Hawker
15th November 2004, 03:58
A reall good article I found.Don't mind the flaws just listen to the facts.
Sometimes you’ve got to call a duck a duck. So here it is:
You’ve been duped, America.
The American people have by and large been convinced—as evidenced by the high poll numbers—that the war in Iraq has to happen. Saddam Hussein is a monstrous dictator—that much is true—with ties to terrorism who must be stopped from developing weapons of mass destruction that might then be used against the United States. We must do this, the Bush administration tells us, to keep ourselves safe.
The reality is that Hussein has no ties to Al Quaeda. His ties to “terrorism” in general have been exaggerated and distorted by an administration looking for justification for a war plan that was preordained by the Bush chicken hawks long before September 11th. I saw a pro-war protester decrying the anti-war protests in New York, proclaiming that America had been attacked using “Hussein’s money, if nothing else.” Not even the Bush administration has made that claim, but by telling the American people that Hussein gives “financial” support to terrorists, they’ve laid the groundwork for such misconceptions. The fact is that Hussein’s Iraq gives money to the families of what many in the Middle East call “martyrs”—suicide bombers who attack Israel. What the Bush administration is unlikely to tell the American people in such stark terms is that many of our Arab allies do the same thing. State-run television in Saudi Arabia holds telethons to raise money for the families of these terrorists and the Fahd royal family itself has donated large sums on-air in the past. The Bush administration has also been touting the destruction of a terrorist camp inside of Iraq. What is downplayed is that this camp was inside Kurdish Iraq, outside of Hussein’s effective control. It was in fact a “rogue” Kurdish group with ties to Al Quaeda—hardly damning evidence against Hussein’s regime.
Will we be safer with Hussein out of power? Well, the Iraqi people surely will be. Make no mistake, Hussein is a monster and a butcher. His people will be glad to see him go, though they are bound to resent America just the same. America, though, will be no safer. The price of containing Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is that Iran and North Korea are now convinced that if they don’t have an arsenal of nuclear weapons then there is nothing to prevent America from invading them next. The atomic bomb was made first with 1940’s technology. There is no way to keep the entire world locked in the past to prevent them from replicating that technology. Only through international cooperation can we contain the threat of nuclear proliferation, and prevent weapons like this from becoming accessible to terrorists.
And now, the principal body through which such cooperation is possible has been undermined. The Bush administration—by demonstrating impatience with the inspection process and by rushing toward an offensive buildup without a clear international mandate for the use of force—has chopped the legs out from under the United Nations. What’s more, by acting without that mandate, the United States has been left looking like a nation bent on imposing its will alone—regardless of the will of the international community. With public support for the war running in the single digits throughout many of our staunchest ally nations, President Bush looks very much the cowboy and to much of the world America looks like an empire grabbing for power. Nowhere is this more true than throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Gone from the fickle memory of the Arab street is the NATO intervention on behalf of persecuted Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia. All the seething masses of the Middle East see is a country running amok, invading two Muslim nations in rapid succession, the latter without provocation. Egypt’s President Mubarak predicts that the antipathy towards the US will now breed hundreds of Osama Bin Ladens. If this was a war against terrorism, then it would be like fighting a house fire with a flamethrower.
But that’s the thing. This isn’t a war against terrorism. This has nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing. How do we know this? Because the people who made this happen have wanted this war since 1991.
In the wake of the First Gulf War, there were many within the defense establishment who were unhappy with the first President Bush’s decision—influenced largely by the concerns of Colin Powell that the war was becoming a massacre—to cease fire once the Iraqi army had been driven out of Kuwait. These figures in the Defense Department like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz—men with no combat experience themselves, though Rumsfeld did serve in the Navy—were angered that America had stopped short of rolling into Baghdad, whether or not that step had been mandated by the UN Security Council. In the aftermath of the war, Wolfowitz drafted a new declaration of American strategy in foreign relations. It was a road map to American hegemony, an unapologetic plan for American empire. America, as the new sole superpower, could preemptively address threats and could act unilaterally to preserve its position as the only real global power, it argued. It was an audacious document. It alarmed many within the Pentagon who saw it and it was soon leaked to the press. President Bush immediately disavowed it as an affront to the ideal of international cooperation in the face of world dilemmas that the Gulf War had represented.
