Iraq Crisis: Statements. 6th February 2003

Iraq Crisis: Statements. 6th February 2003.
Mr. Norris: I welcome the Minister of State,
Deputy Tom Kitt. I am glad that he is here
because he is a decent man with firm liberal principles.
It is dangerous to use the word ‘‘liberal’’
in the United States of America at present. It was
not with surprise but with cynicism that I discovered
that a motion I tabled last week under
Standing Order 29 was not regarded as an urgent
matter by the Seanad. Such rulings need to be
questioned.
Many people who have spoken against the
looming war in Iraq have been challenged to
place their credentials on the record and perhaps
I should do so before I give reasons for my opposition
to it. Unlike the overwhelming majority of
those who place themselves in the camp of the
warmongers, I have opposed Saddam Hussein
from the beginning. I believe that I have locus
standi in relation to this issue. For example, I was
the only Member of the House to oppose selling
beef to the Iraqi army in the early 1990s. While
Senators on the Government benches at the time
told me that my position might have been a moral
one, they asked whether Ireland could afford to
adopt it. As it turned out, we did the immoral
thing and when Saddam Hussein welshed on the
deal, the taxpayer ended up with a bill of more
than £100,000 to add to the immorality of the
Government’s actions.
I went to Baghdad two years ago as a member
of an all-party delegation and had a stand up row,
face to face, on human rights issues with the for
mer Foreign Minister, Dr. Tariq Aziz. I pointed
out to him that his regime was not exactly virginal
in terms of aggression but I also pointed out that
when they fired their Scud missiles across the borders
at Israel, the only good thing about it was
that they could not shoot straight and most of the
out-of-date and ineffective missiles landed in the
sand. It is absolutely absurd to suggest, when ten
years ago at the height of his military strength he
could not even land a missile in Israel, that
Saddam could attack New York. It is nonsense. I
also smuggled into Baghdad over £2,000 worth of
drugs for the children’s hospital in Baghdad.
Therefore, I have earned the right to speak with
some sympathy for the Iraqi civilian population.
Saddam Hussein is a monster, something on
which we can all agree. I know he tortured
people. There is plenty of evidence
12 o’clock that he is psychopathic. He murdered
his two sons-in-law after guaranteeing
them safe passage back from Switzerland but
who put him there? It was the Anglo American
axis which inflicted him on the unfortunate Iraqi
people in pursuit of their own foreign policy aims.
It was also they who armed him with chemical
and biological weapons which were used on the
Kurds in 1988. Moreover, those of us with clear
political memories will recall that after this — in
full knowledge of Saddam’s crimes against his
own people — Mr. Donald Rumsfeld — the Dr.
Strangelove of the present American Administration
— actually went to Baghdad and
embraced Saddam, knowing him to be a mass
murderer.
Senators may recall the notorious incident of
the ‘‘Supergun’’, which was actually capable of
landing chemical, biological and nuclear war heads
on Tel Aviv. It was built by a British firm,
Matrix Churchill, with the connivance of the then
British Government, as was subsequently proved
in a series of law cases. In other words, the very
forces posing today as advocates of human rights,
the American and British Administrations, are
clearly complicit in Saddam Hussein’s crimes
against his own people and his neighbours,
although now, opportunistically and with revolting
hypocrisy, it suits them to attempt to play the
moral card.
Saddam was given the green light for the
invasion of Kuwait. Let us be frank about Kuwait
also: looking for its border, one finds a line starting
at the coast, going straight up, turning at right
angles, turning again at right angles and hitting
the coast. It was drawn by a British cartographer
in 1919, neatly enclosing massive oil reserves for
the benefit of European and American oil
interests. It is not a naturally occurring border.
Kuwait was historically part of Iraq, about which
there is no question.
Although their hands are already drenched in
the innocent blood of Iraqi children, Messrs.
