CUMHURIYET- Columnist Ergin Yildizoglu writes on forces lying behind the imminent war in Iraq. A summary of his column is as follows:
The United States has failed to win the UN Security Council’s support for its war plans against Iraq. The US media have put the blame squarely on France. In an essay in the current issue of Time Magazine, Charles Krauthammer, one of the mavens of the ‘hawk’ crowd in Washington, said, ‘France’s issues are not about Iraq. They are about whether the US will run world affairs.’ This is exactly why thousands of Iraqis will lay dead in just a few days. Let’s look at how things got to this point and dig into the ‘candidates’ to rule the world. Many years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the decision to wage a war against Iraq was made at an institution called ‘The Project for the New American Century’, and the details of its decision were published as a report by a special select group. This group included many future members of the current administration, among them Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle, all figures deeply embedded and tied with the military-industrial complex and oil lobbies. According to the report, the preservation of the US’ global hegemony necessitated an overall military campaign in order to strengthen US dominance over the Middle East. However, back then, US citizens were not yet ready for such a project. Only a disaster like Pearl Harbor could have offered an opportunity to embark on that adventure -- and on Sept. 11, history gave the gang just what it had long awaited. And now this gang is preparing to rule the world. Before Rumsfeld joined the ranks of the Bush administration and declared war against ‘the axis of evil,’ he served in 1994 as chairman of a special US congressional committee on the ballistic missile threat. Yet the Swedish firm ABB, which had tried to sell $200 million of nuclear technology to North Korea, also paid him well for attending its board of directors meetings (Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Feb. 17, 2003). Nowadays, Rumsfeld is pressing the US administration to withdraw from the Chemical Weapons Convention as well. Newspapers have reported that the US could use chemical weapons in a war with Iraq and that use of such weapons would a breach of the international agreements (The Independent, March 9, 2003). Moreover, we have learned that one of Iraq’s biggest chemical factories was actually constructed by a British company in 1984. Appearing on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN public policy show ‘Late Edition’, Richard Perle seemed uncomfortable with the criticisms posed towards him, and especially one by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who charged him with holding a secret meeting with Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Kasikci. Perle branded Hersh a ‘terrorist.’ The Halliburton Company, one of three bidders invited by the Bush administration to upgrade Iraq’s oil production facilities in a project worth fully $1.5 billion, paid Cheney $1 million last year even after he had officially quit the company’s board of directors (The Guardian, March 13, 2003).
What a gang, indeed!
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION