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.
