Neocon Lieutenant Colonel Blames Iraq’s Victims

Kurt Nimmo
Apr. 08, 2007

Perhaps you remember Ralph Peters? He’s the United States Army Lieutenant Colonel formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence who redrew the map of the Middle East for Armed Forces Journal in June, 2006. In the article, entitled “Blood Borders,” Peters wrote that his “hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic affinities and religious communalism,” in other words, Peters has adopted the Israeli idea of busting up the Arabs, Kurds, and Persians into Bantustans.

Now we have Peters interviewed by Paul Kengor for the FrontPageMagazine website, a neocon operation run on Scaife and foundation grant money by the former Marxist turned neocon impresario and confidence man, David Horowitz.

“Once again, the Arab people, within Iraq and without, have failed themselves horribly,” Peters tells Kengor. “Their pettiness, their embrace of corruption, their social structures and their taste for internecine feuds and religious intolerance all have led them to make a hash of this unprecedented opportunity to build one rule-of-law democracy in the Arab world. Arabs have an ineradicable genius for failing themselves.”

In other words, the Iraqis have only themselves to blame for more than a decade of crippling and deadly sanctions in the wake of Bush Senior’s invasion, an illegal and immoral adventure that targeted water and sewage plants, civilian infrastructure, hospitals and homes. Even before Bush the Junior’s invasion, at least 500 children a day in Iraq died from disease, mostly cancer from depleted uranium. “Cases of lymphoblastic leukaemia have more than quadrupled with other cancers,” the Lancet, an esteemed British medical journal, reported in 1998. “In men, lung, bladder, bronchus, skin, and stomach cancers show the highest increase. In women, the highest increases are in breast and bladder cancer, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Diseases such as osteosarcoma, teratoma, nephroblastoma, and rhabdomyosarcoma are also increasing with, according to the review, the most affected being children and young men. Congenital malformations have also increased, as have diseases of the immune system.”

“Prior to the 1990s, Iraqā€™s infrastructure was among the best in the Middle East,” explains the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq. But in the wake of the second Iraq invasion, “most Iraqis have limited access to essential basic services, including electricity, water supply, sanitation, and refuse collection…. Serious environmental and health risks associated with contaminated water supplies, inappropriate handling of solid waste, and disposal of sewage threaten to further burden the already stressed health system.”

Iraqis have only themselves to blame for this, as they tolerated the former CIA operative Saddam Hussein, a dictator who faithfully did the bidding of his neoliberal masters, only to confront betrayal (see my Saddam Hussein: Taking Out the CIA’s Trash). “While many have thought that Saddam Hussein became involved with US intelligence agencies from the 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts date back to 1959 when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi prime minister General Abd al-Karim Qasim,” notes the Indo-Asian News Service, citing a UPI article that has, not surprisingly, found its way to the memory hole. “The Saddam Hussein-US intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end on August 2, 1990 when 100,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. America’s one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy,” although it is not mentioned that April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, under instructions from the Bush crime family consigliere James Baker, invited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, and thus set in motion the death machine that ultimately claimed nearly 2 million Iraqi lives.

It was the Iraqis who invented spurious lies about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, not the conniving neocons—primarily Zionists determined to put an end to the Iraqi example—who burned the midnight oil over at the Office of Special Plans, eschewing reality checks from none other than the CIA. Even now, more than four years after Bush’s invasion, thus far resulting in the murder of over 700,000 Iraqis, we are told it was all a mistake, the result of “intelligence failures,” while the criminal culprits are promoted to the World Bank or free to pursue careers at Georgetown University, indoctrinating the next generation of neocons and neolibs.

In short order, we have experienced amnesia in regard to the crimes perpetuated against the Iraqi people—indeed, we seem ready to sign off on the next attack, this time against Iran, as we are ignorant of the crimes committed against Iraq.

In the middle of all this, we get the platitudes of Ralph Peters, who is little more than an academic cartographer working in the service of the neocons. Peters’ “solution” to the “Arab problem,” indeed the “Islamic problem,” as viewed through an Israeli lens, is simply yet another paragraph—or more accurately, a footnote—in the clash of civilizations agenda, the racist and hubris-filled parti pris of the neocons who will, if not arrested and punished soon, destroy the planet or, at least, make it largely unrecognizable.