GEORGE W. BUSH stood before the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on September 12 as judge, jury and would-be executioner of Iraq. He threatened more war against a country already devastated by 12 years of bombs and sanctions--unless Iraq met the conditions of previous UN resolutions, plus six other requirements that Bush added for the occasion.

Even after Iraq announced earlier this week that it would accept UN weapons inspectors unconditionally, the White House was still talking tough. The offer on inspectors may slow down the U.S. timetable, but Bush made it clear to the General Assembly that war is coming.

"It's an open-and-shut case," an unnamed U.S. official told the Boston Globe. "By going to the United Nations, we're trying to make people more comfortable with what we are trying to do, and that is to move forward toward a military engagement. We're doing things just to make people in the international community feel better."

Washington's cynical war makers and their mainstream media mouthpieces don't care that Bush's "case" for war is built on a mountain of lies. Even hawkish military analyst Anthony Cordesman had to admit that the document released by the White House to back up its claims about Iraq is a joke. "This is a glorified press release that doesn't come close to the information the U.S. government made available on Soviet military power when we were trying to explain the Cold War," Cordesman said. "It's clumsy and shallow… As an overall grade, I'd give it a D-minus."

After trying and failing many times to link Iraq to last year's September 11 attacks, the administration doesn't even try anymore. Instead, we hear the familiar charges that Saddam "gassed his own people" and "used weapons of mass destruction."

These charges are true--but they omit the fact that Saddam was Washington's ally when he committed these atrocities. In fact, during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, the U.S. government's special envoy to the Iraqi regime was none other than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The U.S. provided Saddam with satellite intelligence to help him use his "weapons of mass destruction" against Iranian troops.

Don't expect the Bush administration's axis of liars to come clean about their complicity with Saddam. The White House took advantage of September 11 last year to move ahead on its plans to redraw the map of the Middle East to suit U.S. interests.

Diplomatic tricks and congressional shenanigans aside, the Bush gang is driving toward a horrific war in Iraq. We need to expose their lies--and mobilize to stop them.

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