January 8, 2003 11:36

Celebrities Should Do Their Homework on Iraq

By Tom Knowlton

The hottest selling gift in Hollywood the past holiday season must have been T-shirts reading, "I am not a politician, but I play one on TV."

For starters, it seems almost impossible to turn on the television and not come across an Arab apologist, misinformed media pundit, or - for some inexplicable reason, Hollywood celebrity - claiming that American action against Iraq is "all about oil."

The most prolific talking heads spreading this misinformation are actors Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, and Susan Sarandon, who during an October 2002 antiwar rally in New York City characterized the proposed military action in Iraq as a "war for oil."

However, I have yet to hear any of these "war for oil" accusers even attempt to explain why we did not take the oil in March of 1991. With the Iraqi military in complete disarray, U.S. forces were in control of Kuwait and were one quick tank thrust away from Baghdad and the world's second largest oil reserve.

It seems highly implausible to the rational mind that the United States would expend $80 billion dollars in 1991, but put off plans of making a run for the oil for more than a decade.

Moreover, a U.S.-Iraqi war in 2003 would likely result in a spike in oil prices akin to the over $40-per-barrel prices we experienced in 1991. Even a short-term rise in oil prices would trim corporate benefits, stymie economic growth and further hobble the airline and shipping industry. This is not exactly the recipe for economic imperialism that the Hollywood jet set are making the impending war out to be.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that the cost of a war with Iraq would amount to approximately $9-13 billion to initially deploy our forces, another $6-9 billion per month to fight the war, $5-7 billion to return our forces home, and $1-4 billion per month to temporarily occupy Iraq.

Those figures do not take into account the escalated costs that would be incurred if Saddam were to employ chemical and/or biological weapons, or if U.S. forces become involved in protracted urban warfare. Neither does it take into account the cost of rebuilding damage to the Iraqi infrastructure.

The CBO points out that Iraq's approximately daily production rate of 2.8 million barrels is near the country's peak sustainable production. Moreover, nearly 80 percent of Iraq's oil production is used to purchase imports under the United Nations Oil for Food Program or for domestic consumption. The only realistic margin for profit growth would come from the estimated 400,000 barrels per day that Saddam Hussein allegedly has smuggled out of Iraq to fund purchases in violation of United Nations sanctions. Legitimizing that production would only amount to approximately $3 billion in revenues per year.

So, even the ill-informed but opinionated "Hollywood elite" must recognize the implausibility of a "war for oil" scenario.

Second, in December 2002, former "M*A*S*H" star Mike Farrell organized 100 Hollywood personas into a group called Artists United to Win Without War. The group sent a letter to President Bush wherein all 100 signatories agreed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction, but also warned that "war talk in Washington is alarming and unnecessary."

While I applaud the Artists United to Win Without War's recognition of that fact that it is a dangerous state of affairs for Saddam Hussein to possess weapons of mass destruction, the group failed to offer a viable alternative solution to military action aimed at toppling the Iraqi regime. Its apparent reliance upon the success and efficiency of United Nations weapons inspections shows an utter lack of comprehension at the history of failure this process has experienced since the close of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Charles Duefler, who served as the deputy executive chairman of UNSCOM from 1993 to 2000, admits that the premise of weapons inspections was that "Iraq would value the ability to export oil and engage in normal commerce more than it valued weapons of mass destruction capability - an assumption that turned out to be dead wrong. Discussions with senior Iraqi officials eventually revealed the enormous importance the regime attached to these weapons."

"Nothing in the U.N. resolutions changed that judgment by Iraq," Duelfer added. "If anything, the lesson Baghdad learned from the Gulf War is that such weapons - especially nuclear weapons - are even more important than they had thought. Senior Iraqis privately acknowledged that it had been a mistake to invade Kuwait before successfully building a nuclear weapon. They are convinced the outcome of the war would have been radically different if Washington had had to consider an Iraqi nuclear capability."

