As we sit here it appears evident that the US government is preparing to mount another attack on the besieged country of Iraq. I am here – as a member of United for Peace, Central Vancouver Island, as a Canadian citizen, as an educator, and as a parent – to do my small part in sending a clear and strong message to our government that, under no circumstances do we want Canada to participate in any act of aggression against Iraq. I urge you to do the same – by signing the petition that is circulating, by writing your own letters and emails, and by participating in tomorrow's “Peace Walk.”

Our broader goal, of course, should be to try to prevent this aggression – period. In my view, it is completely unwarranted, and it will almost certainly bring only more misery to a people – as John Pilger's film has shown us – already devastated by a previous attack in 1991, by continuous bombing since then, and by over 12 years of harsh, punishing sanctions.

In the few minutes I have, I would like to draw your attention to some myths about the situation in Iraq – and some facts that do not get widely reported in standard or mainstream media. The sources I am using are all very credible, and I will be happy to provide them to anyone who wishes to follow up on my remarks. And I encourage everyone to seek out alternative sources of information so that as a citizenry we can come to better understand the motives and methods of the forces of power in our world (though there are numerous credible sites on the web, one of the best places to start is http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm).

As many of you know, Iraq has been ruled since 1963 by the Ba'th Party, which came to power in a coup that had U.S. backing. Saddam Hussein has been President and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council since 1979. His has been a brutal reign, to be sure, with executions of political opponents the standard practice. Of the twenty years of his military dictatorship, the U.S. supported him for 12 of those years. “It was still a dictatorship, and political human rights were still severely constrained” during this period of U.S. support (Bennis). At the same time, oil wealth permitted the regime to build an “impressive welfare state” with “rising living standards for ordinary Iraqis” (MERIP). In fact, “prior to 1990 and the imposition of sanctions, the Iraqi population had among the highest standards of living in the middle East: food access, education, health care and general quality of life approached that of developed countries” (Bennis). There were also vibrant professional classes, which have been “cut off from advances in knowledge and technology since 1990” (MERIP 16).

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Of most concern, however, is the fate of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq. “UNICEF estimates that 5000-6000 children under the age of five die each month as a direct result of sanctions, primarily from a lack of clean water, as well as medicine and equipment to treat easily-curable diseases. The water is contaminated, of course, because the U.S. bombed the electricity grids that powered Iraq's water treatment plants (a from of biological warfare). Under the terms of the UN Sanctions Committee (UNSCOM), chlorine is designated a “dual use” good – that is, it can also be used for WMD – and is therefore prohibited. Of note in this regard is the fact that pencils for schoolchildren are also prohibited because graphite can be used in weapons production (Bennis).

During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, it was revealed that Iraq had used chemical weapons against Iranian troops. At the time the U.S. had been “tilting” towards Iraq in the war, and “had authorized the sale of 60 U.S.-made Hughes helicopters to Baghdad” (Extra!). Given the hysteria today in the U.S. administration about the possibility of Iraq having chemical weapons, we might expect that the hawkish Reagan administration would have an equally strong response. However, the Reagan administration's response to Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction was this brief statement: “The United States strongly condemns the prohibited use of chemical weapons wherever it occurs” (Extra!). Well, what about the media, who last fall repeatedly ran unsubstantiated footage of a dog being gassed by al-Queda. The Washington Post said, on March 6, 1984, that it was “'not surprising' that Iraq would use gas, given the fierce Iranian attack in which 'any major crack in the Iraqis' defenses could bring down the army and the government'” (Extra!). “By year's end, the United States had established full diplomatic relations with Iraq for the first time since 1967 (Extra!). Now come back for a moment, if you will, to the late 1990's; here is the Washington Post explaining why an attack on Iraq is justified: “The gravity of letting a proven and unreconstructed aggressor defy international strictures and wield frightening weapons that threaten opposing armies and civilian populations alike can scarcely be exaggerated. This specter is what makes it necessary for law-respecting nations to unite to the extent possible and proceed against Saddam Hussein” (Extra!).

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In March 1988, towards the end of the war, Iraq was again accused of using chemical weapons, this time against the Kurds in the north. In fact, in the notorious “Anfal operation,” resulting in 50,000-100,000 deaths, Iraq used a mixture of poison gas and nerve agents, killing an estimated 5,000 Kurds. The U.S. Senate passed a bill to impose mild sanctions on Iraq. However, the Reagan and Bush administrations adamantly opposed the bill, calling it 'premature', and claiming it “would hurt U.S. exporters and worsen our trade deficit.” The bill eventually died.

