The Bean Defense

July 15, 2003

07/15/200303/21/2016 · Martin Kelley

Readers might remember the field day I had a few weeks ago when US occupying forces announced they had uncovered a cache of beans. They claimed Saddam Hussein had stockpiled a few hundred bags of castor beans to use to make a biological agent called ricin. In my postUS: Iraqis Planned Operation Fart and Stink I pointed out that the supposed weapons worked on the well-documented principle that beans can produce gas and indigestion – ricin just works especially well and concentrates the effect enough to kill someone in a particularly messy way.

What I didn’t do was Google ricin and Iraq. Today I did and found this fascinating article that I missed at the time. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed an Iraq/ricin connection before the House International Relations Committee back in early February:

“The ricin that is bouncing around Europe now originated in Iraq — not in the part of Iraq that is under Saddam Hussein’s control, but his security forces know all about it,” Powell said.

European intelligence sources quickly discredited this claim, pointing out that it was obvious the European ricin was home-made and not Iraqi. The French were “stunned” that Powell would make such a obviously-wrong statement, and the British flatly stated they were “clear” that that ricin found in London wasn’t produced in Iraq.

Here we have another instance of a senior US official claiming an easily-disprovable claim of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, just weeks after the now-infamous Niger/Iraq forgery appeared in the President’s State of the Union address. Powell and others in the U.S. have trotted out the ricin threat repeatedly yet it’s hard to make a weapon out of the stuff. It’s really only ever been used for a ridiculous James Bond-like assasination in 1991, when a Bulgarian agent is supposed to have killed a dissident in London using a ricin-filled pellet fired from an umbrella tip (one is reminded of Austin Power’s Dr. Evil: “I’m going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death”). As one site points out The current wisdom among biological defense experts is that ricin is more likely to be used as a tool in assassinations than as a weapon of mass destruction.

There is a clear pattern of the Bush Administration deliberately mis-interpreting Iraqi threats to make the case for war. These are purposeful deceptions with only the thinnest escape clause to wiggle through when the lies are exposed. Colin Powell isn’t stupid enough to make this kind of repeated mistake and a year of disproven ricin alerts is a mark against the Administration’s integrity.

Tough Time to Love War(Making)

January 23, 2003

01/23/200310/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

This just isn’t a good time to be George W. Bush. United Nations inspectors combing Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have come up empty handed. Saddam Hussein has allowing them relatively unfettered access but all they’ve uncovered is a few unused shells.

Bush is nothing if not persistent when it comes to perceived world bad guys. Just yesterday he told an audience in St. Louis that Hussein is “a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons.” Despite the repeated use dangerous, the rest of the world is unconvinced. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder still talks about “peaceful solutions” and Germany and France is putting the brakes on war in the U.N. Security Council, waiting for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to turn up.

It must frustrate our president to see that all these years of military sanctions against Iraq have been working. All the evidence uncovered by the U.N. inspectors prove that we can “win without war,” as one current slogan goes, and that we have in fact been winning. We’ve kept Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military after the Gulf War. U.S. isolation of Iraq has been successful despite its numerous flaws. Saddam is not a threat.

Which brings us to real threats and to North Korea. President Bush and his team of war mongerers have been so busy looking at Iraq that they’ve given North Korea just sporadic attention. Recently-declassified reports show that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has known much more about North Korea’s nuclear bomb making over the last dozen years than anyone’s been admitting.

The C.I.A. has known that North Korea and Pakistan have been trading nuclear secrets. Pakistan has been showing its ally of convenience how to build the centrifuges that process weapons-grade uranium. North Korea in return has provided the missile technology that gives Pakistan the nuclear reach to destroy arch-rival India. Now that we know President Bush knew all about this history of what we might call “dangerous, dangerous” technology trade, why did he cozy up to Pakistan following September 11th? He so wanted wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that he normalized relations with a country far more dangerous. If a Pakistani or North Korean nuclear weapon goes off in New York City it will kill a whole lot more people than Osama bin Laden’s four hijacked airplanes. What happened on September 11th was terrible but it’s nothing compared to what a enemy with resources could do.

There are real threats to world peace, far more “dangerous, dangerous” than Iraq. The United States needs to drop its president’s obsessions and look squarely at the world and who we’re allied with. And when we reset our policies we wqcan use Iraq as our model. For as the U.N. inspectors have proven, we can create peace through diplomacy and we can isolate troublemakers through smart sanctions.

What a tough lesson for U.S. leaders bent on war.

