Yesterday, John Kerry won the New Hampshire Democratic Election. Lord Hutton cleared Tony Blair of being responsible for the Kelly suicide. Conservatives will probably take this a step further and say it vindicates Blair’s and Bush’s reasons to go to war in Iraq. They would be wrong in this assumption.
Just the fact that WMD have not been found, compounded with Kay’s resignation and acknowledgment that there was no evidence of WMD found by the Iraq Survey Group, lend credibility to theory that both America and Britain were fooled into war. It doesn’t help that Cheney, in a public interview this past Sunday while attempting to rally international allies about the mission in Iraq, ignored the question posed on Iraqi weapons.
Joe Conason (from Joe Conason’s Journal, January 27th) summed up Kay’s resignation and comments by saying:
What neither Blair nor Bush nor Cheney has answered is Kay's admission that the U.N. inspections regime after the first Gulf War had disarmed Iraq. The implication is that continued inspections would have prevented Saddam from resuming production of chemical and biological weapons -- as well as the nuclear weapons that he never had and probably could never have built -- without hundreds of American and thousands of Iraqi lives lost. Kay's parting comments offer a clue to the final gambit that will be employed the White House and Downing Street. Having spun the cautious findings of professional analysts to accommodate their war agenda, the Bush and Blair governments will try to blame "bad intelligence." Just don't expect the intelligence agencies to accept that damning verdict without a response that could damage those dishonest politicians.
Daniel Ellsberg, the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, wrote a scathing piece for The Guardian and TomPaine, titled "The Next ‘Pentagon Papers.’"
In the article, Ellsberg retells his experience observing "pacification efforts" in Vietnam for 17 months and compares the sudden violent attacks he experienced, some by very young boys, with what is currently happening in Iraq.
Ellsberg writes:
[These attackers] were local boys. They had the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion and fire away with American troops on all sides. They thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn't. This would have been a good moment to ask myself if they were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be in their backyard to be fired at.
I can't help but remember [my experience] as I read about U.S. and British patrols meeting rockets and mines without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed villagers who could have told us we were about to be attacked. Why didn't they? First, there was a good chance their friends and family members were the ones doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by the local population not as allies or protectors——as we preferred to imagine——but as foreign occupiers. Helping us would have been seen as collaboration, unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was to be in danger from the resistance, and that the foreigners' ability to protect them was negligible.
There could not be a more exact parallel between this situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking into attacks in the course of patrols apparently designed to provide "security" for civilians who, mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined to warn us of these attacks. This situation——as in Vietnam——is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there.
As more and more U.S. and British families lose loved ones in Iraq——killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there——they will begin to ask: "How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?" And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam.
Moreover, Ellsberg sees a sickening degree of familiarity between how Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon sold the war to America and how Bush and Blair sold this war. "I served three US presidents," Ellsberg writes, "—who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied——and continue to lie——as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam."
In the closing paragraphs of his article, he alludes to documentation yet to see the light of day, that are waiting, like the infamous Pentagon Papers, for courageous individuals to reveal them.
I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now——the Pentagon Papers of Iraq——whose unauthorized revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has already come out through unauthorized disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organized covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr. Kelly's case with tragic results.
Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake.
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
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