youth in conflict areas are now more prone to radical views with the belief that their religion and very identity is under attack.


Fawaz Gerges concludes that after 9/11 “ the dominant response to the Al-qaeda in the Muslim world was very hostile, specifically among jihadis, who regarded it as a dangerous extremist fringe. Instead of recognizing that the opposition to al-qaeda offered Washington the most affective way to drive a nail into its coffin by finding intelligent means to nourish and support the internal forces that were opposed to militant ideologies like the bin laden network, the bush administration did exactly what bin laden hoped it would do; resort to violence in a grand sweeping gesture of retaliation.


Israeli think tanks and Saudi intelligence have reported that the vast majority of foreign fighters in iraq were not former terrorists but became radicalized by the war itself because it was perceived as an attack on muslims.


Centre for Strategic and and International Studies found that 85 percent of Saudi militants that went to iraq were not on any government watchlist, al-qaeda members or terrorist sympathizers, but were radicalized by the invasion.

Suicide bombings, which have their origin in secular tamil tigers, were non-existent in Iraq. However, since the invasion 400 bombings have been reported.

As is self-evident, the invasion has also succeeded in making the clash of civilization theory a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indonesia is the country with the largest Muslim population in the world with over 200 million Muslims. According to a pole conducted in 2000, 75 percent Indonesians viewed US favorably. This number has plummeted to 15 percent after 2003’s invasion with 80% of Indonesians fearing an attack in the future by the US.




Conclusion:

We sat here yesterday drawing comparisons between Nazism and communism. Similarly, journalists and academics already find themselves juxtaposing Iraq under Saddam’s tyrannical regime with an Iraq ravaged by a brutal invasion. I cant help but ask, ‘should Saddam be the moral yardstick by which we measure our own moral inequities? For many, the war on Iraq is the past. This could not be farther from the truth. In a fast globalizing world, the harsh reality in Iraq is playing a large role in defining our present and shaping our future. To all those who still believe in myths, magic and miracles, let me assure them that ghosts too exist; and unless we’re honest in our commitment to Human Rights, this one will loom over our heads and haunt us for a long time to come.