www.thornwalker.com/ditch/dtw_wmd_notes.htm
Mr. Wright's main text
NOTES
1. One of the most disgusting allegations of the war party has been its insistence
that the starvation of the Iraqis was their own fault, or at least Saddam's. The horrifying Madeleine Albright,
Clinton's supremely belligerent foreign minister, said in public that she thought the death of a half million or
more Iraqi children was "worth it," but most war-party members of all stripes felt they had to excuse the
blockade by saying that it was Saddam's fault, because he was hiding WMD from inspectors. Such an excuse is
both infantile and morally grotesque putting us in mind of the schoolyard bully who hits a smaller kid
and says, "See what he made me do?"
According to the warmongers, all Saddam had to do was give in to U.S. demands to reveal and destroy the
WMD, and the blockade would end. However, when Saddam later offered to allow inspectors back into the
country (they had withdrawn in 1998 in anticipation of the U.S. bombing campaign) and to give them free rein,
Washington changed its tune and said that even complete access to everything wouldn't be enough to end the
sanctions. Saddam was a Bad Man, and so his people must be punished for the crime of being ruled by him.
After being mostly a non-issue for 12 years, the brutality inflicted on the Iraqis by the blockade has finally
begun to gain some attention. And with the attention has come a new twist on the "it's Saddam's fault" song and
dance. Saddam was rich, say the war apologists, and he used his money to build all those trashy-looking
palaces with gold-plated bathroom fixtures. If only he had used his riches to help the Iraqi people, they wouldn't
have suffered so much. Like all good lies, this one has an element of truth. But it ignores the fact that it wasn't a
lack of cash that prevented items such as chlorine for water treatment plants, medical supplies and equipment,
nutritional supplements, replacement parts for electrical generation facilities, and other necessities from
getting into the country. It was the blockade, which the United State could have ended at any time if it chose. Or
was Saddam expected to manufacture all those things from oil and sand?
2. Or maybe not so weird. It turns out that the British sold the Iraqis an artillery observation balloon system in
the late 1980s. The CIA propaganda piece on the trailers, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production
Plants" (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/iraqi_mobile_plants/index.html) admits that they
could be used for hydrogen production, but says that they wouldn't be very efficient, and that "compact,
transportable hydrogen generation systems are commercially available, safe, and reliable." That's true, they
are but not if you're Iraq. The CIA document conveniently overlooks the blockade, whose alleged
purpose was to prevent the importation of anything that might be used for military purposes. Because of it, the
only way the Iraqis could obtain production facilities to supply gas for their balloons was to build their own.
Editor's note: The above link to the CIA document sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
3. The Office of Special Plans is a Pentagon entity that was set up by Paul Wolfowitz to serve as an alternative
intelligence source, bypassing the CIA. The problem was that all intelligence information received by the
President was funneled through the Director of Central Intelligence. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were convinced
that the spooks were a bunch of wimps, afraid to draw the necessary conclusions from the evidence at hand.
Special Plans, whose name was obviously chosen as a smoke screen, provided an alternative source of
interpretation of the available intelligence, producing ammunition for Rumsfeld's push for war.
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