[Vision2020] The Deceptions of War: A Response to Phil Nisbet and a Request for an Apology

[Nicholas Gier]

Hail to the Vision!

Phil and I have traded the phrase “scattergun approach” to 
characterize each of our posts, but of course I still think that it 
applies only to him.  I was very careful in choosing my examples.  I 
chose claims by Cheney or Bush that were contradicted by previous 
claims by reputable sources, even their own Defense Department and 
other agencies.  Phil was a scattergun because he did not focus on 
these claims; rather, he chose to quibble with my interpretation of 
the facts, which sometimes led us far from my basic claims.

Phil did not even respond to my first bullet, which was that Cheney 
continued to repeat the alleged 2001 meeting between 9/11 hijacker 
Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague, even though American and 
European intelligence agencies previously stated that this was false.

Phil claims that I deceived my readers by failing to mention some 
details in the 9/11 report that qualified the report’s conclusion that 
there were no formal, operational ties between Saddam and Osama.  Let 
me summarize the details that can be found in the text end noted as 54-
55 and 74-76.   (My html version does not have page numbers.)  There 
were three exchanges between Iraqi agents that ended with a meeting 
with Osama at the end of 1994.  Osama asked for training camps in Iraq 
but did not get any.  When Osama was back in Afghanistan there were 
more exchanges in 1998-99.  Osama was offered safe haven in Iraq, but 
he rejected the idea. 

There are good reasons why these exchanges were evidently shrouded in 
suspicion and did not lead to anything substantial. Secular Iraq was 
on Osama’s hit list of infidel regimes. Specifically, he urged the 
Saudi government to form a Jihadi army under his direction to remove 
Saddam from Kuwait. Osama also supported Islamic extremists in Iraqi 
Kurdistan who were fighting against Saddam.  I think it is very clear 
that Saddam and Osama would have made horrible allies.  If Osama had 
gone to Iraq, Saddam would have completely restricted his activities.

Next Phil takes us on a really speculative detour.  He quotes Richard 
Clarke and his fears that Osama would seek asylum in Iraq, so it was 
better to get him in Afghanistan.  But the obvious place for him to 
go, after our invasion, was Western Pakistan where he and his Taliban 
allies could and did find ready refuge.  It helped that Pakistani 
intelligence agents were very supportive of the Taliban.

Phil completely overstates and exaggerates the Jordian Zarqawi’s 
relationship with Osama.  He worked from separate bases in Western 
Afghanistan and, after the invasion of Afghanistan, was able to move 
into northern parts of Iraq not under Saddam’s control.  Zarqawi also 
had a safe haven in Qatar, where a Qatari prince provided him shelter 
and at least $1 million.  The irony of course is that we have a 
military command post in Qatar.  

The first mention of the organization "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and Zarqawi’s 
leadership of it is October, 2004.  Before that Rumsfeld and others 
had no evidence other than to conclude correctly that on June 17, 2004 
Zarqawi was "not Al Qaeda." I’ll simply repeat the obvious point.  
Bush’s invasion of Iraq brought Zarqawi and Osama together 
operationally, and then only a full year and a half after U.S. troops 
arrived. If these ties were so tight, Phil, why on earth did it not 
happen sooner? So even with all of Phil’s scattered objections, my 
original claim "Zarqawi now heads the main terrorist organization in 
Iraq because of the turmoil of the U.S. invasion, not because Saddam 
invited him there" or Al Qaeda sent him there still stands.

Phil does not appear to understand the full implication of the 
Cheney’s false claim that Zarqawi "ran[a] poisons factory in northern 
Iraq out of Baghdad.”  The only confirmed citing of Zarqawi was a 
medical visit before the war, and there is no documentary evidence 
that anything other than that was going on between him and Saddam.  To 
say that Zarqawi “ran” anything from Baghdad is false and deception of 
the highest order. 

Now with regard to Iraq's capacity to produce nuclear weapons, I have 
made a thorough search of the website of the International Atomic 
Energy Association (IAEA), and I have not found any prediction of a 
mushroom cloud over America or Iraqi nucs within six months. The 
report that is most telling is the one from December, 2002, in which 
the IAEA had to admit that Saddam was telling the truth about his own 
nonexistent weapons program.  You all can read this at 
www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2002/ebsp2002n010.shtml.  Is Phil 
working from a full data set?

In  a March 21, 2004 CNN interview Mohamed El Baradei, Nobel Laureate 
of Peace and General IAEA Director, had this to say: “With regard to 
the nuclear file, we were pretty convinced that we haven't seen really 
any evidence that Iraq resumed its nuclear weapon program, because we 
knew we dismantled that program in 1997, and our focus was to see 
whether anything has been resuscitated between '98 and 2002.”

Yes, David Albright was a UN, not US, weapons inspector—a minor error 
and the only one that Phil caught.  The fact that in January, 2003, he 
doubted that Saddam willingness to disarm does not in any way 
undermine my point that in December, 2002, Albright rejected the 
aluminum tubes as uranium centrifuges and accused Bush of cooking 
intelligence for the war. Albright’s full analysis of this issue can 
be found at http://www.isis-
online.org/publications/iraq/IraqAluminumTubes12-5-03.pdf.  Again 
Scattergun Phil distracts us from the main point. 
  
