When the US government, with its British and Australian allies, launched its invasion for Iraq's huge oil resources in March 2003, they claimed it was necessary to stop the Saddam Hussein regime handing over "weapons of mass destruction" to Saudi Arabian millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
Since then, it has been revealed that the claim Iraq possessed an arsenal of WMD was a gigantic lie concocted by US officials. They employed fabricated "intelligence" supplied by Iraqi exile groups on the payroll of the Pentagon and the CIA — like the Iraqi National Accord (INA), which is led by Iyad Allawi, now Iraq's US-appointed interim prime minister.
The alleged ties between Hussein's regime and al Qaeda have since been dismissed by US President George Bush's own commission of inquiry into the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US. On June 16, the commission found that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda — a finding that the FBI and the CIA now concur with.
The continued presence of 160,000 US-commanded foreign troops in Iraq is now being justified by Washington, London and Canberra as necessary to "bring democracy" to the Iraqi people and to defeat "terrorists", with Iraq now being designated the "central front" in the US "global war against terrorism".
Like the WMD claims, these are complete lies, revealed as such by Washington's imposition of a despised gang of Iraqi collaborators, headed by a CIA-recruited terrorist, as Iraq's nominal government.
On June 9 the pro-war New York Times reported that the "CIA recruited Dr Allawi in 1992, former intelligence officials said", and that in the mid-1990s Allawi's INA "used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq" to carry out terrorist attacks.
"One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period 'blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed' ... Other former intelligence officials said Dr Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time", the NYT reported.
All Washington's talk about "bringing democracy" to Iraqis is exposed as a lie by the fact that the US and its occupation allies refuse to accept the clearly evident desire of the majority of Iraqis for the US and allied occupation troops to leave their country.
This is not only indicated by the growing war of national liberation being waged by Iraqi armed patriots against the US-led occupation forces and their Iraqi collaborators. On June 15, Newsweek magazine reported that the "first survey of Iraqis sponsored by the US Coalition Provisional Authority after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shows that most say they would feel safer if Coalition forces left immediately".
The results of the poll, conducted in mid-May but not made public, were leaked to both Associated Press and Newsweek. AP reported that "92% of the Iraqis said they considered coalition troops occupiers, while just 2% called them liberators".
The results of the CPA-commissioned poll confirmed the deeply hostile attitude of Iraqis toward the US-led occupation forces that was revealed by a mid-April USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll. That poll found that 57% of Iraqis want US and allied troops to leave Iraq. It also found that 55% of Iraqis believe armed attacks on the occupation forces are justified. This rose to 67% in Baghdad.
Clearly, if Washington, London and Canberra really wanted to bring an end to violence in Iraq and return control of Iraq to the Iraqi people, they would withdraw their troops from the country. As the British Guardian's Baghdad correspondent Jonathan Steele observed in the paper's June 20 edition, "Liberation will only come when the Americans leave".
From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
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