http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/07/1046826528748.html

Reader Alun Breward writes: "I found this article on the website of German news magazine Der Spiegel this week. I thought it was one of the best pieces of journalism on the Iraq conflict I have read and so I translated it." Thanks Alun! Here we go. "This war came from a think tank," by Jochen Boelsche, Der Spiegel.

... As far back as 1998, ultra right US think tanks had developed and published plans for an era of US world domination, sidelining the UN and attacking Iraq. These people were not taken seriously. But now they are calling the tune... These 1990's schemes of the Think Tanks, from sidelining the UN to a series of wars to establish dominance - were in no way secret. Nearly all these scenarios have been published; some are accessible on the Web. For a long time these schemes were shrugged off as fantasy produced by intellectual mavericks - arch-conservative relics of the Reagan era, the coldest of cold-war warriors.

...A 1997 proposal of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)... forcefully mapped out "America's global leadership". On 28 Jan 1998 the PNAC project team wrote to President Clinton demanding a radical change in dealings with the UN and the end of Saddam... He was, they said, a threat to the US, Israel, the Arab States and "a meaningful part of the world's oil reserves". They put their case as follows:

"In the short term this means being ready to lead military action, without regard for diplomacy. In the long term it means disarming Saddam and his regime. We believe that the US has the right under existing Security Council resolutions to take the necessary steps, including war, to secure our vital interests in the Gulf. In no circumstances should America's politics be crippled by the misguided insistence of the Security Council on unanimity." This letter might have remained yellowing in the White House archives if it did not read like a blue-print for a long-desired war, and still might have been forgotten if ten PNAC members had not signed it.

These signatories are... Dick Cheney, Vice President; Lewis Libby, Cheney's Chief of Staff; Donald Rumsfeld, Defence Minister; Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Peter Rodman, in charge of 'Matters of Global Security'; John Bolton, State Secretary for Arms Control; Richard Armitage, Deputy Foreign Minister; Richard Perle, former Deputy Defence Minister under Reagan, now head of the Defense Policy Board; William Kristol, head of the PNAC and adviser to Bush, known as the brains of the President; Zalmay Khalilzad,fresh from being special ambassador and kingmaker in Afghanistan, now Bush's special ambassador to the Iraqi opposition.

But even before that - over ten years ago - two hardliners from this group had developed a defence proposal that created a global scandal when it was leaked to the US press. The suggestion that was revealed in 1992 in The New York Times was developed by two men who today are Cabinet members - Wolfowitz and Libby. It essentially argued that the doctrine of deterrence used in the Cold War should be replaced by a new global strategy. Its goal was the enduring preservation of the superpower status of the US - over Europe, Russia and China. Various means were proposed to deter potential rivals from questioning America's leadership or playing a larger regional or global role.

...But the critical thing, according to the Wolfowitz-Libby paper, was complete American dominance of Eurasia. Any nation there that threatened the USA by acquiring WMD should face pre-emptive attack, they said. Traditional alliances should be replaced by ad-hoc coalitions. This 1992 masterplan then formed the basis of a PNAC paper that was concluded in September 2000, just months before the start of the Bush Administration. That September 2000 paper (Rebuilding America's Defences) was developed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Libby, and is devoted to matters of "maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests".

Amongst other things, this paper said, the USA must re-arm and build a missile shield in order to put itself in a position to fight numerous wars simultaneously and chart its own course. Whatever happened, the Gulf would have to be in US control: "The US has sought for years to play an ongoing role in the security architecture of the Gulf. The unresolved conflict with Iraq provides a clear basis for our presence, but quite independent of the issue of the Iraqi regime, a substantial US presence in the Gulf is needed." ...Even peace efforts, the paper continues, should have the stamp of the USA rather than the UN.

