RULE BY SECRECY, JIM MARRS

dropped to $3.03 a share. The tardy SEC records revealed that by some good fortune, Bush had sold 66 percent of his Harken stock on June 22, 1990—just weeks prior to Iraq's invasion—for the top-dollar price of $4.00 a share, netting him $848,560. Despite locating productive wells in South America, the drop in oil prices in early 1999 caused Harken stock to remain about $4.00 per share.

Stock purchases, oil and grain deals, arms sales, loans and guarantees, the weakening of the Arabs to benefit Israel, the movement toward a global army and government created a mind-numbing entanglement. "It is doubtful whether the 'real' reasons why the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf will ever emerge," wrore Vankin and Whaley. "Unlike in Vietnam, where the ambiguous outcome elicited natural suspicions, in the Gulf the decisiveness of victory has buried the reality deeper than any Iraqi or American soldier who went to a sandy grave."

The duplicity didn't end with the fighting. Throughout the Clinton administration there have been periodic air forays into Iraq, ostensibly to punish Saddam for preventing UN inspection of his development centers for biological and nuclear weaponry. However, this time there was a big difference—probing questions were taised by both a suspicious public and a few less timid members of the news media.

Following missile and bombing strikes in late 1998, a letter writer to a national news magazine asked, "By using weapons of mass destruction to deter Iraq from manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, would America cot be doing the very thing we're warning Iraq not to do?" Others raised the question of why we attacked Iraq for refusing UN inspection of its sensitive military installations when President Clinton also had refused to allow such inspections in the United States—a refusal greeted with general approval by the public.

Scott Ritter, a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) created to locate and eliminate Saddam Hussein's secret weapons caches, resigned in August of 1998 and accused the U.S. government of using the commission to justify an attack on Iraq. Ritter said that before his resignation he disbelieved Baghdad's minister of defense when he told him the UNSCOM team was being used to "provoke a crisis," but he slowly came to agree with the charge. Hitter's superiors scoffed at the allegation, claiming Ritter's knowledge of the situation was "limited."