On December 15, on the subject of the WikiLeaks release of secret documents, columnist Tony Fraser, in his apparent unabashed distaste of anything American, has regrettably displayed a one-sided view.
Fraser wrote that George Bush and Tony Blair invented a fiction that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. No less a person than General Colin Powell, a diplomat and soldier internationally respected, addressed the United Nations on this subject in February 1993. His objective was "to share what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction from a variety of sources, some US, as well as those of other countries. Some of the sources are technical, such as intercepted telephone conversations and photos taken by satellites. Other sources are people who have risked their lives to let the world know what Saddam Hussein is really up to."
As it turned out, this was poor intelligence, certainly. But a vast plot among hundreds would have been necessary for this to be fiction. Few now doubt that the war was inexcusable, but the faulty evidence was simply misleading. Fraser also stated that Saddam Hussein was created by the British and Americans. Ought he not to check his information? Surely he confuses Hussein with the Shah of Iran.
The fact is that Iraq was granted independence from the British in 1932, whereas Saddam was born five years later. After independence the saga of Iraq was one of internal dissension, tribal uprisings, and military occupation by Britain during World War II. There followed internal revolutions and military coups, terminating in 1968 when the Baath Party, of which Saddam was a principal, came to long-term power. It took another 11 years before Saddam became President of a fiercely independent Iraq.
Benedict Anthony
St James, PoS