As Congress debates war with Iraq, the Institute for Public Accuracy has made available a detailed analysis of President Bush’s Cincinnati address. The assessments feature a dozen Middle East, legal, weapons and policy analysts with multifaceted critiques of Bush’s claims. Issues covered range from biological weapons to U.N. Security Council resolutions to Congress’s constitutional role.
The analysis is available at: www.accuracy.org/bush
Here are some of the points made:
CHRIS TOENSING
The editor of Middle East Report, responding to allegations that Iraq is threatening the region, Toensing said: “There is no evidence whatsoever that Iraq is doing so, or has any intention of doing so. Other powers are actively disrupting the peace in the region: Israel is trying to crush Palestinian resistance to occupation with brute force, and the U.S. and Britain have bombed Iraq 46 times in 2002 when their aircraft are ‘targeted’ by Iraqi air defense systems in the bilaterally enforced ‘no-fly’ zones.”
JAMES E. JENNINGS
President of Conscience International, a humanitarian aid organization that has worked in Iraq since 1991, Jennings said: “The claim that al-Qaeda is in Iraq is disingenuous, if not an outright lie. Yes, the U.S. has known for some time that up to 400 al-Qaeda-type Muslim extremists, the Ansar al-Islam, formerly ‘Jund al-Islam,’ a splinter of the Iranian-backed Islamic Unity Movement of Kurdistan, were operating inside the Kurdish security zone…. [L]ast Spring the Kurds themselves attacked and killed most of the terrorists in their territory, sending the rest fleeing for their lives across the border into Iran…. [But] this area was under U.S. protection, and not under Saddam Hussein’s rule.”
SUSAN WRIGHT
Wright, co-author of the new book Biological Warfare and Disarmament: New Problems/New Perspectives, responding to the administration’s charges of current Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, said: “We’re expected to accept the administration’s word for this without seeing any evidence. We have no way of judging the accuracy of these claims and the only way to do so is to hold inspections. The only country in the region that is known to possess a nuclear arsenal is Israel.”
STEPHEN ZUNES
Author of the new book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, Zunes is associate professor of politics, University of San Francisco, and Middle East editor of the Foreign Policy in Focus project. His response to demands that U.N. resolutions be taken seriously: “There are well over 90 U.N. Security Council resolutions that are currently being violated by countries other than Iraq. The vast majority of these resolutions are being violated by allies of the United States that receive U.S. military, economic and diplomatic support. Indeed, the U.S. has effectively blocked the U.N. Security Council from enforcing these resolutions against its allies.”
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167