Data vs Saddam old — but factual

"We SHELL not EXXONerate Saddam Hussein. We will MOBILize to meet his threat to vital interests in the Persian GULF until an AMOCOble solution is reached. Our best strategy is to BPrepared. Failing that, we ARCOming to kick his ass."

That message going around the Internet is attributed to US President George W. Bush. He never really say that. Antiwar activists and politicians worldwide are spreading it just the same, if only to bare what they suspect is Bush’s true motive for military action against Iraq.

Dubya is an oilman, they say. His Dad built the family fortune on oil and coal, and now works for Carlysle Group that has huge investments in oil. His vice president and national security adviser were oil executives. The man he installed in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s fall and the envoy he sent there had worked in the same oil firm. His intention can only be oil. That is, to ditch Saddam for someone who would supply oil to the West.

"So what?" screech the hawks. It has been argued from a purely economic standpoint that ousting Saddam would be good for all. Half of the world’s oil comes from the Gulf. Sanctions provoked by Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait have resulted in artificial shortage. The UN supervises Iraq’s daily oil trade of 1.7 million barrels. Yet Saddam shuts the faucet at whim. While he’s allowed up to 2.4 million barrels a day, he choked up only 1.2 million since January. He dropped it to 370,000 in August in a vain effort to whip up an Arab embargo for Israel’s intensified actions in Palestine. Coupled with OPEC cartel pricing, Saddam’s oil stinting has pushed prices to $26-28 per barrel. It’s higher than the $22-24 "buffer" desired by Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s biggest producer but also the staunchest US ally in the Gulf.

Attacking Saddam, warns OPEC’s Sheikh Zaki Yamani, would push prices to $100 a barrel. Although European and US analysts believe it will be more like $50, the prospect is still scary. But they agree the rise would be temporary. When Saddam is taken out, Iraq oil will flow freely and give Saudi Arabia a run for the money. Prices consequently would drop to $18-22 per barrel. Probably even lower if investors refurbish Iraq’s wells, which sit on the world’s second biggest reserve.

But it’s greed, the doves caw. Bush wants invasion to reignite a US war economy that has faltered into recession. That’s what, they claim, he did in Afghanistan. As early as July 2001 Bush already told Pakistan he needs its help to crush the Taliban. This, supposedly because the ruling mullahs reneged on their promise of access to the Caspian Sea where US firms wanted to mine oil. Sept. 11 came and gave Bush the chance to bomb Afghanistan. Yet no Afghan was involved in the New York and Pentagon terrorist attacks, and no solid proof linked Osama bin Laden to it.

Lost in the conspiracy theory is the evil of Saddam staring everyone in the face. A growing number of world leaders are expressing doubts that the US has enough grounds for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq. The 50-page dossier presented by British Prime Minister Tony Blair two weeks ago is old hat, they shrug. Until they get new proof of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, they would regard any unilateral US action as a bullyboy’s.

The hawks thump, what more proof do they want Bush and Blair’s evidence may be mostly old, but they’re factual. Saddam did have deadly gas and germ weapons as far back as the ‘80s. Photographs show that he first tried the bombs in war against Iran, then used them to annihilate entire villages of Iraqi Kurds. Those very weapons were what emboldened Saddam to invade Kuwait. UN inspectors found evidence of manufacture in seemingly innocuous water-treatment plants before Saddam expelled them in 1998.

The case against Saddam making nuclear bombs, on the other hand, is more analytical than actual. Yet it makes sense, say the hawks. Saddam had acquired Scud missiles, then learned to make his own. UN inspectors were in the middle of counting short-range missiles that can fly 150 kms when Saddam kicked them out. They surmised that he was hiding rockets capable of flying 600 kms or farther. Other evidence are mostly intelligence gatherings on Saddam’s talks with Russian mafiosi for possible supply of fissile uranium. The world need not wait for another Kuwait-type invasion to find out what Saddam is capable of.

Dove or hawk, leaders must adjudge another evidence of sorts. The first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 killed six civilians and maimed hundreds. Had the truck bomb brought one tower crashing onto the other, the death toll could have been worse than 9/11. But the remarkable thing was the date: Feb. 26, exactly two years to the day Desert Storm humiliated Saddam to withdraw his forces from Kuwait. No smoking gun directly ties Saddam to the bombing. But one arrested conspirator, Ramzi Yousef, had entered the US with an Iraqi passport. Another, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is a US-born Iraqi who fled to Baghdad right after the misdeed. Bush’s hand may be oily today, but Iraq’s was bloody in 1993.

It still is. Saddam continues to call on Islamist militants and fellow Arabs to attack US facilities. Doves ironically raise this as a case against war: a US unilateral action will radicalize the Middle East and moderate Muslims elsewhere.

The hawks are unperturbed. The world feared an upsurge of Islamic radicalism in the aftermath of US bombing of Aghanistan. It never materialized. On the contrary, Arab and Muslim leaders generally were supportive or silent. Their bigger concern was painful Western suspicion of their race and creed. No one lamented the fall of the Talibans except the mullahs themselves and bin Laden. Moderate or secular governments in Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, even Pakistan seized the moment to crush homegrown militants.

Perhaps the best pitch against war is US military capability itself. Pre-emptive strike would mean bombing runs on Iraq’s weapons factories and silos. But as a US Navy weapons expert warns, strafing biological and chemical weapons will not destroy but deploy them. Arguing from a point of view of jet fighters and ships accidentally but repeatedly hitting civilian targets in war or peace-keeping missions, there might be something there.

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