Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
How 'Regime Change' Wars Led to Korea Crisis
September 4, 2017
Exclusive: The U.S.-led aggressions against Iraq and Libya are two war
crimes that keep on costing, with their grim examples of what happens to
leaders who get rid of WMDs driving the scary showdown with North Korea,
writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
It is a popular meme in the U.S. media to say that North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un is "crazy" as he undertakes to develop a nuclear bomb and a missile
capacity to deliver it, but he is actually working from a cold logic
dictated by the U.S. government's aggressive wars and lack of integrity.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Indeed, the current North Korea crisis, which could end up killing millions
of people, can be viewed as a follow-on disaster to President George W.
Bush's Iraq War and President Barack Obama's Libyan intervention. Those wars
came after the leaders of Iraq and Libya had dismantled their dangerous
weapons programs, leaving their countries virtually powerless when the U.S.
government chose to invade.
In both cases, the U.S. government also exploited its power over global
information to spread lies about the targeted regimes as justification for
the invasions - and the world community failed to do anything to block the
U.S. aggressions.
And, on a grim personal note, the two leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar
Gaddafi, were then brutally murdered, Hussein by hanging and Gaddafi by a
mob that first sodomized him with a knife.
So, the neoconservatives who promoted the Iraq invasion supposedly to
protect the world from Iraq's alleged WMDs - and the liberal
interventionists who pushed the Libya invasion based on false humanitarian
claims - may now share in the horrific possibility that millions of people
in North Korea, South Korea, Japan and maybe elsewhere could die from real
WMDs launched by North Korea and/or by the United States.
Washington foreign policy "experts" who fault President Trump's erratic and
bellicose approach toward this crisis may want to look in the mirror and
consider how they contributed to the mess by ignoring the predictable
consequences from the Iraq and Libya invasions.
Yes, I know, at the time it was so exciting to celebrate the Bush Doctrine
of preemptive wars even over a "one percent" suspicion that a "rogue state"
like Iraq might share WMDs with terrorists - or the Clinton Doctrine hailed
by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's acolytes enamored by her application
of "smart power" to achieve "regime change" in Libya.
However, as we now know, both wars were built upon lies. Iraq did not
possess WMD stockpiles as the Bush administration claimed, and Libya was not
engaged in mass murder of civilians in rebellious areas in the eastern part
of the country as the Obama administration claimed.
Post-invasion investigations knocked down Bush's WMD myth in Iraq, and a
British parliamentary inquiry concluded that Western governments
misrepresented the situation in eastern Libya where Gaddafi forces were
targeting armed rebels but not indiscriminately killing civilians.
But those belated fact-finding missions were no comfort to either Saddam
Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, nor to their countries, which have seen mass
slaughters resulting from the U.S.-sponsored invasions and today amount to
failed states.
There also has been virtually no accountability for the war crimes committed
by the Bush and Obama administrations. Bush and Obama both ended up serving
two terms as President. None of Bush's senior advisers were punished - and
Hillary Clinton received the 2016 Democratic Party's nomination for
President.
As for the U.S. mainstream media, which behaved as boosters for both
invasions, pretty much all of the journalistic war advocates have continued
on with their glorious careers. To excuse their unprofessional behavior,
some even have pushed revisionist lies, such as the popular but false claim
that Saddam Hussein was to blame because he pretended that he did have WMDs
- when the truth is that his government submitted a detailed 12,000-page
report to the United Nations in December 2002 describing how the WMDs had
been destroyed (though that accurate account was widely mocked and
ultimately ignored).
Pervasive Dishonesty
The dishonesty that now pervades the U.S. government and the U.S. mainstream
media represents another contributing factor to the North Korean crisis.
What sensible person anywhere on the planet would trust U.S. assurances? Who
would believe what the U.S. government says, except, of course, the U.S.
mainstream media?
President George W. Bush in a flight suit after landing on the USS Abraham
Lincoln to give his "Mission Accomplished" speech about the Iraq War on May
1, 2003.
Remember also that North Korea's nuclear program had largely been mothballed
before George W. Bush delivered his "axis of evil" speech in January 2002,
which linked Iran and Iraq - then bitter enemies - with North Korea. After
that, North Korea withdrew from earlier agreements on limiting its nuclear
development and began serious work on a bomb.