But it was not forgotten. Within two weeks of 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz was standing before President Bush arguing that the time was right to attack Iraq. Though responsibility for the attack had not yet been established, all indicators pointed to Bin Laden’s organization and away from state-sponsored terrorism. The CIA knew well that Bin Laden and Hussein were diametrically opposed and that any collusion between the two in planning an attack against the US was highly unlikely. Still, Wolfowitz and his old boss Dick Cheney were arguing that the time was ripe to take out Saddam Hussein, even before any action in Afghanistan. Though the US did intervene in Afghanistan first, the idea of taking out Hussein was in play and the philosophy sketched out by Wolfowitz more than a decade earlier was about to resurface in Bush’s National Security Strategy.
That it is that strategy that dictated Bush’s decision is clear. Over the summer of 2002, before Colin Powell—in a private dinner with the president in the fall—convinced the president to work with the Security Council, the language of confronting Iraq was wholly the unilateral language of the NSS and of Wolfowitz’s earlier document. It was the United States that was going to dictate “regime change” in Baghdad. This was nothing new, really. The US has meddled in the internal affairs of countries for decades. The CIA has had a hand in overthrowing democratically elected governments in countries as disparate as Chile and the Congo. Yet this was an open declaration that the US would, by force, impose its own will on another nation. It was brazen, and not surprisingly, announcing it to the world was the equivalent of walking up to a hornet’s nest and swatting it with a nice big stick. Powell was able to do some serious damage control and garner unanimous support for a new Security Council resolution on Iraq, calling for renewed and more vigorous inspections. But the world was paying attention to the fact that while the inspectors went about their business, a huge US military presence was building in the Gulf. It’s an old adage from the Napoleonic Wars that armies do not stand idle in the spring. As spring came, though, the inspectors were not willing to declare Hussein’s regime in material breach of its obligations under the outstanding resolutions and France and Russia—swayed by their heavy business ties to Iraq—were unwilling to cooperate with the US on a resolution authorizing force.
That’s the past. The present of the sad affair of the United States and Iraq is being written in blood upon the sand as I write this. So far, nearly one hundred coalition soldiers have been killed in action. The United States media—in the new zeitgeist of non-dissent that has gripped American culture—is not fond of reporting potential numbers of Iraqi casualties. One website dedicated to tracking reported civilian casualties in Iraq from credible news sources—obviously not the Iraqi information service itself—now puts its confirmable total of civilian casualties at almost six hundred. As to Iraqi soldiers—many of whom had little choice but to fight—there is no one counting, though after one convoy of Iraqi vehicles foolishly approached the American forces approaching Baghdad it was carpet bombed by B-52’s. Afterward, the road was said to be littered with bodies.
But it was the potential future for Iraq that motivated this war. The mission has been dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” in an attempt to convince the American people that the US military is being used to bring democracy to Iraq. “Operation Free Market” would have been more appropriate, given the ties of this administration to the companies that will now have open doors to post-war markets in Iraq. Even though during the Gulf War Dick Cheney called Hussein a new “Hitler,” as CEO of Haliburton in the 90’s he was happy to do business with Hitler’s government in Iraq. Unfortunately, Iraq was handing most of its very limited business to firms from France and Russia, both of whom supported rolling back the sanctions against Iraq. It was also made clear that when those sanctions were finally repealed that it was those countries that would be in a position to profit most in Iraq. If American companies were to have a stake in the wealth of Iraq—which is considerable—then Hussein would have to go. Sure enough, as the war began, Cheney’s old company, Halliburton was awarded a lucrative contract in the captured oil fields of southern Iraq. Though this decision managed to attract enough attention to become an embarrassment for the Bush administration, many other contracts are already being awarded to American companies in Iraq. Against the wishes of our British allies who wanted Iraqis to manage the ports in captured Um Qasar, the American firm Stevedoring Services has been awarded the multimillion dollar contract to administrate the docks. The Bush administration has also hand picked companies for an additional nine hundred million worth of reconstruction contracts. The records of the bid process have been sealed, but the winning companies have ties to the Republican party. The greatest fear of the French and Russians is that once the US flag waves over Baghdad, the occupation government will nullify all outstanding contracts with the old Baa’th party regime. This would cut a lot of Russian and French companies out of their arrangements in the oil fields and open it for American firms to step in. Is it any wonder that the Bush administration has already crafted a plan—without much consultation with our British allies—to create an occupation authority in Iraq independent of the United Nations? If the war had been enacted under a UN mandate and a UN peacekeeping force had been the agency taking control of post-war Iraq, then France and Russia would have been able to maintain all their contracts inside of Iraq. With the US acting outside of a UN mandate, though, all bets are off.
