The lie that circled the world

2003 Colin Powell publicly lied that the Clinton administration “conducted a four-day bombing campaign in late 1998 based on the intelligence that he [UNSCOM director, Richard Butler] had. That resulted in the weapons inspectors being thrown out.”

In fact, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, after having ceased to comply with UN weapons inspectors on October 31, had sent a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan offering to facilitate the inspections. On December 16, Richard Butler (pictured), Australian head of UNSCOM, the UN weapons inspection team, withdrew the team from Iraq, to protect his staff from the air strikes that the US and UK governments were threatening. Within hours, Operation Desert Fox began: the US and UK began pre-emptively bombing Iraq – hundreds of cruise missiles raining down on the country, marking the start of strikes to punish the Baghdad government.

An avalanche of US and British propaganda was published by a mostly unsuspecting world media, justifying the aggression and ignoring the destruction of Baghdad’s utilities and the deaths of many innocent civilians and service people.

Since Butler’s forced withdrawal in the face of US-UK threats, many Western media and politicians have usually pretended to the public that Iraq “expelled” the team.

The events surrounding the withdrawal are recounted in Butler’s book, Saddam Defiant (2000):

“I received a telephone call from US Ambassador Peter Burleigh inviting me for a private conversation at the US mission ... Burleigh informed me that on instructions from Washington it would be ‘prudent to take measures to ensure the safety and security of UNSCOM staff presently in Iraq.’ I told him that I would act on his advice and remove my staff from Iraq.”

The lie gets round the world
The ‘mistake’ has been made not only by pro-war people such as George W Bush in his State of the Union address (‘the axis of evil’ speech), Dick Cheney, Alexander Rose, the Canadian right-wing Washington correspondent of the National Post, and the editorial writers of the Sunday Times. It has also been made by those who have shown concern for the humanitarian situation in Iraq, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, UK Liberal Democrats foreign affairs spokesperson Menzies Campbell, and the usually trustworthy Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker ...

Tagged: unscom, iraq, saddam+hussein, bush, usa, disinfo, disinformation, war, peace, war+on+terror