Neo-Conned!: Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq

by D. Liam O'Huallachain (Editor), J. Forrest Sharpe (Editor), Bishop Hilarion Capucci (Foreword by), George Lopez (Introduction)

Overview

Refuting the myth that America's socially conservative thinkers, journalists, and commentators tend to support the war in Iraq, this text incorporates the opinions of some of the leading figures in America's conservative movement on why the decision to go to war and the continuing occupation of Iraq was and is the wrong course of action. Twenty-five articles by influential thinkers such as former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan; syndicated columnists Sam Francis, Eric Margolis, Charley Reese, and Joseph Sobran; leading economist Jude Wanniski; social critics Tom Fleming and Paul Gottfried; and religious figures Bishop John Michael Botean and the late Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani make the case against the Iraqi conflict using conservative arguments on geopolitics, Christian morality, and common sense. Four detailed appendices on the war teachings of the Roman Catholic Church are also provided.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605700090
Publisher:	Ihs Press
Publication date:	10/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	447
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

D. Liam O'Huallachain is the editorial director of IHS Press and is a student of Catholic Social Doctrine, the English Distributist Movement, and contemporary alternative political movements. J. Forrest Sharpe is the publisher and managing director of IHS Press. He is a student of Catholic Social Doctrine and the English Distributist movement. Bishop Hilarion Capucci is the Patriarchial Vicar of Jerusalem in exile. George Lopez, PhD, is a senior fellow at the Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Read an Excerpt

Neo-Conned!

Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq

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By D.L. O'Huallachain, J. Forrest Sharpe

IHS Press

Copyright © 2007 IHS Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-932528-41-1

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CHAPTER 1

The (Bogus) Case Against Saddam .........

An Interview with Jude Wanniski

"... why could we all be so wrong?"

— David Kay

"We were almost all wrong."

— Charles A. Duelfer

"... the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

— The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

The invasion ofIraq in 2003 by the United States and Britain was based primarily on the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, theoretically being manufactured to threaten other countries. How much truth was there in that assertion?

JW: None at all. The U.S. Armed Forces only considers nuclear weapons to be weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had neither nuclear weapons nor chemical or biological weapons. The only thing it may have possessed were some of the ingredients necessary to develop chemical or biological weapons. In fact, there were several attempts by France, Russia, and China to declare Iraq in compliance with the resolutions some years before Gulf War II, but each time they were vetoed by the United States and the U.K. For example on November 20, 1997, a Russian-Iraqi Press communiqué was released in which Moscow pledged "to promote energetically the speedy lifting of sanctions against Iraq on the basis of its compliance with the corresponding UN resolutions." On July 30, 1998, the New York Times reported that "Russia tried and failed to get Security Council action today on a resolution declaring that Iraq had complied with demands to destroy its nuclear weapons program and was ready to move away from intrusive inspections to long-term monitoring." These are just a couple of the many examples that could be cited.

WMD

The presentation of the Duelfer Report on October 6, 2004 – and the confirmation of its conclusions by both the report of the "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding of Weapons of Mass Destruction" (delivered on March 31, 2005) and the Duelfer addendum, released on April 25 of this year and officially declaring "exhausted" the search for WMD in Iraq – is the final proof of this fact. No WMDs were found; no facilities to produce such weapons were found. The conclusion was that the Hussein government had, indeed, complied with the relevant UN resolutions in the wake of the first Gulf War – exactly as countless experts had said prior to Gulf War II.

LID: What do you mean by "countless experts"? Surely it is well known that up to their departure in 1998, the UN inspectors were uncovering hidden WMDs almost on a daily basis?

JW: What I mean is that the people in the best position to know the true extent of Iraq's WMDs – both real and alleged – were the inspectors sent in by the UN after the end of the first Gulf War. Those experts concluded years ago that in practical terms the weapons and the production facilities for such weapons had been destroyed. As for being "well-known," I think that it is truer to say that the "impression" was given that WMDs were being found on a daily basis, though the truth of the matter was not being reported.

LID: Could you be more specific since this will be news to a lot of people?

JW: Many of us pointed out that Iraq was always being put in the position of having to "prove a negative." From the end of 1992 onward, Iraq insisted it did not possess WMDs any longer. We now know that they were telling the truth, but the U.S. government – both the Clinton and Bush administrations – insisted they were not telling the truth and had to prove to us that they had nothing hidden. By 1995, we now know Iraq did not possess the facilities to recreate the arsenal that it originally had, but how could it prove this fact at the time? How could it take us to a hidden cache somewhere in the hills or mountains if no such cache existed? Yes, the Iraqis seemed to be acting suspiciously at times, at least in U.S. press accounts that described a "cat and mouse" game with UN inspectors. But the bottom line is what counts at the time the decisions were being made to go to war, and by 2001, with George W. Bush a newly minted President, the former UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, was asserting: "There is absolutely no reason to believe that Iraq could have meaningfully reconstituted any element of its WMD capabilities in the past 18 months."