Bush and Blair seem to want more. I say now
from the Upper House of the Irish Parliament
that if they really want to know whether Saddam
Hussein still has chemical, biological or nuclear
weapons, let them look at the invoices of their
own commercial industries in their own countries
where they will find the records of what they sold
to him. In this sentiment I am joined by a fellow
Dubliner, a very remarkable man, Mr. Nelson
Mandela, on whom we were honoured to confer
citizenship of the city. That is what he has to say
about it and he knows something about imprisonment,
torture and international injustice.
Who is the real terrorist? Saddam Hussein’s
evil wings have been clipped to such an extent
that he can no longer realistically be regarded as
a threat. The record, however, of the Bush regime
is interesting. It welshed on the International
Criminal Court, the very court to which Senator
Mooney correctly drew our attention and to
which we were honoured to have a senior judge
appointed from this country. The Bush Administration
did not want any part of it, which suggests
that it wants Americans to be allowed to
commit war crimes with impunity — they will not
subject themselves to its operations.
The Bush regime welshed on the Kyoto Protocol
in order that American industry could continue
to pollute the world. It welshed on the
agreement negotiated under President Clinton
that sought to contain the development of chemical
and biological weapons in order that America
could continue their manufacture. Anthrax is
being manufactured at 70 sites in the United
States. It indicated in recent weeks its readiness
to use low-yield nuclear bombs in the attack on
Iraq. Most certainly, this regime inspires terror.
Are the people of Baghdad not terrified as they
wait, helpless and afraid, for the thing they know
they cannot stop? They are terrified even to use
municipal bomb shelters in the light of the fate
of those unfortunate civilians incinerated in the
Amiriyah shelter during the Gulf War. I found it
astonishing to hear a self-styled expert on RTE
radio the other day referring unchallenged to
‘‘some civilian casualties’’ in this incident. Four
hundred people, including seven members of one
entire family, were incinerated by one of the
‘‘bunker-buster’’ bombs that landed on the
shelter.
Let us have no more Orwellian newspeak. If
we are to commit filthy acts, let us acknowledge
the filth of what we are doing. Leaks in recent
days from US sources indicate that the first
assault, even before the waves of hundreds of
missiles directed at Baghdad, will consist of
intense microwave radiation intended to interrupt
military communications. In view of what it does
to machinery, what will it do to the civilian population?
How would the population of Dublin feel
if they were about to be microwaved? We are
aware of the intense public campaign against
electricity pylons and mobile phone masts. Are
we to regard the Iraqi people as less than human?
After yesterday’s performance at the United
Nations, it is clear that there is no smoking gun.
The USA has, in fact, shown itself to be in contravention
of both the letter and the spirit of Resol
ution 1441 because it did not provide evidence of
mobile laboratories or the alleged infection and
death of 12 technicians to the monitoring team
under Dr. Blix. This requirement is contained
clearly and specifically in Resolution 1441: ‘‘All
Member States [are requested to] give full support
to UNMOVIC and the IAEA . . . including
by providing any information related to prohibited
programmes or other aspects of their
mandates. . .’’. The Americans have not done so.
It would be useless to apologise afterwards to the
estimated 500,000 civilian casualties who will be
affected almost immediately, most of them children.
Moreover, the fourth Geneva Convention,
which is also part of international customary law
and which, therefore, cannot be derogated from,
requires the proper protection of children in circumstances
of war. This is about to be flouted
once more in a myriad of ways.
I am not anti-American. I love what decent
Americans stand for and know there are many
millions of decent Americans who are strongly
opposed to the waging of this war. It is worth noting
that the democratically elected representatives
of more than 40 cities throughout the USA
have already passed resolutions against it. Moreover,
every major religious denomination in the
USA — except for the Southern Baptists — has
issued a proclamation questioning unilateral
action by the USA, including the United Methodist
Church, a religious affiliation claimed by both
President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Let us look at America’s foreign policy record
of recent years. Let us recall the covert involvement
of sinister American forces in the overthrow
of the democratically elected Government of
Chile and the murder of its head of state, the late
Dr. Allende. Let us remember the unprincipled
use of drug money to destabilise the neighbouring
state of Nicaragua. Let us remember the
aggression against the people of Cuba in the Bay
of Pigs incident. Let us call to mind the fact that
in recent months we have once more had the
spectacle of the CIA attempting the overthrow of
a democratically elected South American Head
of State, President Hugo Chavez, in the interests
of American big business. To paraphrase a former
American President — it is the oil, stupid.
