From Failed States

The threat posed by [the stores of equip­ment for pro­du­cing WMDs in the 1980s] had been put for­ward as one reason for invad­ing Iraq.

These sites had been secured by UN inspect­ors but the invaders dis­missed them, leav­ing the sites unguarded. The imme­di­ate con­sequence was massive and soph­ist­ic­ated loot­ing of these install­a­tions. The UN inspect­ors con­tin­ued to carry out their work, rely­ing on satel­lite imagery. By June 2005, they had dis­covered 109 sites that had been looted. Most loot­ing was from pro­duc­tion sites for solid- and liquid-pro­pel­lant mis­siles, where about 85% of equip­ment had been removed, along with biotox­ins and other mater­i­als usable for chem­ical and bio­lo­gical weapons, and high-pre­ci­sion equip­ment cap­able of making parts for nuc­lear and chem­ical weapons and mis­siles. A Jord­anian journ­al­ist was informed by offi­cials in charge of the Jord­anian-Iraqi border after US and UK forces took over that radio-active mater­i­als were detec­ted in one of every eight trucks cross­ing into Jordan, des­tin­a­tion unknown. – Noam Chomsky

And I’m only 29 pages in.

Thanks so much, Mr Bush. I guess that’s what you meant about the UN becom­ing irrel­ev­ant if they didn’t sanc­tion your inva­sion, huh? Because they clearly have no role to play.

Back to the Euston Mani­festo I linked to a while ago. I under­stand why the people who put it together have a prob­lem with Amer­ica-bash­ing. I do. And I’m all for Saddam-bash­ing (well, verbally) and con­dem­na­tion of tor­ture thoughout the years by nations who have tor­tured and still tor­ture. I wrote let­ters for Amnesty as a teen and well into my twen­ties and have since writ­ten for them pro­fes­sion­ally. Back then, though, I thought we were not tor­tur­ers and I wrote those let­ters from a pos­i­tion of secur­ity and con­fid­ence in the Geneva Con­ven­tion and having been part of Aus­trali­a’s offi­cial 1979 Year of the Rights of the Child when I was 8, grow­ing up in a house that dis­cussed polit­ics and with an ideal­ist mother who took me to peace marches.

I cri­ti­cise my coun­try’s lead­er­ship and that of the Amer­ican Empire build­ers pre­cisely because of that. They have aban­doned those high stand­ards to which I hold them. The Amer­ic­ans are worse: they have aban­doned the lofty ideals upon which they built their own coun­try – we hold these truths to be self-evid­ent, that all men are cre­ated *equal*.

I’m more rad­ical than they pro­fess to be. I moved away from the small ‘l’ lib­eral teen that I was some­time around my Marx­ist awaken­ing in Year 10 (thanks, Mrs Little. His­tory classes with you were awe­some). But even if I only hold them to lib­eral ideals, they fail. 

Char­ity starts at home, they say. Polit­ical action has to as well. I can’t tell other gov­ern­ments how to clean their houses when our own is moul­der­ing. I dis­agree with the implic­a­tion that this pos­i­tion is tan­tamount to con­don­ing ter­ror­ism. It isn’t. I con­demn viol­ence of any kind, any­where. The inva­sion of Iraq in response to the destruc­tion of the Twin Towers and the inva­sion of Palestine in response to the kid­nap­ping of an 18-year-old is just another excuse for the Iraqis and the Palestini­ans to do some­thing worse again to the Amer­ic­ans and the Israelis which will be an excuse to do some­thing worse again… Stop. Fight­ing for peace is still like fuck­ing for vir­gin­ity. It utterly defeats the purpose.