The period to which Ritter referred was when the UNSCOM inspectors were pulled out of Iraq at the insistence of the Clinton administration, which decided on its own that Iraq had to be punished for its "cat-and-mouse" behavior. It proceeded to bomb Iraq and did not want any inspectors killed in the process. As you point out in your question, very few Americans to this day are aware of the specific cause of action that led to the bombing, although the press corps only needed to ask Scott Ritter, who had resigned in dismay that the U.S. State Department had provoked Iraq by demanding massive entry into the political headquarters of the Ba'ath Party in Baghdad to look for WMD evidence. It was because of the "irregularities" of U.S. behavior that the UN later folded the UNSCOM inspection process, which permitted the U.S. to name and finance inspection teams on its own, replacing it with an UNMOVIC inspection process, entirely under the control of the UN Security Council in its appointment and payment of inspectors.

LID: Why was there a cat-and-mouse game to begin with?

JW: Knowing they had fully complied with the UN resolutions, the Iraqis came to believe that the inspection teams were laced with CIA operatives, looking not for WMD but for ordinary military operations that could be pinpointed in subsequent bombing raids. There were also realistic suspicions that the operatives were trying to locate Saddam's whereabouts so they could take him out. At one point, as I recall, the chief foreign correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, wrote a column entitled "Head Shot," in which he recommended that the U.S. seriously consider a covert operation to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis can read, you know.

LID: On April 13,1999, you wrote to Tim Weiner at the New York Times about the then recently published book of Scott Ritter entitled Endgame. Can you tell us about that?

JW: You must remember that in this period, soon after Ritter quit UNSCOM and came home, he was celebrated as a hero for seeming to justify the harsh actions taken against the Baghdad regime. Weiner criticized the hastily-written book for its inconsistencies, and I wrote what I thought could explain those inconsistencies, although I had never met Ritter, and still have not.

I suggested to Tim that the 240-page book demonstrated "Ritter's frustration in spending seven years looking under rocks and behind trees for WMDs and not finding any." The fact is that the propaganda surrounding our effort to starve more than 20 million Iraqis into submission to cover up the botched job of our political establishment in that sorry land has been among the most effective of the twentieth century. After several years of living with what I knew to be stacks of baloney in the news media, I decided, in 1998, to arrange a meeting with Nizar Hamdoon, then Iraq's Ambassador to the UN I knew that would draw the ire of some in the American establishment, especially when it became known that successive governments had forbidden our Ambassadors to the UN even to speak to their Iraqi counterparts. I consider this a childish and counterproductive approach to diplomacy.

In the event, I told Hamdoon that I had come to believe our government was lying through its teeth, Democrats and Republicans, because there was nobody around with the guts to tell it to stop. I told him flat out I would act as "devil's advocate" for Iraq, but only on the condition that whatever he told me in regard to the weapons issue had to be verifiable as truthful, otherwise I would look like a dope and a traitor!

LID: You mean, like Reagan, you would trust, but verify? How could you verify?

JW: Let me explain. When Hamdoon agreed, I first asked him when had been the last time that UNSCOM – the UN Inspectorate set up after the conclusion of the first Gulf War – had destroyed any weapons of mass destruction. He said: "November 1991." I found that hard to believe, indeed incredible. I repeated my question and again he insisted that in the previous six and half years UNSCOM had not destroyed any WMDs. Not one lousy, crummy nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. Shocked, yet still skeptical, I then asked him how many WMDs had been found and destroyed by UNSCOM inspectors without the help of the Iraqi government in the seven months between the end of the first Gulf War in early 1991 and November 1991. He looked me in the eye and said "none." Every WMD that had been destroyed in that period was the result of UNSCOM being taken to a WMD site and shown the stuff, either stuff that had already been destroyed, or stuff awaiting destruction. I suspected Hamdoon was playing verbal tricks with me, but he was so fervent I decided I would risk going forward.

A few days later, in Washington, I met Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who I had known for decades, and I told him what I had heard from Hamdoon and I saw the disbelief in his eyes. He said – I'm paraphrasing here now – "No way, Jude boy, you have got to be wrong. The UNSCOM inspectors are finding WMDs every day of the week, except Sundays which they observe as a Day of Rest."

