Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Lies 

Who engineered current US policy toward Iraq?

By Laney Littlejohn

Yesterday, Colin Powell tried to reject recent suggestions that the Bush administration confrontation with Iraq was engineered by Israel and /or American Zionists.

Per NYTimes (3/14, p.A11), "Mr. Powell told a House Appropriations  subcommittee that the drive to compel Iraq to disarm stretches back over two administrations and 12 years of United Nations resolutions."

"It is driven by our own national interest," Mr. Powell is quoted as saying.

I fear I must take issue with Mr. Powell for more than one reason.

First, he carefully shifts the basis of the question by referring to the "drive to compel Iraq to disarm."  The Bush administration is pushing not for the disarmament of Iraq, but for a regime change.  Those are very different objectives, and the disarmament objective clearly does not require war.  Thus, we must accuse Mr. Powell of quite deliberately obfuscating the discussion by changing the question at the outset.  Few, if any, in the Congress seem bright enough to spot this little slight of tongue.

But more significantly, if one shifts the question back to relevant question, the origin of the policy objective of regime change, Mr. Powell's denial speaks ill of his knowledge of history and of the backgrounds and political leanings of influential members of the current administration (notably Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld).

Let's do a little bit of exploration ourselves and see where the policy objective of regime change came from.  (The UN objective, and that of the first Bush administration, was disarmament, not regime change).

On July 8 , 1996, Richard Perle (current Chairman of the Defense Policy Board) hand-delivered to Benyamin Netanyahu, incoming Israeli prime minister, a document entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm."  (copy attached).   This paper calls for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq for two reasons, first as an Israeli strategic objective in its own right, and second, as a means of weakening Syria.

Two days later, Netanyahu delivered a speech before a joint session of the US Congress, the text of which was drawn largely from the Perle paper.

All this had no apparent effect on US policy in 1996.  Major policy shifts don't make good material going into elections.

But then, in March of 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a speech at George Washington University stated that the US did not agree that Iraqi compliance with UN arms resolutions was sufficient cause for the removal of sanctions against Iraq.  In the question and answer session following the speech, she made it clear the Saddam had to go before the US
would talk about lifting sanctions.

Albright's speech seems to have been little noticed, but clearly, a policy shift had occurred, from disarmament to regime change.  Clinton reiterated the new policy in November of 1997:  ""Sanctions will be there until the end of time or as long as he [Saddam Hussein] lasts."

The new policy of sanctions until Saddam goes, although inconsistent with any and all UN resolutions on the matter, was insufficient to satisfy Israel, American supporters of Israel, or Richard Perle and his band of neo-cons.  Sanctions are passive, and Saddam, even disarmed might last as long as Castro.  Israel wanted removal, not containment of Saddam.

On January 26, 1998, eighteen people, including Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, sent a letter (copy attached) to President Clinton urging him to abandon the "containment" policy and implement a strategy to remove Saddam Hussein from power.  (Of the 18 signatories, 10 are now part of the Bush administration).

Although the Clinton administration toyed with various means of achieving Saddam's removal, such supporting a military coup or dissident uprisings, it does not appear that the notion of a full-scale US invasion of Iraq was ever on the table.  And, perhaps unfortunately, Clinton was unable to identify any group or organization of Iraqis capable of mounting a credible challenge to Saddam.  (Ahmed Chalabi's much touted Iraqi National Congress is in fact little more than a collection of con artists, something which Clinton figured out, but which seems to have escaped the neocons).

Then, in the first year of George W. Bush's administration, we have the catastrophes of 9/11.  Within a matter of days, a frightened (who wouldn't be) President, surrounded by the likes of Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Rumsfeld had concluded that Saddam was a sufficient threat that his early removal by force was required, even if that entailed a full-scale war, invasion, and a commitment of the US to rule Iraq for some unknown period of time.

Mr. Powell, in light of that history, in light of the backgrounds and political proclivities of the major participants in that history, especially Richard Perle, I cannot accept your claim that US plans to invade Iraq were not engineered by Israel and hard-line American supporters of Israel.

Powell says the current policy is driven by our "own national interest." What interests are those?  The safety of American citizens and their property?  Then where is Saddam's capacity to pose such a threat?  We have no evidence of either suitable weapons or the capacity to deliver such, and even if they exist their deployment would be suicidal.  And we have been lied to about claims of evidence, be it aluminum tubes, magnets, or uranium from Niger.  And Powell himself carried these lies onto the floor of the UN.

Terrorism?  The administration has tried for 18 months to establish some sort of connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, but is yet to produce a shred of credible evidence.  The proposition is nonsense on its face, for the secular government of Saddam Hussein is the target, not the ally, of the religious crazies of al-Qaeda and related organizations. (Unfortunately, the Bush administration and its allies in the press have, according to recent polls, managed to convince over 40% of the American people that Saddam is responsible for 9/11.  Which tells us that people who are frightened, angry and ignorant are easy to manipulate.)

No, Mr. Powell, I don't think the Bush administration is defending American interests.   I think you are implementing Israeli strategy as drafted by Richard Perle and handed to Benyamin Netanyahu in 1996.

But the Bush administration has convinced me of one thing.  Even in the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, it is possible to ride to war on the four horsemen of Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Lies.

For months, I have hung onto the notion of Colin Powell as one flickering light in a den ruled by the Prince of Darkness (Perle's sobriquet during his tenure in Defense).  My fingernails are beginning to slip.

Courtesy of and © 2003 by Laney Littlejohn. The writer is President of Littlejohn Associates, an oil economics consultancy in Houston.  He retired in 1996, after 23 years in Arabia, from the post of Senior Economist at Saudi Aramco.