This will be the legacy of Bush II. Where his father set down a precedent of cooperation and international community, this Bush has changed the course of American power in the world completely. America was primed to lead the world. Now Bush has positioned us to confront it. The two Bushes, when history looks back, will be likened to honey and vinegar. Both men were willing to fight their Gulf Wars alone, but one didn’t have to. Both would have liked to remove Saddam Hussein, but one wasn’t willing to do it at the expense of America’s relationship with the world at large.
Already the resistance to this new era of American power has begun. Bin Laden and Al Quaida were reflections of that desire to derail American unilateral power. Now, though, the parties opposed to us include our oldest ally, France, and our Cold War foe-turned-friend, Russia. Will Britain stand with us after we have squashed their agenda for an Iraq-for-Iraqis and replaced it with an Iraq-for-American-profit? And what of those one billion Muslims—so many of whom we see teeming in anger on the streets of the world? How will they resist this Pax Americana? Ex-CIA director Woolsey is calling this another world war, one to be fought against radical Islam. But if American troops step foot in one more Muslim country, it may be a literal world war we have on our hands—and one not against a nation, or alliance, but against a broad culture. It would be an unwinnable war.
When Rome blossomed into an empire, its republic fell. America purports to be taking freedom to the people of Iraq, yet the freedom here at home is in peril. The shameless persecution of Arab immigrants and the insidious Patriot Act—nevermind the draconian Patriot Act II being drafted inside the Department of Justice—have eroded the core of American democracy to the depths we have not seen since the miasma of segregation and the infamy of the McCarthy era. Voices of dissent have since 9/11 been branded as unpatriotic. And now especially speaking out against the administration is blasted as inappropriate in a time of war. But President Bush has declared that we are in an endless war on terrorism, so when then, shall our freedoms return in full? When may we raise our voices again? At the rate that self-censorship is taking hold within the American media, I fear by the time we are allowed to use our voices again, they will be hoarse from disuse.
America is now charting a course ripped straight from the pages of history. Iraq's fate is sealed now, but our own is still before us.
Sometimes you’ve got to call a duck a duck. So here it is:
You’ve been duped, America.
The American people have by and large been convinced—as evidenced by the high poll numbers—that the war in Iraq has to happen. Saddam Hussein is a monstrous dictator—that much is true—with ties to terrorism who must be stopped from developing weapons of mass destruction that might then be used against the United States. We must do this, the Bush administration tells us, to keep ourselves safe.
The reality is that Hussein has no ties to Al Quaeda. His ties to “terrorism” in general have been exaggerated and distorted by an administration looking for justification for a war plan that was preordained by the Bush chicken hawks long before September 11th. I saw a pro-war protester decrying the anti-war protests in New York, proclaiming that America had been attacked using “Hussein’s money, if nothing else.” Not even the Bush administration has made that claim, but by telling the American people that Hussein gives “financial” support to terrorists, they’ve laid the groundwork for such misconceptions. The fact is that Hussein’s Iraq gives money to the families of what many in the Middle East call “martyrs”—suicide bombers who attack Israel. What the Bush administration is unlikely to tell the American people in such stark terms is that many of our Arab allies do the same thing. State-run television in Saudi Arabia holds telethons to raise money for the families of these terrorists and the Fahd royal family itself has donated large sums on-air in the past. The Bush administration has also been touting the destruction of a terrorist camp inside of Iraq. What is downplayed is that this camp was inside Kurdish Iraq, outside of Hussein’s effective control. It was in fact a “rogue” Kurdish group with ties to Al Quaeda—hardly damning evidence against Hussein’s regime.
Will we be safer with Hussein out of power? Well, the Iraqi people surely will be. Make no mistake, Hussein is a monster and a butcher. His people will be glad to see him go, though they are bound to resent America just the same. America, though, will be no safer. The price of containing Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction is that Iran and North Korea are now convinced that if they don’t have an arsenal of nuclear weapons then there is nothing to prevent America from invading them next. The atomic bomb was made first with 1940’s technology. There is no way to keep the entire world locked in the past to prevent them from replicating that technology. Only through international cooperation can we contain the threat of nuclear proliferation, and prevent weapons like this from becoming accessible to terrorists.
