Again, war of aggression began with lies -- Akahata editorial, July 9

Three months have passed since the U.S. invasion led to a downfall of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad and the country came under the rule of occupation forces.

On the ground, however, U.S. forces are facing attacks day after day and are apparently getting bogged down in a quagmire.

The U.S. and British allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been found to be based on documents that were either fake or falsified, adding fuel to the suspicions that the two powers started the war by lying to their citizens.

Revelations

The reason the United States and Britain gave for their invasion of Iraq was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But during the three months of the occupation, no WMDs have been found.

It has become clear that the arguments about threats from Iraq's WMDs have been either false or doctored.
The U.S. president in his State of the Union address said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Recently, the U.S. government was obliged to admit that it used doctored documents to support this argument.

In Britain, the foreign secretary as well as the prime minister's communications director has admitted that the dossier stating that Iraq obstructed the United Nations inspectors took the idea and words from a paper by a U.S. post-graduate student. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee report on the government's intelligence dossiers on Iraqi weapons programs stated that the action harmed the government's trustworthiness.

It was clear from the outset that the war on Iraq, which the United States and Britain started after their failure to obtain a U.N. Security Council approval, was illegitimate.

To invade another country without U.N. resolutions and occupy it militarily by bringing down its government is a war of aggression and war of conquest, which is outlawed in the modern world.

It is also unjustifiable for the United States to call its attack on Iraq "Operations Iraqi freedom" and assert that the attack was aimed at overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime. The war clearly reneges on the U.N. Charter establishing the principles of self-determination and equal sovereign rights of member states.

The war was illegitimate, so is the military occupation that followed the war.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 only requested the United States and Britain to be aware of their powers, responsibilities, and duties; it does not justify the occupation.

The U.S. president now says that the occupation will last longer. This is in violation of the UNSC resolution calling for "Reaffirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq," and "expressing resolve that the day when Iraqis govern themselves must come quickly."

The United States invaded Iraq for the stated purpose of overthrowing the regime. Then why didn't the United States withdraw its troops from Iraq to pave the way quickly for U.N.-led humanitarian reconstruction assistance?

History shows that most wars of aggression were launched under various false pretexts.

We know that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident was cooked up by the United States as a pretext for its bombing of North Vietnam and that in 1931 Japan produced the Liutiaohu incident that marked the start of Japan's all-out war of aggression against China.

It is quite natural for the people who fell victim to foreign wars of aggression followed by occupation to put up resistance.

For all this, does the government want to dispatch the SDF?

Note that the Koizumi Cabinet gave its support to the war the United States and Britain started against Iraq on the grounds that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and is now planning to send the SDF to assist in the military occupation of Iraq.

Japanese Communist Party Chair Shii Kazuo in his recent one-on-one debate with Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro quoted Koizumi's mail magazine as saying that "Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." Now, what Koizumi has claimed has proven to be groundless.

The need now is for the U.S. and British forces to immediately withdraw from Iraq and for the Koizumi Cabinet to stop its attempt to dispatch the SDF to Iraq. (end)