Dick Cheney’s Rambo Complex

March 12, 2002

03/12/200203/21/2016 · Martin Kelley

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney is touring England this week, trying to find co-producers on Gulf War II, the sequel to the disappointing minor hit of 1991. You remember the original: it was briefly popular until Bill Clinton’s “Peace and Properity” broke all previous records for an unprecedented run.
In Gulf War II, Dick Cheney is playing Rambo. It’s twelve years later and he and his sidekick George Bush Jr. are going to re-fight the war against Iraq singlehandedly. No other countries will join them this time in their fight for justice.

Like all shot-em-up movies, this one needs a convincing villain. There’s no connection between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden but so what? They’re both shifty Arabs with facial hair. Throw in a spicy subplot if you want – “Dashing American pilots secretly held prisoner since 1991.” Americans barely notice plot and motivations. After 9/11 the White House is betting that the audience wants more war and retribution.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a Hollywood movie. Dick Cheney and the second President Bush are indeed trying to start a second war against Iraq. There’s no new provocation from Saddam Hussein. There’s no connection between him and Osama bin Laden or the 9/11 terrorist attacks. None of our allies from the first Gulf War want to join us in a second.

But Cheney and Bush want a fight anyway. It’s hard not to conclude this is some sort of “Rambo Complex.” The U.S. is led by two men fighting legacies that won’t let them put 1991 behind them. One is the son of the president accused of prematurely stopping the 1991 war before U.S. troops got to Baghdad. The other is the dying aide to both father and son, who has waited almost twelve years for a chance to prove he was right.

This week rumors of an American pilot supposedly held for eleven years have appeared out of nowhere. President Bush has been diverting attention to Saddam Hussein even while Osama bin Laden runs free. And Dick Cheney is indeed in England trying to drum up support for a new Gulf War.

While the Vice President is off wandering the margins of stage right, real tragedy and drama are holding the world’s attention center stage. Palestine and Israel are close to an all-out war. The mounting violence has worried important countries like Saudi Arabia and Syria so much that they’re proposing new peace plans. So much of the Mideast’s anger against the U.S. revolves around the Palestinian question. A war there could topple friendly Muslim governments and rip apart our current alliances.

This is where the world’s attention is focused. But President Bush and Cheney are ignoring the situation. They have not followed past Presidents’ lead in leading peace negotiations. American pressure and involvement is certainly needed to craft real peace between Palestine and Israel.

But Bush and Cheney are snoring in the bleacher seats when it comes to the world’s most pressing and intractable conflict. They’re dreaming of cinematic glory. It’s 2002 and two lone G.I.‘s are paratrooping into Iraq, knives clenched in teeth, machine guns at the ready. One dreams of avenging the cowardice and failure of his father. The other of winning just one more war before the curtains close in on him.

Stopping the Next War Now: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror

October 7, 2001

10/07/200103/03/2016 · Martin Kelley

Originally published at Nonviolence.org

The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.

The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.

The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.

The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.

The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.

There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.

And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.

And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.

The Real Phantom Menace is Us

May 27, 1999

05/27/199910/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Being the home to a couple of dozen peace groups, the Nonviolence Web has published a lot of press releases calling for an end to bombing in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. They’re all very fine but also all very predictable.

But as we write, the U.S. government continues pursuing a war that has no clear realistic goals, has led to even more killing in the region, and has seriously disrupted post Cold-War relationships with Russia and China (See George Lakey’s “Cold War Returning? — A Chilling Russian Visit”).

At home, Americans just watch the pictures on TV as they go about living a glorious Spring. We laugh, cry, work and play; we make trips to the shore for Memorial Day weekend; and we obediently flock to a movie called Phantom Menace that tells the story of the start of cinema’s most famous Evil Empire.

A new empire is being shaped here. The United States has been able to claim the title of “empire” for at least a hundred years. But something new is at work here ( see my own War Time Again). We’re witnessing the birth of a new American order which is starting a new wars every three months. New kinds of wars, which barely touch American lives, even those of the bombers waging them from 20,000 feet. The Pentagon and State Department’s planners are building on lessons learned at the start of the decade in the Gulf War. They’re refined their missiles for accuracy but they’ve learned how to spin the media

Now every new villain is presented to the media as the new Hitler. Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden. Milosvic. Everyone calling for peace is painted as a neo-isolationist, a contemporary Chamberlain appeasing a tyrant. Afterwards it’s easy to see how overly-dramatic the propaganda was and how ineffectual all the American bombs were. But still, here we are in Kosovo, in another Nineties war and next year we’ll be in yet another. Unless we stop the zest for these Clinton wars now.