...Scarcely had President Bush (jnr) won his controversial election victory and replaced Clinton than he brought the hardliners from the PNAC into his administration. The old campaigner Richard Perle... [took] the key role at the Defense Policy Board. This board operates in close cooperation with Pentagon boss Rumsfeld. At a breath-taking pace the new power-bloc began implementing the PNAC strategy. Bush ditched international treaty after international treaty, shunned the UN and began treating allies as inferiors. After the attacks of 11 September, as fear ruled the US and anthrax letters circulated, the Bush cabinet clearly took the view that the time was ripe to dust off the PNAC plans for Iraq.

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seymour "the killing fields" hersh

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/030317fa_fact

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees... During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal... Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, [for] Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist... and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board... [which] meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P... [which] invests in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense... The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State... and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle’s... The purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and Zuhair.

...In mid-2001... [Perle] accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board... [to] give advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement... As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any matter in which he has a financial interest.

...Four members of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met most recently on February 27th and 28th, had not been informed of Perle’s involvement in Trireme. One board member, upon being told of Trireme and Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, “Oh, get out of here. He’s the chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for homeland security, and I’ve put people on the board with whom I’m doing that business, I’d be had”—a reference to [Perle-appointed] Gerald Hillman... “Seems to me this is at the edge of or off the ethical charts. I think it would stink to high heaven.”

Hillman, a former McKinsey consultant, stunned at least one board member at the February meeting when he raised questions about the validity of Iraq’s existing oil contracts. “Hillman said the old contracts are bad news; he said we should kick out the Russians and the French,” the board member told me. “This was a serious conversation. We’d become the brokers. Then we’d be selling futures in the Iraqi oil company. I said to myself, ‘Oh, man. Don’t go down that road.’”

...Last month, I spoke with Khashoggi, who is sixty-seven and is recovering from open-heart surgery... Khashoggi explained that before Christmas he and Harb Zuhair, the Saudi industrialist, had met with...Gerald Hillman in Paris and had discussed the possibility of a large investment in Trireme. Zuhair was interested in more than the financial side; he also wanted to share his views on war and peace... Khashoggi said that he agreed to try to assemble potential investors for a private lunch with Perle. The lunch took place on January 3rd at a seaside restaurant in Marseilles. (Perle has a vacation home in the South of France.)

...When I asked Perle whether the Saudi businessmen at the lunch were being considered as possible investors in Trireme, he replied, “I don’t want Saudis as such, but the fund is open to any investor, and our European partners said that, through investment banks, they had had Saudis as investors.” Both Perle and Hillman stated categorically that there were currently no Saudi investments.

Khashoggi professes to be amused by the activities of Perle and Hillman as members of the policy board. As Khashoggi saw it, Trireme’s business potential depended on a war in Iraq taking place. “If there is no war,” he told me, “why is there a need for security? If there is a war, of course, billions of dollars will have to be spent.” He commented, “You Americans blind yourself with your high integrity and your democratic morality against peddling influence, but they were peddling influence.”

When Perle’s lunch with Khashoggi and Zuhair, and his connection to Trireme, became known to a few ranking members of the Saudi royal family, they reacted with anger and astonishment. The meeting in Marseilles left Perle, one of the kingdom’s most vehement critics, exposed to a ferocious counterattack. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who has served as the Saudi Ambassador to the United States for twenty years, told me that he had got wind of Perle’s involvement with Trireme and the lunch in Marseilles... “There is a split personality to Perle,” Bandar said. “Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred-million-dollar deal, and, on the other hand, there were elements of the appearance of blackmail—‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’—as I have been informed by participants in the meeting.”

...When Perle was asked whether his dealings with Trireme might present the appearance of a conflict of interest, he said that anyone who saw such a conflict would be thinking “maliciously.” ...There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war. In doing so, he has given ammunition not only to the Saudis but to his other ideological opponents as well.

