[casi] New York Times covers up for lies on Iraq war

["emir chen" <hc228@DELETETHIScam.ac.uk>]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/frie-j06.shtml


WSWS News

Friedman: We did it ¡§because we could¡¨
New York Times covers up for lies on Iraq war
By Bill Vann
6 June 2003


In the face of a mounting international scandal over US and
British falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction,
advanced to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq,
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times¡¦s chief foreign affairs
columnist, has leapt into the breach to assure the paper¡¦s
readers that whether Bush and Blair lied about WMDs is
beside the point.

His June 4 column in the Times is a demonstration of the
cynicism of the media¡Xincluding its erstwhile ¡§liberal¡¨
representatives¡Xand its contempt for democratic principles.

Friedman declares that the failure to discover Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction is not ¡§the real story we should be
concerned with.¡¨ The question of WMDs was, he says, ¡§the
wrong issue before the war, and it is the wrong issue now.¡¨

The Times columnist argues that there is no point getting
upset about the US president launching a war under false
pretenses. This is a minor technicality. ¡§Because there
were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason,
the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.¡¨

Curiously, one often raised reason is absent from Friedman¡¦
s list¡Xnamely, Iraq¡¦s oil wealth. This is a glaring
omission, coming as it does in the wake of statements from
top administration officials who planned the war
acknowledging that Iraq¡¦s possession of the world¡¦s
second-largest oil reserves was the decisive factor in the
decision to go to war.

Explaining why Washington invaded Iraq¡Xwhere no weapons of
mass destruction were found¡Xwhile opting for a diplomatic
approach to North Korea, which has openly touted its nuclear
weapons program, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
told delegates to a security summit in Singapore last
weekend: ¡§The most important difference between North Korea
and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq.
The country swims on a sea of oil.¡¨

In an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, Wolfowitz tacitly
acknowledged that the charge of Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons was a pretext. ¡§For reasons that have a
lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on
the one issue that everyone could agree on: weapons of mass
destruction,¡¨ the Pentagon¡¦s number-two man said.

Friedman¡¦s omission is all the more curious¡Xand
damning¡Xsince he himself published a column in the New York
Times last January 5 bearing the headline ¡§A War for Oil?¡¨
in which he declared he had ¡§no problem¡¨ with a war waged
to gain control of Iraq¡¦s petroleum reserves.

In his latest column, Friedman writes, ¡§The real reason for
this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11
America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.
Afghanistan wasn¡¦t enough.¡¨ Washington could have picked
any Arab country, he argues. ¡§Smashing Saudi Arabia or
Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple
reason: because we could...¡¨

Friedman is unabashed in his thuggery. His answer is worthy
of any thief asked to explain why he mugged an elderly
woman. Iraq was an irresistible target because the 1991
Persian Gulf War, followed by a decade of United Nations
sanctions, continuous US-British bombing in the ¡§no-fly
zones,¡¨ and the work of United Nations weapons inspectors
had left the country virtually defenseless. And there was
that small matter Friedman chooses to ignore: Iraqi oil.

Friedman is a fan of brutality and force, a taste he
acquired while covering the bloody exploits of Ariel Sharon
and the fascist Falange during the Lebanese civil war two
decades ago. If the toll in human lives exacted in
Afghanistan was not enough to balance the scales for
September 11, why not slaughter thousands, if not tens of
thousands more in Iraq?

The point, he suggests, is to terrorize the entire Arab and
Islamic world, subjugating it to the requirements of
Washington and Israel.

Having dispensed with the ¡§real reason,¡¨ he moves on to
the ¡§right¡¨ and ¡§moral¡¨ ones. The ¡§right reason¡¨ for
the war, he claims, is ¡§the need to partner with Iraqis,
post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime.¡¨ Such a
regime, Friedman suggests, would represent an antidote to a
supposed terrorist threat by serving as a ¡§model¡¨ for
¡§angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are
produced by failed or failing Arab states.¡¨

¡§Partnering¡¨¡Xa term that generally describes two
companies setting up a joint enterprise¡Xis a strange word
to use for what could better be described as plunder. One
could as easily speak of Hitler¡¦s Germany ¡§partnering¡¨
with the Poles to create Lebensraum in the east.

The contours of Friedman¡¦s ¡§progressive Arab regime¡¨ that
is supposed to serve as a ¡§model¡¨ for all of the Arab
¡§failed states¡¨ have already begun to emerge. Its
principal foundation is the sweeping privatization of Iraq¡¦
s state sector, beginning with its oil fields. Accompanying
these measures, the US viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer,
has already announced more than half a million layoffs of
Iraqi state workers.

