Clarke Exposes Bush's Iraq Agenda

OVER A million anti-war protesters marched worldwide last Saturday to mark the 12-month anniversary of the US-led war on Iraq.

In the last year a mountain of facts has been accumulated to show that George Bush and Tony Blair fabricated evidence to wage a war.

These two warmongers falsely claimed that Saddam's Iraq regime possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which posed an immediate threat to the West and also, that the Iraqi regime was intimately connected with Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qa'ida. This was the basis for "regime change".

Bush and Blair's lies have been exposed by Hans Blix, the former UN chief weapons inspector, David Kay, the CIA official who headed the Iraq Survey Group looking for WMDs, and White House insiders such as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

The latest revelation of dirty dealings in the White House comes from long-time US government terrorism expert, Richard Clarke. In an interview on the TV news programme 60 minutes Clarke, who had served under presidents Reagan and Clinton and the Bush's, senior and junior, claimed that George W Bush the day after the 11 September attacks pressured him into establishing a connection between al-Qa'ida terrorism and Saddam Hussein.

Clarke confirmed O'Neill's earlier accusation that the Bush administration came into office in 2000 with an agenda of toppling the Iraqi dictator. Bush's foreign policy was molded by a group of Cold War warriors known as 'the Vulcans'. They advised him continue the job started by his father ie finish off Saddam's Iraq.

At a meeting in April 2001 attended by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence and a neo-conservative hawk, Clarke warned of a terrorist threat from al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden. Wolfowitz's response was: "Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States." The rest, they say, is history.

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