On Saddam and the Occupation

By Imad Khadduri

"I wrote the following before the occupation of Iraq, i.e. nearly four years ago, in my book "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions, page 223:
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"An unfair reaction developed to the above articles by close Iraqi and Canadian friends. Their attitude prompted me to write the following “Postscript” to the published articles. It was sent only to selected Iraqi and Canadian friends on March 13, 2003, one week before the invasion of Iraq:

“There is the assumption that if one decries the coming slaughter of Iraqis by Americans, that one must also curse Saddam at the same time; otherwise, so the accusations go, you are defending Saddam. This self-imposed condition may be summarized in the following anguished retort of an Iraqi friend: "I watched the video of the whole interview. Very interesting, but what I also find interesting is the fact that you never said a word about Saddam and the horrors he caused the Iraqi people!! Not a single word!!. . I think any Iraqi should never miss an opportunity to tell the world what Saddam has done to Iraq and the Iraqi people."

Both my Iraqi, and non-Iraqi, friends have made similar comments as above, and have attempted to coax me into denouncing Saddam each time I discussed Iraq's nuclear non-capability. However, this suggestion by my friends merely reflects the dead end of their own logic, as will become evident in the following exchange.

I personally can touch and feel the pain of my Iraqi friends. They have suffered much more than my family and I at the hands of Saddam's Intelligence and Security apparatuses. We had left Iraq without their knowledge or their approval and at the risk of our death. Many others have lost their relatives or families. I accept their narrow vision of the need to curse that reign of terror daily, to spend nearly every breath venting their deep anguish and anger; however, if they could cast their justified emotions aside for just one moment, I ask for them to realize that the Americans are utterly lacking a viable plan for Iraq and the Iraqi people after they drop their hundreds of bombs and fire their destructive missiles at Iraq. This will lead to at least tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and the easy defeat of the tattered remains of the Iraqi army. Iraq and the Iraqi people will be in a state of free fall, dropping into a deeper abyss, with Turkey, Iran and Israel (with its own agenda against the Palestinians) all eyeing pieces of Iraqi flesh to bite off. The oil has already been marked.

I do not want to counter right now this same stance held by the non-Iraqis, whose selfish shortsightedness reveals deeper antagonisms.

In both cases, I reject their bankrupt final solution to their one-dimensional way of thinking, that "if you do not agree with us, why did you leave Iraq and why not return to Iraq”.

The coming war was not launched in the spur of the moment. It is an opportunity seized upon after September of 1991. Its seeds have been planted since the early nineties by a clique of American neoconservative right wing thinkers, with strong sympathies (and some, even ties) to Israeli interests. These thinkers engineered their plans for reshaping the Middle East through their work with the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and other like-minded organizations.

They have managed to ascend to high ranks in the American State Department, the White House and especially the Pentagon. Among these neoconservative thinkers are Richard Perle (Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board), Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Defense Secretary), William Kristol (Chairman of the Project for the New American Century), Douglas Feith (Under Secretary of Defense and Policy Advisor at the Pentagon), Lewis Libby (Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff), and others.

A search on the Internet will reveal much more of their thinking, agenda and reports. Visit some of these organizations' websites. Despite fierce American media support, their arguments are being riddled with holes, yet the war crimes they plan on committing in Iraq will still take place.

My five articles, and the numerous TV and radio interviews, are solely intended to shred even further their flimsy arguments and expose the extent of the misinformation that is beamed to the American people and others to blind their vision of what is actually being enacted.

These neoconservatives will, sooner or later, be fully exposed and cast aside; hopefully they will appear in front of an international war tribunal along with Saddam.
The Iraqi people will resurrect”.
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I erred in only fact above, and with great sorrow and pain, that the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the American occupation is in the hundreds of thousands of people, and not in the tens of thousands.
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My above mentioned book ended with the following:
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"The neoconservatives have indeed succeeded in manipulating the “American Way of Life” to devour my beloved Iraq.

We shall, however, resurrect, to their detriment.""