David Norris on Iraq

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday March 24, 2003 04:36 by the senate

last week...

Mr. Norris: This is a very sad day. I also have been in Baghdad but unlike some of the other people in both Houses, I had a blazing, face to face confrontation with Tariq Aziz on human rights.

When I opposed the beef deals on the basis that they were supplying and feeding the Iraqi army, I was criticised by those on the Fianna Fáil benches. Senator Seán Haughey, then spokesman, said what Senator Mooney has, with engaging honesty, echoed here today, that there is no morality in foreign affairs and that even a small country like Ireland cannot afford to take a moral position. That is a disgrace to the Irish people.

If Senators want to know what I was doing over those years and at the time of Halabja and all the rest of it, I spoke out against those atrocities, unlike Donald Rumsfeld who, having supplied the gas to the Iraqis and encouraged them to use it against the Iranians, embraced Tariq Aziz. Those are the people that the Senators opposite are mixing with and those are the people who are covering their hands with blood today. It does not give me any pleasure to watch the building in which I sat, and then stood and shouted at Tariq Aziz, explode in flames. It is about time we realised the impact of this war on the civilian population who were disregarded by the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

We tell these horror stories about people being strung up on lamp posts, which possibly happened, but did any one of the Senators opposite object when the United Kingdom Government licensed the sale to some of these countries of a fully equipped torture chamber? Do they remember that? Was there any morality then? If any one of them had the slightest decency, they would cross the floor today and vote against murder, which is what it is.

I turn to the Minister of State's speech. I feel sorry for this Minister because he is a decent man but it is a disgrace that he was supplied with this awful piece of mealy-mouthed hand-wringing. He quoted Dr. Blix. Dr. Blix made it perfectly clear that he wanted more time and that his mission was succeeding. In the period under United Nations supervision Iraq destroyed 817 of 819 prescribed medium range missiles, 14 launchers, nine trailers and 56 missile launch sites. It also destroyed 73 of 75 chemical or biological warheads and 163 warheads for conventional use. UN inspectors also supervised the destruction of 88,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions, more than 600 tonnes of weaponised and bulk chemical weapons agents, 4,000 tonnes of precursor chemicals and 980 pieces of equipment considered key to the production of such weapons. More weaponry was destroyed under the regime of the arms inspectors than in the last little Bush escapade. Let us bear this in mind.

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Let us look at the notion that there is no generally accepted view on the validity of the different interpretations on whether this war is legal. It is plainly and demonstrably a violation of international law. There can be no doubt it. Whatever way people equivocate here and in the United States of America, 16 of the leading authorities in this area from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge signed a letter sent to The Times a week ago stating there was no possible doubt. The Pope has said that in doing this, the United States and the United Kingdom have abandoned international law. Kofi Annan indicated as much as he can in his difficult situation that this is the clear view of the head of the United Nations. Where does that leave Members opposite? It leaves them making the case for the United Nations to be nothing other than a rubber stamp for people like Bush. I personally find that absolutely disgusting.

The Minister of State said Ireland would not participate in this war. Does he know anything about law? Does he know what is the legal definition of the word "participation"? It is "knowingly giving assistance to". That is a simple phrase which should be comprehensible to anybody. In the light of that legal definition, is there any doubt that we are giving assistance knowingly to the United States of America by refuelling its aeroplanes? As somebody asked at the demonstration last night at the United States Embassy where I was proud to be - I am not a member of any of these crank groups which Senator Bradford in his disgraceful speech tried to tar - if one knew that an armed robbery or bombing was going to take place and knowing this put petrol in the tank of the vehicle used, would one not be responsible, both legally and morally, for it? That is what we are doing. We know we are fuelling vehicles with bombs in them. That is participation. Will the Minister of State, please, not dishonour this House by lying? He should tell the truth and say it like Senator Mooney. There is no morality, in which we are not interested. He should say it like Kevin Myers, that we need to be on the side of the big boys, that Bush is going to win and we have to be on the side of the winners. That is the Minister of State's morality but the people defy it. Some 100,000 protested in O'Connell Street and more will do so.

