What Bush wants us to forget

Things that Bush wants us to forget:

• Forget for a moment that we still can’t prove Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons.
• Forget that the latest Bush speech was just a re-hash of all the “ifs” and “mays” and “coulds” in Tony Blair’s flimsy 16 pages of allegations in his historically dishonest “dossier”.
• Forget that if Osama bin Laden ever acquired a nuclear weapon, he’d probably use it first on Saddam.
• Forget the 14 Palestinians, including the 12-year-old child, killed by Israel a few hours before Mr Bush spoke…
• …forget that when his aircraft killed nine Palestinian children in July, along with one militant, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon — a “man of peace” in Mr Bush’s words — described the slaughter as “a great success”.
• Forget that President Ronald Reagan dispatched a special envoy to meet Saddam Hussein in December 1983. It’s essential to forget this for three reasons.
• • Firstly, because the awful Saddam was already using gas against the Iranians — which is one of the reasons we are now supposed to go to war with him.
• • Secondly, because the envoy was sent to Iraq to arrange the re-opening of the US embassy — in order to secure better trade and economic relations with the Butcher of Baghdad.
• • Thirdly, because the envoy was — wait for it — Donald Rumsfeld.
• We must forget, too, that in 1988, as Saddam destroyed the people of Halabja with gas, along with tens of thousands of other Kurds — when he “used gas against his own people” in the words of Messrs Bush/Cheney/Blair/Cook/Straw et al — President Bush senior provided him with $500m in US government subsidies to buy American farm products.
• We must forget that in the following year, after Saddam’s genocide was complete, President Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1bn, along with germ seed for anthrax, helicopters, and the notorious “dual-use” material that could be used for chemical and biological weapons.
• Forget how the Americans promised Pakistan and Afghanistan a new era of hope after the defeat of the Soviet army in 1980 — and did nothing.
• Forget how President Bush senior urged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam in 1991 and — when they obeyed — did nothing.
• Forget how America promised a new era of hope to Somalia in 1993 and then, after “Black Hawk Down”, abandoned the country.
• Forget how President Bush junior promised to “stand by” Afghanistan before he began his bombings last year — and has left it now an economic shambles of drug barons, warlords, anarchy and fear.
• We must forget, as we listen to the need to reinsert arms inspectors, that the CIA covertly used UN weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq.
• And of course, we must forget about oil…in all of Bush’s 30 minutes of anti-Iraq war talk yesterday — pleasantly leavened with just two minutes of how “I hope this will not require military action” — there wasn’t a single reference to the fact that Iraq may hold oil reserves larger than those of Saudi Arabia, that American oil companies stand to gain billions of dollars in the event of a US invasion, that, once out of power, Bush and his friends could become multi-billionaires on the spoils of this war.

We must ignore all this before we go to war. We must forget.

— Robert Fisk: What the US President wants us to forget