Reply #69: A mission in Iraq built on a lie - Sydney Morning Herald 6/16/03

[Stephanie]

from party_line:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/06/15/1055615673779.html

Sydney Morning Herald:
"A mission in Iraq built on a lie"
June 16 2003

When Bush wondered what to do about September 11 an ultra-right lobby group was there to tell him, writes Robert Manne.

It is gradually becoming transparent that the endlessly repeated claim used to justify the invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein possessed a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction - was false.

The 200 most plausible sites for the storage of such weapons have been inspected. Many of the most senior military, intelligence and scientific figures in the regime have been captured and interrogated. Yet not one weapon of mass destruction has so far been found.

The spurious justification constitutes, in my opinion, one of the greatest foreign policy scandals involving Western governments since 1945.

It is surely imperative for all those who care about democracy - whether or not they supported the war - to try to discover an explanation for the deception and the true causes of what has occurred.

One important moment on the road that led to the invasion of Iraq can be found in the formation in 1997 of the Project for the New American Century. This lobby group represented almost all the most powerful figures associated with the defence and foreign policy wing of American neo-conservatism: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol.


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