When Richard Butler, head of the first U.N. weapons inspections team in Iraq, said in 1997 that "Truth in some cultures is kind of what you can get away with saying," he was referring to the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. However, as Milan Rai shows in "War Plan Iraq," Butler could equally have been describing the West.
While the United States, supported by Britain, founds its case for invading Iraq on the need to disarm Hussein, Rai argues in this book that ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction has never been the priority. Rather, U.S. and British foreign policy has focused on ousting Hussein, a goal that fatally undermined the first round of weapons inspections between 1991-98, hampers disarmament efforts to this day, and has unnecessarily prolonged economic sanctions exacting a terrible toll on Iraq's people.
Rai, author of a book on the politics of U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky and cofounder of the British antiwar group Arrow, has been hailed as "one of the wisest war resisters of our time," and his commitment to informed dissent shines through in the pages of this thoroughly researched account. Based on reports Rai first produced for Arrow, the book places the planned attack on Iraq within the wider context of the Bush administration's so-called war on terror, and includes comments from the relatives of Sept. 11 victims and a thought-provoking essay by Chomsky.