Subject: cartoons, Jordan's King objects, Schanberg on
lies
AFP April 3 2003, 4:07 AM
Jordan's King Abdullah II today described for the first time the
US-British-Australian attacks on neighbouring Iraq as an "invasion"
and said his country had persistently refused to open its airspace to the
coalition.
Abdullah, in an interview with the official Petra news agency, also expressed
his "pain and sadness" over civilian war casualties in Iraq, whom he
described as "martyrs".
"Frankly speaking, we were asked to open our airspace to military aircraft
but we steadfastly refused," the king told the director of Petra, who was
asking him to comment on reports that coalition planes used Jordan to attack
Iraq.
"Jordan is not and will never be a launchpad for strikes on brethren in
Iraq and if our airspace was being used for that purpose we would not have
allowed civil aviation to use it and would have closed it like other countries
have," he said.
.....
The Iraqi people have the right to chose their leadership and because we
believe in democracy ... we cannot imagine that any people will agree to a
leadership imposed on them from the outside, against their will," he said.
Abdullah also said he shared his people's anguish at seeing "on television
screens the rise in the number of Iraqi civilian and innocent martyrs"
killed in the war.
"We strongly denounce the killing of women and children ... and as a
father I feel the pain of each Iraqi family, and each Iraqi child and
father," he said.
"We are one with our people who reject and condemn the invasion," he
said.
for complete article http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/03/1048962835005.html
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A retrospective article by the former Pulitzer Prize
winning New York Times reporter of Cambodia's Killing Fields
Let Us Count the Lies on the Road to
War
Below is a partial timeline of how the White House kept changing its story.
Follow the ever shifting, ever absolute bouncing ball.
Bush's Ever Shifting Absolutes
by Sydney H. Schanberg
April 2 - 8, 2003
A puzzled America watches now as the Bush imperial public-relations samurai try
to behead the notion that they were the mongers who planted the vision of a
quick and practically painless war. The recorded evidence doesn't help their
case.
Their cocky drumroll oratory has been with us for many months. Vice President
Dick Cheney, for one, told America that Saddam Hussein's regime was "a
house of cards." We could expect the war to last "weeks rather than
months," Cheney said just two weeks ago. Every once in a while, the
president and his minions would protect themselves with a few words about
possible unforeseen complications, but the thumping central message was that
the invasion and conquest of Iraq would be easy. The nation was told
relentlessly that our technological superiority and complete command of the
skies would demolish the dictator like a plaster of paris statue and send
Iraqis into the streets by the thousands to hail their liberators.
Some or even much of this may still happenas I write, American units about 60
miles south of Baghdad are reported making early probes at Iraqi forces ringing
the capitalbut it will not change the fact that this president humbugged and
lulled the public into acceptance of war. He has dealt them a shameless series
of half truths, erasures of history, allegations without tangible proof,
allegations without any proof and just plain stable droppings, the final one
being the whopper that the war would be a cakewalk. No warnot even his father's
Tinkertoy invasion of Panama City in 1989, where earsplitting rock music was
used to try to stun Manuel Noriega (once the CIA's favorite money-launderer and
drug dealer south of the border) out of the church building he'd fled into for
sanctuarycould be a cakewalk.
Below is a partial timeline of how the White House kept changing its story.
Follow the ever shifting, ever absolute bouncing ball.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew three hijacked commercial planes full of
passengers into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another hijacked craft
crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted. The death toll was roughly
3,000. In the aftermath, U.S. intelligence confirmed that the assault was
carried out by operatives from Osama Bin Laden's global terrorist network. No
mention was made by the White House or anyone else in the Bush administration
of any Iraqi involvement.
President Bush, in his annual State of the Union address, on January 29, 2002,
described an "axis of evil" comprising North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.
He cited Iraq, a former ally whom Washington had aided in its war against Iran
in the 1980s and to whom Washington allowed American companies to ship
ingredients for biological and chemical warfare, for its development of weapons
of mass destruction. He mentioned chemical and biological weapons and efforts
to develop nuclear bombs. Still no suggestion of any Iraqi link to September
11.
