| Letter from America (about Iraq) |
| by Wade Frazier, November 11, 2002 |
Today a friend asked me how I would reply to a friend of his who had said to him that Bush had confounded the "left" by seeking and obtaining Congressional and United Nations approval before the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Then his friend asked if he would support removing Hussein from power and making Iraq into a democracy, if Hussein does not completely comply with the U.N. resolution. My response is below:
Hi:
On non-compliance with the resolution, it must be remembered that such an inspection program is unprecedented, and Iraq largely did comply with the first one. Scott Ritter, who was the leading arms inspector in Iraq, is also an ex-Marine and must be called a hawk. He has repeatedly stated over the past few years that no nation in modern history has ever been disarmed to the extent that Iraq has been.
The American media has been gripped by an amazing bout of amnesia lately, as it says that Hussein "kicked out" the arms inspectors in 1998, leading to the U.S. bombing. The opposite is true. The arms inspectors were ordered to pull out by their superiors in anticipation of the U.S. bombing of Iraq, which coincided with Bill Clinton's impeachment for lying about having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, in Wag the Dog fashion. With immense problems already rocking the Bush administration, such as the Enron scandal (where none of Bush's cronies have yet been indicted), and a collapsing economy, waging war against Iraq seems to be a popular presidential pastime.
The U.N. resolution, which can be seen at http://www.serendipity.li/more/sc_res_1441.htm, states in section 7:
"UNMOVIC and the IAEA shall have the free and unrestricted use and landing of fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft, including manned and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles"
Just last week, an unmanned spy aircraft assassinated several people in Yemen (including an American), which is now admitted was a CIA operation, and has even been "justified" by establishment pundits as within George Bush the Second's global vigilante "rules" for how America is to conduct its "War on Terror." Combine that with the revelations back in 1999 that some of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors were actually spying on behalf of the United States, installing spying equipment that was not used to search for "weapons of mass destruction," but to locate Iraqi officials for assassination during the American attack of 1998 (which in fact succeeded in killing a high-ranking member of Hussein's administration),
and Hussein could not be faulted if he thought that section 7 of the U.N. edict is at least partly designed to murder him. In Afghanistan this past year, tall, bearded Afghani men have been targeted by those unmanned assassination craft, and many have died, because one of them might have been Osama bin Laden.
That U.N. edict reads somewhat like the Rambouillet "agreement" that the U.S. used as the pretext to invade Yugoslavia:
Basically the Rambouillet "agreement" completely eliminated Yugoslavia's sovereignty, and when Milosevic refused to completely sign over Yugoslavia's sovereignty (which no head of state on earth would do, except after military defeat, as with Japan) America bombed them. Today Milosevic sits behind bars in a kangaroo court, a distinction he shares with Noriega, the only two heads of state behind bars. I would not bet that Hussein will live to a ripe old age as a free man.
On the weapons of mass destruction issue, even the New York Times has been pointing out the awesome hypocrisy of the entire affair, as virtually all of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" were bought from the U.S., France, Germany and Britain, and when Hussein used them "on his own people" (as we often hear), George Bush the First, when Vice-President, helped block Congressional action against Iraq, and the Reagan/Bush White House clandestinely kept giving Hussein what he wanted, similar to how the Iran-Contra affair panned out.
Today's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was in Iraq on a goodwill mission to Hussein in 1984, soon after news of Iraq using chemical weapons became known, and Rumsfeld was completely silent on the issue while he met with Hussein's administration, trying to open Iraq as a market for U.S. corporations, the very same companies who sold the material for "weapons of mass destruction."
The entire issue stinks, particularly George Bush the Second's self-righteous posture these days.
On the "diplomacy" of Bush and gang, with getting Congress and the U.N. to "back" them, all that really shows is how cowardly everybody else is, nobody wanting to stand up to the Empire and those who have hijacked it. The global political apparatus looks more like Stalin's Politburo every time I look at it. Politicians are not noted for their courage, and they have all been bribed or bullied into acquiescence regarding the U.N. edict, just like the "Cash Register Coalition" was fabricated before the Gulf War.
If we go all the way back to George Washington and his strategy to swindle the natives out of their land
fraudulent "diplomacy" has been an American specialty for centuries. While Bush is holding the U.N. resolution over Hussein's head as I write this, when every nation on earth votes against the United States in the U.N., nary a peep is heard from the American media.
