Letter to a War Protester

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Dear Melissa,

Last week you sent me an email asking me to join you in marching for peace on the 15th in Center City Philadelphia. I explained to you about the leadership of these protests. I explained that these people were communists and anti-Americans who have an axe to grind. I explained that my research about them leads me to believe that their cause has more to do with discrediting and destroying capitalism, democracy, and the United States than peace.

I told you I would be more than happy to express my desire for peace. However, peace is not what these leaders want. You started spouting specious arguments comparing Iraq to North Korea and about oil-the usual canards and fallacies that this crowd spouts. You replied that the leadership did not matter. It did not make a difference they were communists. The ultimate objective was peace.

You told me that you were at a forum the week before at the White Dog Café. Medea Benjamin was the guest speaker. You said Medea fascinated you. You remarked about how compassionate her speech was. You told me that she went to Iraq and met nice Iraqis.

My reply was that I did not think she was invited to Iraq to meet members of the secret police and the Republican Guard. Of course, there are nice Iraqis, I said. I know some Iraqis. They are the salt of the earth. So what? Saddam Hussein has murdered many nice Iraqis lately. Then again, a lot Iraqis have been murdering other people.

Once again, I reiterated that these pacifists were really Communists. You said that Communism was no longer a threat and reiterated that the leadership of the rallies did not matter only what their objective was. You proffered a sort of ends “justifies the means” thesis.

My rejoinder was that the rally leadership did matter and that these rally leaders deceive. These rally leaders idolize those who kill and enslave.

Well Melissa, here is a concrete example of why the leadership is important. These are excerpts from a Sunday, February 16, 2003, Washington Post article written by Evelyn Nieves. Even you will believe the Washington Post Melissa. I know normally you do not believe me when I tell you something. You did not believe me when I told you that ANSWER was affiliated with a Stalininst/Kimist organization. You did not believe me when I told you that Not In Our Name was affiliated with a Maoist group. You learned I was correct. However, I do not believe that you will question the Washington Post.

In her article entitled Antiwar Organizer's Politics Cause Rift, Nieves wrote, “. . . few of the tens of thousands of marchers had even heard of International ANSWER., one of the main organizers.. ANSWER's politics seemed moot…(ANSWER) has defended dictators such as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il and decried the state of Israel…the last several days, ANSWER's politics have created a rift within the leadership of the antiwar movement…Rabbi Michael Lerner, one of the nation's most prominent liberal Jewish leaders and editor of the San Francisco-based magazine Tikkun, went public to complain that he was "banned" from speaking at the Sunday rally here, because ANSWER objected to his positions on Israel.”

According to Nieves’ article, ANSWER and other rally organizers, said Lerner was not invited to speak because he had previously "attacked" ANSWER's positions. Lerner had criticized ANSWER for allowing too many speakers who believe that the United States is threatening to attack Iraq because Israel wants the war. Nieves quoted Lerner as saying "There are good reasons to oppose the war and Saddam. Still, it feels that we are being manipulated when subjected to mindless speeches and slogans whose knee-jerk anti-imperialism rarely articulates the deep reasons we should oppose corporate globalization."

Nieves then quoted a news release by the four coalitions organizing the antiwar demonstrations -- Bay Area United Against War, Not In Our Name project, United for Peace and Justice and International ANSWER. The communication stated, "When members of the Tikkun community, who have actively participated in the organizing meetings for Feb. 16, suggested to Bay Area United for Peace and Justice, that it propose Michael Lerner as a speaker, it was explained by members of UFPJ that since he had publicly attacked ANSWER in both the New York Times and Tikkun community e-mail newsletters, his inclusion in the program would violate the agreement among the Feb. 16 organizing groups."

Then Nieves states what is the crux of the issue-why leadership matters. In one sentence Nieves expressed the Orwellian world of the organizers when she wrote, “In other words, dissent among dissenters was not allowed.”

