They admit the truth at last: “We need to ensure, notwithstanding the significant natural resources that our country has been blessed with, that we are able to access the energy requirements in our region and throughout the world” said Brendan Nelson (Australian defence minister).
John Howard isn’t admitting it yet, he’s sticking to his lie from 2003 that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.
It’s a convenient story, but how was Saddam a threat to oil? The more important reason is to keep up huge armaments industries, that lost their reason to exist after the cold war. I don’t know about Oz, but the US and UK economies are just too dependent on those industries for any govenment of recent times to stop going to war.
Lie? Please provide documentation that such a statement was in any way a lie, as opposed to simply having been mistaken or misinformed.
As a result of the first Gulf War (when Iraq invaded Kuwait), Iraq agreed to a regime whereby it would undergo continuing weapons inspections by the UN.
Those weapons inspections did find evidence of WMD activities which were ceased soon after the first war, but none that were still in progress.
However, Hussein did use Sarin gas (a WMD) against the the Kurds in norhern Iraq and against the Iranians.
In 2003, Saddam Hussein discontinued the UN scantions inspections. Having actually used WMD in the past, stopping the UN inspections, and with his publicly defiant stance, it was not unreasonable to suspect that he was planning to return to making WMD.
History shows that the US govt engaged in talking up what was quite obviously dodgy information to “justify” the invasion, and sabotaged the careers of anybody who dared to try get at the truth. This allowed them to invade on false pretences with the “whoops, maybe the intel was wrong” defence to ellude accountability.. possibly a near perfect crime form that perspective.
Whats more this is blatant hypocrisy given the US blocking UN criticism of Iraq use of WMD earlier on:
“On 21 March 1986 the United Nation Security Council recognised that “chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces”; this statement was opposed by the United States, the sole country to vote against it in the Security Council (the UK abstained).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
Dave: by a mathematical standard of proof we can never prove that someone has lied. The best we can prove is that a given statement turned out not to be true and that plenty of people, who SHOULD have known better, gave their support to the untrue statement.
Based on past performance we can conclude that certain information sources are likely to deliver further falsehoods in the future.
Our government gave four different reasons for the Iraq war:
* WMD — searched hard, turned out to be false. The entire CIA report of 2002 (which gave many specific examples of factory sites, weapon types, manufacturing activity) turned out to be completely incorrect.
* Champion Democracy, defeat tyranny and help the Iraqi people — the recent Blackwater incident has proven the Democratic Iraqi government has no real support from the USA, and we know that the Iraqi people were better off in 2001. Also, inconsistent with Dafur, Burma, etc.
* Link between the Baath party and Al Quada — disproven many times but still they try to bring it back.
* We want the oil — mentioned once and then recanted.
When you put that lot together you can at BEST say that the current administration are flagrantly disinterested in presenting a truthful picture. That’s being as generous as possible. The implication is that anything else they say cannot be trusted and they are certainly unsuitable to be in government.
We still see an attempt to link the 911 WTC attack to the Iraq war, as if Iraq was somehow responsible. For example Brendan Nelson, Federal House of Reps, 12 September, 2007 (when asked a question about stibility in Iraq):
Note, there IS no link between 911 and Iraq but by saying it enough times in an Iraq context there is a hope that it will make an impression. This is indeed dishonesty and there is no other name for it.