By Ismail Salami – Tehran
Much to the bitter disappointment of international community, a report recently declassified by CIA reveals that a war that started in the name of democracy in Iraq in 2003 and claimed the lives of more than one million innocent Iraqis and thousands of US-led troops was waged on the basis of an unfortunate series of blatant lies fabricated by CIA.
In a nutshell, the report says CIA failed to carry out sufficient research into the possibility of WMDs in the hands of the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein and that without due proof, they concluded that since Saddam was in the habit of lying about WMDs, they guessed he was in possession of weapons and mass destruction and that Iraq had to be reduced to dereliction and misery at the hands of the US military on the strength of a sheer conjecture.
Prominent points in the report are as follows:
1) When the [U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency] inspections proved more intrusive than expected, the Iraqi leadership appears to have panicked and made a fateful decision to secretly destroy much of the remaining nondeclared items and eliminate the evidence.
2) Iraq’s firmly established “cheat and retreat” pattern made it difficult for U.N. inspectors and Western analysts to accept new Iraqi assertions at face value.
3) A liability of intelligence analysis is that once a party has been proven to be an effective deceiver, that knowledge becomes a heavy factor in the calculation of the analytical observer.
The new report brings to fore and highlights the necessity of an idea audaciously expressed by some in recent past: the trial of Georg Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals for lying about WMDs in Iraq.
Only recently, South African peace activist and Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu pulled out of a leadership summit in Johannesburg because he refused to share a platform with Mr. Tony Blair whom he considers a war criminal. Loud and clear, Tutu has announced Tony Blair and George W. Bush as war criminals who should be taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague over the Iraq war for lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Besides, Tutu has said the US- and UK-led war against Iraq had brought about conditions for the civil war in Syria and a possible Middle East conflict involving Iran.
"The then leaders of the United States [Mr. Bush] and Great Britain [Mr. Blair] fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies and drive us further apart. They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand – with the specter of Syria and Iran before us," he said.
No doubt, Bush and Blair will be eventually tried in a fair court of justice for the crimes they have committed in Iraq in the name of democracy under the hallucination of a divine decree; indeed, that is only a matter of when rather than if. As for Bush, he has explicitly stated that he was on a mission from God to strike Afghanistan and Iraq. Overwhelmed with a maniac feeling of messianic mission, Bush revealed this religious madness four months after the US-led invasion of Iraq in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in his meeting with a Palestinian delegation during the Israeli-Palestinian summit.
He said, “I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.”
In an unprecedented ruling handed down by the Kuala Lumpur (KL) War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia in May, George W. Bush and a number of his accomplices including Dick Cheney, former US Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Secretary, and Alberto Gonzales, then Counsel to President Bush were found guilty of war crimes.
Though the Kuala Lumpur Tribunal may not have the authority to try them in practice, it must be regarded as a great step in upholding justice and respecting humanity on a large scale.
Besides, the tribunal evinces a keen sense of public sensitivity to and awareness of a universal quest for truth and justice. It is manifest that global awareness is on the increase in the world and that the truth will emerge from behind the clouds one day.
Day by day, more evidence is building up to put Bush and Blair to abject shame for their crimes and fresh calls for arresting and trying the duo and their accomplices at the international criminal court fall upon the ears from time to time.
International community is waking up to the realities thanks to the efforts of peace activists and the justice-seeking dissidents across the world. It is indeed a good sign that a new age of social and political enlightenment has already begun to dawn and that a new light is in sight. This marks an imminent end to multitudes of atrocities perpetrated by Washington and its allies and the plots hatched by the Zionists to divide and rule the world.
Washington’s monophonic urge to decide for the world is growing weaker and weaker every day with a powerful polyphonic global voice taking the place of the old one. In short, the world is developing greater perceived need for sustainable peace and security.
What the CIA file documents is the fact that Iraq was ferociously devoured in the belly of the CIA beast not as a country with a dictator as its leader but as a nation which was denied the opportunity to hold its fate in its own hands and get rid of its dictator.
The sheer ouster of Saddam Hussein barely justifies the innocent blood that was spilled in Iraq and a military invasion of such colossally devastating proportions.
– Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and lexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