See what I mean Melissa.

You and your colleagues say it does not matter who the leaders are. Yet it does. Here is a perfect example. The anti-war leadership who organized the February 15 rally would not permit a particular anti-war activist to speak because they do not like his politics and because he criticized them.

The people who believe in free speech really do not think speech is free.

These are your associates Melissa, deny it though you may. They are as every bit as ruthless, despotic, and deceitful as the genocidal totalitarians they admire. Remember Medea Benjamin was originally Susie Benjamin and chose the name of an infanticidal character of Greek mythology. These are not the people who will bring peace on earth.

You want peace Melissa? Join me in a rally. My march will be to protest the real villain in this drama -Saddam Hussein. Join me in telling him to destroy his WMD’s. Then there will be peace AND FREEDOM.

DISARM SADDAM NOW!

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"I quote others only the better to express myself."

1. War never solved anything.
Not true – war has successfully solved many (if not most) of the major problems and dangers in history. What "solved" Hitler? Negotiation, compassion, psychoanalysis? No, the willingness of Churchill and Roosevelt to slaughter as many Germans as necessary before we achieved regime change in Berlin. Decisive, crushing victories (like World War II) lead to long-term solutions (like the utter transformation of Germany and Japan), while indecisive and hesitant outcomes (World War I, the Gulf War) often lead to further struggle and instability.
2. We have no right to attack Saddam because our aid made him powerful and he once functioned as our ally.
Not true, and not even vaguely relevant. During the Cold War, Iraq was a client state of the Soviet Union, not the United States, and Saddam has always been outspoken in his Marxist, anti-Western fulminations. It's true that the U.S. foreign-policy establishment tilted toward Iraq in its bloody war against Iran, but only because the Islamic fanaticism of the Iranians represented a more direct, immediate danger to the United States. Suggesting that fleeting cooperation some 20 years ago means that we have no right to oppose Iraq today makes no sense whatever. We provided massive military and financial support to Stalin during his desperate battle against Hitler. Does that mean that we had no moral right to oppose the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union when it turned against us within months of the conclusion of the world war?
3. It's all about oil.
Not really, but so what? Are we supposed to ignore the fact that our whole economy, and therefore our national security, depends upon imported oil? Why is it even theoretically inappropriate to fight in order to ensure the continued delivery of a substance so essential to our survival and independence? Meanwhile, Saddam's psychotic and despotic regime would represent a profound danger to the world even if he controlled no oil assets whatever. The United States imports almost none of its petroleum from Iraq, but our European "allies" (the French, in particular) get a great deal of their energy from that country – and therefore ardently oppose the idea of waging war. On this issue, it's the appeasers – not the hard-liners – who are "all about oil."
4. Instead of planning war we should be developing alternate energy sources to lessen our dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Sure, it's a good idea to secure new energy supplies – beginning with the long overdue drilling of the fertile oil fields contained in 4 percent of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. Meanwhile, the fond visions of windmills and solar panels solving our national addiction to that nasty black goo will do nothing to change our immediate economic or strategic situation. Even the most visionary and optimistic views of "renewable" energy development indicate that these emerging technologies can play a significant role only some 10 or 20 years in the future – by which time regime change in Iraq will have surely occurred in any event, due to the eagerly awaited demise of the mustachioed megalomaniac.
5. If we make war on Iraq, it will only enrage the Arab world and provoke even more terrifying assaults by terrorists.
The logic behind this assumption is that our enemies don't really hate us yet, but that if we dare to harm Saddam, they'll just go nuts. As a matter of fact, it's hard to understand how much more hostile you can feel once you've already declared (as Osama did in 1998) that every American, civilian or military, adult or child, richly deserves to die. The truth is that our enemies don't hate us for what we do, they hate us for who we are. The "don't get the crazy Arabs mad" argument rests upon the premise that their fury arises in reaction to some action or policy of the United States, rather than as an expression of their own self-destructive insanity and suicidal evil.