I then went and told the story to my good friend, Jack Kemp, at Empower America – someone who normally believes everything I tell him. His response was that everyone knew the inspectors were digging up WMDs all the time, in all the secret places Saddam had located in Iraq which would be many and varied since it is 10,000 square miles larger than California. Still, he sent one of his people, a young lawyer, over to the UN offices in Washington to look into the matter. After poring over the UNSCOM documents for two days, Kemp was informed: the record shows that no WMDs had been found without the help of Baghdad, and none had been destroyed since November 1991!

LID: Can you say what came of all this?

JW: Well, for one thing, Kemp became a believer, enough so that I could first arrange for his chief-of-staff at Empower America, Larry Hunter, to meet with me and Hamdoon in New York City for dinner, with Hunter taking Hamdoon's measure. I then arranged a meeting of Kemp and Hamdoon in New York City – as Hamdoon was not allowed to leave the UN environs without special permission. Hamdoon is no longer with us. He died of cancer last year, but Kemp would tell you if you asked, I'm sure, that he then met with UN General Secretary Kofi Annan to try to head off what seemed to be imminent U.S. action against Iraq. This was in early 1998. As a result of back-and-forth discussions, Iraq agreed to alter the modality of inspections to permit UNSCOM to look anywhere they wished for WMD, including the presidential palaces. The neocons who wanted war with Iraq back then, under Clinton auspices, were totally frustrated and have been out to get Kofi Annan ever since. In the several months that followed, UNSCOM inspectors under the direction of Richard Butler – an Australian diplomat who owed his appointment to the U.S. State Department – prowled all over, and finding nothing were led to provoke the Iraqi government into the Ba'ath Party incident I described earlier.

LID: So at this point Saddam did not kick the inspectors out of Iraq?

JW: No, Iraq did not expel the inspectors. The U.S. State Department instructed the inspectors to leave, because the inspections incident was deemed sufficient for the U.S. to conduct its unprovoked, unauthorized military action that became known as "Desert Fox." It is also important to note that on January 6, 1999, the Washington Post confirmed publicly that the weapons inspection had been used by the CIA as a cover for military espionage, and Scott Ritter mentioned on the NBC Today show on December 17, 1998, that "Washington perverted the UN weapons process by using it as a tool to justify military actions, falsely so. ... The U.S. was using the inspection process as a trigger for war." Once again we see that it was the Iraqis, not the Americans, telling the truth.

LID: Was none of this known to President Bush?

JW: I really don't think it was known to President Clinton. The CIA certainly must have known all about it, for goodness sakes, because Ritter wrote another book about it in the spring of 2002 with William Rivers Pitt, War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know. If George Tenet of the CIA didn't read it or know about it, he should be ashamed of himself. It takes only an hour or two to read and you can buy it used on Amazon these days for less than $1.

Yet, when President George W. Bush appeared before the UN General Assembly in September 2002, he produced a raft of unsubstantiated accusations to justify forceful action by the United Nations – and failing that, unilateral action by the United States. Upon hearing all this, the then Iraqi Ambassador to the UN, Mohammed Aldouri, a man of integrity and respect to the best of my knowledge, told the New York Times that the list of charges against his government contained more untruths than any he had heard in any similar speech in his experience. After reeling off pages of charges against the Iraqi government that began with the pre-invasion period before the first Gulf War and ran up to 2002, Bush had said: "The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger."

Was it really a serious and imminent threat to anyone, especially the United States? Subsequent events have shown that there was no substance to this "threat" at all, and they have also shown that men like Hamdoon and Aldouri – indeed the Iraqi government – were telling the truth all along. That may be hard for some Americans to accept, but that is the reality. And it is a reality that was known by the experts long before the second Gulf War was launched unilaterally. Scott Ritter wrote in Arms Control Today in June 2000:

