BY U.S. SENATOR ROBERT BYRD
The Truth Will Emerge
W
e believe this recent speech by
Sen. Robert Byrd is so important
that we offer it in full to
our readers. Senior member of
the U.S. Senate, Byrd is the
85-year-old
Democrat
from West Virginia who
continues to speak with
passion against the poli-
cies of the Bush admin-
istration. His remarks
are rarely covered in the
mainstream media. This
speech was given on the
Senate floor May 21, 2003.
“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers.”
Truth has a way of asserting itself despite
all attempts to obscure it. Distortion only
serves to derail it for a time. No matter to
what lengths we humans may go to obfuscate
facts or delude our fellows, truth has a way of
squeezing out through the cracks, eventually.
But the danger is that at some point it may
no longer matter. The danger is that damage
is done before the truth is widely realized.
The reality is that, sometimes, it is easier to
ignore uncomfortable facts and go along with
whatever distortion is currently in vogue. We
see a lot of this today in politics. I see a lot of
it — more than I would ever have believed —
right on this Senate Floor.
Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears
to this senator that the American people may
have been lured into accepting the unpro-
voked invasion of a sovereign nation, in vio-
lation of long-standing International law,
under false premises. There is ample evi-
dence that the horrific events of Sept. 11 have
been carefully manipulated to switch public
focus from Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda
who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, to
Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to
our invasion of Iraq featured the president
and members of his cabinet invoking
every frightening image they
could conjure, from mush-
room clouds, to buried
caches of germ warfare, to
drones poised to deliver
germ laden death in our
major cities. We were
treated to a heavy dose of
overstatement concerning
Saddam Hussein’s direct
threat to our freedoms. The
tactic was guaranteed to pro-
voke a sure reaction from a nation
still suffering from a combination of post
traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the
attacks of 9/11. It was the exploitation of fear.
It was a placebo for the anger.
Since the war’s end, every subsequent rev-
elation which has seemed to refute the previ-
ous dire claims of the Bush administration has
been brushed aside. Instead of addressing the
contradictory evidence, the White House
come up missing.
The administration assured the U.S. pub-
lic and the world, over and over again, that an
attack was necessary to protect our people
and the world from terrorism. It assiduously
worked to alarm the public and blur the faces
of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
until they virtually became one.
What has become painfully clear in the af-
termath of war is that Iraq was no immediate
threat to the U.S. Ravaged by years of sanc-
tions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane against
us. Iraq’s threatening death-dealing fleet of
unmanned drones about which we heard so
much morphed into one prototype made of
plywood and string. Their missiles proved to
be outdated and of limited range. Their army
was quickly overwhelmed by our technology
and our well trained troops.
Presently our loyal military personnel
continue their mission of diligently searching
for WMD. They have so far turned up only
fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional
weapons, and the occasional buried swim-
ming pool. They are misused on such a mis-
sion and they continue to be at grave risk.
But, the Bush team’s extensive hype of
WMD in Iraq as justification for a preemp-
tive invasion has become more than embar-
the common people. In fact, if the situation in
Iraq is the result of “liberation,” we may have
set the cause of freedom back 200 years.
Despite our high-blown claims of a better
life for the Iraqi people, water is scarce and
often foul, electricity is a sometime thing,
food is in short supply, hospitals are stacked
with the wounded and maimed, historic treas-
ures of the region and of the Iraqi people have
been looted, and nuclear material may have
been disseminated to heaven knows where,
while U.S. troops, on orders, looked on and
guarded the oil supply.
Meanwhile, lucrative contracts to rebuild
Iraq’s infrastructure and refurbish its oil in-
dustry are awarded to administration cronies,
without benefit of competitive bidding, and
the U.S. steadfastly resists offers of U.N. as-
sistance to participate. Is there any wonder
that the real motives of the U.S. government
are the subject of worldwide speculation and
mistrust?
And in what may be the most damaging
development, the U.S. appears to be pushing
off Iraq’s clamor for self-government. Jay
Garner has been summarily replaced, and it is
becoming all too clear that the smiling face of
the U.S. as liberator is quickly assuming the
scowl of an occupier. The image of the boot
The American people unfortunately are used to political shading,
spin, and the usual chicanery they hear from public officials.
They patiently tolerate it up to a point. But there is a line.
deftly changes the subject. No weapons of
mass destruction have yet turned up, but we
are told that they will in time. Perhaps they yet
will. But, our costly and destructive bunker
busting attack on Iraq seems to have proven,
in the main, precisely the opposite of what we
were told was the urgent reason to go in. It
seems also to have, for the present, verified the
assertions of Hans Blix and the inspection
team he led, which President Bush and com-
pany so derided. As Blix always said, a lot of
time will be needed to find such weapons, if
they do, indeed, exist. Meanwhile bin Laden is
still on the loose and Saddam Hussein has
on the throat has replaced the beckoning hand
of freedom. Chaos and rioting only exacer-
bate that image, as U.S. soldiers try to sustain
order in a land ravaged by poverty and dis-
ease. “Regime change” in Iraq has so far
meant anarchy, curbed only by an occupying
military force and a U.S. administrative pres-
ence that is evasive about if and when it in-
tends to depart.
Democracy and freedom cannot be force
fed at the point of an occupier’s gun. To think
otherwise is folly. One has to stop and pon-
der. How could we have been so impossibly
naive? How could we expect to easily plant a
rassing. It has raised serious questions about
prevarication and the reckless use of power.
Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were
countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed
when war was not really necessary? Was the
American public deliberately misled? Was
the world?
What makes me cringe even more is the
continued claim that we are “liberators.” The
facts don’t seem to support the label we have
so euphemistically attached to ourselves. True,
we have unseated a brutal, despicable despot,
but “liberation” implies the follow-up of free-
dom, self-determination and a better life for
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