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http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/09/le.00.html

WOLF BLITZER, HOST: It's noon in Washington, 9:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, 5:00 p.m. in London, and 8:00 p.m. in Baghdad. And wherever you're watching from around the world, thanks for joining us for this special LATE EDITION, Showdown: Iraq... We're talking with the former assistant U.S. defense secretary, Richard Perle... Before you go, Richard, I want to give you a chance to respond. There's an article in the New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hersh that's just coming out today in which he makes a serious accusation against you that you have a conflict of interest... Let me read a quote from the New Yorker article, the March 17th issue, just out now. "There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war."

PERLE: I don't believe that a company would gain from a war. On the contrary, I believe that the successful removal of Saddam Hussein, and I've said this over and over again, will diminish the threat of terrorism. And what he's talking about is investments in homeland defense, which I think are vital and are necessary. Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.

BLITZER: Well, on the basis of -- why do you say that? A terrorist?

PERLE: Because he's widely irresponsible. If you read the article, it's first of all, impossible to find any consistent theme in it. But the suggestion that my views are somehow related for the potential for investments in homeland defense is complete nonsense.

BLITZER: But I don't understand. Why do you accuse him of being a terrorist?

PERLE: Because he sets out to do damage and he will do it by whatever innuendo, whatever distortion he can -- look, he hasn't written a serious piece since My Lai.*

BLITZER: All right. We're going to leave it right there. Richard Perle, thank you very much.

*["My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath." New York: Random House, 1970. Hersh, who won the Pulitzer Prize, was the reporter who first made public the My Lai massacre [in Vietnam].]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/20/opinion/20THU4.html

After the National Guard killed four antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio in the spring of 1970... a song, simply titled "Ohio," about the horror of the event, criticizing President Richard Nixon by name... was rushed onto the air while sentiment was still high, and became both an antiwar anthem and a huge moneymaker. A comparable song about George W. Bush's rush to war in Iraq would have no chance at all today... Independent radio stations that once would have played edgy, political music have been gobbled up by corporations that control hundreds of stations... [as a result of] a 1996 federal law that allowed corporations to gobble up hundreds of stations, limiting expression over airwaves that are merely licensed to broadcasters but owned by the American public.

...The Telecommunications Act of 1996 increased the number of stations that one entity could own in a single market and permitted companies to buy up as many stations nationally as their deep pockets would allow... Under the old rules, the top two owners had 115 stations between them. Today, the top two own more than 1,400 stations.

...Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin has introduced a bill that would require close scrutiny of mergers that could potentially put the majority of the country's radio stations in a single corporation's hands... Which brings us back to the hypothetical pop song attacking George Bush. The odds against such a song reaching the air are steep.

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http://www.workingforchange.com/printitem.cfm?itemid=14625

Last Friday, the Federal Communications Commission came to town. For an event that by its very definition is mundane -- a public hearing on a proposed federal regulatory rulemaking -- it was an extraordinary event, for several reasons. The first, of course, was that there was a public hearing at all... When FCC Commissioner Michael Powell (Colin's son) was appointed by Pres. Bush as FCC Chairman two years ago, and Republican appointees assumed three of the five commissioner positions, Powell took on as a top priority the radical deregulation of... the ability of large corporations to control the nation's airwaves.

...The Telecommunications Act of 1996, perhaps the single greatest act of corporate welfare in Congressional history... left the country's largest broadcaster, Clear Channel Communications, with over 1,200 radio stations as well as control of most of the country's concert promotion and a big chunk of its billboards. However, bans on companies owning both daily newspapers and radio or TV stations in one market remain... Those bans were Powell's particular targets when, last fall, he ordered a comprehensive review of the FCC's ownership regulations. There were to be no public hearings.

...But a funny thing happened: the public. Lone dissenting commissioner Michael Copps (the fifth seat was at the time vacant) raised a ruckus, and so did public interest groups, alternative media activists, and, eventually, Democratic legislators. A public hearing was scheduled... When a record 2,200 public comments were filed by the end of the year, the comment period was extended. And then Copps used public pressure to force Powell to allow further public testimony and hearings.