And now, the principal body through which such cooperation is possible has been undermined. The Bush administration—by demonstrating impatience with the inspection process and by rushing toward an offensive buildup without a clear international mandate for the use of force—has chopped the legs out from under the United Nations. What’s more, by acting without that mandate, the United States has been left looking like a nation bent on imposing its will alone—regardless of the will of the international community. With public support for the war running in the single digits throughout many of our staunchest ally nations, President Bush looks very much the cowboy and to much of the world America looks like an empire grabbing for power. Nowhere is this more true than throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Gone from the fickle memory of the Arab street is the NATO intervention on behalf of persecuted Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia. All the seething masses of the Middle East see is a country running amok, invading two Muslim nations in rapid succession, the latter without provocation. Egypt’s President Mubarak predicts that the antipathy towards the US will now breed hundreds of Osama Bin Ladens. If this was a war against terrorism, then it would be like fighting a house fire with a flamethrower.
But that’s the thing. This isn’t a war against terrorism. This has nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing. How do we know this? Because the people who made this happen have wanted this war since 1991.
In the wake of the First Gulf War, there were many within the defense establishment who were unhappy with the first President Bush’s decision—influenced largely by the concerns of Colin Powell that the war was becoming a massacre—to cease fire once the Iraqi army had been driven out of Kuwait. These figures in the Defense Department like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz—men with no combat experience themselves, though Rumsfeld did serve in the Navy—were angered that America had stopped short of rolling into Baghdad, whether or not that step had been mandated by the UN Security Council. In the aftermath of the war, Wolfowitz drafted a new declaration of American strategy in foreign relations. It was a road map to American hegemony, an unapologetic plan for American empire. America, as the new sole superpower, could preemptively address threats and could act unilaterally to preserve its position as the only real global power, it argued. It was an audacious document. It alarmed many within the Pentagon who saw it and it was soon leaked to the press. President Bush immediately disavowed it as an affront to the ideal of international cooperation in the face of world dilemmas that the Gulf War had represented.
But it was not forgotten. Within two weeks of 9/11, Paul Wolfowitz was standing before President Bush arguing that the time was right to attack Iraq. Though responsibility for the attack had not yet been established, all indicators pointed to Bin Laden’s organization and away from state-sponsored terrorism. The CIA knew well that Bin Laden and Hussein were diametrically opposed and that any collusion between the two in planning an attack against the US was highly unlikely. Still, Wolfowitz and his old boss Dick Cheney were arguing that the time was ripe to take out Saddam Hussein, even before any action in Afghanistan. Though the US did intervene in Afghanistan first, the idea of taking out Hussein was in play and the philosophy sketched out by Wolfowitz more than a decade earlier was about to resurface in Bush’s National Security Strategy.
That it is that strategy that dictated Bush’s decision is clear. Over the summer of 2002, before Colin Powell—in a private dinner with the president in the fall—convinced the president to work with the Security Council, the language of confronting Iraq was wholly the unilateral language of the NSS and of Wolfowitz’s earlier document. It was the United States that was going to dictate “regime change” in Baghdad. This was nothing new, really. The US has meddled in the internal affairs of countries for decades. The CIA has had a hand in overthrowing democratically elected governments in countries as disparate as Chile and the Congo. Yet this was an open declaration that the US would, by force, impose its own will on another nation. It was brazen, and not surprisingly, announcing it to the world was the equivalent of walking up to a hornet’s nest and swatting it with a nice big stick. Powell was able to do some serious damage control and garner unanimous support for a new Security Council resolution on Iraq, calling for renewed and more vigorous inspections. But the world was paying attention to the fact that while the inspectors went about their business, a huge US military presence was building in the Gulf. It’s an old adage from the Napoleonic Wars that armies do not stand idle in the spring. As spring came, though, the inspectors were not willing to declare Hussein’s regime in material breach of its obligations under the outstanding resolutions and France and Russia—swayed by their heavy business ties to Iraq—were unwilling to cooperate with the US on a resolution authorizing force.
That’s the past. The present of the sad affair of the United States and Iraq is being written in blood upon the sand as I write this. So far, nearly one hundred coalition soldiers have been killed in action. The United States media—in the new zeitgeist of non-dissent that has gripped American culture—is not fond of reporting potential numbers of Iraqi casualties. One website dedicated to tracking reported civilian casualties in Iraq from credible news sources—obviously not the Iraqi information service itself—now puts its confirmable total of civilian casualties at almost six hundred. As to Iraqi soldiers—many of whom had little choice but to fight—there is no one counting, though after one convoy of Iraqi vehicles foolishly approached the American forces approaching Baghdad it was carpet bombed by B-52’s. Afterward, the road was said to be littered with bodies.