6. The U.S. is no better than Saddam because we've murdered some 1.5 million Iraqi children with our sanctions.
At times, leftists offer this same argument using the figure of 500,000 Iraqi children, or 2 million Iraqi children, or whatever other number sounds good at the moment. It's a stupid lie – contradicted by reports of the United Nations – and simply shows that whoever repeats it serves as an unpaid but loyal propagandist for Saddam. The U.N. has repeatedly reported (as recently as last month) that the Iraqi standard of living and health care has been going up, not down, for the last several years – in part because of the "Oil for Food" program administered as part of the sanctions regime.
Starvation remains a problem in that country – not because of a lack of resources or trade, but because of the deliberate and cruel policies of an evil regime. The magical mystery tours of Saddam's palaces by the United Nations inspectors demonstrate that the problem for Iraq isn't a lack of wealth, but a misallocation of wealth by a monstrous kleptocracy. In one of the dictator's palaces, all eight walls of an entrance hall were decorated with verses of poetry in praise of Saddam, inlaid in solid gold.
7. There is no connection between Islamic terrorists and the Saddam Hussein regime.
This statement represents one of the few examples of anti-war activists disagreeing with the official line of the Iraqi government. That line emphasizes the proud support of the heroic and revolutionary Iraqi people for Islamic fighters everywhere, including the holy warriors of al-Qaida. Meanwhile, the al-Qaida crew similarly expresses its solidarity with Saddam – as they did in their Internet statement (widely validated by intelligence agencies in the West) claiming credit for the recent Kenya attacks, and linking future assaults to potential war against their friends, the Iraqis. If Iraq expresses solidarity with al-Qaida, and al-Qaida expresses solidarity with Iraq, peaceniks face a difficult challenge in arguing that they represent utterly disconnected phenomena.
8. All the talk of war against Iraq has caused us to lose focus on the war against terrorism.
Even if the president of the United States happens to focus on Iraq in his speeches, that doesn't mean that the several hundred thousand Americans who have been dedicated since Sept. 11 to rooting out Islamic terror suddenly gave up or pulled back on their efforts. If our military and counter-terrorist capabilities don't allow us to simultaneously combat a gang of murderous thugs like al-Qaida and a fourth-rate military power like Iraq, then we have been even more tragically weakened by eight years of Clinton defense cuts than even the gloomiest conservatives assumed.
9. If we go ahead with war against Iraq, it will represent a betrayal of our values and mark the first time in history that we attacked another country that never attacked us first.
Only those with a truly pathetic public-school education could believe such rubbish, since we fought the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, our campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many lesser engagements – all with no direct attack on the United States. Great powers face great threats – and dangerous enemies. Why would a war prove easier or more appropriate after Saddam develops, or uses, nuclear weapons – rather than before he's completed such deadly development?
10. Iraq is no military pushover and we will suffer appalling losses in any war we launch.
No credible military analysts agree with this assessment, and the peaceniks don't believe it either. After all, some of the same "activists" issued the same dire warnings about imminent disaster before the first Gulf War, not to mention our recent efforts in Afghanistan. According to any impartial analysis, the Iraqi military is vastly less powerful than it was at the time of the prior Gulf War, and our capabilities – including our mission-appropriate high tech weaponry – make us much better prepared than we were last time.
The truth is that for many of the critics of Bush administration policy, the real fear (as some of them actually admit) isn't a bloody American defeat but a swift, relatively painless U.S. victory. Their belief is that it's a bad thing for the world if America becomes even more powerful, more dominant, in the Middle East and around the globe. They're dead wrong, of course – all humanity – especially the 200 million Arabs who suffer under the fanatical oppression of their own regimes – will benefit from a sweeping U.S. victory and an increase in American influence.