The question, then, is, were Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons any less deadly in the 1980s than they are now? Today, the Washington Post and just about every other major media outlet are clamoring for “bombings, sieges, and the violent overthrow of the Iraqi government for merely possessing chemical weapons,” if indeed they still do. However, when Iraq actually used these weapons the Post had this to say: “The United States sees a strategic interest in supporting Arab Iraq and containing fundamentalist Iran. But this political tilt has not kept the Reagan administration from going public, as well as private, with a [verbal] protest against Iraq's C[hemical] W[eapons] policy. It is only by this demonstration of a single standard that a government gains the authority to have its protests heard when its target is an unfriendly government” (Extra!).

Now times change, I suppose, even over a mere decade, and perhaps the Washington Post has reconsidered its position on chemical weapons and has come to the conclusion that they are, as we knew all along, evil beyond words, and that the proper response calls for a massive military assault on any nation even suspected of having them. Nevertheless, it is instructive to monitor these inconsistencies and double-standards in U.S. foreign policy with respect to Iraq, because they give us some understanding of the motives, and therefore the likely actions, of this government. In some circles it is suggested that bad motives might result in actions that will have good results. According to this theory, the U.S. may very well be motivated by the desire to control the second-largest oil reserves in the world (115 billion barrels of proven reserves), as well as the region itself, but military action to accomplish this goal will also result in the demise of Saddam Hussein, something few people would mourn.

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The problem with this theory is that it overlooks the fact that the ends – as well as justifying the means – often determine the means too. That is to say, going to war for purely economic greed is not likely, for instance, to engender humanitarian concern for those who get in the way, such as the estimated 250,000 Iraqi troops and civilians killed in the 1991 aggression (to call it a “war” is a euphemism I hesitate to employ), including those poor souls incinerated on the infamous “Highway of Death” to Basra. There, “more than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway,” as the U.S. “immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then bomb[ed] and straff[ed] the resulting traffic jam for hours. This attack “occurred after Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660 (http://deoxy.org/warcrime.htm). Could we say that “good things stemming from bad motives” befell them? I think it is important to bear in mind that all wars are inherently unpredictable and hence should be undertaken only after meeting a very high burden of proof, especially when the motives of those clamoring the loudest for war – Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld – are highly suspect, to say the least.

As for Saddam's present threat to the U.S. and the world, it is clear that he is nowhere near as dangerous today as he was when he committed his worst atrocities, which happened to coincide with his greatest support from the U.S. and Britain. (In fact, during this period, Bush the elder “authorized loan guarantees and sale of advanced technology with clear applications for weapons of mass destruction right up to the day of the Kuwait invasion.” “The State Department banned all contacts with the Iraqi democratic opposition, maintaining this policy even after the Gulf War, while Washington effectively authorized Saddam to crush a Shi'ite rebellion that might well have overthrown him” [Interview with Chomsky]).

Today, however, Iraq is a vastly weaker country. The Gulf War was extremely destructive to Iraq and since then the country has been devastated by 12 years of sanctions, which probably strengthened Saddam's grip on power but weakened his ability to wage war. No country has been under the scrutiny that Iraq has been under over the past decade. In fact, “former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, maintains that the military threat from Iraq is exaggerated and that since the Gulf War Iraq has been largely disarmed. In October 2002, the CIA issued a report saying that the military threat from Iraq is at its lowest in a decade (“Analysts Discount Attack by Iraq,” www.washingtonpost.com). Certainly, the U.S. and Britain have “offered no evidence to support [their] alarming rhetoric about Iraq.” No credible authority believes that Saddam Hussein possesses nuclear weapons. According to former UN weapons inspectors, 95% of Iraq's chemical weapons have been destroyed. Iraq may possess stores of biological agents, since the US supplied Baghdad with stock for anthrax, botulism and other diseases in the 1980s. However, Ritter and others point out that the potency of these agents is expired and that Iraq lacks the delivery systems to turn chemical or biological agents into weapons (Susskind). This is not to say that Iraq is 100% free of WMD, or that Saddam would not use such if given the opportunity or if threatened. On the contrary, the pressure of inspections must be maintained to ensure against these possibilities. However, inspections should not be used merely to find a pretext for war.

