Has George Bush heard a Filipino Monkey ?

Last Monday, on his final State of the Union address, George Bush was quite tough against Iran, saying : «America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.»
This speech clearly refers to the US-Iran naval dispute, when an Iranian Revolutionary guards speed boat allegedly threathened US Navy ships (read my previous post).

The US Navy official paper Navy Times published a story explaining that this radio engagement may very well have been hijacked by a heckler nicknamed by the crews of the Gulf region «Filipino Monkey». The entire article is available on the Navy Times website.

Like often in this kind of situation, this last information was virtually not reported in the press. For the media, it is  much more exciting to tell about the dangers of Iran or the threat of war that the facts that contradict this scenario are not given as much importance as the bellicist statements coming from the administration.

It confirms a very old rule : «si vis bellum, para bellum».

Pre-war lies, post-war lies

A recent survey discloses the media campaign that precedeed the US invasion of Iraq. This survey is summarized in this AFP wire «Truth was first US casualty in Iraq war: study»
We read : «US President George W. Bush and his top officials ran roughshod over the truth in the run-up to the Iraq war lying a total of 935 times, a study released Wednesday found.
Bush and his administration “waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” said the damning report entitled “False Pretenses.”
According to the Center for Public Integrity, eight administration officials “made at least 935 false statements” about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, or links to Al-Qaeda, on 532 separate occasions.
“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003.”»

People can enjoy that such a study has been carried out. An exemple of transparency.

But :
1. The Bush administration still keeps its position, claiming that «what (the administration) said was a consensus that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.»
2. Very few medias were critics at the time of these statements.
3. Very few medias acknowledged their mistakes.
4. A vast majority of the medias still refuse to listen to what the Iraqi regime was saying prior to the invasion.

On Jan. 24th, CBS’ 60 minutes released an exclusive interview with George Piro, a Lebanese-American working for the FBI who interrogated Saddam Hussein for seven months.
The main point of this interview is that Saddam was surprised by the invasion. He «initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen.»

It is a mistake and even a lie to say that Saddam Hussein « kept secret the fact that he had no WMD’s. » On numerous occasions, the Iraqi diplomacy claimed, in press statements or in public speeches (Unmovic, UN Security council, …), that these weapons were destroyed in the 1990’s.

At that time, at least on this issue, the US administration was the only to lie.
Saddam’s regime wasn’t.

War buzz is good for business

An infamous deal. George Bush’ regional tour in the Gulf was due to rise awareness against the dangers of Iran, pictured as the « world’s leading state sponsor of terror ». By the way, he got the unexpected help of an alleged naval incident, a kind of modern Maddox - you can read Maddox’s history here, enlighted by the recent disclosure of US intel.

But the very first tangible result is an enormous commercial deal : 20 billions dollars of new weaponry to be sold to Saudi Arabia. Actually, a war with Iran is no longer needed : the US military industry (and its powerful lobbies) already harvested its main benefits !

This news brings two thoughts to my mind.

First, we may question how moral it is to use fear in international relations to promote the sale of weapons. Not very moral, indeed, but not new at all !

Second, we must remind the genesis of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was born from a double move. First, at the end of the soviet occupation of Afghanistan, thousands of jihadis (at the time sponsored by the West) came back home. They found themselves jobless, so to say.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In the Gulf region, this event caused a huge emotion. The people there believed that their armies were strong, but the Gulf leaders didn’t know how to face Saddam’s potential danger. Since 1945 and the conclusion on the USS Quincy of a long term strategic agreement, US and Saudi Arabia were linked by an « oil for security » deal. Cheap oil against security. And the West gets back part of the money it spends in oil purchases, as the product of the sales of weapons. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries spent billions and billions of dollars to purchase weapons.

Soon after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Ossama Bin Laden offered the late Saudi king Fahd to rise a mudjahideen army, based on his fellow fighters back from Afghanistan, to fight the secular Saddam and free the conservative monarchy of Kuwait. But Fahd was offered by the US the coalition that we know and eventually refused Bin Laden’s proposal.
For the Saudis, that was a major blow. For decade, their country had spent a big part of its income to buy weapons to the West and the first regional crisis caused what was considered by many as a foreign invasion (by the West !). All these billions were spent in loss, as their country was not even able to face alone a very regional security issue.

This humiliation is seen by several analysts as the founding momentum of Al Qaeda. Partly as a reaction to the 1991 Gulf war, Bin Laden established the World islamic front for jihad against the Jews and the crusaders, the first stone of his organization.