The Cost of a Lie

Bush's Uranium and the People of Iraq

Revolutionary Worker #1208, July 27, 2003, "http://rwor.org">posted at rwor.org

On January 28, George W. Bush stood before television
cameras and Congress to make his case for invading Iraq. Among
the charges he made was this:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."

It was not true. It was one lie, surrounded by many other
lies, all in the service of a classic Big Lie: The U.S. and
British government said Iraq's government and military
represented a real and possibly immediate threat to the people
of the U.S., and that Iraq therefore had to be conquered
without delay.

Since the war, this issue of Niger uranium has started
leaking into the mainstream media and political arena.

They try to say they didn't know the charges were false. But
that is becoming harder and harder to claim. Evidence is piling
up that top government officials knew that Iraq had no serious
nuclear program, but made these charges anyway.

Their case is pathetic and crumbling. The Emperor has no
clothes.

And so, increasingly, the Bush administration has responded
with a shameless answer: It just doesn't matter, they say, if
specific charges against Iraq were true or not.

Bush's false Niger claims were (they say) "just 16 words,"
just one sentence in much larger campaign of charges and
accusations.

The outrage over "this one error," they say, is "overblown."
After all, they say, the war was victorious, the conquest is
over. It is all now history.

Bush insists repeatedly that there is no excuse now for
"historical revisionism"--meaning that the official version of
events should not be questioned in public.

His defenders argue that the "credibility of the U.S." is
not undermined by Bush's prewar lies, but by anyone who is
now questioning those lies.

"Let's move on," they say; there are, after all, more wars
to fight.

And that is exactly why the truth does matter. Such
lies were created to draw people into supporting an unjust war.
And such lies will be produced again, the next time these
empire builders want to bully or attack a country.

We must not "move on"--but look closely at what this war,
and those lies, have done to the people of Iraq.

What is the Cost of a Lie?

On the basis of a relentless campaign of lies, Iraq, a
sovereign and strategic country, was attacked and invaded and
now lies conquered by an army of foreign occupiers.

No one knows precisely how many Iraqi people this unprovoked
attack killed or wounded--the U.S. military itself has never
bothered to offer an estimate. Widely respected estimates by
groups like "Iraqi Body Count" suggest that Iraqi civilian dead
were at least 6,000 and may be close to 8,000. In addition,
over 10,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed in a war that was so
one-sided exactly because the Iraqi military DID NOT have or
use the powerful weapons they were accused of having.

The Iraqi people continue dying under occupation. Iraq was
littered with anti-personnel cluster bombs that continue to
kill people, especially children. The tank weapons of the U.S.
shot their depleted uranium shells--and the radioactive
materials are now embedded in Iraqi soil where it will poison
people for years to come.

Meanwhile the masses of Iraqi people suffer all the
injustice and misery of defeat and foreign conquest. People are
reduced to desperation. The economy has virtually stopped.
Millions have no income or ways of getting money. Goods don't
move. Electricity rarely works. Factories sit idle. Fields lie
brown and barren because there is no power to run the
irrigation pumps.

The occupation has hit women especially hard. On one hand,
there has been an epidemic of gang rape in the continuing
conditions of war, documented in a recent report by Human
Rights Watch. Women and girls often cannot go to work or school
because of the intense danger of rape. They are prisoners in
their homes and made dependent on their brothers and husbands
for the simplest needs. On the other hand, the destruction of
Iraq's relatively secular Baathist government has strengthened
fundamentalist religious forces who insist that women belong in
the home and should be forced to wear headscarves and even
veils in public. And finally, the desperation of war and the
reactionary nature of the foreign occupiers have started to
coerce more and more young Iraqi women into the degradation of
prostitution around U.S. barracks.

Prior to the 1991 war, the Iraqi people enjoyed some of the
highest living standards in the Middle East. Iraq was the only
Arab country in which 90% of the population had access to clean
water. Now after two wars, 12 years of U.S./UN sanctions and a
full occupation--their country and lives are in shambles.

After the war-time destruction of Iraqi water works, sewage
pours raw into Iraq's rivers and irrigation canals, and often
spills into urban streets, creating dangerous lakes of filth.
Months of garbage is uncollected.

Half of Iraq's population faces disease from unclean
drinking water. International aid organizations, like CARE and
UNICEF, recently warned that as many as 300,000 Iraqi children
could die if water processing is not resumed soon and if the
emerging epidemics of cholera, dysentery and typhoid
spread.

Before the war, sick people could go to hospitals and be
treated. Epidemic diseases were monitored and contained by an
active Ministry of Health. All that is gone. Hospitals and
clinics often operate without electricity, basic medical
supplies (like bandages, oxygen or antibiotics) or any
resources for paying doctors and staff. They are overwhelmed
with tens of thousands of wounded from the war and those sick
from the unsanitary water. In many hospitals, the most
seriously ill simply die, as horrified doctors are forced to
focus on those most likely to survive. In Baghdad's Mansour
Children's Hospital a recent power failure stalled ventilators
for hours, killing a six-year-old girl.

For the moment there is no famine--largely because the
prewar government distributed months of basic food supplies to
the population just before it was overthrown. But those stores
will not last forever, and there are no signs of a replacement
system for feeding the people.

In the U.S. press, the "problem" in Iraq is described as
not enough control by their occupying troops--and the
solution is described as more troops, more aggressive
intervention, more action by the invaders in directing the
economy.

In fact, the core problem is the unjust invasion and
occupation of this country-- and all their ugly and predictable
results for Iraq's people.

The invasion has now transformed into a harsh new war aimed
at an emerging Iraqi resistance.

Armed troops careen through the streets, set up
roadblocks--threatening, frisking, seizing people at will. The
occupation authorities issue orders, suppress newspapers they
don't like, dismiss and arrest mayors, declare arbitrary
curfews--and have launched frenzied offensives of "collective
punishment" across whole stretches of the country, where they
threaten to seize the village elders and flatten the houses in
any villages with signs of resistance. Hundreds are rounded up,
held and brutalized--all without charges or evidence.

Those U.S. and British soldiers, who have been turned into
instruments of conquest, themselves are caught in the grip of
this unjust war. Over 200 U.S. soldiers have died. Many now
live with the guilt and memory of the unjust and wholesale
killing they did. Suicides are being reported among the
troops.

And these soldiers now sit, in the brutal desert heat,
guarding oil fields and trying to enforce occupation on an
unaccepting population, and they are dying, one by one, day
after day, from the resistance.

Mary Kewatt, aunt of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, recently
said on Minnesota Public Radio: "President Bush made a comment
a week ago, and he said `bring it on.' Well, they brought it
on, and now my nephew is dead."

*****

The truth matters: he costs of this government'slies have
been extreme and bitter--especially for millions of people in
Iraq. And they intend to push ahead. They occupy in the name of
helping the Iaqi people. They threaten Iran in the name of
preventing nuclear danger and helping the Iranian people. And
so it goes. New moves, new lies. It just can't be allowed to
get over.

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