Government lie: The people of the United States overwhelmingly support the administration's policy toward Iraq.

Flounders’ response: The students at Ohio State University put that lie to rest on Feb. 18. At the IAC we saw it coming when hundreds of groups of people around the country contacted our web site or called to report their anti-war actions or get advice or material.

The people know the top politicians lie—and not only about their private lies. They lie about war, from the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine 100 years ago to Vietnam’s supposed Gulf of Tonkin attack to today’s charge of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Some people may think the last-minute agreement has ended the threat of war. But U.S. and British troops, aircraft carriers and missiles remain in the Gulf, ready to strike. As long as the Pentagon is mobilized for war, as long as sanctions continue, the anti-war movement must stay mobilized to fight to stop that war.

And we at the IAC will expose any lies or provocations Clinton and the Pentagon try to invent to justify a new attack.

Lie: U.S. strategy aims at forcing Saddam Hussein to abide by United Nations resolutions and allow UNSCOM agents "unfettered access" to sites where Iraq can manufacture chemical and biological weapons.

Flounders: First of all, the charge is always put like a lawyer would put it, so you have to look at their words carefully. Iraq is said to have the "capacity" or the "ability" to make weapons. The weapons are "suspected." Or that Iraq has materials that could have a "dual use." They use the charge that such weapons can’t be found against Iraq, rather than concluding the obvious, that such weapons don’t exist. Former UNSCOM inspector Raymond Zalinskas admitted to National Public Radio that UN inspectors had already seen all reasonable weapons sites and had destroyed whatever potential existed. Only by killing all the Iraqi scientists, he said, could the U.S. do more. So it’s all a ruse, used to cloak Washington's real aims in the Persian/Arabian Gulf.

Iraq's territory contains one-tenth of the earth's known oil reserves, some 100 billion barrels. Mobil, Exxon, Texaco and Shell, which are headquartered in the U.S. and Britain, want unfettered access to this oil so they can monopolize the vast profits made from pumping, delivering and refining this natural resource. Washington is merely working on behalf of Big Oil, which wants to replace the Iraqi government with a compliant puppet regime that will open the gates wide to fabulous profit.

In addition, by attacking Iraq the Pentagon sends a message to all oppressed countries—and even to U.S. allies—that it will use its monopoly of military power against anyone who refuses to submit.

A Pentagon "White Paper" the New York Times published on March 8, 1992, described this policy.

Lie: Iraq is dangerous to the world. It possesses, plans to build and is ready to use weapons of mass destruction.

Flounders: The U.S. military has more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined. It has used nuclear weapons against the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and carried out devastating bombings of Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. It also bombed Libya and invaded Grenada and Panama.

In the 1991 war against Iraq, the U.S. flew 110,000 aerial sorties and dropped 88,000 tons of explosives in 42 days. This and the ground war killed at least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians. Iraq responded with 58 Scud missiles, and U.S. forces lost only 148 personnel, one-third from friendly fire.

Today, Iraq's army is much weaker than it was seven years ago. Can anyone seriously believe the Pentagon considers Iraq a threat?

Lie: The U.S. government cares about the welfare of the Iraqi people.

Flounders: This is probably the most absurd lie of them all.

Let me explain how the U.S. government "takes care" of the Iraqis’ welfare: Since 1990, Washington has been the leading world force imposing war and sanctions on the country. In the 1991 war, U.S. air strikes destroyed the electric grid and power plants, water refineries, the sewage system, pharmaceutical and food-production plants.

Since then, sanctions have murdered 1.5 million Iraqis, including 700,000 children. UN agencies say the sanctions still kill 4,500 Iraqi children each month.

On "60 Minutes" a few years ago, Leslie Stahl asked then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright if U.S. policies were worth killing a half-million Iraqi children. Albright answered, "Yes, it is worth it."

That's U.S. humanitarism in a nutshell.

Now Pentagon generals are talking of targeting "dual-purpose" factories. That means pharmaceutical or fertilizer plants that might possibly produce chemical weapons, or food-processing plants that "might possibly" produce dangerous bacteria. They think this gives them the "right" to bomb Iraq back to the stone age.

Lie: Iraq is a bully and a threat to its neighbors in the Gulf region.

Flounders: Actually, the U.S. is the bully in the region, with its aircraft carriers, military bases, and so on. The U.S. is widely seen to be attempting to recolonize Iraq. With the exception of Kuwait—now completely dependent on the United States—no Gulf regime will publicly back a U.S. attack on Iraq. This refusal is only a pale shadow of the hatred the masses of people in the region have for Pentagon bullying of the Iraqi people.