Wayne Madsen

In this March 20, 2003 photo, smoke rises from the Trade Ministry in
Baghdad after it was hit by a missile during US-led forces' attacks.

Although Cable News Network (CNN) no longer reports news but blatant propaganda and worthless reports on insignificant celebrities, it and other media operations should not be permitted to engage in the same war-mongering today that they fostered ten years ago.

On the very day that America was reflecting on the preposterous reasons it attacked and occupied Iraq ten years ago – March 20, 2003 – CNN and other broadcasters were hyping a phony story about Syria using WMDs – weapons of mass destruction – against civilians. Ten years ago, Saddam Hussein was used as an international bogeyman for his possession of WMDs. However, the claims of Iraqi WMDs were based on false and forged intelligence. And the claims that Bashar al-Assad’s government is using chemical weapons are just as fallacious…

CNN’s neo-Conservative main stay Wolf Blitzer, who once served as a mouthpiece for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an unregistered foreign agency of the Israeli government operating as a pressure group on the U.S. government, interviewed Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers of Michigan on the «breaking news» that Syria was using chemical weapons against its own population. Blitzer, of course, engaged in the very same theatrical propaganda and war mongering over Saddam’s alleged possession of mass destruction.

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Maidhc Ó Cathail

From top left: Albert Wohlstetter, Oded Yinon, Richard
Perle, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, David Wurmser,
Paul Wolfowitz, Joseph Lieberman, William Safire,
Eliot Cohen, David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, Kenneth
Adelman, Charles Krauthammer, Benjamin Netanyahu,
Phili Zelikow, Elliott Abrams, Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
Douglas Feith and Bernard Lewis.

Three years ago this month, I wrote a piece entitled “Who’s to Blame for the Iraq War?” to mark the seventh anniversary of the US invasion. My sole purpose in compiling a by-no-means-exhaustive list of 20 Israel partisans who played key roles in inducing America into making that disastrous strategic blunder was to help dispel the widespread confusion — some of it sown under the guise of “progressive investigative journalism” by likely crypto-Zionists – about why the United States made that fateful decision. As the tenth anniversary approaches, there is no excuse for anyone genuinely interested in the facts to deny the ultimate responsibility of Tel Aviv and its foreign agents for the quagmire in Iraq. Nevertheless, it’s an appropriate time to remind ourselves of some of the chief architects of the devastating Iraq War.

1. Ahmed Chalabi, the source of much of the false “intelligence” about Iraqi WMD, was introduced to his biggest boosters Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz by their mentor, a University of Chicago professor who had known the Iraqi con man since the 1960s. An influential Cold War hawk, Albert Wohlstetter fittingly has an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference centre named in his honor.

2. In 1982, Oded Yinon’s seminal article, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s” was published in Kivunim, a Hebrew-language journal affiliated with the World Zionist Organization. “Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets,” advised Yinon. “Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel.”

3. “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a report prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, recommended “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right.” Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board during the initial years of the George W. Bush administration, was the study group leader.

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