Contrary to Phil’s claim, there were no terrorist cells in Iraq except 
Saddam’s own torture chambers.  Yes, he supported Palestinian groups 
but so did most other Arab countries.  Lebanon still serves as a base 
for Hamas operatives, but we of course are not planning on invading 
that country. When the 9/11 Commission asked experts where we should 
concentrate our anti-terrorist efforts they pointed to Saudi Arabia, 
Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Phil asks: what would my solution have been?  We had Saddam contained: 
the no fly zones allowed the Kurds to prosper in the North and 
protected the Shias in the South.  Hans Blix’s inspection teams had 
essentially found nothing except one artillery shell with mustard gas 
that could be fired 15 miles.  David Kay’s thorough search after the 
war began turned up nothing. 

Our original goals with regard to Iraq were met. Saddam was 
essentially disarmed of WMDs before the invasion. The UN and the US 
Congress had authorized the disarming of Saddam, not his overthrow.  
Republicans have long ridiculed Democrats since Carter for their 
emphasis on human rights and nation building, but now we have a 
Republican President who is trying to do this on the cheap in the 
worse place in the world for such an experiment.  The principal task 
of a occupation force is to secure the country it occupies.  We have 
failed miserably in that task.

Our invasion of Iraq has not stabilized the country or the Middle 
East, and it has not reduced the threat of terror attacks around the 
world. It has created more terrorists and an Iraqi insurgency whose 
force has not diminished. In fact, we did such a poor job of securing 
Iraq’s remaining arsenal that Iraqi insurgents now have a huge supply 
of artillery shells to make roadside and car bombs for years to come.  
And much to El Baradei’s horror, the seals that UN inspectors had put 
on Saddam’s nuclear sites were broken after the invasion.  There were 
plenty of troops guarding the Iraqi ministry, but no troops at the 
antiquities museum or at the weapons depots.  But I’m concentrating on 
Bush’s deceptions, not his outright incompetence.

I much appreciated John D’s recent post with a list of dictators who 
are oppressing their people.  It would have been much easier and far 
cheaper to take out Castro in Cuba or Chavez in Venezuela.  (Pat 
Robertson is willing to lead the Marines!)  Far more people have died 
because of the Chinese occupation of Tibet than in Iraq and it’s gone 
on longer, but we do nothing other than a half-hearted attempt (now 
ceased) to support Tibetan guerrillas in Nepal.

The 9/11 panel, now operating with private money, just gave the Bush 
administration a failing grade for implementing their 
recommendations.  Phil calls me an isolationist solely because I agree 
with this bipartisan committee that our ports, cargo planes, chemical 
and nuclear plants ought to be secure.  

In my piece I drew a parallel between the proxy wars that we and the 
Soviets waged in the Third World (with the loss of millions of non-
Russian and non-Americans) to the Bushies war cry of “better to kill 
the terrorists in Iraq than in Detroit.”  The civilian causalities are 
now in the tens of thousands, and if we “stay the course,” they will 
soon match Saddam’s own death tolls over many more years.  How much 
longer to people of color have to die for our arrogance and 
incompetence? 

Phil goes ballistic on this one, accusing me of favoring nuclear war 
with the Soviets (!) rather than these third world wars.  Other than 
responding to North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and forcing 
missiles out of Cuba, I can think of no other Cold War military 
intervention on our part that was a wise move.  Certainly not Vietnam 
and definitely not the cynical support for the Contras, and certainly 
not Ollie North’s insane idea to support the Contras buy selling arms 
to our enemy Iran.  

In a recent column in The New Republic (11/21/05), Franklin Foer 
reminds us that it was Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle who in 1976 
claimed that the CIA had undercounted Soviet nucs.  A special Team B 
was appointed within the Defense Department (sound familiar?), and 
sure enough the hawks got what it wanted: “Team B exaggerated the 
Soviet threat as badly as the Bush administration botched Iraqi WMD.”  
By cooking the intelligence then we continued to ratchet up an arms 
race that impoverished the Russian people and continued to fuel the 
proxy wars in the Third World.  For us the ends, countering an 
exaggerated Soviet threat, justified the means, and we became as evil 
as our enemy.  We now justify torture and “rendering” of terror 
suspects to foreign torture chambers for the same reasons.  Today Rice 
had to apologize to the German government for mistakenly kidnapping 
one it citizens and holding him for five months in one of our secret 
prisons.

Phil charges me with propagandizing and intellectual dishonesty, but I 
have justified my interpretation of the facts.  I think he owes me an 
apology for such an outrageous accusation. 

One last point.  It is the height of hypocrisy for Phil, a trained 
geologist, to claim that I have no business writing about foreign 
affairs because I am a trained philosopher/theologian, when he writes 
intelligently but not always accurately about foreign affairs.  Get 
real, Phil.  

The goal of all my UI instruction was to equip my students so that 
they could inform themselves for meaningful debate on the issues that 
would face them in real life.  Sadly, American teachers at all levels 
have generally failed in that goal.  For the most part this has not 
been their fault, but the fault of a pervasive anti-intellectual 
culture in which reasoned argument and persuasion exist only when 
attorneys are forced to make arguments before the Supreme Court.  See 
my column on this topic at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/anti-
intellect.htm.

Nick Gier