So call me skeptical about America "leading the world" against the demonic Hussein. Also, nobody should assume that America is about to invade Iraq to help anybody over there, or even protect Americans from "terror" operations. Invading Iraq will nearly guarantee that World War III will be the eventual outcome, and I am vastly more afraid for my personal safety if we invade Iraq than if we did not. As I was recently reading, regarding a nation dropping nuclear bombs in the near future, the smart money is putting it on Israel, with the largest cache of weapons of mass destruction in that part of the world, which the U.S. has always turned a blind eye toward, even today.
Nobody in the Middle East feels the least bit threatened by Iraq, although many fear the outcome if Iraq tries repelling a U.S. invasion. All Middle East nations fear the United States. Nobody in the Middle East has any illusions that the U.S. is going to invade Iraq to help the Iraqi people, who have already suffered genocidally at our hands.
The only people who believe that rhetoric are Americans. We did not invade Vietnam to help the Vietnamese,
Korea to help the Koreans, the Philippines to help the Filipinos,
and so on. Invasions are never, ever, ever intended to help the people in the invaded lands.
About the only possible exception to that rule, particularly in imperial societies, is the U.S invasion of Europe during WWII, but even then, it is today widely recognized as a move which was meant to limit Soviet influence in Europe, just as atom bombing Japan was meant to limit Soviet influence in East Asia.
But even that "noble" motive in Europe readily falls apart under scrutiny, as the U.S. quickly overthrew the post-war democratic governments of Italy and Greece, because the heroic anti-Fascists there were largely socialists and communists. When the U.S. hired all the useful Nazis in Operation Paperclip, and "rehabilitated" the bankers and industrialists who were Hitler's biggest cheerleaders and put them right back into the positions of power they had before the war was finished, it gave the lie to that noble sentiment.
The same goes for the Marshall Plan, which while seemingly altruistic on the surface, was largely designed for the benefit of U.S. corporations, where most of the "aid" money went. American war planners had no illusions about what World War II and subsequent foreign policy was all about, as declassified documents have made clear.
Only people who cannot get past the TV news or the mainstream and right wing pundits take any of this stuff seriously, as far as there being anything heroic and noble regarding the upcoming invasion of Iraq. As with the other "diplomacy," the U.S. will either greatly exaggerate or even fabricate a violation of the "agreement" to justify invasion, if Hussein even agrees to the U.N. edict (he is definitely between a rock and a hard place). Everybody who has watched the U.S. in action lately knows how the game is played. It is simply might makes right, as usual, and what is happening has everything to do with the oil. Calling it part of the "War on Terror" is simply unbelievable. Everybody knows that Hussein and Al Qaeda not only have nothing to do with each other; they hate each other. One party is Islamic Fundamentalist in bent, while the other is a secular tyrant.
It kills me what is happening today, because I have been trying to prevent it since I was 16, with my alternative energy dreams.
The nightmare is coming to pass before my eyes.
I would not expect your friend's eyes to open in recognition of the truth or anything like that. Your experience might be an exception, but anybody who defends the legitimacy of our position regarding Iraq is probably too far gone for reason, facts, compassion and the like to touch them. They will often frame their views with jargon like "legitimate projection of military power," and subscribe to the fairy tale that the U.S. has ever tried helping people beyond its borders. Whenever anything like that happened (helping foreign peoples), it has been incidental to the real goals, but makes for a nice cover story to keep the masses dazed, confused and cheering the violence.
Just reading the occupation plan that America has for post-war Iraq makes clear that transforming Iraq into a democratic nation is the furthest thing from the minds of the war planners. Look at the "democracy" we reinstalled in Kuwait after we liberated it, or the government in Saudi Arabia that we said we were protecting from Hussein (another fraudulent rationale, as Iraq had no quarrel with Arabia). Afghanistan is in worse shape today than it was before we bombed them in 2001, and nothing like "democracy" is taking shape there. America has never exported democracy,
and neither has anybody else.
I stopped wasting my time with people like your friend awhile back. I found that it never sank into their heads very far, and what they really wanted, what they always wanted, was a justification for violence. They did not like it when I consistently showed how there wasn't one. Some friendships ended because of it. The ones that I kept, that veered into that territory, have been maintained by just talking about the weather. : - )
Best wishes,
Wade
Details here.
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