But it was the potential future for Iraq that motivated this war. The mission has been dubbed “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” in an attempt to convince the American people that the US military is being used to bring democracy to Iraq. “Operation Free Market” would have been more appropriate, given the ties of this administration to the companies that will now have open doors to post-war markets in Iraq. Even though during the Gulf War Dick Cheney called Hussein a new “Hitler,” as CEO of Haliburton in the 90’s he was happy to do business with Hitler’s government in Iraq. Unfortunately, Iraq was handing most of its very limited business to firms from France and Russia, both of whom supported rolling back the sanctions against Iraq. It was also made clear that when those sanctions were finally repealed that it was those countries that would be in a position to profit most in Iraq. If American companies were to have a stake in the wealth of Iraq—which is considerable—then Hussein would have to go. Sure enough, as the war began, Cheney’s old company, Halliburton was awarded a lucrative contract in the captured oil fields of southern Iraq. Though this decision managed to attract enough attention to become an embarrassment for the Bush administration, many other contracts are already being awarded to American companies in Iraq. Against the wishes of our British allies who wanted Iraqis to manage the ports in captured Um Qasar, the American firm Stevedoring Services has been awarded the multimillion dollar contract to administrate the docks. The Bush administration has also hand picked companies for an additional nine hundred million worth of reconstruction contracts. The records of the bid process have been sealed, but the winning companies have ties to the Republican party. The greatest fear of the French and Russians is that once the US flag waves over Baghdad, the occupation government will nullify all outstanding contracts with the old Baa’th party regime. This would cut a lot of Russian and French companies out of their arrangements in the oil fields and open it for American firms to step in. Is it any wonder that the Bush administration has already crafted a plan—without much consultation with our British allies—to create an occupation authority in Iraq independent of the United Nations? If the war had been enacted under a UN mandate and a UN peacekeeping force had been the agency taking control of post-war Iraq, then France and Russia would have been able to maintain all their contracts inside of Iraq. With the US acting outside of a UN mandate, though, all bets are off.
This will be the legacy of Bush II. Where his father set down a precedent of cooperation and international community, this Bush has changed the course of American power in the world completely. America was primed to lead the world. Now Bush has positioned us to confront it. The two Bushes, when history looks back, will be likened to honey and vinegar. Both men were willing to fight their Gulf Wars alone, but one didn’t have to. Both would have liked to remove Saddam Hussein, but one wasn’t willing to do it at the expense of America’s relationship with the world at large.
Already the resistance to this new era of American power has begun. Bin Laden and Al Quaida were reflections of that desire to derail American unilateral power. Now, though, the parties opposed to us include our oldest ally, France, and our Cold War foe-turned-friend, Russia. Will Britain stand with us after we have squashed their agenda for an Iraq-for-Iraqis and replaced it with an Iraq-for-American-profit? And what of those one billion Muslims—so many of whom we see teeming in anger on the streets of the world? How will they resist this Pax Americana? Ex-CIA director Woolsey is calling this another world war, one to be fought against radical Islam. But if American troops step foot in one more Muslim country, it may be a literal world war we have on our hands—and one not against a nation, or alliance, but against a broad culture. It would be an unwinnable war.
When Rome blossomed into an empire, its republic fell. America purports to be taking freedom to the people of Iraq, yet the freedom here at home is in peril. The shameless persecution of Arab immigrants and the insidious Patriot Act—nevermind the draconian Patriot Act II being drafted inside the Department of Justice—have eroded the core of American democracy to the depths we have not seen since the miasma of segregation and the infamy of the McCarthy era. Voices of dissent have since 9/11 been branded as unpatriotic. And now especially speaking out against the administration is blasted as inappropriate in a time of war. But President Bush has declared that we are in an endless war on terrorism, so when then, shall our freedoms return in full? When may we raise our voices again? At the rate that self-censorship is taking hold within the American media, I fear by the time we are allowed to use our voices again, they will be hoarse from disuse.
America is now charting a course ripped straight from the pages of history. Iraq's fate is sealed now, but our own is still before us.