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030220-89227416.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27773-2003Feb18.html

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Immorality on the March
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, February 19, 2003; Page A29

PARIS -- Last weekend, across Europe and America, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million people marched against a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All protests against war are ultimately ethical in nature, and Saturday's placard-wavers did not break with tradition: "Give Peace a Chance," "Make Tea, Not War," "Bush and Blair -- the Real War Criminals." These are statements of sentiment, not power politics, and the sentiment is, or is meant to be, a moral one.

Of course, not all the marchers can be counted as 99.9 percent pure moralists. Some -- perhaps many -- marched out of simple reactionary hatred: for the United States, for its power, for its paramount position in a hated world order. London's paleosocialist mayor, "Red Ken" Livingstone, a speaker at that city's massive demo, comes to mind. His enlightened argument against war consisted chiefly of calling George W. Bush "a lackey of the oil industry," "a coward" and "this creature."

But doubtless, hundreds of thousands of marchers -- and many more millions who did not march -- believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, that "war is always the worst answer."

The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, at least as concerns Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the position of profound morality but one that stands in profound opposition to morality.

The situation with Iraq may be considered in three primary contexts, and in each, the true moral case is for war.

The first context considers the people of Iraq. There are 24 million of them, and they have been living (those who have not been slaughtered or forced into exile) for decades under one of the cruelest and bloodiest tyrannies on earth. It must be assumed that, being human, they would prefer to be rescued from a hell where more than a million lives have been sacrificed to the dreams of a megalomaniac, where rape is a sanctioned instrument of state policy, and where the removal of the tongue is the prescribed punishment for uttering an offense against the Great Leader.

These people could be liberated from this horror -- relatively easily and quickly. There is every reason to think that a U.S. invasion would swiftly vanquish the few elite units that can be counted on to defend the detested Saddam Hussein; and that the victory would come at the cost of few -- likely hundreds, not thousands -- Iraqi and American lives. There is risk; and if things go terribly wrong it is a risk that could result in terrible suffering. But that is an equation that is present in any just war, and in this case any rational expectation has to consider the probable cost to humanity to be low and the probable benefit to be tremendous. To choose perpetuation of tyranny over rescue from tyranny, where rescue may be achieved, is immoral.

The second context considers the security of America, and indeed of the world, and here too morality is on the side of war. The great lesson of Sept. 11, 2001, is not that terrorism must be stopped -- an impossible dream -- but that state-sanctioned terrorism must be stopped. The support of a state -- even a weak and poor state -- offers the otherwise vulnerable enemies of the established order the protection they need in their attempts to destroy that order -- through the terrorists' only weapon, murder. To tolerate the perpetuation of state-sanctioned terror, such as Hussein's regime exemplifies, is to invite the next Sept. 11, and the next, and the next. Again, immoral.

The third context concerns the idea of order itself. The United Nations is a mightily flawed construct, but it exists; and it exists on the side (more or less) of law and humanity. Directly and unavoidably arising from the crisis with Iraq, the United Nations today stands on the precipice of permanent irrelevancy. If Iraq is allowed to defy the law, the United Nations will never recover, and the oppressed and weak of the world will lose even the limited protection of the myth of collective security. Immoral.

To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil.

This cannot be the moral position.

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My contention is that there shouldn’t be protests, but what are the marchers protesting? Capitalism? Corporate America? Oil control? This is not anti-war, it is anti-constitution.

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As friend of mine likes to quote Richard Rorty, "I'm not sure that any of this is relevant."

I'm not sure where you're going with this SeanG, it seems like you really want us to believe that anti-war protestors should be lumped with communists and should also be considered immoral? I don't get it. It's just not true. I'm sure there are communists who are anti-war, as there are democrats, republicans, socialists and everybody has an agenda! There are probably even moral people in all those parties and some are for war and others are not.

