The Cost of a Lie
Bush's Uranium and the People of Iraq
Revolutionary Worker #1208, July 27, 2003, posted at rwor.org
On January 28, George W. Bush stood before television cameras and
Congress to make his case for invading Iraq. Among the charges he made
was this:
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
It was not true. It was one lie, surrounded by many other lies, all in
the service of a classic Big Lie: The U.S. and British government said
Iraq's government and military represented a real and possibly
immediate threat to the people of the U.S., and that Iraq therefore
had to be conquered without delay.
Since the war, this issue of Niger uranium has started leaking into
the mainstream media and political arena.
They try to say they didn't know the charges were false. But that is
becoming harder and harder to claim. Evidence is piling up that top
government officials knew that Iraq had no serious nuclear program,
but made these charges anyway.
Their case is pathetic and crumbling. The Emperor has no clothes.
And so, increasingly, the Bush administration has responded with a
shameless answer: It just doesn't matter, they say, if specific
charges against Iraq were true or not.
Bush's false Niger claims were (they say) "just 16 words," just one
sentence in much larger campaign of charges and accusations.
The outrage over "this one error," they say, is "overblown." After
all, they say, the war was victorious, the conquest is over. It is all
now history.
Bush insists repeatedly that there is no excuse now for "historical
revisionism"--meaning that the official version of events should not
be questioned in public.
His defenders argue that the "credibility of the U.S." is not
undermined by Bush's prewar lies, but by anyone who is now questioning
those lies.
"Let's move on," they say; there are, after all, more wars to fight.
And that is exactly why the truth does matter. Such lies were created
to draw people into supporting an unjust war. And such lies will be
produced again, the next time these empire builders want to bully or
attack a country.
We must not "move on"--but look closely at what this war, and those
lies, have done to the people of Iraq.
What is the Cost of a Lie?
On the basis of a relentless campaign of lies, Iraq, a sovereign and
strategic country, was attacked and invaded and now lies conquered by
an army of foreign occupiers.
No one knows precisely how many Iraqi people this unprovoked attack
killed or wounded--the U.S. military itself has never bothered to
offer an estimate. Widely respected estimates by groups like "Iraqi
Body Count" suggest that Iraqi civilian dead were at least 6,000 and
may be close to 8,000. In addition, over 10,000 Iraqi soldiers were
killed in a war that was so one-sided exactly because the Iraqi
military DID NOT have or use the powerful weapons they were accused of
having.
The Iraqi people continue dying under occupation. Iraq was littered
with anti-personnel cluster bombs that continue to kill people,
especially children. The tank weapons of the U.S. shot their depleted
uranium shells--and the radioactive materials are now embedded in
Iraqi soil where it will poison people for years to come.
Meanwhile the masses of Iraqi people suffer all the injustice and
misery of defeat and foreign conquest. People are reduced to
desperation. The economy has virtually stopped. Millions have no
income or ways of getting money. Goods don't move. Electricity rarely
works. Factories sit idle. Fields lie brown and barren because there
is no power to run the irrigation pumps.
The occupation has hit women especially hard. On one hand, there has
been an epidemic of gang rape in the continuing conditions of war,
documented in a recent report by Human Rights Watch. Women and girls
often cannot go to work or school because of the intense danger of
rape. They are prisoners in their homes and made dependent on their
brothers and husbands for the simplest needs. On the other hand, the
destruction of Iraq's relatively secular Baathist government has
strengthened fundamentalist religious forces who insist that women
belong in the home and should be forced to wear headscarves and even
veils in public. And finally, the desperation of war and the
reactionary nature of the foreign occupiers have started to coerce
more and more young Iraqi women into the degradation of prostitution
around U.S. barracks.
Prior to the 1991 war, the Iraqi people enjoyed some of the highest
living standards in the Middle East. Iraq was the only Arab country in
which 90% of the population had access to clean water. Now after two
wars, 12 years of U.S./UN sanctions and a full occupation--their
country and lives are in shambles.
After the war-time destruction of Iraqi water works, sewage pours raw
into Iraq's rivers and irrigation canals, and often spills into urban
streets, creating dangerous lakes of filth. Months of garbage is
uncollected.
Half of Iraq's population faces disease from unclean drinking water.
International aid organizations, like CARE and UNICEF, recently warned
that as many as 300,000 Iraqi children could die if water processing
is not resumed soon and if the emerging epidemics of cholera,
dysentery and typhoid spread.
Before the war, sick people could go to hospitals and be treated.
Epidemic diseases were monitored and contained by an active Ministry
of Health. All that is gone. Hospitals and clinics often operate
without electricity, basic medical supplies (like bandages, oxygen or
antibiotics) or any resources for paying doctors and staff. They are
overwhelmed with tens of thousands of wounded from the war and those
sick from the unsanitary water. In many hospitals, the most seriously
ill simply die, as horrified doctors are forced to focus on those most
likely to survive. In Baghdad's Mansour Children's Hospital a recent
power failure stalled ventilators for hours, killing a six-year-old
girl.
For the moment there is no famine--largely because the prewar
government distributed months of basic food supplies to the population
just before it was overthrown. But those stores will not last forever,
and there are no signs of a replacement system for feeding the people.
In the U.S. press, the "problem" in Iraq is described as not enough
control by their occupying troops--and the solution is described as
more troops, more aggressive intervention, more action by the invaders
in directing the economy.
In fact, the core problem is the unjust invasion and occupation of
this country-- and all their ugly and predictable results for Iraq's
people.
The invasion has now transformed into a harsh new war aimed at an
emerging Iraqi resistance.
Armed troops careen through the streets, set up
roadblocks--threatening, frisking, seizing people at will. The
occupation authorities issue orders, suppress newspapers they don't
like, dismiss and arrest mayors, declare arbitrary curfews--and have
launched frenzied offensives of "collective punishment" across whole
stretches of the country, where they threaten to seize the village
elders and flatten the houses in any villages with signs of
resistance. Hundreds are rounded up, held and brutalized--all without
charges or evidence.
Those U.S. and British soldiers, who have been turned into instruments
of conquest, themselves are caught in the grip of this unjust war.
Over 200 U.S. soldiers have died. Many now live with the guilt and
memory of the unjust and wholesale killing they did. Suicides are
being reported among the troops.
And these soldiers now sit, in the brutal desert heat, guarding oil
fields and trying to enforce occupation on an unaccepting population,
and they are dying, one by one, day after day, from the resistance.
Mary Kewatt, aunt of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, recently said on
Minnesota Public Radio: "President Bush made a comment a week ago, and
he said `bring it on.' Well, they brought it on, and now my nephew is
dead."
*****
The truth matters: he costs of this government'slies have been extreme
and bitter--especially for millions of people in Iraq. And they intend
to push ahead. They occupy in the name of helping the Iaqi people.
They threaten Iran in the name of preventing nuclear danger and
helping the Iranian people. And so it goes. New moves, new lies. It
just can't be allowed to get over.
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