That is what this is about — not human rights.
Vietnam is now acknowledged generally as a
huge mistake which caused great loss of both
American and Vietnamese life. What use is that
acknowledgement to the dead? In Kampuchea,
up to 500,000 civilian citizens of a neutral country
were done to death by illegal bombing raids and
the architect of this, Henry Kissinger, has in
recent days had the gall to pop up as an expert
on Iraq.
With regard to American expertise on Iraq, I
recently had the pleasure of meeting one of the
Bush Administration’s advisers. A charming
gentleman, I asked him when he had last been to
Baghdad. He acknowledged that he had never
been in Iraq. I assumed he read the Iraqi news
papers, only to discover that he could neither
read nor speak Arabic. That is a big help.
The other allegation used to justify war against
the defenceless people of Iraq is that the regime
is complicit with the al-Qaeda network. This, as
anyone who knows anything about the Arab and
Muslim world, is complete nonsense. However
repulsive Saddam Hussein’s regime is to us in the
West, it is, at least, equally repulsive to Muslim
fundamentalists precisely because of its secular
nature.
It is imperative that this war is stopped. I
acknowledge the courage of those in the peace
camp at Shannon and, in particular, their apparent
willingness to go to Baghdad to act as human
witnesses by placing their own lives in jeopardy.
If I thought that action such as that of Mary Kelly
would help to stop the war or prevent the deaths
of innocent Iraqi civilians, I would drive to Shannon
airport this minute with a hatchet on the back
seat of my car. I remind the House of the
judgment in the Trident Ploughshare case in Liverpool
some years ago when a woman peace activist
who disabled a Hawk fighter, that was being
sold by the British to the Indonesians so they
could paste the unfortunate East Timorese into
the ground, was held by a jury to be worthy of
acquittal because what she did, although technically
illegal, was calculated to prevent an infi-nitely
greater crime.
Mr. Bush has ignored the basic message of the
arms inspectors — that they need more time.
They have indicated that the Iraqi regime is now
co-operating. Mr. Bush derides this as passive co-operation.
What precisely does he expect? Is it
realistic to expect a creature of the CIA such as
Saddam Hussein willingly to incriminate himself?
Would this not in itself be a violation of one of
the anchors of the American Constitution, the 5th
amendment, under which no American citizen
can be required to incriminate himself or herself?
What of the aftermath of the war, when the
UN has once more been subverted and bypassed?
It is understood that depleted uranium is to be
used, as it was in the Gulf War, with disastrous
consequences for many ordinary Iraqi citizens. I
have seen the effects of this in the unusual rates
of cancer among women in the Basra region. I
have also visited hospitals where scores of children
were dying of leukaemia and simultaneously
deprived of the necessary treatment which might
give them a change of survival.
General Colin Powell, that apostle of human
rights who, although black himself, helped to
institutionalise discrimination against gay people
in the American army, has indicated that the
United States will ‘‘administer the Iraqi oil fields
in the interests of the Iraqi people’’. I will believe
that when I see it. You can bet your last dollar
that the oil fields will be administered in the
interests of American business and the American
economy. We will have a situation just like Afghanistan
where, having installed a criminal regime
to terrorise the people, Americans took against it
and tried to squash the monster they themselves
had created, but in fact merely left the unfortunate
civilian population worst off except for a
small area around Kabul. Do any of us here know
about the human rights of the ordinary Afghans
or of the continuing abuse of women in all centres
outside Kabul? This is the kind of fate that awaits
the Iraqi people and this is yet another among the
many reasons why all decent people must oppose
this war.