What do we have to do to end this war? And what do we need to do to stop the U.S.‘s newfound zest for cruise missiles? How can peace and antiwar activists start acting beyond the press releases and isolated vigils to think creatively about linking folks together to bring new people and ideas into the peace movement?

I don’t pretend to know what exactly we need. All I know is that I’m personally bored of the standard issue peace actions we’ve been engaging in and want to see something new. Some of it might look like clichés from the 60s and some might look like rip-offs of McDonald’s latest ad campaign. But we need to build an antiwar culture that will intrude upon a sunny spring and remind people that a war is on. The real phantom menace this summer is an American Empire that is retooling it’s military and re-conditioning its citizens to think of war as a normal course of affairs.

American Spies and Blood for Oil

January 15, 1999

01/15/199910/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Saddam Hussein was right: the U.N. teams inspecting Iraq did contain U.S. spies. His expulsion of the teams was legitimate, and the U.S. bombing that followed was farce.

Karl Marx once wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” We’re seeing that today, with each successive military action by the U.S. against Iraq becoming ever more transparent and ridiculous.

Perhaps you haven’t heard the news. It was conveniently released the day before President Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial was to begin and the major American news networks didn’t give it much attention. They were too busy with segments on how the U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice designed his own robes. With hooks like fashion and sex attending the impeachment trial, how could they be blamed for under-reporting more Iraq news.

But on January 7th, the New York Times confirmed rumors that United States planted spies on the United Nations: “United States officials said on Wednesday that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs.” The Washington Post and Boston Globe further reported that the operation was aimed at Saddam Hussein himself. NBC News reported that U.N. communication equipment was used by U.S. intelligence to pass along intercepted Iraqi messages.

This is exactly what Saddam Hussein has been charging the U.N. teams with. He has long claimed that the teams, run by the United Nations Special Commission or UNSCOM, were full of “American spies and agents.” It was for this reason that he denied the inspectors access to sensitive sites. And it was this refusal that prompted President Clinton to attack Iraq last month.

So what’s going on here? Senior U.S. officials told NBC News that the main targets of last month’s attack weren’t military but economic. The cruise missiles weren’t aimed at any alleged nuclear or biological weapons factories but instead at the oil fields. Specifically, one of the main targets was the Basra oil refining facilities in southern Iraq.

In a separate article, NBC quoted Fadhil Chalabi, an oil industry analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, as saying Iraq’s oil producing neightbors are “hoping that Iraq’s oil installations will be destroyed as a result of American air strikes. Then the [U.N.-mandated] oil-for food program would be paralyzed and the market would improve by the disappearance of Iraqi oil altogether.”

Since the start of the Gulf War, Iraq has produced relatively-little oil because of a combination of the U.N. sanctions and an infrastructure destroyed by years of war. A report by the United States Energy Information Administration back in the summer of 1997 stated Iraq’s per capital Gross National Product was at levels not seen since the 1940s.

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have picked up this slack in production and made out like bandits. Before the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was only allowed to pump 5.4 millions barrels a day under it’s OPEC quota. Today it produces 8 million barrels a day, a fifty percent increase that translates into billions of dollars a year in profit. If the sanctions against Iraq were lifted, Saudi production would once more have to be limited and the Anglo-American oil companies running the fields would lose ten billion dollars a year in revenue.

t’s time to stop kidding ourselves. This is a war over money. The U.S. and Britain are getting rich off of Saudi Arabia’s increased oil production and don’t want anyone muscling in on their oil profits. It is in the economic interest of the U.S. and Britain to maintain Iraqi sanctions indefinitely and their foreign policy seems to be to set off periodic crises with Iraq. France and Russia meanwhile both stand to get lucrative oil contracts with a post-sanctions Iraq so they routinely denounce any bombing raids and just as routinely call for a lifting of sanctions.

Saddam Hussein is also making out in the current state of affairs. A economically-healthy Iraqi population wouldn’t put up with his tyranny. He currently rules Iraq like a mob boss, siphoning off what oil profits there are to pay for fancy cars and presidential palaces. He gets to look tough in front of the TV cameras and then retreats to safe underground bunkers when the bombs start falling on the Iraqi people.

It is time to stop all of the hypocrisy. It is estimated that over a million Iraqis have died as a results of the post-Gulf War sanctions. These oil profits are blood money and it is long past time that they end.

Why We Mourn and Protest

December 19, 1998

12/19/199810/14/2010 · Martin Kelley

Many of the this week’s critics of the Nonviolence Web are insisting that the U.S. needs to bomb Iraq in order to secure a future world of peace: “Are you an idiot? We needed to bomb them.