Why the anti-constituion notion? The constitution is not infallible, our own elected government has found the need on several occasions to offer and pass amendments. It's DEMOCRACY. If an anti-war protest is lead by a group of environmentalists, so what? republicans, so what? The point is that we all are supposed to have a voice in a democracy. Communism has some good ideas, its just another imperfect system, but I don't see the necessity in pointing out who is who in the millions of protestors of war?

†††"To have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity's claim upon him." – S. Kierkegaard

“Since the inspectors were in Iraq from 1992 to 1998, and Clinton said that Iraq was still building weapons of mass destruction, why do you think more inspections would help given that they were in the country for 6 years?”

“You just said Saddam was an evil tyrant, with that in mind, how would you deal with Saddam Hussein?”

“How long should the inspectors be given to accomplish the job?”

“We should talk to him, maybe we can talk him into complying…”

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government…”

James Madison (fourth President, co-author of the Federalist Papers and the “father” of the Constitution) – “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general; been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

John Adams (American political philosopher, first vice President and second President) – “Remember, democracy never lasts long. it soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

Benjamin Rush (signer of the Declaration) – “A simple democracy… is one of the greatest of evils.”

Fisher Ames (American political thinker and leader of the federalists [he entered Harvard at twelve and graduated by sixteen], author of the House language for the First Amendment) – “A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will provide an eruption and carry desolation in their way.” - “The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness [excessive license] which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.”

Governor Morris (signer and penman of the Constitution) – “We have seen the tumult of democracy terminate… as [it has] everywhere terminated, in despotism…. Democracy! Savage and wild. Thou who wouldst bring down the virtuous and wise to thy level of folly and guilt.”

John Quincy Adams (sixth President, son of John Adams [see above]) – “The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.”

Noah Webster (American educator and journalist as well as publishing the first dictionary) – “In democracy… there are commonly tumults and disorders….. therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”

John Witherspoon (signer of the Declaration of Independence) – “Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”

Zephaniah Swift (author of America’s first legal text) – “It may generally be remarked that the more a government [or state] resembles a pure democracy the more they abound with disorder and confusion.”

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong In the Cold War and Still Blame America First
This book is a list of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric by liberals during the Cold War. And that today’s left is no different… in fact, worse.

Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terorrism
One of the best books written on the moral reasons to enter into a war with another nation. A must read for those into political philosophy and theology.

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

I joined the Dartmouth Review for two reasons: one esthetic, the other intellectual. The first was that I found a style and a joie de vivre that I had not previously associated with conservatism. The best example of this was the paper’s mentor, Jeffry Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth and a senior editor of National Review. Hart was exactly the opposite of the conservative stereotype. He wore a long raccoon coat around campus, and he smoked long pipes with curvaceous stems. He sometimes wore buttons that said things such as “Soak the Poor.”… Even more outrageous than Hart’s attire and equipment was his mind. He was a walking producer of aphorisms. “When I heard about the French Revolution,” Hart once said, “my reaction was that I was against it.” During a trip to Washington D. C., a group of us saw an antiracism demonstration. One fiery-eyed black man wearing a Malcolm X shirt approached Hart. “Hey man,” he said, “Can I have two dollars for breakfast?” Hart replied, “Shame on you. You should be using the money to fight racism.”… In part because of his political incorrectness< Hart was one of the few people I have met whose jokes made me laugh out loud. His sense of humor can be illustrated by a contest that National Review privately held among its editors following the publication of a controversial Bill Buckley column on the issue of AIDS. People were debating whether AIDS victims should be quarantined as syphilis victims had been in the past. Buckley said no: The solution was to have a small tattoo on their rear ends to warn potential partners. Buckley’s suggestion caused a bit of a public stir, but folks at National Review were animated by a different question: What should the tattoo say? A contest was held, and when the entries were reviewed, the winner by unanimous consent was Hart. He suggested the lines emblazoned on the gates to Dante’s Inferno: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

“These incidents [giving examples earlier] point to the larger dilemma facing conservative students in a liberal culture. The dilemma can be stated this way. Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But what if the existing society is liberal? What if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? [As this topic has shown.] It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means the conservative must stop being conservative. More precisely, he must be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical.”