Saddam has not only continued to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, but has shown little reservation about employing them against soldiers and civilians alike. In 1988, Iraq launched deadly poison gas attacks against both the Iranian military on the al Fao Peninsula and the Kurdish town of Halabja (that claimed over 5,000 civilian lives).

Saddam and the ruling Ba'ath party have enforced their iron-fisted rule through assassination, kidnapping, torture and murder. Mass executions are regularly carried out during Iraqi "prison cleansings," and the Iraqi military has conducted genocidal campaigns against the al-Dulaym tribe in 1995 and marsh Arabs in 1997. The 1988 Anfal campaign in northern Iraq alone resulted in the massacre of over 100,000 Kurds.

International authorities have suspected Saddam's agents are behind the assassination of several Iraqi dissidents in Europe and Asia, as well as the attempted assassination of former President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993.

The Artists United to Win Without War group fails to realistically understand that Saddam Hussein has achieved and maintained power solely through brute force. Saddam's total disregard for international law and national sovereignty is clearly evidenced by his 1990 invasion of Kuwait and ill-fated attempt to conquer areas of Iran a decade earlier. Moreover, he has repeatedly and consistently violated the terms of the U.N. resolutions that he agreed to in ending the 1991 Gulf War. While sanctions and embargos will bring greater hardship on the people of Iraq, they will never effectively alter the course of the Iraqi tyrant's ruling elite.

Third, the most vocal and visible celebrity to challenge the legitimacy of a war against Iraq is actor Sean Penn. Penn, who took out a $56,000 advertisement in The Washington Post in October 2002 denouncing the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, visited Iraq two months later to assess firsthand the situation. The visit was organized by the Institute of Public Accuracy, a U.S. group of policy analysts.

However, what was noticeably omitted from Penn's itinerary was a visit to Iraq's prisoner of war camps.

While the thought of keeping hostages for decades seems almost inconceivable to Americans, Iraq has a history of doing exactly that.

In April 1998, Iraq released an Iranian pilot, Hossein Lashgari, whose plane had been shot down in southern Iraq on Sept. 18, 1980 during the Iran-Iraq war. Although the Iran-Iraq War ended almost 15 years ago, several thousand Iranian prisoners of war are still held captive in Iraq. Likewise, over 600 Kuwaiti prisoners of war are still missing and believed held in Iraq over a decade after the close of the Gulf War in 1991.

Several political psychologists have attributed this horrific practice to Saddam Hussein's propensity for collecting "trophies."

During Penn's "factfinding" mission to Iraq, he failed to even broach the topic of missing U.S. Navy pilot Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, during his conversations with highly level Iraqi officials including Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.

Speicher's F/A-18 Hornet was brought down over western Iraq during a mission on the first night of the U.S. air campaign on Jan. 17, 1991. He remains the only U.S. serviceman lost over land whose status remains in dispute.

An Iraqi defector claimed in 1999 that during the Gulf War he was ordered to pick up a U.S. pilot captured by villagers in western-central Iraq and turn him over to military authorities in Baghdad. The defector stated that the pilot was unhurt, and he identified Speicher's picture from a lineup of photos and passed several lie detector tests on the matter.

On Jan. 11, 2001 the Navy changed Speicher's status from "Killed In Action - Body Not Recovered" to "Missing In Action."

In March 2001, an unclassified summary of the "Intelligence Community Assessment of the Lieutenant Commander Speicher Case" produced at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence indicated that a preponderance of the evidence pointed not only to that fact that Speicher survived the downing of his plane, but that he was captured alive by Iraq.

While Sean Penn lounged in the posh Al-Rashid Hotel as a guest of the Iraqi regime, Capt. Speicher and several thousand Kuwaiti and Iranian "trophies" spent yet another night in decidedly less comfort.

Our celebrities need to realize that there is more to world events than what makes it into the scripts of today's movies and television shows. They have the power to greatly influence public opinion, and thus the responsibility to be better educated on world events before weighing in on affairs of state.

Tom Knowlton is a Contributing Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at TKnowltonDW@aol.com.