Otherwise, many more INNOCENT will eventually die at the hands of Saddam Hussein. Sometimes force is necessary in order to prevent much greater violence later.”

This is the logic that has brought us to most violent century in human existence. War is always fought for peace. Acts of violence are always justified with the argument that they’re preventing acts of violence later. We kill for peace. And they kill for peace. And as the death count rises we build even bigger and smarter bombs. And they build even bigger and smarter bombs.

The million-dollar cruise missiles going into Iraq aren’t go to hurt Saddam Hussein. He’s safely ensconced in one of his presidential palaces watching CNN (meanwhile, President Clinton sits in the White House watching CNN as well). All the cruise missiles in the U.S. Navy won’t bring Hussein from power.

It is the people of Iraq who feel the sting of these bombings. Just as it is them who have born the brunt of eight years of brutal sanctions. It is the mothers who suffer as they watch their children die because even the most basic medical supplies are non-existent. It is the little ones themselves suffering as yet another wave of bombs come raining down on their world from that abstract entity called the “U.S.”

American policy is wrong precisely because we are at war not with Saddam Hussein, but with the people of Iraq-the citizens, the poor and meek, the downtrodden and hurting.

The nation of Iraq will always have the technical know-how to build weapons of mass destruction. Because the fact is that we live in a world where every industrialized nation with a couple of smart chemistry Ph.D.‘s can build these bombs. India and Pakistan just a few months ago set off nuclear weapons, we know Israel has a stockpile. We can’t just bomb every country with a weapon of mass destruction or with the capacity to produce such a weapon.

We need to build a world of real peace, of peace between nations built on the rule of law, yes, but also on reconciliation. We need foreign policy that recognizes that it is the rulers and the policies of other nations with which we disagree. That recognizes that it is wrong to ever condemn a whole people for the excesses of their leaders.

A number of U.S. peace groups have called for today to be a day of National Mourning and Protest. Let us gather to remember that we stand together in solidarity with those suffering in Iraq. Let us vigil quietly and then yell out loudly that war to end war is wrong.

End the Sanctions. Stop the Bombing. Declare peace with the Iraqi People.

Stop the Zipper War Before It Starts

January 30, 1998

01/30/199805/26/2016 · Martin Kelley

Why is President Clinton talking about a reprise of the 1991 Persian Gulf War?

We’re told it’s because U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq has hidden “weapons of mass destruction.” But of course so does the United States. And Britain, France, Russia, the Ukraine, China, India and Pakistan. Iraq doesn’t even hold a regional monopoly, as Israel certainly has atomic weapons atop U.S.-designed rockets aimed this very moment at Hussein’s Baghdad palaces.

Insanely-destructive weapons are a fact of life in the fin-de-Millennium. There’s already plenty of countries with atomic weapons and the missile systems to lob them into neighboring countries. Hussein probably doesn’t have them, and the weapons U.N. inspectors are worried about are chemical. This is the “poor man’s atomic bomb,” a way to play at the level of nuclear diplomacy without the expenses of a nuclear program.

Clinton seems oblivious to the irony of opposing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with our own. The aircraft carriers and battle fleets that have been sent into the Gulf in recent weeks are loaded with tactical nuclear missiles.

If the possession of weapons of mass destruction is wrong for Iraq, then it is wrong for everyone. It is time to abolish all weapons programs and to build real world peace along lines of cooperation.

He’s our Bully

Most Americans, on hearing a call to let Hussein be, will react with disbelief. Conditioned to think of him as our modern Hitler, anyone opposing a new Gulf War must be crazy, someone unfamiliar with the history of the appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II that allowed him to build his military to the frightening levels of 1939.

But Americans have alas not been told too much of more recent history. Saddam Hussein is our creation, he’s our bully. It started with Iran. Obsessed with global military control, the U.S. government started arming regional superpowers. We gave our chosen countries weapons and money to bully around their neighbors and we looked the other way at human rights abuses. We created and strengthened dictators around the world, including the Shah of Iran. A revolution finally threw him out of power and ushered in a government understandable hostile to the United States.

Rather than take this development to mean that the regional superpower concept was a bad idea, the U.S. just chose another regional superpower: Iraq. We looked the other way when the two got into a war, and started building up Iraq’s military arsenal, giving him the planes and military equipment we had given Iran. This was a bloody, crazy war, where huge casualties would be racked up only to move the front a few miles, an advance that would be nullified when the other army attacked with the same level of casualties. The United States supported that war. International human rights activists kept publicizing the abuses within Iraq, and denouncing him for use of chemical weapons. They got little media attention because it was not in U.S. political interests to fight Hussein.

Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.

Quaker Ranter

A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley

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