The Taoiseach says there is a precedent for the use of Shannon Airport dating back to the Vietnam War. Is he proud of this? Does he remember what happened in Vietnam? Does he know that Henry Kissinger was criminally implicated in the annihilation of 500,000 civilians in a neutral state, Kampuchea, and is afraid to come to Europe because he will be arrested for it? Is that what we want to remember with pride? Have we no shame? I say the same to the United States of America. It should stop the guff, tell it like it is, say this is about oil, power and manipulation. Look at its pathetic string of allies which are not willing; they are the bullied and the bribed. Did Members not see the cheque books out in Ankara? However, even the Turks had the guts to turn it down, they had no stomach for this kind of thing but we have. We are happy to do it because we are afraid that some of the multinational corporations might take their greasy little jobs away from Shannon Airport.

The Tánaiste asked a few questions in the Dáil yesterday. I applaud her because she asked some of the right questions which I would like to answer. She said, "To withdraw permission now ... would be questioning the honesty of their stated security concerns." Who could do otherwise? They have lied all the way. They lied about a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They are completely antithetical, they cannot stand each other. That was a lie. They have lied consistently. I do not have time to indicate all the lies. If we had any decency and morality - although we have been told we do not and cannot afford it - we would question their honesty and the security concerns. We would be sitting as judge and jury on the legality of their actions. We would be saying it is irrelevant for them to cite 17 UN resolutions in support of their actions. What about the resolutions on Israel? I am a friend of Israel but we are prepared to stand idly by and see a peace activist bulldozed into the dirt in Palestine by the Israelis, we say and do nothing about it. I am ashamed of what is happening. Is this war even going to work? Personally, I hope it does not. It would be better to have a big mess and have to clear it up. That is where we are going.

Vice-Admiral Sir Nicholas Hill-Norton, deputy chief of defence staff from 1992 to 1995, criticised the lack of debate over whether attacking Saddam Hussein "is the best use of our scarce financial and human resources." He voiced the suspicion that "either our policy makers in Whitehall have led our inexperienced Prime Minister up a disastrous and mistaken path or that vanity and naiveté have obscured truth and clouded good judgment."

We must also ask about the impact of this war on the civilian population of Baghdad, half the population of which are under the age of 16 years. One in four children is malnourished. What condition are they in to resist this kind of operation launched against them by these evil people in pursuit of money? Mr. Bush has the effrontery to make these speeches in front of a neon cross. I am a Christian, too, and he does not speak in my name. It is a blasphemy for him to do so. Let him read the Bible. I know he was previously more acquainted with the bottle than the Bible to which he might turn his attention and think of a few phrases such as "the love of money is the root of all evil". That is what is behind this war, the love of money, nothing else.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs said in February this year that "force should only be used as a last resort when every other possibility has been tried and failed." However, it has not been tried and not failed. I deprecate the attacks on Jacques Chirac. For once the French stood up for something that was decent and moral.

I want to nail this nonsense about being anti-American. There was a marvellous programme on television the other evening called "America on trial". One large section of the audience were Americans who said it should not be America on trial but Bush. They stood with the European people objecting to what was being done in their name. Some 1,400 people were arrested yesterday protesting in San Francisco, even despite the fact that the American public is deprived of accurate information on much of this stuff by the alliance of Bush, Blair and Murdoch who, of course, is going to get his reward. There is going to be further deregulation of the media industry in the United States of America. How do Members think Blair got in? That is a real little murder triangle. The public should beware these people.

I am not anti-American. I strongly disapprove of its current President and its highly dangerous military and foreign affairs adventures but know the vast majority of Americans can distinguish between criticism of the Bush regime and hatred of America from where I have just returned from my third visit since Christmas. I have many greatly loved friends there. I know it to be a country of extraordinary natural beauty and human vitality, all of which makes it all the more tragic that the present regime is pursuing a course of criminal folly. I know also that because of the control of the news by pro-Bush media such as Rupert Murdoch, the people do not have access to accurate information. Yesterday the media stated three quarters of the Iraqi army had capitulated and surrendered but it turned out to be only 17 soldiers. The scud missiles supposed to have been fired turned out not to be scud missiles.

