Iraq - Bush Can Fool No One

From the February 2002 issue of World Press Review (VOL. 49, No. 2)

Baghdad in the Cross Hairs

Bush Can Fool No One

Iman Ahmad, Al-Thawrah (Internet publication of Iraq’s ruling Baath Party), Baghdad, Iraq, November 29, 2001

Baghdad residents listen to President Saddam Hussein (pictured in the mural) addressing the nation, Dec. 18, 2002 (Photo: AFP).

Perhaps the U.S. president believed his news media that he had achieved a great and fast victory in Afghanistan. He began to act as a victorious man, using hollow, arrogant language, making threats and reshuffling the cards to achieve an objective sought by his Zionist team. Bush, however, can fool no one. Certainly he would not be able to fool us. If he wants to repeat the massacre he committed and the destruction he caused in Afghanistan, this is his business.

Bush and all the strategists and experts behind him seek to capitalize on the post-September situation to serve scenarios that were devised in advance to achieve U.S goals. It is now obvious that the aggression against Afghanistan was committed not because of Bin Laden, but with the purpose of rewriting the geopolitical equations in the U.S.’s interest. Bush strives for the permanent goal of keeping the Iraqi situation as it is, meaning that the blockade, daily air attacks, the anomalous situation in the northern part of the homeland, illegitimate interventions, and the media and diplomatic wars will continue.

Thus, Bush began to talk about the return of inspectors to Iraq to prove that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. But what does this have to do with the Afghanistan issue? Is the aim behind the U.S.-organized international fanfare, under the slogan of combating terrorism, not meant to maintain the blockade on Iraq?

No matter how hard Iraq works to prove that it is free of weapons of mass destruction, the United States will find a reason to maintain its hostile stance toward it, as the experience of more than a decade shows. Former [U.N.] weapons inspectors revealed the nature of interventions and practices that the United States carried out through the weapons-inspection teams. Many of these inspectors admitted that the United States incited them to act in a provocative way and tasked them with spying missions.

In 1998, these inspectors behaved in a way that prompted aggression under a prior agreement with Washington, as subsequent revelations indicated. Furthermore, senior officials of the inspection committees, such as [Rolf] Ekeus, acknowledged that Iraq was virtually free of weapons of mass destruction. Ekeus also testified that Iraq fulfilled 95 percent of its obligations six years ago. Even his successor, [Richard] Butler, said that the files on nuclear and chemical weapons were closed. But what did the Security Council do in return for Iraq, other than maintaining the blockade and allowing the aggression to continue?

If Bush wants to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction, let him implement Article 14 of Security Council Resolution 687 that calls for removing these weapons from this region, including the Zionist state. [The resolution was passed in April 1991, acknowledging the “sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of Kuwait and Iraq.” Section 14 states that “the actions to be taken by Iraq...represent steps toward the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction..., and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons.”—WPR]

Why does he keep coming after a country that implemented the Security Council resolutions, but leaves, or rather supports, a terrorist state that is full of all kinds of deadly weapons and does not care about any Security Council resolutions?

Bush should calm down and be careful in uttering his threats, because Iraq is not the kind of country that bows to threat. We know very well how to survive, resist, and move forward despite everything. Experience has proved this fact.