There
are days when you watch the news, you swallow hard
the terrible bile of disgust and you try to get
on with your life. And there are days when a hammering
sound nearly splits your eardrums. Impossible to
avoid. Yesterday was such a day. I watch the England
v Wales match, trying not to think of Bigley and
suddenly the thousands among the 55,000 plus ‘English’
fans boo and boo and boo the Welsh national anthem.
Not a comment from the expert commentators –
not a sound! And then, in silence, the same 55,000
‘pay their respect’ to the executed Liverpoodlian.
And in those 60 seconds of eerie quiet there is
the hammering sound in my eardrums. Is it perhaps
the echo of the final nails being pounded into the
coffin of the Bush Administration's and Blair’s
lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Is
it the shame of the ‘New’ Labour Party
telling the Queen to honour Blair’s National
Security and Intelligence advisors on Iraq?
Last
Wednesday, the CIA's Iraq Survey Group, headed by
Charles Duelfer, released a 918 page report that
once and for all concluded that Saddam Hussein's
government destroyed its remaining military WMD
stockpiles immediately after the Gulf War in 1991
-- and the last of it following UN weapons inspections
in 1996.
The
White House is spinning the Duelfer report madly
while there is not even a sound from London. Spin
aside, there is not even a shred of evidence at
all that Saddam and his top aides even discussed
the weapons programs after the mid '90s -- nearly
a full decade before the United States and Britain
launched a preemptive war based on disarming those
weapons.
The
weapons simply didn't exist, and it's important
to not let the record of what the Bush and Blair
were claiming go down the memory hole. There was,
according to the Duelfer report, no attempt to smuggle
uranium from Niger. There was also no attempt to
pass weaponry on to Al-Qaeda. The ‘civilised
and democratic west’ went to war because, we
were told, there was a "grave and growing danger"
to our security posed by these weapons -- a threat
so imminent and dire that it could not even wait
for the few additional weeks needed for U.N. weapons
inspectors to do their job. The inspectors, remember,
were already in Iraq, and were being given open
access to all of Iraq's defenses -- far more access,
for example, than the U.S. or Britain would ever
permit an international body to have. In retrospect,
it looks like the ‘Coalition of the Believers’
launched its war to preempt those inspections --
to stop them before they could conclusively say,
as the CIA now has, that Saddam was telling the
truth. And here is the hammering sound again, as
the Sunday Times today, in a two-page spread tries
to explicate why Saddam was “incapable of telling
the truth”!! Richard Woods and Nick Rufford
in pp. 16-17 argue that “Saddam had no WMD
but would not admit it”!!! He, according to
the two hacks, apparently, bluffed us and fooled
us. Great!
Bush
and Blair, on the other hand, were certainly not
telling the truth. They, and their cronies, were
pressurising their respective intelligence agencies
to cook up scare stories about an Iraqi threat --
and doing so, as John Kerry keeps pointing out,
in place of the very real and very different type
of threat posed by Al-Qaeda. And here goes Claire
Short telling us now that Bin Laden’s struggle
is “just”!!
Methinks
here that there is no legal justification for attacking
a country, or a region, or a community, or a person
that has never attacked you except for the belief
that such an attack is imminent. Other reasons may
sound good, but war, and violence, legally speaking,
must be a last resort -- not something undertaken
just because it sounds good.
Tens
of thousands of people of all nationalities have
died in a senseless war for exactly that reason
-- because it sounded good. What's worse, the war
is now enmeshed, as Powell and Bremner recently
stated, in a steady downward spiral compounded by
the Bush Administration's and Blair’s refusal
to recognize that things aren't going well. We'd
be a lot better off if Bush and Blairite company
could admit reality -- starting with something they've
never really done. They could admit, once and for
all, that they were wrong about Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction. That they were wrong in their
decision to go to war.
All
that leaves is the question of whether they knew
they were wrong at the time they were making all
those extravagant claims. In the end, it probably
doesn't matter. The war is still a vicious and horrible
mess, and Iraqis and Americans and British and Poles
and Turks and Italians and Israelis and Palestinians
and ‘innocents’ like Kenneth Bigley are
going to continue to die, in ever-increasing numbers.
Whether deposing a cruel dictator like Saddam in
this way was a good idea is still open to debate
– depending on your standpoint. But on the
topic of the matter that justified the war, the
debate is now over. Finished.
And
the hammering sound goes on. As Dick Cheney and
Fox News and Sky News and the Sunday Times and the
Sunday World continue to lie. The last one in today’s
edition in its front page in huge typefaces arguing
that “This trash should be put behind bars”.
No, not the Iraqui opposition – no. The reference
is to one of the protagonists of the Dunsink travellers
engaged in peaceful direct action against the County
Council – while shedding crocodile tears for
“poor Mr. Bigley”. And a certain Susan
Philips, a former Wicklow County councillor, in
an article in last Wednesday’s Irish Times,
lauding the “visionary” Bush.
Hammer/bang/hammer/boom.
Impossible to avoid – impossible to make it
stop! Not even after celebrating the Greens’
humiliation of Barthez, Henry and Co. in Paris.
No escape.
