President Bush speaks
at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., on Monday,
July 12, 2004. Bush defended his decision to invade Iraq even as he
conceded that investigators had not found the weapons of mass
destruction that he had warned the country possessed. “Although we have
not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go
into Iraq,” Bush said after inspecting a display of nuclear weapons
parts and equipment from Libya, which were sent to Oak Ridge as part of
an agreement with Moammar Gadhafi to end his country’s nuclear weapons
program. Photo: Mark Humphrey/AP
RABAT, Malta —
The weapons of mass destruction (WMD) premise has proven useful
throughout the United States’ continued imperialist infiltration of the
Middle East. Indeed, former President George W. Bush’s address to
Congress on Sept. 20, 2001 can be read as a prelude to more recent
intervention galvanized under the banner of democracy.
In his address, Bush remarked: “On September the 11th, enemies of
freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have
known wars – but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign
soil … Americans have known surprise attacks – but never before on
thousands of civilians.”
He blamed al-Qaida for 9/11, and as his speech continued, he invoked
the NATO Charter, Article 5 of which states, “The parties agree that an
armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America
shall be considered an attack against them all.” Armed with this
justification, Bush declared the
“war on terror.”
“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,”
Bush said. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
After commencing in
Afghanistan, the war on terror was taken to Iraq in 2003, where the WMD
narrative was again used toward the ultimate goal of forcing a regime
change.
But it didn’t stop there.
The
process that facilitated imperialist violence in Iraq was repeated,
albeit under different circumstances, during the Arab Spring —
especially in Libya. Apart from the U.S., active participants
include NATO and the United Nations, whose input ensured the destruction
of countries and, consequently, their subjugation.
A 2007 interview with U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark offers insight into
the events unfolding around the Arab Spring. Clark said that a U.S.
general, whose name is not disclosed, had told him, “This is a memo that
describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years,
starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and,
finishing off, Iran.”
A history of subjugation and pretexts for war
The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916
represents the first step taken by the British and the French toward
limiting Arab independence as they carved out new states from the
Ottoman Empire.
It established the strategy of dividing the Middle East along ethnic, sectarian and tribal lines.
In 1917, British imperialism set the foundations for a stronger,
hostile presence in the Middle East with the Balfour Declaration, which
approved a national home for Jews in Palestine. The inception of Israel
in 1948 provided a solid settler-colonial presence in the Middle East — a
presence hostile to Arabs and one which serves as a stronghold for the
U.S.
Then, in 1945, the U.N. Charter established a hegemonic
interpretation of intervention and domination. Chapter VII of the
Charter legitimizes foreign intervention in the case of “threats to
peace, breaches of the peace and acts of aggression.” U.S. aggression in
Iraq is an example of violence being sanctioned under the auspices of
the U.N. Charter. In this case,
an
ambiguous WMD premise was leveraged by the U.S. to facilitate regime
change, install a U.S.-aligned government, and provide the foundations
for mutating violence – the most recent such mutation to emerge has been
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
On Nov. 8, 2002, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted
Resolution 1441, which was meant to serve as a warning that would compel
Saddam Hussein to comply with previous resolutions. It specifically
asserted that Iraq constituted a threat to the international community
due to its “non-compliance with Council resolutions and proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles.”
Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security
Advisor, declared Resolution 1441 to be a mere pretext for the intended
war in Iraq: “No government that talked to President Bush or his
advisers since Resolution 1441 was passed in November 2002 could have
any doubt that within a few months the Americans would announce a breach
of this resolution as well as retaliatory measures.”
Meanwhile, from August 2002 to March 2003,
Vice
President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush
publicly reiterated the chemical weapons propaganda to the U.S. public
as a pretext for the invasion.
The U.S. also set out to dismantle resistant nations’ means of
maintaining their economic independence, thus allowing the U.S. to
control oil wealth — a strategy that requires constant turmoil in the
region. Bush signed Executive Order 13303 in 2003, giving immunity to
oil companies controlling Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Purportedly enacted
to protect the Development Fund for Iraq — a project affiliated with the
World Bank, it exempts U.S. companies from being investigated for a
wide range of violations, including those pertaining to human rights.
Chemical weapons
Recent reports in U.S. media indicate that troops in Iraq — both
American troops and American-trained Iraqi troops — encountered chemical
weapons from 2004 to 2011, including remnants of nerve and mustard
gases. These weapons had mostly been left behind by Saddam’s regime, and
were built with heavy cooperation with the West. However, this
discovery was not made public at the time, as it would have rendered
Bush’s WMD premise false and distorted the prevailing narrative.
U.N. weapons inspectors found no evidence of WMD manufacturing or
possession of banned weapons throughout their investigation in Iraq.
Given that the invasion and subsequent military occupation of Iraq was
based on allegations that Saddam constituted a major threat through an
alleged WMD program, a declaration on behalf of the U.S. government
regarding the discovery of old, abandoned weapons would have been in
glaring contrast to the propaganda disseminated by the Bush
administration.
The truth was kept secret and manipulated to such an extent that
affected troops were prevented from receiving medical care. Thus,
holding onto that false premise was prioritized over dealing with the
reality — troops injured by decades-old weapons.
A New York Times report in October states that the bulk of the
material “could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all.
Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard
agent or residual sarin.” Manufactured between 1979 and 1981 in an
attempt to counter the Iranian Revolution under Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini’s rule, Germany and the U.S. are two countries mentioned as
responsible for aiding Iraq’s production of chemical weapons during that
period.
Yet the U.S. forces’ use of
white phosphorus in Fallujah in 2004 – a toxic and incendiary weapon
which is restricted under the 1980 Protocol on Incendiary Weapons and
prohibited under the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention — was
manipulated to fall beyond the parameters of WMD and accountability. The
U.S. State Department attempted to counter reports on the use of
chemical weapons during the war in Fallujah by stating that white
phosphorus was used “to illuminate enemy positions at night.” However,
graphic images are testimony to the fact that white phosphorus was used
during the attack in a manner that constituted a massacre.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization remains reluctant to link
the high rate of congenital birth defects in Iraq to the depleted
uranium used by the U.S. In the FAQ section pertaining to the congenital
birth defect study that started in Iraq in 2012, the WHO explicitly
states that the study, carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of
Health in Iraq, will not delve into the link between birth defects and
use of depleted uranium.
Either way, destruction and death
In 2011, prior to NATO’s invasion of Libya under the pretense of
aiding the Arab Spring, former justice minister Mustafa Abdel Galil
claimed that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi was in possession of
biological and chemical weapons.
“At the end, when he’s really pressured, he can do anything,” Galil
told Al-Jazeera. “I think Gaddafi would burn everything left behind
him.”
The destruction which leaders like Saddam and Gaddafi were expected to bring upon their countries was averted, of course.
Yet toppling these leaders required a cycle of bombings, massacres and mass graves — all in the name of democracy.
Other than sensationalism to further instability in the Middle East
and thus cement imperialist domination, the pretext of WMDs has proven
irrelevant as a reason for foreign intervention. While no longer needed
as justification for pre-emptive war, imperialist forces are still
utilizing a variation of the narrative to divert attention away from the
violence wrought by U.S. and NATO bombings. This, in turn, renders
“liberated” countries subservient to contemporary forms of colonization.
