Still chastened by the unforgettable lies told by former President George Bush for “regime change” in Baghdad – achieved at horrific, mind-boggling human cost and devastation of Iraq – the American people should know that in our Caribbean region there are also deep anxieties over President Barack Obama’s impending US-led military attack in Syria.
The March 13, 2003 war on Iraq had been shamelessly propagandized by the Bush administration as a costly sacrificial undertaking to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), even after credible United Nations inspectors had already declared there were none.
However, significantly aided by a then cosy British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush’s war against Saddam – once a formidable political ally of the United States in their shared hatred for Iran – expediently chose to forget that Washington’s once so-called “Hitler of Baghdad” had murdered thousands of Iraqis with mustard gas and sarin in four major political offensives during 1988.
Most ironically, this information is sourced not to enemies of superpower America, but to its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – that vital arm of Washington administrations so often involved in political subversion against governments in this and other regions of the world.
Of immediate relevance is that when the time came for US-designed “regime change” in Baghdad, the huge lie offered was for destruction of claimed WMDs in Iraq. Now fast forward to Syria where claims – including from UN investigators – in the use of sarin gas from the reported stockpile of chemical weapons in control of Assad’s government is the official reason being offered by Obama to launch his planned military strike.
At the time of writing, and while the British House of Commons’ historic vote to block Prime Minister David Cameron’s initiative to participate in military action against Syria has now left the White House waiting on a vote from Congress, Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are revealing an agonizing political quandary of their own creation.
Singing from the same page, they separately thought it expedient to stress that the use of chemical weapons by any government against its own people cannot be ignored by the international community. There should be no disagreement with this contention, even though the United States had conveniently ignored it in the case of Iraq – long before its enforced “regime change” in Baghdad.
The Obama administration subsequently coupled its determination for planned military action against Syria by reaffirming that it was not being done with “regime change” in mind but, as Kerry subsequently told the Senate foreign relations committee on Wednesday, “Assad must go”.
What double-speak! “Go” where and how? By what means? And if Assad survives the coming US-led military attack – but with a “degraded” stockpile of chemical weapons – what next? We shall soon find out.
• Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist.