February 16, 2003
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/tma68/spidersweb.htm
Spider's Web, by Alan Friedman (an award-winning British journalist), is
a must-read book for anyone who doubts the legitimacy of the upcoming war on
Iraq. Exhaustively researched, it provides an all-important historical context
within which to judge the pro-war rhetoric of the Bush administration.
There are countless examples I could cite in support of this assessment. Here is one that is sure to make your blood boil.
On page 8, Friedman notes that:
"Since 1979, Iraq had been on the State Department’s list of states identified as sponsors of terrorism."
Then, on page 19, he reveals that:
"On February 26, 1982, the Reagan administration told Congress that it had dropped Iraq from the list of nations that supported acts of international terrorism. Before coming to Baghdad, [Fred] Haobsh had read about the move and the complaints from senators about Congress not being properly consulted ahead of time. The State department had made it clear that taking Iraq off the list of terrorist nations did not mean the United States was lifting its ban on arms shipments to Iraq. Little was said, however, about the significant hidden value of the change in Iraq’s status: Baghdad would now be eligible for American government loan guarantees. The decision in Washington was more important than people like Fred Haobsh could have realized. To covert operators like Johnson and Smith, it was a signal that they now had political cover to go ahead with their plans to provide U.S. equipment to Iraq, albeit by way of unofficial channels."
The result of these U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans was, of course, Iraq-gate (which the media now pretends never happened).
So the Reagan-Bush administration (with Bush Sr., a former CIA director, playing a pivotal role) helped arm Iraq after it had already been identified years earlier as a sponsor of terrorism.
If that wasn't bad enough, consider the following:
"While many saw evidence that Baghdad was no less a menace than before, Bush and Baker wanted to emphasize the positive. So on Monday, October 2, 1989, with all the necessary information available to him, President George Bush lifted a pen and with one stroke set in motion a secret presidential policy to help Saddam. He signed his name to a secret order that would become known by the acronym of NSD 26, for National Security Directive 26. (See Appendix B, pages 320-322).
"'When you look at NSD 26, you find out it was the Administration's sole desire and policy to aid and abet Saddam Hussein,' said Congressman Sam Gejdenson, a Connecticut Democrat who became one of Bush's harshest critics. 'The cop was put in the intersection, and he was waving the sellers on'" (p. 134).
Why is that excerpt so significant? Because Bush Sr. did this long after Saddam Hussein supposedly "gassed his own people."
Now we have Bush Sr.'s son, in a shameless display of mind-boggling hypocrisy, using this 15-year-old gassing incident as a pretext for the upcoming slaughter of Iraqi peasants. The hollowness of this pretext is so painfully obvious that it has provoked an unprecedented level of anti-war activism before the war in question has even started.
What's worse is that there are millions of people in this country who, when presented with these facts, immediately throw a tantrum and start mindlessly accusing the messenger of being "anti-American." In the sense that "America" denotes a moral commitment to the universal principles of truth and justice, it is they who are "anti-American."