The Bush Administration's Camouflage
                 Why They Don't Present Honest Answers
                               by Ronda Hauben


On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, George Bush held one of his rare press
conferences. When a reporter asked about the erroneous statement in his
State of the Union address about Iraq buying uranium from Africa, Bush
quickly changed the subject. He responded that he himself had "analyzed a
thorough body of intelligence--good, solid, sound intelligence", and that
this showed him the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power.(1)

Once again George W. Bush has evaded explaining how the charges made
against Iraq in his State of the Union speech were the product of forged
documents. In a similar way, Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of 
Defense, came up with a different reason for the war in Iraq in his
presentation to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, July 29, 2003. He painted 
Saddam Hussein as a villain whose government had to be removed in Iraq. 
Yet just a few days earlier, Wolfowitz had explained that sending U.S. 
troops into a war could not be justified on the basis of wanting to change 
the government of another country. Only a threat to the lives of the people 
of the U.S., he maintained, could justify sending soldiers to war.

In the past few weeks, several articles in the press have pointed out that
the Bush administration is constantly shifting the reasons given for the war
against Iraq. A similar pattern of shifting reasons was used by George W. 
Bush's father to justify the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. Describing this 
phenomena in the 1991 Gulf War, an article written in 1991 explains:

   "The American administration continually changed the reasons
    given to justify a war against Iraq. Such a changing string
    of explanations clarifies that there wasn't a good or
    honorable reason in the first place to justify sending
    massive amounts of American troops to the Gulf region. The
    reasons also contradicted each other."(2)

This article helps to provide perspective. In a way reminiscent of the
lack of a legitimate justification for the 1991 war against Iraq, the
current Bush administration lacks any legitimate justification for
the 2003 Iraq war. What has become clear in 2003, however, is that the real, 
but illegitimate reasons for the war, are being hidden from the public by 
the Bush administration.

In her article, "The Neocons in Power"(3), Elizabeth Drew writes:

    "The conflict within the Bush administration in recent months
     over policy for postwar Iraq has caused much confusion and
     has already damaged the reconstruction effort....Almost from the
     outset of the Bush administration there have been battles between
     the State Department and the Defense Department, but the
     controversy over postwar Iraq has brought out bitterness and
     knife-wielding of a sort that Washington has seldom seen."

More recently, Washington Post reporters provided some particulars
of the bitterness and knife-wielding. Reporters Peter Slevin and Dana Priest
describe a meeting in February 2003 where plans(4) for the occupation of Iraq
were unveiled to Jay Garner and others, who were to be in charge of
the U.S. occupation. These plans had been created by the Pentagon's
Office of Special Plans (OSP).(5)


The reporters describe this February meeting:

     There, the Special Plans staff handed out spreadsheets on four
     dozen issues, all policy recommendations for key decisions: war
     crimes prosecution, the elimination of the Baath Party, oil
     sector maintenance, ministry organization, media strategy and
     'rewards, incentives and immunity' for former Baath Party
     supporters.

"To the outsiders at the meeting," they write, "it looked like a 'fait
accompli'. 'We had no input into the Special Plans office,' said one
reconstruction official who was there."

Meanwhile the Bush administration promises that a free Iraq will change
the nature of the Middle East. What is the free Iraq he is describing?
Bush and the Neo-conservative oriented officials he has appointed to
powerful offices in his government want to have Iraqi oil privatized. Also
the U.S  officials in the Pentagon and National Security Council involved in
Iraq policy, are part of a "cabal" of officials, as they call themselves,
interested in protecting the Israel Likud Party.  They are not concerned
with the interests and the desires of the majority of Iraqi people. In the 
article on the 1991 war against Iraq(2), the author describes some of the
concerns of people in the Middle East. He writes:

      "The Middle Eastern people also view the control of
       the region's resources and the resolution of long standing
       grievances to be at stake. One major grievance that the Iraqis
       have is when Britain set the borders in 1922, those borders
       deliberately limited Iraq's access to the Persian Gulf."


Earlier attempts by Iraq to change its borders with Kuwait in 1961 and 1973, 
were resolved by the Arab League.  Similarly the League planned to resolve 
the problem in 1990, but were prevented by the U.S. government.

Instead of recognizing the desires of the people of the Middle East to benefit
from their oil and other resources, the U.S. government is planning to change
the nature of Iraq and to try to change the nature of the Middle East. The
model they have is not a model that has  proven itself to benefit the
majority of people. Rather it is a model that provides for the privatization
of the resources of a nation and for indebting the nation to foreign
interests. The Bush administration has given the responsibility for the
"reconstruction" of Iraq to the U.S. Secretary of Defense. The plans,
according to a summary recently carried at the electronicIraq.net web
site, "are definitely not to rebuild Iraq in the way it was before Phase
III of this war."(6)

Instead, Iraq is to be turned into a "market economy" where the
"occupation forces are quickly working towards selling the Iraqi
governmental services to private companies." The Office of Special
Plans, according to Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official at the
Pentagon, was called "Special Plans because, at the time, calling it
Iraqi Planning Office might have undercut our diplomatic efforts."(7)
Their goal in planning for the future of Iraq is for a Neo-conservative
designed Iraq and then Middle East.

While there is internal opposition in the U.S. government to some aspects
of this plan being reported by journalists like Elizabeth Drew and Seymour
Hersh, that opposition hasn't challenged the goals of the plan, but rather
the methods for carrying them out. One journalist, recently, in an editorial,
warns the Neo-cons that they will fail if their plans are kept secret.(8)
Instead he encourages them to present their goals openly and engage in a
broad public debate about these plans.

It seems such an open presentation of the plans for Iraq's future needs
to be presented not only to the people of the U.S., but also to the
people of Iraq. Privatizing the Iraqi resources or selling off their
country to foreign firms is contrary to the long struggle of people in
Iraq. The camouflage the Bush administration and their allies in
the U.S. press use to present the goal of the Bush administration in Iraq,
is a problem.

There is a serious need for open discussion of the Neo-conservative
plans and the camouflage they use to keep these plans from being openly
understood and examined. That's what the journalists at the Bush press
conferences failed to question Bush about.  Some few journalists have
begun to investigate this hidden strata of the Bush administration policy
with regard to the reasons for the war against Iraq. There is the need for
extending this investigation to the Neo-con plan for the future of Iraq and
the Middle East.


(1)See President Bush Discussed Top Priorities for the U.S.
 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030730-1.html

(2) Michael Hauben, The 1991 War Against Iraq
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/CS/iraq1991.txt

(3)New York Review of Books, vol 50, No. 10, June 12, 2003
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16378

(4)"Wolfowitz Concedes Iraq Errors", July 24, 2003, A1,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37468-2003Jul23.html?nav=hptop_ts

(5) See Macbeth and the Forged Documents of Niger
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/15268/1.html

(6)Rania Masri,"Re-Constructing or De-Constructing Iraq?"
http://electronicIraq.net/news/981.shtml

(7)"Preparing for War, Stumbling for Peace", LA Times, 7-18-03
http://publicbroadcasting.net/wnyc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=523426

(8) Roger Patching "Are Neocons cooking their own goose?" Sacramento Bee,
CA, July 27, 2003
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/7112547p-8060159c.html