Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Verges

Verges’s line is less a claim than a trap: it dares the listener to accept the comfortable post-9/11 morality play while quietly swapping the roles. The phrase “mass destructive weapons” (clumsy on purpose or in translation) lands like an indictment in bureaucratic language, forcing the topic away from abstract evil and toward invoices, export licenses, and signatures. By stacking “sale… bargain… market,” he drags war down from ideology into commerce. It’s not just that weapons existed; it’s that they moved through a familiar supply chain, and respectable hands made money or policy off it.

The specific intent is courtroom-grade reversal. Verges, famous for the “rupture” strategy, isn’t trying to win consensus; he’s trying to contaminate the prosecution’s moral purity. Naming Rumsfeld personalizes what governments prefer to keep institutional. “One of the man responsible” is a deliberate narrowing: not “America did this,” but “a decision-maker did,” making accountability legible and politically radioactive.

Subtext: if the U.S. helped arm Saddam at one moment and then used Iraqi weaponization as moral justification later, the narrative isn’t justice; it’s opportunism. The quote gestures at the long shadow of U.S.-Iraq relations during the Iran-Iraq war era, when Western support and toleration lubricated Baghdad’s military capacity. Verges’s cynicism isn’t abstract anti-Americanism; it’s a prosecutorial move against selective outrage, arguing that the “war on weapons” was always also a war of convenient amnesia.