Yet, while North Korea moved toward a form of mutual assured destruction,
Iraq and Libya chose a different path.
In Iraq, to head off a threatened U.S.-led invasion, Hussein's government
sought to convince the international community that it had lived up to its
commitments regarding the destruction of its WMD arsenal and programs.
Besides the detailed declaration, Iraq gave U.N. weapons inspectors wide
latitude to search on the ground.
But Bush cut short the inspection efforts in March 2003 and launched his
"shock and awe" invasion, which led to the collapse of Hussein's regime and
the dictator's eventual capture and hanging.
Gaddafi's Gestures
In Libya, Gaddafi also sought to cooperate with international demands
regarding WMDs. In late 2003, he announced that his country would eliminate
its unconventional weapons programs, including a nascent nuclear project.
Ousted Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi shortly before he was murdered on Oct.
20, 2011.
Gaddafi also sought to get Libya out from under economic sanctions by taking
responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland, although he
and his government continued to deny carrying out the terror attack that
killed 270 people.
But these efforts to normalize Libya's relations with the West failed to
protect him or his country. In 2011 when Islamic militants staged an
uprising around Benghazi, Gaddafi moved to crush it, and Secretary of State
Clinton eagerly joined with some European countries in seeking military
intervention to destroy Gaddafi's regime.
The United Nations Security Council approved a plan for the humanitarian
protection of civilians in and around Benghazi, but the Obama administration
and its European allies exploited that opening to mount a full-scale "regime
change" war.
Prominent news personalities, such as MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, cheered on
the war with the claim that Gaddafi had American "blood on his hands" over
the Pan Am 103 case because he had accepted responsibility. The fact that
his government continued to deny actual guilt - and the international
conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was a judicial travesty - was
ignored. Almost no one in the West dared question the longtime groupthink of
Libyan guilt.
By October 2011, Gaddafi had fled Tripoli and was captured by rebels in
Sirte. He was tortured, sodomized with a knife and then executed. Clinton,
whose aides felt she should claim credit for Gaddafi's overthrow as part of
a Clinton Doctrine, celebrated his murder with a laugh and a quip, "We came;
we saw; he died."
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton honor the four
victims of the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi,
Libya, at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, on Sept. 14, 2012. [State
Department photo)
But Gaddafi's warnings about Islamist terrorists in Benghazi came back to
haunt Clinton when on Sept. 11, 2012, militants attacked the U.S. consulate
and CIA station there, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three
other Americans.
The obsessive Republican investigation into the Benghazi attack failed to
demonstrate many of the lurid claims about Clinton's negligence, but it did
surface the fact that she had used a private server for her official State
Department emails, which, in turn, led to an FBI investigation which
severely damaged her 2016 presidential run.
Lessons Learned
Meanwhile, back in North Korea, the young dictator Kim Jong Un was taking
all this history in. According to numerous sources, he concluded that his
and North Korea's only safeguard would be a viable nuclear deterrent to
stave off another U.S.-sponsored "regime change" war - with him meeting a
similar fate as was dealt to Hussein and Gaddafi.
Since then, Kim and his advisers have made clear that the surrender of North
Korea's small nuclear arsenal is off the table. They make the understandable
point that the United States has shown bad faith in other cases in which
leaders have given up their WMDs in compliance with international demands
and then saw their countries invaded and faced grisly executions themselves.
North Korean missile launch on March 6, 2017.
Now, the world faces a predicament in which an inexperienced and intemperate
President Trump confronts a crisis that his two predecessors helped to
create and make worse. Trump has threatened "fire and fury" like the world
has never seen, suggesting a nuclear strike on North Korea, which, in turn,
has vowed to retaliate.
Millions of people on the Korean peninsula and Japan - and possibly
elsewhere - could die in such a conflagration. The world's economy could be
severely shaken, given Japan's and South Korea's industrial might and the
size of their consumer markets.
If such a horror does come to pass, the U.S. government and the U.S.
mainstream media will surely revert to their standard explanation that Kim
was simply "crazy" and brought this destruction on himself. Trump's liberal
critics also might attack Trump for bungling the diplomacy.
But the truth is that many of Washington's elite policymakers - both on the
Republican and Democratic sides - will share in the blame. And so too should
the U.S. mainstream media.