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It is widely believed that the UN weapons inspectors were “thrown out” of Iraq in 1998. Of course, as was openly reported at the time, even in mainstream media, inspectors were withdrawn by request of President Clinton on the eve of his Desert Fox bombing campaign. This did not stop CNN, however, from repeating the lie, in an interview just before Christmas with former chief weapons inspector, Richard Butler, by way of a ticker-tape line beneath his video picture. Also little known is the fact that the U.S. was using inspectors as spies, as confirmed in July 2002 by Rolf Ekeus, head of UNSCOM from 1991-97 (MERIP 5). Former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, states: “T]he difficulty with UNSCOM has been the inclusion of espionage, of spies, of various intelligence organizations which, under the UN auspices, is something that is appalling to all of us. . . . [T]he CIA and others have owned up to what they did . . . that they used the UN as a cover for espionage, which is a very unfortunate thing and what, of course, the Iraqis had been saying for many years and the UN had denied for many years. They were right; we, obviously, were wrong” (The Fire This Time, April 1999, in Lindemyer).

With respect Bush's claim that Iraq has violated UN Security Council resolutions, of the sixty-odd Resolutions dealing with Iraq, it has failed to comply with 12, but has since permitted access to UNSCOM without conditions. However, any violations of Security Council Resolutions are to be addressed by the Council itself. No country has the right to unilaterally enforce UN resolutions, according to Articles 41 and 42 of the UN Charter. “Moreover, Iraqi violations are relatively few and minor compared to those of countries like Turkey and Indonesia, which are in violation of multiple resolutions and enjoy strong support from the US. Israel, the world's leading violator of Security Council resolutions (44 to date) is the largest recipient of US aid worldwide.” Furthermore, the Bush administration “rails against Iraqi violations of UN resolutions while declaring its own willingness to violate a fundamental principle of the UN Charter: attacking Iraq without authorization from the Security Council.”

It is also worth remembering that the Bush administration's concern about compliance with the United Nations is quite selective: “since taking office, [it] has scrapped more international treaties and violated more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years” (Susskind). The U.S. will not even honor the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention; they refused to sign a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the convention by allowing for on-site inspections, and instead walked out of the conference declaring the protocol “dead.” So much for the deep concern over biological weapons of mass destruction. U.S. ratification of the International Criminal Court, rather than U.S. obstruction of it, would also be a good way to deal with Saddam's atrocious human rights record, among the worst in the world. And let's not forget that Article 14 of Resolution 687 calls for “steps towards the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons.” Not surprisingly, we do not hear much discussion of this article in mainstream media. All of this makes it quite clear, to me at least, that the US sees international law as an obstacle to their geopolitical interests, not as a guide for international relations.

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In conclusion, military solutions should always be considered a last resort, and then they should be authorized by the UN, according to Chapter VII authorization to use force. Even then the burden of proof should lie heavily with those advocating war, an action that will almost certainly imperil the lives of thousands of innocents, just as it did in 1991. To oppose this war is not to be naïve, or woolly-headed, or “soft” on Saddam, as peace activists are often characterized. Rather, such opposition is born of honest analysis and a willingness to look behind the statistics to see the real faces of the victims of imperial aggression. As the respected U.S. historian and World War II veteran, Howard Zinn, says: “. . . What is certain about war is that large numbers of innocent people will die, including many children, and what is uncertain about war is that any good will come of it. . . . When you go to war, you assume that the lives of people in another country are not as valuable as the lives of your own countrymen. If we really believe, as our most fundamental moral principles demand we believe, that the children in other countries have as much right to live as our children, then we must refuse the call to war”

With respect to the situation in Iraq, in light of the lies, deception, double standards, and questionable motives to which the public has been subjected, no unilateral action by the U.S. should be supported by Canada, or any other government for that matter. Canada should not go along with this planned aggression – with or without the fig-leaf of UN Security Council support. The inspectors should be permitted to finish their work, the disarmament provisions in the Security Council Resolutions should be implemented, and diplomacy and international law should take precedence over saber-rattling and unilateralism. That this approach to international problems does not accord with the “Bush doctrine” of “preemption” should not deter us from working towards these goals. The people of Iraq – the children of Iraq – are depending on us.

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