...The auditorium at the University of Washington was packed with critics of corporate media...One of the other two Republican commissioners, Kevin Martin, broke with Powell and created a 3-2 majority with Copps and Adelstein on a key telecommunications industry vote last month; Martin's "mutiny" has FCC and broadcast industry insiders abuzz that he might also break with Powell on the ownership initiative... Michael Powell's deregulatory corporate gift, once considered a slam-dunk to be enacted, has already been significantly impeded by a media democracy movement that did not exist five years ago.

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http://www.reuters.com/printerFriendlyPopup.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2348725

Acclaimed authors Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston were among a group of 23 women arrested in front of the White House on Saturday as they protested against what they called a misguided march toward war, protest organizers said. "They were in front of the White House, registering their discontent with the war and the war plans and were arrested by Park Police simply for standing in front of the White House and saying 'no' to war," said Gopal Dayaneni, a spokesman for the anti-war group CodePink which organized the rally.

..."The president may pretend that he doesn't want to hear us, he doesn't see us, but believe me eventually he will see us and he will hear us," Walker, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for her novel "The Color Purple," told CNN before her arrest. Kingston, perhaps best known for her 1976 novel The Woman Warrior, has won numerous awards for her work and was a recipient of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981... CodePink, whose name is a play on the Bush administration's system of terror threat warning levels, said Medea Benjamin, who founded the group with Evans, and Amy Goodman, the host of the Pacifica Radio program "Democracy Now," were also arrested.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62953-2003Mar8?language=printer

The president promised that American troops would not remain in the Middle East "for one day longer than is necessary" and he said the coming war with Iraq provides opportunities "to settle the conflicts that divide the Arabs from Israel." Sound like President Bush's speech Feb 26 to the American Enterprise Institute? Well, yes. But the quotes are actually from President George H.W. Bush's address to the United Nations on Oct. 1, 1990. The president, as he readies the nation for war in Iraq, has been recycling some of the arguments and phrases his father used more than 12 years ago.

[To] the 45th General Assembly of the United Nations, back in 1990, the 41st president said: "We seek no advantage for ourselves, nor do we seek to maintain our military forces in Saudi Arabia for one day longer than is necessary." Bush the 43rd said two weeks ago: "We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more."

The elder Bush told the United Nations: "I truly believe there may be opportunities for Iraq and Kuwait to settle their differences permanently, for the states of the Gulf themselves to build new arrangements for stability, and for all the states and the peoples of the region to settle the conflicts that divide the Arabs from Israel." The younger Bush last week revived his father's unfulfilled forecast by calling the mission "an opportunity" for peace: "Success in Iraq could also begin a new phase for Middle Eastern peace, and set in motion progress towards a truly democratic Palestinian state."

...Father spoke of a "grim nightmare of anarchy" from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Son spoke of "the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen" for his people. Father asked to "redouble our efforts to stem the spread of nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and the ballistic missiles that can rain destruction upon distant peoples." Son called for "international bodies with the authority and the will to stop the spread of terror and chemical and biological and nuclear weapons."

In both speeches, they spoke of a universal craving for freedom and prosperity. "In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same," the president said at the AEI gathering. "In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same." Here's his father's version from 1990: "The truth is, people everywhere are motivated in much the same ways. And people everywhere want much the same things: the chance to live a life of purpose; the chance to choose a life in which they and their children can learn and grow healthy."

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not a satire.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-605441,00.html

THE first President Bush has told his son that hopes of peace in the Middle East would be ruined if a war with Iraq were not backed by international unity... He also urged the President to resist his tendency to bear grudges... The former President’s comments reflect unease among the Bush family and its entourage at the way that George W. Bush is ignoring international opinion... The message, in a speech at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was unmistakeable.

...Mr Bush Jr, who is said never to forget even relatively minor slights, has alarmed analysts with the way in which he has allowed senior Administration figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, aggressively to criticise France and Germany. There are, however, signs that Mr Bush Sr’s message may be getting through. Father and son talk regularly and it was, in part, pressure from Mr Bush Sr... that helped to persuade the President to go to the UN last September.

