Sunday 16 February 2003

America's motive for invading Iraq

Some excellent analysis, a little dated but worth the read anyway...

by Joe Vialls

Although most of this long report was first written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, it is still valid today in terms of explaining America and Israel’s apparent obsession with “Ridding the World” of Iraq’s “Evil Dictator” President Saddam Hussein, plus his alleged [and apparently unique] "weapons of mass destruction".

Very few people know or even care that until 1971, all of the oil reserves in Iraq were owned and completely controlled by American and British interests. At that precise point in recent history, the Iraqi people were regarded by the “Western Powers” merely as serfs, who were graciously allowed to keep three cents out of every three dollar barrel of their own Iraqi oil. The balance of US$2.97 per barrel went straight into the New York and London bank accounts of western “investors”.

Then suddenly in 1972, the young Saddam Hussein peacefully nationalized the Iraqi Oil Company, and told its American and British employees to recognize this new reality or leave the country. Most decided to leave, and horrified western investors then found “their” oil reserves in Iraq were no longer paying the rent on luxury apartments in Manhattan and Mayfair. From a Wall Street perspective it was Fidel Castro and Cuba all over again, and the bankers quietly vowed to take revenge on Saddam Hussein for his “reckless insubordination”.

As each year rolled by, Hussein ordered that all of Iraq’s recovered oil wealth be invested in irrigation, infrastructure, education, medicine, defense and other essentials. Within a decade Iraq became easily the most advanced secular Muslim country in the world, with large numbers of women in the professions, and a free health service that could only be marveled at by less fortunate nations.

Predictably perhaps, Saddam Hussein became a national hero: the man who “Kicked the Americans and British out” and catapulted Iraq into the 20th Century. Even today in 2003, all Iraqi citizens are free to carry loaded automatic weapons on the street, because President Hussein has nothing to fear from his own people.

As recently as last October, an Iraqi woman on a balcony in Baghdad saluted her President as he passed less than fifty yards away, by a firing a three-shot burst from a fully-automatic AK-47 assault rifle up in the air. Saddam Hussein, standing erect and unprotected in an open Jeep, merely smiled and nodded his acknowledgement. If any woman in Washington, London or Canberra had dared to salute President Bush, Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Howard in this way, she would have been shot dead immediately by government snipers.

By the late eighties, the western powers decided to take action against Iraq and in particular against the charismatic Saddam Hussein. It was time to lure President Hussein into a trap cunningly laid by Ambassador April Glaspie of the US State Department, and take back “their” oil reserves. Within two years the western media thoroughly demonized Saddam Hussein as the man who “killed his own Kurds at Halabja [he did not], whose troops ruthlessly butchered helpless babies in incubators in Kuwait [they did not], and who collectively terrorized the defenseless Kurds and Shiite Muslims in the south of Iraq [they did not].

For many years the real truth behind these structured western lies was available on the Internet as the original “Falklands Alternative”, which was suddenly hacked and destroyed a few weeks ago, curiously in company with all my work on the sabotage of Air France Concorde 4590. For those interested in why Iraq was invaded in the first Gulf War, and why American and British troops are once again assembling in Kuwait today, here is the original “Falklands Alternative” again, edited only for context and spelling.

Full story...