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

“If an anti-war protest is lead by a group of environmentalists, so what? republicans, so what?”

As far as “soap boxes” go, the same could be said about how the school teaches environmentalism. This is another extremely radical view that is taught “as if” it is mainstream. I am only making a point here, the books your school supplies and how the course is taught is in direct opposition to the facts… to quote the co-founder of Green Peace, Dr Patrick Moore:

“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology. At the same time that business and government are embracing public participation and inclusiveness, many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.”

A few more examples to make the point:

“There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere or disruption of the Earth's climate.” - (Oregon Petition, from the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, signed by over 17,000 international scientists including more than 2000 of the world's leading climatologists, meteorologists and planetary / atmospheric scientists.)

“There is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming of the past century. We are disturbed that activists, anxious to stop energy and economic growth, are pushing ahead with drastic policies without taking notice of recent changes in the underlying science” - (Statement of Principle, signed by 55 of the world's leading atmospheric scientists, issued prior to the Rio Summit 1992.)

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

“What's so wrong with just having a PERMANENT U.N. inspection crew over there?…. If we're really worried about this, let[’]s double the numbers, triple the numbers, whatever.”

“Why do we have to think of this as a ‘job’ that has to have a time limit?”

“… picture the young Iraqi soldiers, and the mothers and fathers of those soliders [soldiers], and little Iraqi kids... and if there's ANY WAY to avoid killing them, I'd rather do that.”

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

(For those who missed the point, ANSWER is a front group for a self-avowed Marxist organization, and it is ANSWER who organized the march on Washington. And the article speaking of the importance of leaders is as follows: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=6182 )

"I quote others only the better to express myself."

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…. According to the latest issue of G2 Bulletin, Iraq's own reports to the United Nations Security Council show that German firms made up the bulk of suppliers for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

"Even while playing the role of peacemaker looking only for solid proof of arms violations by Iraq, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder knows the truth – that he and his country have provided much of the equipment and expertise Iraq has needed to reinvigorate its efforts to build weapons of mass destruction," the newsletter reports.

The German intelligence agency BND is believed to have served as a silent partner in a Hamburg front company, Water Engineering Trading or WET, which facilitated the export of materiel needed for such arms, the report says. Half of the precursor materials and a majority of the tools and the technology for their conversion into weapons were sold to Iraq by German firms -- both prior to and after the 1991 Gulf War.

The German firm Preussag is the leading supplier of chemical agents and production equipment to Iraq, according to documents turned over to the U.N. by Baghdad. Preussag is a subsidiary of Europe's largest travel agent and tour operator TUI. It is also a company that has been very supportive of Schroeder. In early 1998, when Schroeder was running for re-election as prime minister of the state of Lower Saxony, he had the state buy 51 percent of Preussag's troubled steel division to the tune of $500 million, claiming that 12,000 jobs were at stake. Schroeder went on to win the crucial election, setting him up to become chancellor.

Included on the Iraqi suppliers' lists are other German corporate names: Hoechst, Daimler-Benz, Siemens, Kloeckner, Carl Zeiss, Schott Glas, Karl Kolb-Pilot Plant and WTB (Walter Thosti Boswau). The WTB undertaking was supported by a credit guarantee for several hundred million German marks by Hermes, a German government export and credit insurer. Rhein-Bayern supplied Iraq with eight mobile toxicological labs housed in sand-colored, camouflage-painted Magirus trucks.

Germany may be the biggest offender in Europe, but it is not alone as a weapons supplier to Iraq. Western intelligence sources marked more than 20 countries as "Iraqi arms embargo busters" and the list could be longer, according to G2. The suppliers have been using mainly Syrian or Lebanese ports as ways for passage to Iraq….

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"I quote others only the better to express myself."