By the spring, the White House was slowly and steadily accelerating its drumbeat
for military action against Iraq. Baghdad was promoted from a member of the
"axis of evil" triumvirate to being the most immediate threat to
world peace. The U.S. and British air patrols in the UN-approved no-fly zones
in Iraq were also being expanded and the war planes began striking more
significant Iraqi military targets.
A key piece of evidence offered by Washington for Iraq's continued efforts to
build a nuclear bombdespite the prohibitions imposed after the 1991 Gulf Warwas
a packet of documents provided by British intelligence. The dossier purportedly
revealed very recent Iraqi attempts to purchase "significant quantities of
uranium" from an unnamed African country. At a classified briefing last
September, CIA chief George Tenet told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
about this document; Tenet vouched for its authenticity and identified the
African country as Niger. Secretary of State Colin Powell also stressed the
document's importance in a closed meeting with the same committee two days later.
All this came at a time when the White House was trying to get a resolution
from Congress, over some Democratic opposition, authorizing the president to
wage war against Iraq. The resistive Democrats were mollified. The resolution
breezed through two weeks later. Shortly thereafter, the administration told
the public about the documents.
Bush used it as ammunition in his 2003 State of the Union speech on January 28.
Powell did the same in his speech to the UN on February 5, seeking broader
support for military action.
There was only one problem with the documents. They were forgeries. After all
the buildup, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, stepped in to
tell the Security Council that the papers were bogus. "The IAEA has
concluded," said its director-general, "with the concurrence of
outside experts that these documents... are in fact not authentic." The
White House went virtually mute, as if the whole episode had never happened.
On February 14, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a speech in New York,
saying military action was probably inevitable in order "to avert a
September 11 with weapons of mass destruction," told a black-tie gathering
of senior military officers and their spouses, "What we're trying to do
right now is hard. It's to connect the dots before the facts."
On February 28, the White House formally upped its demand on Iraq. At a news
briefing, press secretary Ari Fleischer confirmed that the president was not
satisfied with merely "total disarmament." Saddam Hussein had to be
removed as well. Responding to a reporter who was certain he was hearing
escalated language, Fleischer said matter-of-factly: "It's disarmament and
regime change." He insisted it was no shift at all. The president, he
said, had been talking this way for some timethough in October Bush had said
Iraq's compliance with UN demands for disarmament would in itself "signal
the regime has changed."
The rest is fresh news, engraved on the public mind. Bush couldn't get the
Security Council to approve a military attack. He then gave Saddam and his
ruling clique 48 hours to leave the country, something no one expected the
tyrant to do. And then the allied bombing began.
And the psy-war campaign, already vigorous, ramped up to new levels.
For starters, the early heavy bombing was given a name just short of
"blitzkrieg." It was called, as we all know now from numbing
repetition, "shock and awe." The Iraqi regime, Washington suggested
to us, would be so terror-struck and unstrung by the ferocity of our bombardment
that it would crumble overnight. Well, Shock and Awe was quite a
nighttime television show, loud and glowing enough to make viewers wince at the
thought of what it might be like living under such a barrage. On the tube, it
looked like Atlanta and Rome burning, both at the same time. Actually, it was a
hail of precision bombs and missiles falling with impressive accuracy on
military command facilities, government buildings, and Saddam's palaces of
self-worship.
At morning light, Baghdad had not been demolished, just a number of select
targets. Now Washington is telling us that the ballyhooing of "shock and
awe" was mostly a psychological-warfare effort to cause panic and perhaps
produce an early surrender with limited casualties on both sides and only minor
damage to the country's economic infrastructure. Maybe so, but could it be that
this explanation itself is just another feint in the psy-war campaigns that
both sides are waging.
There is nothing new about political leaders lying to us. At times it may be a
necessary tool to lead us away from some angry mob action or to calm community
fears. Most of the time, though, it's a cynical device to get us to embrace a
course of action we wouldn't otherwise touch with a barge pole.
No scientific method exists to measure whether political prevarication is more
abundant now than in the past, though with media overload on overdrive in
around-the-clock image bombardment, it certainly seems as if more and bigger
lies are flying around.