One of the favourite tactics of Bush's European fellow travellers, of whom we have a few here today, is to discredit their opponents by suggesting they are soft on Saddam, on which my record is clear and I am not going to go over it again. Saddam Hussein, like Osama Bin Laden, is a creature of a corrupt American foreign policy. Bush is only President by virtue of a very murky election process in which, despite the gerrymandering of the Florida electorate, he still managed to receive less votes than Al Gore. It was a coup organised by the military-industrial complex against democracy. He is a man of absolute shamelessness. Like Senator Mooney, he has invoked the spectre of the Nazis, serenely bypassing the fact that his grandfather, Prescott Bush, in collaboration with Fritz Thyssen, actually financed the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and continued to support him with money and materials during the Second World War. Matters reached such a pitch that on 29 October 1942 the United States alien property custodian, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized the shares of one of Prescott Bush's companies, Union Banking Corporation. On 17 November 1942 another company, Silesian American Corporation, managed by Prescott Bush, was also seized because it was supplying coal and steel to the Nazi war industry and financing the German Steel Trust which was responsible for between one third and one half of Nazi iron and explosive production. This was done in association with Friedrich Flick, friend and financial supporter of Heinrich Himmler.

According to John Loftus, author of Secret War Against The Jews, recent information confirms the direct line between the Bush empire and the profits of slave labour from Auschwitz concentration camp. The motto "business is business" seems to have prevailed among the Bush family even during the past decade, when most of its business associates did not disdain profiting from investment by the Bin Laden family. This irony may not bother Mr. Bush at all, as he has consistently displayed a disjuncture between language and reality, as on the celebrated occasion that he described Ariel Sharon as "a man of peace." This surely entitles him to be regarded as one of the great defilers of language.

The Bush Administration was never disposed to giving the arms inspectors a chance. The position of the chief weapons inspector, Dr. Hans Blix, was already called into question in January when Mr. Bush referred to the United Nations team as "so-called inspectors." Consider the proof the Americans and their allies produced. British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, could only produce a second-hand, out-of-date university thesis. No real and credible threat is posed by Iraq. In the 1970s a group called Team B took responsibility for assessing the Soviet military threat. Whenever it failed to pinpoint weaponry, the assumption of the US Administration at the time was that the Soviets must have hidden it. The same psychology lies behind the current war against Iraq.

Who are the people in the Bush Administration leading this war? They are the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld; the Chief-of-Staff, Paul Wolfowitz; the Vice-President, Dick Cheney; Louis Libbey and the notorious Richard Perle who claimed in a newspaper article that the war would finish the United Nations and that it was about time. These are the allies of Members on the other side of the House. The Bush Administration has also reintroduced Elliott Abrams, a veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal who was indicted for false testimony and is now heading up the Middle East policy section of Bush's National Security Council.

What is the purpose of this war? To adapt President-speak, read my lips - it is the oil industry, stupid. Can anybody who saw the remarkable documentary on RTE television about the US role in Venezuela doubt this? The United States attempted three times to get rid of President Hugo Chavez and replace him with an oil executive. He, in turn, appointed a pseudo Attorney General who, "in the name of democracy," decided to dissolve the national assembly and abolish the electoral supervision group. If Mr. Bush is fighting for democracy in Iraq, that is the type of democracy for which he is fighting. I warn this House against it.

Bush has given us the litmus test by which he judges those states which are a danger to humanity - the possession of weapons of mass destruction, the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons, the training of terrorists and the export of terrorism, the defiling of the environment and possession and potential use of nuclear weapons. By these tests, his Administration and the sad record of American foreign policy score a full ten out of ten. The largest stocks of anthrax in the world are held by the United States which manufactured in Maryland the very anthrax that it gave to Saddam Hussein. The present Administration has been openly gloating about the possession of new and terrible weapons like the microwave bomb and the MOAB which spreads inflammable fog over its target and then sets it alight to create an explosion as powerful as an atomic weapon. Does this remind Senators of anything - Blitzkrieg, Joseph Gobbels, total war? Is this beginning to ring a warning bell?

The United States has systematically exported terrorism to South America through the notorious School of the Americas which trained the death squads which are the curse of Latin America-----

Mr. Mooney: The Senator should give others a chance to speak.

Mr. Norris: The Americans have fomented coups, revolution and disorder in friendly neighbouring democracies. They have sabotaged the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty outlawing the production of chemical and biological weapons, and the protocol establishing the International Criminal Court because they are afraid of being caught out, as well as various anti-nuclear regimes. We must avoid shaming ourselves again. God save America, viva la France.