IRAQ, HISTORY REPORT

Dutch Government Misrepresented Case for Iraq War

By NRC Handelsblad Staff

dpa

Willibrord Davids, a former president of the Dutch Supreme Court, presents the Iraq report to Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende on Tuesday.

The Dutch government offered the US "political support" for its 2003 invasion of Iraq. A new report has found, however, that cabinet ministers were less then truthful in defending that stance before parliament.

A new report on the Dutch government's political support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has found that cabinet ministers repeatedly cited justifications for the war which they should have known to be false. The study, however, found no evidence that Holland provided clandestine military support of the invasion, as has often been alleged.

The report, which took several months to compile, was created by a special committee of inquiry set up by Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende. The committee was chaired by retired Dutch Supreme Court justice Willibrord Davids. The report, which features a lengthy English-language summary (English begins on page 519), was presented to Balkenende on Tuesday.

In 2003, a compromise forged by a caretaker government composed of the Christian Democrats and right wing parties saw the Dutch government supporting the American-led invasion of Iraq "politically but not militarily." The Netherlands did offer military support in the occupation of Iraq, stationing more than 1,000 troops in the southern Al-Muthanna province from 2003 to 2005. The Dutch also deployed Patriot missile launchers in eastern Turkey well before the war. The government labelled these weapons "defensive."

'No Substantial Exchange'

Since then, the call for a public inquiry into the Dutch support of the Iraq invasion has grown louder, with the matter having become a contested issue in 2006 parliamentary elections. Prime Minister Balkenende opposed an inquiry for years. But in February 2009 he pre-empted his critics by establishing an inquiry committee himself.

The report was vehemently critical of the manner in which the government defended its position with regard to the invasion. The Dutch cabinet was "so determined" to retain its positions on the matter that "no substantial exchange of ideas between government and parliament with regard to the policy on Iraq" ever took place.

The Dutch government was less than honest in making its case for the Iraq war, the report notes. For one, the committee found the government justification for the invasion "to some extent disingenuous" -- particularly its insistence that the dismantling of weapons of mass destruction stockpiles was the main reason for the Anglo-American invasion, long after it had learned that regime change was the most important goal. Davids and his fellow committee members also noted that Dutch intelligence agencies mainly sourced their information from foreign colleagues, but presented a "more nuanced" picture to the Dutch government. Dutch ministers, however, failed to adequately communicate these nuances to parliament, the report found.

A Miscommunication

The report contested the defensive nature of the Patriot missile launchers stationed near the Iraq border, noting that their deployment without parliamentary consent was a violation of constitutional law.

According to the committee, the US benefitted from Dutch political support for the mission. Even though the Netherlands was keen to maintain a clear division between political and military support, "this distinction was not always made by the US," the report notes. In 2003, the Netherlands even ended up on a document released by the US government, listing the so-called "coalition of the willing" that supported the Iraq invasion. A miscommunication with the Dutch ambassador to the US was to blame, the report said.

The presence of a Dutch officer at a press conference held by the American General Tommy Franks in Qatar on March 22, 2003 was similarly explained away as a "misunderstanding."

Because the committee was instituted by Prime Minister Balkenende, it is regarded with suspicion by some. Davids said at a press conference on Thursday that his committee had not been established in order to "whitewash" the run-up to the invasion. "No undue influence or pressure was exerted," he said.

Why I Threw The Shoe

By Muntazer al-Zaidi

23 September, 2009 - The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/17/why-i-threw-shoe-bush

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I traveled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.v