For Now We See Through a Glass, Darkly

America is hated around the world because of our foreign policy, the inner workings of which we are unaware. Now and then, we are afforded a glimpse, as in the case of a secret Downing Street memo. Appearing in London's Sunday Times 5-1-05, this memo recapped a briefing on 7-23-02 of Prime Minister Blair by Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Services, recently back from Washington. "Military action is now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, at least eight months prior to the Iraq invasion, it had been decided to concoct intelligence and facts to support unnecessary preemptive war. Indeed, for years before that we had tormented the Iraqi people with cruel sanctions and bombings. After 9/11, Osama bin Laden listed three reasons we were under attack: 1. our support of the Israeli occupation, 2. our troops in the Arabian holy land, 3. the inhumane sanctions on the Iraqi people. Scott Ritter, a leader of UN weapons inspections teams in Iraq from 1991-1998, reveals US ulterior motives in his book, "Iraq Confidential---The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein." The official UN policy was to lift sanctions once Saddam had disarmed. However, the US government was not interested in disarmament; it aimed to perpetuate sanctions with the ultimate goal of regime change. Saddam was aware of this and also of the inter-relationship between CIA and the inspectors. A CIA-attempted coup was foiled during this period. The UN inspections were finally halted in 1998 so that the US could carry out bombing missions. From the viewpoint of a British diplomat, Carne Ross describes in his book "Independent Diplomat--Dispatches From An Unaccountable Elite," the way sanctions were perpetrated even though they were killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. Diplomats favoring sanctions prevailed at the UN by using one-sided arguments while summarily dismissing human rights evidence on the other side. The reality of the situation in Iraq played no role in these discussions. Ross compares this to the cherry-picking of intelligence to make the faulty case for war. And thus were the Iraqi people wronged by foreign governments who kept their own people in the dark.