Some quotes:
"We are praying you will stick to your resolve to liberate our country from a dictatorial tyranny over 30 years which has caused the deaths of nearly 2 million men and women, sons and daughters." -Letter to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair from Iraqi Exiles
?In 1991 Saddam killed 500,000 people when they rose against him. Nobody demonstrated against him then. But now the United States wants to get rid of the dictator, people are demonstrating against it.?
-one of the Iraqi liberation soldiers the U.S. is training at "Camp Freedom" in Hungary
"If Saddam Hussein fails to comply and we fail to act or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction and continue to press for the release of sanctions and ignore the commitments he's made? Well, he will conclude that the international community's lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on doing more to build an arsenal of devastating destruction. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow. The stakes could not be higher. Some way, someday, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal."
-President Bill Clinton in 1998
?I am surprised to hear of all the anti-war demonstrations in the West. I wish that the demonstrators could spend just 24 hours in the place I have come from and see the reality of Iraq. Fourteen lost years of my life. Nothing but bread for food ? darkness, filth, beatings, torture, killings, bitterness and humiliation.?
-Rafat Abdulmajeed Muhammad, jailed for selling a roll of film to an British journalist
"Iraq under Saddam?s regime has become a land of hopelessness, sadness, and fear. A country where people are ethnically cleansed; prisoners are tortured in more than 300 prisons in Iraq. Rape is systematic . . . congenital malformation, birth defects, infertility, cancer, and various disorders are the results of Saddam?s gassing of his own people. . . the killing and torturing of husbands in front of their wives and children . . . Iraq under Saddam has become a hell and a museum of crimes."
?Iraqi Safia Al Souhail, Advocacy Director of the International Alliance for Justice
"Of course they have no credibility. If they had any, they certainly lost it in 1991. I don't see that they have acquired any credibility."
-Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, on the Saddam regime
I would not exactly call 12 years (91-03) a rush to war...
This from Condoleezza Rice:
In 1989 South Africa made the strategic decision to dismantle its covert nuclear weapons program. It destroyed its arsenal of seven weapons and later submitted to rigorous verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspectors were given complete access to all nuclear facilities (operating and defunct) and the people who worked there. They were also presented with thousands of documents detailing, for example, the daily operation of uranium enrichment facilities as well as the construction and dismantling of specific weapons.
Ukraine and Kazakhstan demonstrated a similar pattern of cooperation when they decided to rid themselves of the nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic missiles and heavy bombers inherited from the Soviet Union. With significant assistance from the United States warmly accepted by both countries disarmament was orderly, open and fast. Nuclear warheads were returned to Russia. Missile silos and heavy bombers were destroyed or dismantled once in a ceremony attended by the American and Russian defense chiefs. In one instance, Kazakhstan revealed the existence of a ton of highly enriched uranium and asked the United States to remove it, lest it fall into the wrong hands.
Iraq's behavior could not offer a starker contrast. Instead of a commitment to disarm, Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons, led by Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay, who controls the Special Security Organization, which runs Iraq's concealment activities. Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie.
For example, the declaration fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq's accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons.
Iraq's declaration even resorted to unabashed plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied word-for-word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented as original text. Far from informing, the declaration is intended to cloud and confuse the true picture of Iraq's arsenal. It is a reflection of the regime's well-earned reputation for dishonesty and constitutes a material breach of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, which set up the current inspections program.
Unlike other nations that have voluntarily disarmed and in defiance of Resolution 1441 Iraq is not allowing inspectors "immediate, unimpeded, unrestricted access" to facilities and people involved in its weapons program. As a recent inspection at the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist demonstrated, and other sources confirm, material and documents are still being moved around in farcical shell games. The regime has blocked free and unrestricted use of aerial reconnaissance.
The list of people involved with weapons of mass destruction programs, which the United Nations required Iraq to provide, ends with those who worked in 1991 even though the United Nations had previously established that the programs continued after that date. Interviews with scientists and weapons officials identified by inspectors have taken place only in the watchful presence of the regime's agents. Given the duplicitous record of the regime, its recent promises to do better can only be seen as an attempt to stall for time.
Last week's finding by inspectors of 12 chemical warheads not included in Iraq's declaration was particularly troubling. In the past, Iraq has filled this type of warhead with sarin a deadly nerve agent used by Japanese terrorists in 1995 to kill 12 Tokyo subway passengers and sicken thousands of others. Richard Butler, the former chief United Nations arms inspector, estimates that if a larger type of warhead that Iraq has made and used in the past were filled with VX (an even deadlier nerve agent) and launched at a major city, it could kill up to one million people. Iraq has also failed to provide United Nations inspectors with documentation of its claim to have destroyed its VX stockpiles.
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The US, being a super power, just has more responsibilty than everyone else. The moment that responsibility is disregarded, the country teeters on the brink of anarchism, or worse yet, terrorism.
I agree....
/JD
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