U.S. MOTIVES IN IRAQ 

The Pundits Have It All Wrong

Everybody is second-guessing why George W. Bush wants to blow Iraq off the map. Some, like William Safire, say he wants a regime change because Saddam is a proven maniac who previously used weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against Kurds and Iranians. Even adding the comment that Saddam also tried to assassinate Bush's father hardly provides a viable rationale for wiping out another million or so Iraqis.

Others say that wiping out Iraq must happen because Saddam can develop a nuclear weapons capability within a few years. The US revised the nuclear threat rationale for pre-emptive strikes when the news got out that North Korea has at least three atomic bombs. The new version has Iraq giving the technology to terrorists. The fact that Israel has been developing nuclear weapons for years goes un-remarked by most of the media and all of the US government.

For the moment, forget about those who say there is not enough evidence to prove that Saddam has WMD capability. It is too easy to dismiss skeptics like Scott Ritter, who was deputy chief UN weapons inspector, or the CIA , which has lots of satellite photo coverage they are not offering as WMD revelations. Those that they have offered do not reveal anything like real evidence.

Momentarily ignore, also, the fact that the Iraqis have even yielded to demands that inspectors be allowed unfettered access to Saddam's palaces, in violation, it should be added, of all that America holds dear about rights to privacy. Along with this, overlook the fact that previous weapons inspectors fed intelligence information unrelated to WMDs to the CIA, which was later used to target presumed WMD sites.

A number of pundits around the world have used their crystal balls to envision oil as the reason for the US wish to rain death on Baghdad and take over Iraq. The speculation that America could get away with a stunt like that assumes that the rest of the world would look the other way as General Tommy Franks reigns over the Iraqi oil fields.

What then is the real, though undisclosed, rationale for decimating Iraq? Quite simply, Israel wants to rid Palestine of Palestinians. Before that can be accomplished, any potential for the use of weapons of mass destruction by Iraq must be eliminated.

There has been much pressure for establishing a Palestinian state. Israel does not want a Palestinian state to exist inside Palestine at all. It wants the Palestinians removed to Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon or Syria - anywhere but in Palestine. That line has been part of the Israeli national agenda since Israel was conceived. It was certainly in evidence when Menachem Begin and the Stern gang mass murdered Palestinians to provoke the rest to flee in fear.

It has been even more in evidence since Ariel Sharon, following up on his sponsorship of Palestinian extermination in Lebanon, unleashed his genocidal troops, with the latest military armaments, against rock throwers and suicide bombers, wiping out freedom fighting members of the Palestinian resistance with Hitlerian ferocity. The line has also been endorsed by US congressmen, like Representative Dick Armey.

Chris Matthews interviewed Armey (Republican, Texas), leader of the Republicans in the US House of Representatives (source: MSNBC, 1 May 2002). In the most blatant admission of this line, Armey said: "I am content to have Israel occupy that land that it now occupies and to have those people who have been aggressors against Israel retired to some other area, and I would be happy to have them make a home. I would be happy to have all of these Arab nations that have been so hell bent to drive Israel out of the Middle East to get together, find some land and make a home for the Palestinians. I think it can be done."

Could not this be done now? Why could not Sharon and Co. force the Palestinians out of Palestine now? As long as Israel perceives that Iraq may be developing weapons of mass destruction along with the capacity to deliver them, they would not dare remove the remaining Palestinians from their midst. They know that if Saddam lobbed a WMD to Israel that it would kill more Palestinians than Israelis.

But if/when the Palestinians have been expelled from their lands, that restraint could be removed from Saddam's mind set; and, assuming he has the weapons, all WMD hell could break loose over the land of Zion before the Israelis could prevent it or retaliate.

So what happens if Sharon and his American supporters - Perle, Wolfowitz, Cohen, Ruben, Rumsfeld, Fleisher, Armey and all of the rest of the US-Israel support troops prodding Bush and Cheney - get their way and finish Iraq?

The Palestinians will be forced again to flee their homeland and become refugees in another Arab country. If/when this happens, resulting in a Diaspora of Palestinians outside of the occupied lands called Israel, there will no longer be a radical like Saddam Hussein, with weapons of mass destruction, to threaten Israel's very existence.

The purpose of the whole Bush & Co. exercise in an Iraq wipe-out is thus clear: it opens the floodgates for Israel to rid Palestine of the Palestinians.

The reporters who accept the Bush administration's public line about regime change and (unproven) weapons of mass destruction have simply been repeating political nonsense. Those commentators who speculate that the Bush-Cheney oil connections have motivated them to seek control of Iraqi oil have merely been grasping at straws for a rationale for the war mongering by Washington hawks. In short, the pundits have it all wrong.