inside the glass house

Words of mass deception
NEW YORK - The US military has obviously mastered the ignoble art of putting a political spin on virtually every other news story filtered out of Baghdad.

A bomb attack on American military forces is invariably followed by a round-up of Iraqi "insurgents" or mass arrests of Iraqis "suspected" of being insurgents.

And much to the amusement of discerning newspaper readers, the Iraqis in US custody are either "leading al-Qaeda operatives," "senior Baath party officials," "top members of the Ansar al-Islam group"-- or some hapless guy described only as "a right hand man of Saddam Hussein".

But what if Saddam Hussein is really left-handed? Does that downgrade the political significance of the arrest? The American public is also made to believe that several of the "foreign insurgents" engaged in terrorist operations have been caught -- incredulous as it may seem-- carrying their passports.

Well, how stupid are these foreign insurgents running around Baghdad with the most identifiable document that could help nail them: a passport. Most of these stories originating from US "military sources" in Baghdad, skilfully manipulated for consumption by the American public, are beginning to lack credibility-- to say the least.

Army General John Abizaid, commander of the US military forces in Iraq, told reporters last week that he is making "real progress" towards defeating the insurgents, according to the Washington Post. "Things have gone very well both in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of our military's ability to get the job done," says Abizaid, an American of Lebanese extraction.

But even as he puts a spin on his story, American soldiers are continuing to die both in Iraq and Afghanistan and suicide bombings are on the increase -- no matter what military commanders say.

The Bush administration has refused to face up to the fact that most Iraqis do not want any foreign occupiers in their native soil-- be they Americans, Europeans, Asians or even officials of the United Nations, if their intentions are perceived to be sinister.

Addressing the Security Council last February, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a dramatic presentation about the dangers of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. On a "conservative estimate", he claimed, there were 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons in the Iraqi arsenal.

Last week the Bush administration's weapons inspector David Kay put it bluntly: "The weapons do not exist". Kay's conclusion, after several months of investigations inside Iraq, was not only a political indictment of the Bush administration but also demolished the basic argument that prompted Washington to launch the military attack on Iraq last March.

When Bush administration officials found no signs of weapons in post-war Iraq, the new spin was that Iraq did have "weapons of mass destruction PROGRAMMES".

In his State of the Union address last month, Bush came up with something creative once again: he said US arms investigators found "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related PROGRAMME ACTIVITIES."

As comedian Al Franken quipped rather sarcastically: "Some of these activities, I understand, are children's colouring books." So, if there were no weapons of mass destruction, why would the Bush administration have to go to war with Iraq? Well, it went to war because it wanted to oust a brutal regime in Baghdad and bring multi-party democracy not only to Iraq but also to the entire Arab world. Sounds very noble.

But in its annual report released last week, Human Rights Watch (HRW) refused to buy that argument either. "The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair," Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, told reporters.

Roth said that atrocities such as the mass killings of Kurds by the Saddam Hussein regime would have justified humanitarian intervention. "But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past," Roth argued.

Meanwhile, the democratic candidates vying for Bush's job -- which is up for grabs in the upcoming November presidential elections -- are making capital out of the US military misadventure in Iraq.

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