A base for the corruption of democracy
By Scott Ritter

05/34/05 "Aljazeera" - - As the honeymoon period of the much-hyped 30 January elections in Iraq comes to an end amid the explosions of car bombs and continuous US military action, the harsh reality that these elections have failed to produce a government capable of governing, let alone govern in a fashion that resembles any notion of what a democracy should look like, comes crashing home.

The purple finger revolution of January 2005 has proved only one thing: that the US media is capable of building something out of nothing.

Any informed observer of Iraq could have predicted the failure of the elections to produce any viable result; Iraq as a nation state was simply too deeply fractured for a process sponsored by an illegitimate military occupier to succeed.

But one doesn't need to be an expert on Iraq to have figured this out.

The simple fact is that one cannot construct something viable when the foundation one seeks to build on is a corrupt one.

A corrupt foundation guarantees one thing only - that what is sought to be built will eventually collapse because of its own inherent weakness.

The United States claims to be trying to help Iraq build a functioning and viable democracy, but the foundation of any such government will by necessity be based on the nature of American involvement in Iraq.

This involvement has been disingenuous, dishonest, and dishonourable from the start.

This is the main reason I have given in the past as to why America lost the war the moment we crossed the border into Iraq in March 2003.

Nothing the US military did, or does, after that event matters, since the foundation the Bush administration laid for its activity was a corrupt one, based upon the lie of weapons of mass destruction, bullet-proof Iraqi connections with al-Qaida, and the falsehood of American diplomacy vis-a-vis the United Nations.

The Bush administration continues to proclaim that the war with Iraq was an inevitable result of Saddam Hussein's record of non-compliance with Iraq's UN-mandated obligation to disarm.

The Bush administration continues to mock international law by claiming that UN Security Council resolution 1441, passed in November 2002, legitimised its decision to invade.

But there are two problems with this line of thought. First, resolution 1441 did not authorise military action; every nation except the United States believed a second resolution was required before military action could be undertaken (even Great Britain took this stance, before Bush's loyal poodle, Tony Blair, had his Attorney General draft a new legal finding on the eve of war).

Second, and most important, Iraq did not violate resolution 1441. The record is clear - Iraq permitted unfettered access to all sites required by the UN weapons inspectors, and the declaration submitted by Iraq in December 2002 (which was dismissed by Colin Powell and Condi Rice as consisting of nothing but lies) was in fact the truth.

To date not a single fact of substance contained in the Iraqi declaration has been shown false, unlike the totality of the presentation made by Colin Powell before the Security Council on 5 February 2003.

There were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) left in Iraq, something the CIA reluctantly admits today.

In fact, there had been no WMD in Iraq since the summer of 1991, something the Iraqis had said all along.>>>continued

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