One of them has to do with the president's tax-cut mania. The president is
still insisting on huge tax reductions, especially for the moneyed class, even
though the weak economy and the costly war are draining the treasury. No
president has ever cut taxes during a war before. It seems to turn common sense
on its head. There is this gravity-defying, reason-challenging quality to much
of what the president has done since September 11.
I'd like to explain why I'm using lie in its several forms, instead of
the euphemisms journalists usually employ, such as spin or misspeaking.
I think it's probably because this graying journalist has perhaps been around
so long and seen so many of the really foul things humans can perpetrate on
other humans that the urge to call things by their proper name has overtaken
him. I hope it doesn't put anybody off.
The president needs to think about being more candid, about talking straight to
his own people and others. I'm sure he believes he is simply conducting himself
the way nearly all of his recent predecessors have. He's right about that. And
he has observed that they got away with it. But he is taking the United States
into what appears to be revolutionary, uncharted territory. He has ordered up a
war that lacks the support of most of the world, even though almost all the
naysayers agree that Saddam Hussein is a vile tyrant whose demise is to be
wished for and pursued. The people and nation-states who shun President Bush's
war generally argue that there has to be a better way to end Hussein's rule
than by the bloodshed and destruction this war will cause in Iraq (and upon the
invading American, British, and Australian troops) and the chaos it might cause
in other parts of the globe. They also point out that Iraq, though a
threatening outlaw nation, has not directly attacked the United States, and
that there is no conclusive or even strong evidence that Iraq played any direct
role in the terrorist attacks of September 11the event that started Bush on the
road to this war (and may subsequently lead him to violent forays against other
troubling nations).
It is because the president is leading us into this unknown terrain and because
he seems to be saying he wants to change the worldand will continue on this
crusade whether or not the United Nations or major nations back himthat I have
raised the issue of how he speaks to the American people and the world. No
matter how convinced he may be that he is doing the right thing and no matter
how powerful a super-nation the United States is, Bush must know that, in the end,
disciplining and changing rogue nations across the board cannot be accomplished
without broad support. He has to start by talking to the voters as his
partners, not as his subjects. We often talk figuratively of an imperial
presidency, but the monarchy is surely dead in this country. That was settled
more than two centuries ago.
In the March 31 issue of The New Yorker, David Remnick, the magazine's
editor, who has written in support of the war, though without enthusiasm, has
an insightful piece on Bush's foreign policy, in particular about its absence
of humility. He writes: "It [humility] is, however, a quality that will be
indispensable in victory if we are to help rebuild Iraq after decades of
tyrannical rule and to repair our own frayed relations with governments,
peoples and institutions around the world." Of Bush's ideological, hawk
advisers, Remnick says that they "seem oblivious, too, of the consequences
of a unilateral, imperial-style occupation of Iraq. They welcome it. By
embracing imperialism franklyby proclaiming that the goal of their policy is
the maintenance and expansion of unchallenged powerthey congratulate themselves
as honest and hardheaded."
The president and his roundtable of civilian advisers do not seem given to much
self-examination or admissions of error. Rumsfeld, for example, does not fall
on his sword voluntarily. When reporters raised questions about the adequacy of
the battle plan, the Pentagon chief quickly disavowed primary authorship.
"The war plan," Rumsfeld said, "is Tom Franks's war plan,"
referring to the general in charge of the Iraq operation.
Maybe, when victory over Iraq comes, a relieved public will look upon these
civilian warriors as heroes and bold visionaries, rather than blinkered souls
suffering from raging hubris. But we are all shaped differently and, after
living for several years in the third world, I cannot see Edens being created
by this war. It looks like just another application of weed-killer being poured
over problems that are much too deeply rooted to die out so easily.
I also have no illusions about truth-telling suddenly taking hold as a guiding
principle among nations. But minimum levels of candor and openness are critical
to keeping democracies aliveeven empires with democratic origins. And for my
money the captain seems at the moment to be purposefully steering the ship to a
place well below those minimums.
Research assistance: Jennifer Snow
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0314/schanberg.php