Washington has made it clear that it will impose a ¡§free
market¡¨ economic model on Iraq¡Xthe same model that has
produced a string of ¡§failed states¡¨ from Latin America to
Africa¡Xregardless of what its people desire. This model
will assure that the current mass unemployment and desperate
poverty remain permanent. Politically, the regime will be a
militarized puppet of the US.

The notion that such a state will inspire hope among
¡§angry, humiliated young Arabs¡¨ is a measure of the
appalling ignorance that merges seamlessly with Friedman¡¦s
arrogance and bloodlust.

Finally, there is the ¡§moral reason¡¨ for the war¡Xthe fact
that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein repressed its own
people. Never mind that the CIA helped bring the Baathists
to power and provided them with lists of socialists and
nationalists who became their first victims.

¡§Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the
true extent of Saddam¡¦s genocidal evil, my view was that
Mr. Bush did not need to find any WMDs to justify the war
for me,¡¨ says the Times columnist.

The unearthing of human remains in Iraq was, according to
Friedman, the irrefutable answer to anyone¡¦s questioning
the morality of the war. That the bulk of these unearthed
victims were Shiites, massacred with the tacit approval of
the US government when they rebelled in the wake of the
first Persian Gulf War, does not enter into Friedman¡¦s
moral calculations.

Moreover, the unearthing of similar remains in Honduras,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Argentina¡Xall victims of
dictatorships installed by the CIA and the
Pentagon¡Xapparently escaped his notice. Had he seen the
skulls and skeletons at those sites would it have caused a
comparable epiphany, convincing him of the immorality of US
imperialist interventions?

Friedman proudly declares that whether or not any WMDs are
found or even existed is for him a matter of indifference.
The ¡§genocidal evil¡¨ that he perceived in the mass graves
uncovered after the war was sufficient justification. ¡§But
I have to admit that I¡¦ve always been fighting my own war
in Iraq,¡¨ he tells his readers. ¡§Mr. Bush took the country
into his war.¡¨

Friedman was never fighting his ¡§own war in Iraq,¡¨ not
even in his own head. His job involved not fighting, but
lying. After luncheon consultations with the war¡¦s Pentagon
plotters, he crafted lying bits of sophistry to justify an
illegal act of aggression. His specialty was to cloak a
filthy and predatory enterprise in ¡§progressive¡¨ and
¡§moral¡¨ trappings.

The ¡§Bush team,¡¨ Friedman tells his readers, opted, ¡§for
PR reasons,¡¨ not to disclose its ¡§real reason¡¨ for war,
not to mention its supposed ¡§right¡¨ and ¡§moral¡¨ motives.

Friedman, it should be pointed out, acknowledged during the
buildup to the Iraq war that there existed no popular
support for attacking the Middle Eastern country. In a
column published February 5, he commented that he was
¡§struck by an incredible contrast...between the audacity of
what they [the Bush administration] intend to do in Iraq¡Xa
audacity that, I must say, has an appeal for me¡Xand the
incredibly narrow base of support that exists in America
today for this audacious project.¡¨

An avowed advocate of war, Friedman found himself compelled
to admit that in public appearances around the country,
¡§there was not a single audience I spoke to where I felt
there was a majority in favor of war in Iraq.¡¨

Faced with the same dilemma, the administration bombarded
the public with phony propaganda about ¡§weapons of mass
destruction.¡¨ It sought to terrorize the American people
into supporting a war. It claimed repeatedly that Saddam
Hussein¡¦s regime had a huge stockpile of nerve gas,
biological weapons and possibly even atomic bombs, and was
preparing to hand them over to the same band of terrorists
that leveled the World Trade Center.

That this is no big deal for the leading foreign affairs
columnist at the New York Times is itself a testimony to the
degeneration of the media and the disappearance of any
significant base of support for democratic rights within the
ruling elite, including its supposedly liberal wing.

One only has to recall the furor unleashed by the Times, the
Washington Post and others over Richard Nixon¡¦s secret
bombing of Cambodia, not to mention his lying over what his
administration tried to dismiss as a ¡§second-rate
 burglary¡¨ at the Watergate complex some three decades ago.

Now, confronted with overwhelming evidence that a US
administration launched an unprovoked war against a country
that posed no threat to the American people based on lies
and fabrications whose like has not been seen since the days
of Adolf Hitler, the response is to invent ¡§moral¡¨ alibis.

Implicit in this attempted whitewash is the idea that the
American people have no right to know why the government
sends its soldiers to kill and die in another country, much
less to exercise any influence on the decision to go to war.

This is not a new idea. Herman Goering, the number-two man
in Hitler¡¦s Third Reich, described the same concept quite
well in an interview conducted in his Nuremberg jail cell:
¡§Naturally, the common people don¡¦t want war, neither in
Russia nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That
is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the
country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy
or a fascist dictatorship...All you have to do is tell them
that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
It works the same in any country.¡¨



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