Nailing the Iraq Lie | Aijaz Zaka Syed
This war never had anything to do with Saddam’s mythical weapons or his alleged links to Al Qaeda. The West just wanted to invade Iraq and was looking for an excuse to hit it. In fact, it didn’t even need an excuse to do so.
According to fresh testimony before Britain’s new Iraq inquiry, Blair had signed on to America’s Iraq war mission during his visit to Bush’s Texas ranch in June 2002. That was a year before the Iraq invasion—and long before Secretary of State Colin Powell swore before the United Nations that Iraq was a ‘clear and present danger’ to world peace. Remember Powell’s claim about Saddam moving around his ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ on trucks?
Sir Christopher Meyer, UK’s envoy in Washington during that critical year, told the Iraq inquiry this week that Bush and Blair had ‘signed in blood’ their Iraq pact during that meeting.
The oil, the Israeli lobby, Bush’s Oedipal complexes or old-fashioned hegemonic ambitions, whatever drove the coalition, clearly Iraq had been in its sights right from the day one. This was a war based on and driven by lies and treachery right from the word go.
And Blair’s BBC interview has nailed this monumental lie on which this sham war was built. What more do we need? Is that not enough to put him and other leading lights of the coalition in the dock for crimes against Iraqi people and for crimes against humanity? Blair is supposed to appear before the Iraq inquiry later next year. But he has already confessed to his crimes, hasn’t he? Blair and Bush are not just guilty of war crimes against Iraqi people but are also guilty of misleading the international community.
It was their WMD claim that persuaded the United Nations and the world community to give that fig leaf of ‘international mandate’ to Iraq invasion.
Would the United Nations, ineffective and toothless as it is, have given its blessings to the invasion, if its august members had known Saddam didn’t have all those frightening weapons that Bush and Blair claimed he had?
The UN Resolution 678 approved use of force against Iraq, only if it failed to ‘disarm’ itself of its weapons of mass destruction. The coalition used this Security Council resolution, passed in the 1990s during the first Gulf War, to justify the war.
Denuded of that legal and moral cover, the Iraq invasion is nothing but war crimes against a helpless, defenceless people. Which it essentially was! International law doesn’t allow any country to force a regime change in other countries even on humanitarian grounds.
Read in full: Khaleej Times Online Aijaz Zaka Syed Nailing the Iraq Lie
