In a speech intended to frighten the American people into supporting a war,
the president Monday again trotted out his grim depiction of Saddam Hussein as
a terrifying boogeyman haunting the world. However, a CIA report released late
last week and designed to bolster Bush's case for preemptive invasion instead
provided clear evidence that Iraq poses less of a threat to the world than at
any other time in the past decade.
In its report, the CIA concludes that years of U.N. inspections combined with
U.S. and British bombing of selected targets have left Iraq far weaker militarily
than in the 1980s, when it was supported in its war against Iran by the United
States.
The CIA report also concedes that the agency has no evidence that Iraq possesses
nuclear weapons, although it lamely attempts to put the worst spin on that embarrassing
fact: "Although Saddam probably does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient
material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them."
Of course, that is a statement about intent, not capability, and one that
can be made about dozens of the world's nations, many of them run by dictators
as brutal as Hussein.
None of the unstable nations already possessing deliverable nuclear weapons
are targets of Bush's wrath. And in the case of the military dictatorship of Pakistan,
which at some point is likely to use such weapons in a war with India, we have
even eliminated the sanctions imposed as punishment for developing those nuclear
arms.
More important than its psychoanalyzing of Iraq's megalomaniacal leader is
the CIA's concession that the much-maligned inspections done by teams of experts
organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency actually worked quite well:
"More than 10 years of sanctions and the loss of much of Iraq's physical nuclear
infrastructure under IAEA oversight have not diminished Saddam's interest in acquiring
or developing nuclear weapons."
Similarly, the report concludes that Iraq's chemical weapons "capability was
reduced during the UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission] inspections
and is probably more limited now than it was at the time of the Gulf War."
The report also notes that all cases of documented use of chemical weapons
by Iraq occurred on or before March 1988, primarily against Iranian troops in
a war covertly supported by the U.S., and that neither chemical nor biological
weapons were used against the United States during or after the Gulf War.
So what we have here is our top intelligence agency endorsing the past success
of a peaceful, enforceable disarmament technique that our allies and the United
Nations support, while our president and his Cabinet repeatedly belittle it as
a sham.
In fact, if the CIA is to be believed, the inspections that were broken off
four years ago amid bombing of Iraq by the U.S. and its allies should be reinstated
immediately, even ahead of a tougher U.N. resolution.
If Iraq thwarts the resumption of effective inspections, the CIA report also
makes obvious that continued airstrikes targeting suspected armaments facilities
would make far more sense than a costly, risky full-fledged invasion.
"UNSCOM inspection activities and coalition military strikes destroyed most
of [Iraq's] prohibited ballistic missiles and some Gulf War-era chemical
and biological munitions," the CIA report says, but "Iraq still has a small force
of extended-range Scud-variant missiles, chemical precursors, biological seed
stock, and thousands of munitions suitable for chemical and biological agents."
The report claims that Iraq may have converted some of its "legitimate vaccine
and biopesticide plants to biological warfare." But since the CIA report provides
maps pinpointing suspect Iraqi weapons sites, they could easily be taken out short
of the antiseptic-sounding "regime change" the Bush administration is aching to
achieve.
In truth, the invasion is required not to meet a pressing threat to our security
but rather to meet the threat to GOP control of Congress posed by a sagging U.S.
economy and a stock market that has wiped out the savings of many Americans. That
and the pent-up desire of frustrated wannabe imperialists among top Bush advisors
to find a way to use our high-tech weaponry to micromanage the world. The CIA
report makes it clear there is no plausible national security reason for pushing
for war with Iraq at this time, other than the ill-advised imperial goal of directly
controlling the world's oil supplies.
That's why the president in his speech Monday was reduced to scaring Americans
with more tales of Hussein the Boogeyman.
Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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