A War Against Truth

8^th September 2006
The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

This is the title of a book authored by Canadian journalist Paul William Roberts, who experienced the invasion of Iraq from a very different perspective to that of most other journalists who were embedded with the US military and thus became an integral part of the media campaign of the invading forces in their quest to win public support for the invasion.

Roberts instead made his own way to Iraq and experienced the invasion from the receiving end mixing with Iraqis and sharing their pain, deprivation, torture and death. Iraqi civilians who had already suffered under Saddam’s regime but where doubly hurt when the supposed liberation resulted instead in a harsher dose of the same further compounded with the humiliation of seeing their homeland occupied by foreign forces who more mindful of protecting the oil infrastructure rather than the historical and cultural treasures of Iraq which are now gone forever.

Roberts had in fact met Iraq’s foreign Minister Tariq Aziz after the collapse of the regime but before he was captured by the “coalition” forces and knew where Chemical Ali was hiding before he was apprehended.

This book is an eye-opener on how the risks of certitude and excessive self confidence could led to grave mistakes which cause so much suffering to the innocent. There is no substitute for reading through its enjoyable prose but readers could get a taste by sharing some of its more striking quotes:

“Why did many New York taxi drivers predict the consequences of Iraq war better than most in the US government? Ex-director of the CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, replied – the problem with this administration is certitude”.

How true. How could a super power that spends a fortune on intelligence get its information so wrong both on the pretext of going to war, the risk of the regime using weapons of mass destruction which where being concealed from UN scrutiny, as well as on the consequences of such war? The truth is that the Bush II administration had a pre-determined mind to take control of the Iraqi oil fields and intelligence was interpreted subjectively to suit this goal rather than objectively to lead wherever it had to lead.

Another quote:

“It (the invasion) was an unqualified fiasco, deeply saddening, and entirely the fault of America, which had made one of the greatest misjudgements in history. Even Israelis began to worry that the region had been destabilised for another generation, and the future was now less certain than it had been when Saddam ruled Iraq”

This was written before the recent Israel Hezbollah conflict that confirmed that the Iraq invasion has in fact resulted in the exact opposite of US original expectations. The invasion was meant to bring stability to region by imposing a pro-US Saddam rebel like Chalabi and don on Iraq a pseudo democracy controlled by US, which could then be exported to other neighbour countries so that the US gets effective political control on the flow of oil exports from this crucial source of energy region. The result of the fiasco is evident in the price of oil that before the invasion was trading in a range of 22 to 28 dollars is now in the 70 to 75 dollar range.

And where do we go from here? This quote suggests it:

“The US will be forced to leave Iraq fairly soon. To remain there would entail a full-scale draft, and I am not sure the political will exists to break what was a key promise of the 2004 presidential election. A relatively small force would be left to maintain some of the desert bases the army has created in Iraq, so that troops can be flown in again if the Iraqi government requests assistance or the now US controlled oilfields are ever threatened.”

What is not suggested in this quote is whether the US pull-out will complicate the civil war the country is already practically experiencing where Sunnis and Shiites kill each other daily leading to the inevitability of the country having to be broken up or dominated by nearby Iran.

An the final quote comes from an Iraqi Christian priest on the first Easter after the invasion. When asked by Roberts who was Saddan Hussein these words of wisdom were offered by the priest:

“Just another man who wanted to be liked like a god and found it easier to make people fear him than it was to make them love him, without noticing that he had forgotten the difference between love and fear. He thought he was loved. The Americans, British are the same. You thought we would not notice what you really wanted if you freed us from Saddam. You misjudged us. You have forgotten what things like freedom really mean. We have not. You thought moving us from one prison into another, no matter how modern or luxurious, would make us forget we are in a prison. It will not. You will never allow us to run our own country but you will make it seem as if we are running it. You will never fool the Iraqi people the way you can fool your own people. You mock our suffering by even trying to fool us.”

Indeed, Iraq has been a war against truth and its consequences will continue until the deception is removed by the next generation of Americans who will revolt against it just as my generation had revolted against the war in Vietnam.