The truth of UK's guilt over Iraq-by Scott Ritter

[kpete]

The truth of UK's guilt over Iraq

Until Chilcot hears UN weapons inspectors' testimony, the fiction of Britain honestly seeking a WMD smoking gun prevails

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In short, Saddam had been found guilty of possessing WMD, and his sentence had been passed down by Washington and London void of any hard evidence that such weapons, or even related programmes, even existed. The sentence meted out – regime termination – mandated such a massive deployment of troops and material that all but the wilfully blind or intentionally ignorant had to know by the early autumn of 2002 that war with Iraq was inevitable. One simply does not initiate the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft, and dozens of ships on a whim or to reinforce an idle threat.

President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president's task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.

The tragic final act of the farce directed by Bush and Blair was the theatre of war justification known as UN weapons inspections. Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq's retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.

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In the end, the British were left with the role of fabricating legitimacy for an American policy of terminating weapons inspections in Iraq, supplying dated intelligence of questionable veracity about a secret weapons cache being stored in the basement of a Ba'ath party headquarters in Baghdad, which was used to trigger an inspection the US hoped the Iraqis would balk at. When the Iraqis (as hoped) balked, the US ordered the inspectors out of Iraq, leading to the initiation of Operation Desert Fox, a 72-hour bombing campaign designed to ensure that Iraq would not allow the return of UN inspectors, effectively keeping UN sanctions "frozen" in place.

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more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/27/truth-uk-guilt-iraq-chilcot

[Name removed]

1. Deleted sub-thread

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[NYC_SKP]

2. And, isn't it just lovely the way we publicly hung Saddam Hussein over this bullshit.

I'm no fan of Saddam, but it's beyond shameful that we did what we did, any of it, all of it.

:puke:

NOTE: While it wasn't public in the sense of being done out in the town square, it was done in a way that allowed video to be taken and published.

:puke:

:puke:

[tularetom]

3. Rotten as he was Saddam was arguably better for Iraq than the current regime

He made the trains run on time.

Now? There are no stinking trains.

[NYC_SKP]

5. A great many people would not have died. Americans and Iraqis. n/t

[Name removed]

6. Deleted sub-thread

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[JohnyCanuck]

4. So Shrub, his poodle and the neocon assholes told a few lies, but we got Saddam,

along with a few deformed babies. But what the heck, they're Iraqi babies, so nothing for warmongering, wsr criminal assholes to loose any sleep over.

Call it Ecocide: Babies With No Heads, 2 Heads or Monstrous Deformities

This is the news I take with me into Thanksgiving and the season of gratitude and family togetherness: that doctors in Fallujah, the Iraqi city we devastated in two military assaults in 2004, have begun documenting a startling rise in birth defects -- about 15 times the pre-invasion occurrence of early-life cancers and brain and nervous-system abnormalities, according to the U.K.'s Guardian.

A group of British and Iraqi doctors have petitioned the United Nations to investigate the situation, which is clearly related to the U.S. invasion and occupation. According to their letter: "In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days (and) a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed." In comparison, the letter said, in August 2002 -- before the invasion -- 530 babies were born; six of them died within the first week, with a single birth defect reported.

Young women in Fallujah, the doctors wrote, "are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs."

What might be causing this nightmare? The most likely factors are chemical or radiation poisoning, according to the Nov. 14 Guardian article, which noted: "Abnormal clusters of infant tumors have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf -- areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used."

Finally, this is just another story about ecocide -- the murder of a nation's ecosystem, both intentionally and as a predictable consequence of military actions -- which is the true name for war. When the New York Times and all other mainstream outlets see the need to write about the future ecocide ventures we are now preparing for, or the current ones we are always in the process of throttling down or up, I wish they'd stop using the romantic word "war." The modern manifestation of this exercise in mutual and collective insanity is so toxic and destructive, its effects cannot simply be absorbed by the human race, the environment in which our lives are possible or even our DNA.

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=101966

[ConcernedCanuk]

8. It ain't just shrub - Obama's armies are still using that genocidal Depleted Uranium

.
.
.

that will maim and kill for centuries

along with poisoning the countries wherever they use them - farmlands, waterways -

spreading a toxin that will maim and kill for generations . .

Obama is still doing it.

[glitch]

7. Wow! Moderators are lightening fast today! K & R for Ritter keeping it real.

Thanks for posting kpete.