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/bush-m08_prn.shtml

...The political aims of the Bush administration require such a blatant and continuous falsification of reality that all connection is lost between what the president says and what masses of people generally perceive. The lies of the administration necessarily assume, therefore, a grotesque “in your face” character... The people are expected to accept, without thought or reflection, whatever the president says. That is, they are expected to behave like the personnel of the mass media.

In the hours leading up to the president’s press conference of Thursday night, the media predicted that Bush would use the occasion to explain to the American people why the invasion of Iraq is necessary and unavoidable.

...The United States, the president said, is “confronting the threat posed to our nation and to peace by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of terror...”

“Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction are a direct threat to this country..." "I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons…" "Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation…" "It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror…" "I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people…" "He’s a murderer…" "He’s a master of deception…" "The American people know that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction …”

Whenever Bush attempted to wander beyond these programmed phrases, he ran into trouble... “Iraqi operatives continue to hide biological and chemical agents to avoid detection by inspectors. In some cases, these materials have been moved to different locations every 12 to 24 hours or placed in vehicles that are in residential neighborhoods.” This claim... was again refuted by Blix in his Friday report to the Security Council.

...Bush also declared, “We know from multiple intelligence sources that Iraqi weapons scientists continue to be threatened with harm should they cooperate with UN inspectors.” This claim was also challenged by Blix the following morning. “In the last month,” he stated, “Iraq has provided us with the names of many persons who may be relevant sources of information... The Iraq side seems to have encouraged interviewees not to request the presence of Iraqi officials, so called minders, or the taping of the interviews... Since we started requesting interviews, 38 individuals were asked for private interviews, of which 10 accepted under our terms, 7 of these during the past week.”

...In the midst of the very public destruction of Iraq’s Al-Samoud missiles, Bush brazenly proclaimed: “If the Iraqi regime were disarming, we would know it because we would see it. Iraq’s weapons would be presented to inspectors and the world would witness their destruction.” ...This was too much for the normally unflappable Dr. Blix... [he] declared in his Security Council report, “We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks. Lethal weapons are being destroyed.”

...The report of ElBaradei was especially compelling, and even more damning in its refutation of the lies of the Bush administration... Perhaps the most important sections of ElBaradei’s report were those that responded to claims by the United States and Britain, trumpeted in the press, that the Iraqis had been engaged in illegal efforts to continue their nuclear weapons program. The United States and Britain had alleged, with great fanfare in late 2002, that Iraq had attempted to import aluminum tubes for the purpose of manufacturing centrifuges required for the secret production of nuclear weapons. This issue was declared by the British and American governments to be a matter of paramount concern... [But] ElBaradei reported... “Based on available evidence, the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq’s efforts to import these aluminum tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuges and, moreover, that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable redesign needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program.”

Even more devastating to the Anglo-American propaganda campaign was ElBaradei’s exposure of the claim that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger. In December 2002, British intelligence claimed to have discovered documents recording an attempt by an Iraqi official to negotiate the purchase of uranium during a visit to Niger in February 1999... “Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents—which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger—are in fact not authentic." If we may be permitted to state the findings in less formal language, the Blair government in London used documents forged by its intelligence agencies to concoct a case for war... In his conclusion, ElBaradei summed up the results of the IAEA’s work in Iraq: “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”

...To listen to Bush meander aimlessly from one absurdity to another requires not only the suspension of one’s judgment, but that one suspend all cognitive activity. Having ringed Iraq with 300,000 troops, Bush declared, for example, that “The form and leadership of that government is for the Iraqi people to choose.” Five minutes later, he stated, “We will be changing the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people.”

...Even those of us who, by dint of professional responsibility, are obliged to listen and read what the president says cannot help but feel that they have been somehow degraded by the experience.