The Crusade of the Shadow Men

February 19, 2003
by Rob Lafferty

Decades ago, about a week or so after the US-supported Shah of Iran was overthrown by fundamentalist Muslims, the American government - the real one, the shadow men backstage who make the rules and own the actors who front for them - began cozying up to the Iraqi government.

When Saddam Hussein took control of Iraq and started a war against Iran, the shadow men supported Hussein. They helped Iran, too, just in case things went badly for Hussein. But Iraq got most of the technology for making chemical, biological and nuclear weapons from US-based multi-national corporations, with US government approval.

Canadian Dimension magazine recently ran a political cartoon that showed a reporter asking an American official, "What proof do you have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction?"

The official replies, "We kept the receipts."

Those would be receipts held by companies such as Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel, International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry, Eastman Kodak, TI Coating and a dozen others.

Other receipts from sales and information exchanges are held by the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture, plus nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia.

Those companies and agencies quietly helped arm Iraq. They trained Iraqi nuclear scientists and supplied material and technology used in the construction of weapons. Russia and Germany are just two of the countries that helped as well, profiting from deals with a known brutal dictator and madman over the course of his political career.

Then Hussein used poison gas against Iran. The shadow men didn't have a problem with that, it seems. They probably disapproved, but not strongly enough to stop selling equipment to Iraq. They got their profit from arms sales, as the shadow men always do when there's a war. But they didn't get their share of the usual spoils of war, as the conflict ended in a truce. There can be no pillaging when there is no official loser.

It wasn't until Hussein used poison gas against Iraqi citizens that some - but certainly not all - companies and governments backed away from supplying weapons to Iraq. Yet the shadow men still took no action to condemn that second use of "weapons of mass destruction."

It wasn't until he invaded Kuwait that the flow dwindled away to a trickle. Even then, the choice was not to force a "regime change" in Iraq after their army was trounced by the UN coalition in "Operation Desert Storm."
So why is our president saying now that time has run out for Hussein?

Because more than a decade ago he actually used weapons that were sold to him? Because he might use them again, or sell them to someone who will?

Time has run out for Hussein because things have changed. They have changed over here, not in Iraq. Our current president is a wanna-be Texas oil man, from an extended family with financial interests in the Middle East, and he blames Hussein for an attempt on his father's life a few years back.

He also owes much to the shadow men who brought him into the oil business, and propped him up when his ventures failed.

George W. Bush is a man with no experience or apparent talent for foreign policy. He believes the oil business is a necessary component of America's strength. He has a personal motive for revenge, and he can see a chance for his family and his friends to become quite wealthy. With all of that external influence and internal pressure working on his ingrained belief system, it's not surprising that he acts like a man obsessed.

And it's no wonder he called the war on terrorism "a crusade" - a choice of words that caused anyone with a basic knowledge of Western history to cringe. Bush speaks as a pious man, just as the old Crusaders did. He's just as sure as they were that the regrettable killing of innocent bystanders during the hunt for "evildoers" is something God has sanctioned.

Citing a moral imperative regarding "weapons of mass destruction" can be effective when people ignore history. The shadow men know that people don't remember when both sides in World War I used chemical weapons against their foes. They count on us to forget Vietnam, where US bombardments of napalm and defoliants - chemical weapons - poisoned and killed soldiers and civilians from both sides.

For forty years the shadow government sent CIA-trained teams to assassinate leaders of other countries. Since WWII the US has led the world in the production, sale and distribution of every imaginable weapon. And America is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons - on civilians, in cities far from the battlefield. Twice.

The nuclear attack on Japan ended the War in the Pacific and probably saved the lives of many American soldiers. The shadow men use that as justification for sending the innocent children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to a fiery death.

Iraqi children will be among the dead when "smart bombs" fall in the streets of Baghdad. Their deaths will be much harder to justify than those children doomed in Japan in 1945.

But as God is his witness, George W. Bush is gonna try... and this time, the shadow men will get their chance to share in the spoils of war.