What is often overlooked in the debate over how to proceed with Iraq's disarmament is the fact that from 1994 to 1998 Iraq was subjected to a strenuous program of ongoing monitoring of industrial and research facilities that could be used to reconstitute proscribed activities. This monitoring provided weapons inspectors with detailed insight into the capabilities, both present and future, of Iraq's industrial infrastructure. It allowed UNSCOM to ascertain, with a high level of confidence, that Iraq was not rebuilding its prohibited weapons programs and it lacked the means to do so without an infusion of advanced technology and a significant investment of time and money. Given the comprehensive nature of the monitoring put in place by UNSCOM, which included a strict export-import control regime, it was possible as early as 1997 to determine that, from a qualitative standpoint, Iraq had been disarmed. Iraq no longer possessed any meaningful quantities of chemical or biological agent, if it possessed any at all, and the industrial means to produce these agents had either been eliminated or were subject to stringent monitoring. The same was true of Iraq's nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. As long as monitoring inspections remained in place, Iraq presented a WMD-based threat to no one.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Neo-Conned! by D.L. O'Huallachain, J. Forrest Sharpe. Copyright © 2007 IHS Press. Excerpted by permission of IHS Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword Bishop Hilarion Capucci,
Introduction Prof. George A. Lopez, Ph.D.,
THE STATESMEN SPEAK: A WAR BOTH UNNECESSARY AND VAIN,
1. The (Bogus) Case Against Saddam An Interview with Jude Wanniski,
2. Whose War? Patrick J. Buchanan,
CONSERVATIVE AND ANTI-WAR: PATRIOTISM, PRUDENCE, AND THE MORAL LAW,
3. Refuge of Scoundrels: Patriotism, True and False, in the Iraq War Controversy Samuel Francis, Ph.D.,
4. On Morals, Motives, and Men Joseph Sobran,
5. Legal Nonsense Charley Reese,
6. Riding the Red Horse: War and the Prospects of Success Thomas Fleming, Ph.D.,
7. A Mirage Too Far Eric S. Margolis,
8. The Failure of War Wendell Berry,
9. A Conservative War? Prof. Paul Gottfried, Ph.D.,
THE VENERABLE TRADITION: PUTTING THE BRAKES ON AGGRESSION AND SECURING JUSTICE FOR IRAQ,
10. Might Is Not Right: Why "Preventive War" Is Immoral Fr. Juan Carlos Iscara,
11. Epistemic Inadequacy, Catholic Just-War Criteria, and the War in Iraq Prof. Thomas Ryba, Ph.D.,
12. A Review of the Literature: Exposing the Fallacies in Defense of the Invasion of Iraq David Gordon, Ph.D.,
13. Iraq: Sovereignty and Conscience Prof. James Hanink, Ph.D.,
JUDGMENT AND INSPIRATION: THE CHURCH STILL SPEAKS WITH AUTHORITY,
14. To Whom Should We Go? Legitimate Authority and Just Wars Prof. William T. Cavanaugh, Ph.D.,
15. A Moment of Moral Crisis The Lent 2003 letter of Bishop John Michael Botean,
16. Peace Is Still Possible: The Unity of the Church in the Face of the Iraq War Deacon Keith Fournier, Esq.,
A HIGHER LAW: CONSCIE A HIGHER LAW: CONSCIENCE, MORALITY, AND THE TRANSCENDENT VISION,
17. Decadent, Belligerent, and Incorrigible Prof. John Rao, D. Phil.,
18. Setting Just Limits to New Methods of Warfare Robert Hickson, USA (ret.), Ph.D.,
19. The Morality of Weapons Systems Paul Likoudis,
20. Christian Killers? Laurence M. Vance, Ph.D.,
21. Is Conscientious Objection a Moral Option? Peter E. Chojnowski, Ph.D.,
22. The Sounds of Conscience Former Army Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia,
SPEAKING WITH AUTHORITY: THE TRUE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AS A LIGHT FOR OUR TIME,
Appendix I. Just-War Doctrine: The Metaphysical and Moral Problem Fr. Franziskus Stratmann, O.P.,
Appendix II. Modern War Is to Be Absolutely Forbidden Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani,
Appendix III. A Study of the Development of Church Teaching on Matters of War and Peace Prof. Romano Amerio,
Index,
About the Contributors,
Acknowledgements,
Further Resources,

Editorial Reviews

"This trenchant collection of articles about the U.S. war in the Middle East is a fulfillment of my dearest wish: seeing the left-wing and the right-wing, religious and nonreligious, Christian and Muslim opposition to the war united in one front against one mutual enemy. It will be the cornerstone of every future realignment of antiwar forces in the U.S."  —Israel Adam Shamir, journalist and author, Flowers of Galilee

"The essays in these volumes, ranging from the best minds of the liberal left to the great wisdom of the orthodox right, take on the war in Iraq, closely examining the ideas and motives of its planners, promoters and defenders. Here is genuine intellectual diversity and hard analysis—fascinating and required reading."  —David Allen White, professor of English, U.S. Naval Academy

"At last, a truly universal critique on the war in Iraq."  —Anthony Cappello, researcher, Victoria University, Australia; director, Freedom Publishing; national secretary, Thomas More Centre

From the Publisher