As part of The Open Media Pamphlet series, this pocket-sized primer was published to mobilize Americans against the war with Iraq, March-April 2003. The result is poorly written, poorly researched, and thoroughly unconvincing.
For one, it argues that “there is no evidence linking Saddam Hussein’s regime to al-Qaeda’s terrorist network,” ignoring the now-captured fugitive Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the 1993 World Trade Center plot organizers. Likewise, it ignores Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda operative who found refuge in Baghdad, not to speak of Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda affiliate in northern Iraq that maintained ties to Saddam.
Oddly enough, the authors claim that attacking Iraq would make “the United States and the world less safe” by angering the likes of bin Laden and Ayman az-Zawahiri—two terrorists who swore to destroy the United States some ten years prior. Also curious is the authors’ claim that “weapons inspections have been effective.” Due to Saddam’s intransigence, weapons inspectors were booted from Iraq in 1998 and did not return until the United States threatened war. The writers also state that “1.27 million innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the economic sanctions” against Iraq. They fail to note, however, that this inflated number was issued by the corrupt Baathist regime in Iraq, and that, among the deaths that did occur, many were due to Saddam’s snubbing of the Oil-for-Food program.
This primer also posits conspiratorially that the United States invaded Iraq for oil and that the “intense desire of increased access to cheap oil more than likely played a major part in the U.S. ability to finally obtain favorable votes from France, Russia, and possibly China” on U.N. Resolution 1441. Wrongly, the authors claim that “in the end, those countries can protest a bit, but they cannot hold out. Oil and economic and military power will win the day for the United States.”
Other wrong predictions include the Vietnam-era argument that “communities of color will be commanded to bear the brunt of the war.” There was also the prediction that the war would “cause American casualties in the thousands.” In reality, there were 138 deaths through April 2003.
Instead of trying to prevent a war with these fallacious arguments, the authors would have done a better job in trying to protect the environment. Indeed, think how many trees they could have saved had they not published this derisory pamphlet.
