The closer war approaches the more intense Bush and Blair’s propaganda becomes. Bush, in his press conference last week, spoke as if the USA was under imminent threat of attack from Iraq that necessitated immediate pre-emptive measures.

"Third rate forgery"

Bush could only believe this if he has relapsed and started heavily drinking again. There is no way in which the Iraqi regime could launch a Pearl Harbour style attack and, if a September 11 style asymmetric assault was even attempted, the whole world knows that a devastating US retaliatory strike would swiftly follow.

This talk of threats is the necessary drumbeat needed to heighten tension and to present an imperialist war as a struggle for "peace and democracy".

A barrage of lies and half-truths is being laid down to clear the road to war. But sometimes the war propagandists come unstuck. Last week’s report to the UN Security Council by the IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei contained the devastating judgement that documents provided by the British and US governments that purported to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger were "not authentic". In the words of another IAEA official "they were fabricated", and as the German Süddeutsche Zeitung commented they were a "third rate forgery". Apparently the forged signatures did not even match the names at the top of the documents!

Now this was not an accidental slip by Bush and Blair. These documents formed a key part of the British government’s 55 page September 2002 "report" claiming that the Iraqi regime was continuing to attempt to get weapons of mass destruction. On the basis of these forgeries the British government wrote that since 1998, "Iraq has sought the supply of significant supplies of uranium from Africa".

Now that it has been exposed that Bush and Blair relied upon fake documents to claim that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons programme, how can any of the US or British government’s allegations be taken at face value? In the event of a war how can any "discoveries" made in Iraq by the US and Britain be trusted?

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