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The Drumbeat for War Gets Louder
By Gabrielle Bernard, Winsted
George W. Bush, who stole the 2000 presidential election, is about to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. We are quite good at overthrowing governments. We've been doing it for a very long time. A hundred years ago, after a lengthy, ferocious war (denounced by Mark Twain), the U.S. overthrew the government of the Philippines; in 1953, the democratically elected government of Iran was overthrown; in 1954, Guatemala; 1968, Chile; in the ‘60s, the government of Greece; in the ‘70s, East Timor; in the 1980s, Nicaragua. Democracy never entered into it. The U.S. set up corrupt thugs (the military junta in Greece; Suharto in Indonesia) who would not interfere with American economic interests and who proceeded to bleed their countries dry.
Iraq is a good case in point. It was one of the more successful Arab states—highly secularized, with advanced education for women and men, universal health care, a sophisticated infrastructure—and, of course, oil. Saddam Hussein was the golden boy of the Reagan foreign policy. To recall the immortal words of another president: "It was clear he was a bastard, but he was 'our' bastard."
After the overthrow of our protégé, the Shah of Iran, and the installation of the glowering, woman-hating, American-hating Ayatollah Khomeini and the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran, the U.S. welcomed Iraq's assault on Iran. The Reagan administration not only provided satellite reconnaissance photos of Iranian installations and deployments, but also, according to the New York Times, knew about and gave tacit approval for the use of poison gas against Iranians and Iraqi citizens (the Kurds). To complicate the sheer nuttiness of what passes for American foreign policy, the Reagan administration was at the same time selling arms to Iran and using the profits to support death squads in Central America.
Suddenly, in 1991, Saddam Hussein moved against the oil fields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; he became enemy number one. He continued to be a bastard, but he was no longer "ours." Because of the embargo undertaken to punish this nasty little man, thousands of Iraqi children have died and are dying of malnutrition and lack of medical supplies. The bombings have never stopped. The country is a basket case. Contrary to American media coverage, the UN weapons inspections team was doing a superb job. They were not thrown out by Hussein. They were pulled out by the U.S. when it was discovered they were being used as a front for American espionage.
Could we expect the help of a Northern Alliance-type of uprising in Iraq? Iraq is a bizarre geographic entity cobbled together by the British and the French when the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I. In the north are large, colorful, warring groups of Kurds who want to annex the Kurdish section of Turkey and set up their own state. In the south are mainly Shiites, an Islamic sect with religious and cultural links to Iran. The rest are the mainstream Moslems, the Sunni. These groups loathe one another. Even if there were a sane male ruler to replace Saddam (which is doubtful), the country could disintegrate.
Do we have any allies? George Bush can probably browbeat quite a few countries into giving formal approval, but they are likely to give little in terms of troops and cold cash. Russia, the European Union (especially Germany and France) and all of the Arab states think the idea of an unprovoked attack is immoral, dumb and likely to unleash, in the worlds of the Arab summit, "the gates of hell" in an already volatile Middle East. That, in turn, will trigger a worldwide oil crisis. But most persuasive is the voice of Nelson Mandela, a man of exquisite moral courage who has faced his share of bullies; he is aghast at the arrogance of such naked aggression. One thing is certain: an attack on Iraq such as that suggested by George Bush strikes at the heart of international law—the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Trials, the United Nations Charter.
George W. Bush maintains that he has secret evidence of imminent danger from Iraq, even though recent terrorist attacks are linked to Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Egypt. Where have we heard this before? In 1964 Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson license to kill and destroy at will in Vietnam. We now know that the resolution was a tissue of lies. The Pentagon Papers later proved that there was no secret danger or knowledge, only leaders who couldn't admit they were wrong and didn't know how to stop the killing. (We should remember that the current man in the White House chose to sit out the Vietnam War while making sporadic appearances in the National Guard.)
We Americans have a schizoid approach to our country. One the one hand, we want to be "the city on the hill," a beacon of freedom, a refuge for the poor and huddled masses. In short, we want to be admired and loved. But we also believe in the slogan, "My country right or wrong." We profess that countries have no morality, only interests; and that we are entitled to get what we want when we want it. The trouble with that kind of satisfying jingoism is that we end up alone and very, very vulnerable. That is the dilemma George W. Bush is walking into.
The crux of the Middle East problem is not Saddam Hussein or even Israel. It is America's addiction to oil. What American president (certainly not this one, with his links to Big Oil) would have the courage to say to the American people: "If you really want to topple Saddam Hussein, give up your gas-guzzling pickup trucks, SUVs and snowmobiles"? Could we muster such patriotism?
Meanwhile, as the drumbeat for war gets louder, Osama bin Laden has not been caught ("dead or alive"); the Al Qaeda network, at least financially, is alive and well; Afghanistan seems to be slipping back into its accustomed anarchy; the U.S. economy is faltering; and Wall Street continues to have a nervous breakdown.
I always cringe when politicians rant about "the greatest, most powerful country in the world." (What must the Danes and Norwegians think when they hear this kind of adolescent bragging?) I'd like to live in the sanest, most decent country in the world.
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