Iraq's outlaw arsenal - letters to the editor - Letter to the Editor

The Bush administration's attempt to suppress and rewrite history as noted in Michael I. Niman's article, "What Bush Doesn't Want You to Know About Iraq" in the March/April 2003 issue of the Humanist, is indeed contemptible. The glaring silence of mainstream and corporate mass media in this regard is also disturbing, if unsurprising. And the irony of the Bush crew complaining about the incompleteness of a document they sought to censor and drastically abridge is--in the most darkly perverse sense--humorous. But none of the above justifies the game of rhetorical bait-and-switch that Niman infuses into an otherwise finely detailed expose.

It is absolutely true that the administration was afraid the eight thousand plus pages of background would knock people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from their morally superior hobbyhorses--and with good reason. The tolerance and even assistance of former key Reagan and Bush Sr. officials, not to mention major U.S. corporations, in Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's pre-1990 weapons buildup and use is damning, to say the least.

But it's equally true and indisputable that the Iraqi weapons declaration of December 2002--even with the embarrassing pages--was incomplete. Frankly, the current and relevant issues have little to do with how Iraq came to posses its outlaw arsenal. The pertinent issues, which the December declaration mostly glossed over or blithely ignored, included the fate of tons of chemical and biological weapons material that Iraq still had in its possession when it unilaterally ended the first round of inspections in the 1990s. Iraq had previously agreed that these weapons would be destroyed, that no more would be manufactured, and that programs for developing nuclear and long-range missile systems would be scrapped. The December declaration stated that it had done all these things--but offered little or no proof.

Virtually all those involved, except the Iraqis, of course, considered this response totally inadequate--including the hypocritical "chicken hawk" Bush faction. But it also included chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, the United Nations Secretary General, and the governments of such nations as France and Russia, which have taken an anti-invasion stance regarding Iraq. In no meaningful sense was the Iraqi declaration "a report they actually completed." For Niman to assert as much only serves to further muddy the waters on this life-or-death issue, which, of course, is also what both the Hussein and Bush regimes have sought to do for their own, mutually exclusive reasons.

Jim Lee
Windber, PA

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