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The First Casualty of War
By Ed Patterson, Torrington
It is with horror and astonishment that I hear and see so many shortsighted jingoistic proponents of war and all its gore. Jingoes, who have obviously never cast a critical eye on past and current U.S. foreign policies and who have never scraped past the surface of history prepared for the gullible who merely believe what they are told—whether from modern church pulpits replete with their newly minted gold-fringed military flags, or from government training facilities euphemistically termed "public schools"—are helping to propel this nation into the never-ending war whose fallout will soon impact every area of our lives and freedoms, none for the better.
Truth is always the first casualty of war. The never-ending war we are called to wage is no exception. Of course those free-thinking individuals who dare to question government "policy" are deemed heretics and terrorists. The Bush dichotomy states, "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists." As Ashcroft said, "… if you speak about the phantom of lost liberty … if you fit this description of a terrorist, fear the United States, for you will lose your liberty." (emphasis his) According to these "servants" of the people, any form of thought that does not line up with government policy is terrorism. The only truth is their truth, all else is thought crime. This is a mark of a dictatorship, not a democracy. Indeed, truth is the first casualty of war.
So now we are told that we must invade Iraq in a war that has not ended since it began in 1991. This war that has resulted in over one million Iraqi casualties, over half of them children under five, and tens of thousands of Gulf War veterans affected by Gulf War illness. And Gulf War illness isn't restricted to only the veterans but has spread to members of their families and has resulted in a huge number of birth deformities. All truth, but it too is a casualty of America's latest holy war.
Countless times I have heard WWII referred to as if Saddam Hussein were a modern-day Hitler, despite the fact that unlike Hitler, Hussein has no navy nor even the means to move beyond his own borders. But here again, to question the actions of the government even in WWII is paramount to heresy. However, this is not about those intrepid souls who believed and still believe they fight to contain evil, but about those who give the orders from the safety of their Ivory Towers.
The truth is—and there is plenty of documentation—that F.D.R. not only knew of the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, but that he provoked that attack to sway a population that was dead set against entering another foreign war. So, rather than let two despicable despots go head to head and take each other out, we had to choose sides. And who did we choose as our ally, a despicable despot responsible for the murder of millions of people, or a despicable despot responsible for the murder of tens of millions of people? Then to top off the war, we dropped two atom bombs on civilian populations with the pretext of "saving millions of lives"—a simple answer for those who are unfamiliar with the facts of history, the truth be damned.
And what of the facts of our present involvement with Iraq during the never-ending war? Just as the administration knew of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor, did they know of Iraq's plan to invade Kuwait? Not only did they know, when confronted with the option by Saddam Hussein himself, Alice Glaspie, ambassador to Iraq, responded: "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America." On August 2, 1990—four days later—Saddam's massed troops, which our government knew about and addressed, invaded and occupied Kuwait. But this action by U.S. diplomats, which helped provide the pretext for the 1991 Gulf War, has been flushed down the memory hole.
So we are now told that we must defend ourselves from the Iraqi madman half a world away by attacking him before he attacks us while we keep our borders wide open. Even though Iraq is tightly boxed in, we must protect ourselves and the rest of the world from weapons of mass destruction—by invasion, and with the use of nuclear weapons, if need be. The administration need not worry about compromising national security by exposing the source of Saddam's WMDs. It is well documented that he acquired them from the world's largest supplier (greater than all others combined) of weapons to tyrants and dictators alike—none other than from the United States.
Irrefutable evidence shows that the Unites States government provided and encouraged Iraq's use of chemical weapons. The United States Department of Commerce and the American Type Culture Collection provided at least 80 shipments of biological agents that were not attenuated (or weakened) and were capable of reproduction. These shipments included such virulent agents as anthrax, West Nile virus and Clostridium botulinum (S.R. 103-900, May 25, 1994, pg. 264). It is also public record that the U.S. not only armed Iraq from 1983 through August 1, 1990, but that it also provided the money to Iraq to purchase the weapons via the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), George Bush, Sr., and the Export-Import Bank. Iraq received $5 billion funneled through the Commercial Credit Corporation ostensibly for food credits. It is also public information that at least $2 billion from the defaulted loan was repaid by the U.S. citizen taxpayers. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Like the iceberg itself, most of the truth remains concealed to those without the wherewithal to pursue it.
Yes, the administration knows that Iraq has WMDs, just as countless other countries do, and has had them for many years because they were supplied by America and Great Britain. The administration also knows that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban, have been CIA creations and assets, and investigations into al-Qaeda were squelched prior to 9/11. That is why the deputy director of the FBI, John O'Neill, quit his post. As he said, "The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it." John O'Neill died on the second day of his new job, as security director of the World Trade Center. More tidbits from the ever-widening memory hole.
When the administration tells us that this never-ending war is currently about removing Saddam Hussein and his WMDs, they are lying. They are lying just as they lied to us that the war in Afghanistan was about hunting down Osama bin Laden. The purpose of this war is not about waging war on a noun called "terrorism." The first truth, slaughtered as it has been in this never-ending war, is that this war is about Empire. It is this truth that all the religiously jingoistic warmongering zealots need to realize before they condone the potential slaughter of additional millions and possibly billions of men, women and children.
This Empire is discussed in The Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Carter (Basic Books, 1997). In it, he claims that for the U.S. to fulfill its destiny of controlling the world, it must control Central Asia. That region has huge reserves of oil and gas, and in 1998 the oil company Unocal was lobbying the U.S. government for legislation to facilitate building a pipeline from Central Asia through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea. Indeed, Brzezinski's book contains a map of projected pipelines, including the one through Afghanistan.
And so it was that the Taliban was offered "a carpet of gold or you'll get a carpet of bombs," but the deal fell through a month before 9/11. The Afghan invasion plan was on Bush's desk, ready to sign, on September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11.
In addition, Brzezinski writes: "Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat … In the absence of a comparable external challenge, American society may find it much more difficult to reach agreement regarding foreign policies … that still require an enduring and sometimes costly imperial engagement." (page 211) The attacks of September 11, 2001 were enough to gain public support for the Empire’s incursion into Afghanistan. In light of the protestation over the looming Iraqi invasion, what it will take to rally public support is left to your imagination.
For those who doubt Brzezinski is speaking explicitly of empire, consider that the aim, according to Brzezinski, is to "decipher the central external goals of the political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them; second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above … To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (page 40)
If that is still not enough to convince you that the never-ending war is about empire, then consider the document entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century," written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
As reported by Neil Mackay in The Sunday Herald on September 15, 2002: "The plan shows that Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.' The PNAC document supports a 'blueprint for maintaining global U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.' This "American grand strategy" must be advanced for "as far into the future as possible," the report says. It also calls for the U.S. to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars" as a "core mission."
If you want to read the whole report, which contains reference to the "American grand strategy" that it says must be advanced "as far into the future as possible," you can download a copy at <www. newamericancentury.org>.
So there you have it. If you want your never-ending war with the latest stop being Iraq, I will not argue with you. Just, please, spare all the bull about weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and all the other extraneous preemptive holy war crusading pretences. The administration knows what the war is about. It's about American hegemony and empire. If you are going to support it, cut all the sanctimonious pontificating and call it what it is—Imperialism.
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