The War On Iraq
Identifying Credibility and Motives

Written around March 2003

It has been almost two years since 9-11 and Washington’s policy makers have stretched it as far as they could as a golden opportunity. They have managed to advance many of their personal agendas, such as the FTAA and militarization, using the “war on terrorism” as a spearhead for such causes. Despite the advancement of these agendas, which have all been largely formulated behind closed doors, their implementation, contrary to the success of utilizing the new ‘enemy’ as a pacification tool, have been faced with massive protest. Such dissent are often suppressed by the media, but on February 15, 2003 the assumptions of the policy makers were proven wrong. The proposed war on Iraq, led by the United States and Britain, ran into a wall of worldwide protest. Against such massive pressure, easily surpassing 10 million people, the media and those with a claim to power had to take notice. In the name of the cracking edifice they fortified in repute, the cult of experts lined-up to fill the gaps of the government agenda they so eagerly parrot. They went into a defensive stance while attacking the peace movement for being intellectually bankrupt. In retrospect, in spite of the criticisms, it is not the protesters who are intellectually bankrupt when they speak of a despotic United States government, but it is those who dismiss such claims. Unlike the defenders of preferred doctrine, many of them are aware of the culture of terrorism that pervades the pens of the policy makers and what perverse form of democracy they promote.

The attack on the anti-war protesters in the mainstream media ranged from the acceptable to the absurd. National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice noted that tyrants do not respond to “appeasement”, referring to the comparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler. This statement is worthy of recognition because this comparison must come the acceptance that Washington supported a genocidal maniac from 1980 to 1988. A support which continued well after the Reagan administration was aware of Hussein’s atrocities against Kurds. While on August 2, 1990, eight days before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam was given what appeared to be the green light for the invasion by a U.S. envoy:

“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Barker h as directed me to emphasize the instruction … that Kuwait is not associated with America.”

European Commission President Romano Prodi emphasized the need to respect the millions who protested against the war. Contrary to Prodi’s statement, Rice claimed that her administration remains unmoved in its stance on Iraq. This statement blatantly reveals the detachment of those in power from the general population. Clearly, despite the show of massive dissent, it does not even merit recognition by allowing more time and room for a wider range of debate. Or when it does, it is usually one-sided. The message is clear that the population does not know better and the policy makers have the expert knowledge, the only knowledge that matters. The justification for ‘less talk, more action’ is based on the fear of an attack on U.S. soil which can be considered irrational in light of the flimsy evidence presented to prove Saddam Hussein’s offensive capacity and his connection with the Al-Queda network. Despite the debunking of many Bush administration claims, including those disproved by U.N. Chief Inspector Hans Blix, the fear continues to be rational inside the media bubble.

Republican Senator Bob McCain at least was more honest with his opinion when he called the protesters “unwise and foolish”. Based on personal interpretations, “unwise” because they have no conceivable cause, other than an unacceptable anti-war principle, and “foolish” for allowing Hussein to deceive them, which is hardly the case. If anything, it is the U.S. government and the mainstream media that have been deceiving the people, by presenting allegations as facts. According to Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org), a media watchdog, the constant repetition of specific phrases, the media gives the public the impression that the alleged banned weapons exists and that the U.N. inspectors were just unskilled in finding them.

Finally, moving from the plausible, which opens dangerous doors, to the absurd, one must quote Rush Limbaugh. The self-proclaimed “truth detector” for his millions of daily listeners to his syndicated radio show played on hundreds of stations across the United States. Limbaugh remarked the following day on his radio show that when it comes to anti-war protesters, they just cannot “bring themselves to be pro-American because in their minds it means they hate other nations.” He continued by ranting that none of the protesters were against Hussein. This is a ludicrous statement even for someone who according to FAIR is “utterly incapable of engaging in factual discourse.” Despite this dismissal, it is reasonable to assume that Limbaugh reflects the attitudes of many of those in office, only less bombastic.

In relation to these influential sentiments, considering the privileges of those quoted, their criticisms can be summarized in that the protesters are “intellectually bankrupt”. Bankrupt because of the inconceivable claims they put forward. One of the claims being that the U.S. government are willing to risk the lives of thousands, perhaps an understatement, to gain control over Iraq’s oil reserves. Although, despite being viable taking from ample historical evidence, policy makers and the mainstream media remain implacable to contemporary history. A history of terrorism which is easily forgotten by those who committed atrocities but harder to forget for those who have been victimized. In the face of history, far from Washington’s ideological structures, the Bush-led war on terrorism appears less angelic, in fact, far from it. An honest look at history substantiates this claim.

As mentioned earlier, a substantial number of protesters had anti-war principles. This prompted Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online to remark that that is exactly the reason they cannot be taken seriously. Somehow being anti-war in principle should not be held in a favorable light when formulating domestic or international policy. A disturbing concept considering the bluntness of the false claims of “humanitarian” intents when justifying foreign intervention, both in the past and the present. It was made clear by the protesters that those involved had differing opinions of war. The common ground within the movement is that they felt the United States is unjustified in their declaration of war against Iraq.

Contrary to the claims of “humanitarian intervention”, Vietnam perhaps is the most obvious example of United States intervention out of self-interest. Noam Chomsky wrote an important essay called “Vietnam and the United States Global Strategy” on the topic in which he cites the Pentagon Papers to identify motives behind the justification for atrocities. He explained that the United States had “strategic and economic interests in Southeast Asia that must be secured.” Furthermore, “a critical consideration went into Japan to prevent it from building a close ‘co-prosperity’ sphere in Asia from which the United States would be excluded.” This would be the result if Southeast Asia is lost. This eventually justified the attack on “rural South Vietnam, where more than 80 percent of the population lived, as part of a program to drive several millions” to what are called “strategic hamlets”, otherwise known as “concentration camps” with the euphemism dropped. This was in 1962 and the administration continued their invasion until domestic and international protest proved insurmountable, not to mention the “devastating bombing of Northern Laos and the 1969 bombing and other attacks against Cambodia” which were dubbed the “secret wars” due to media suppression. The U.S. invasion of Vietnam was anything but humanitarian in intent. It is foolish not to question the motives of the Bush administration as something less than noble.

The claim that the Bush administration has a benevolent and genuine concern to set-up a democratic government after Hussein’s ouster is perhaps the most intellectually bankrupt of all. Again, taking from historical data, Washington has a very different concept of democracy from the rest of the world. Democracy either translates into a dictatorship or a puppet government. Either way, democracy is a type of Orwellian newspeak which means economic penetration for U.S. interests. In the case of Nicaragua, according to President Carter’s main Latin American specialist Robert Pastor, the U.S. did not want to control it. The same goes for other nations in Latin America. Regardless, they wanted to keep development in check throughout Latin America. In other words, as Chomsky puts it, they have the “Freedom to make the right choices.” This is the justification for U.S. support for the brutal Somoza dictatorship until he was overthrown by the Sandanistas in 1979.  Of course, along with Somoza comes the National Guard which Pastor describes together to rule Nicaragua “with a brutality a nation usually reserves for its enemy.”

In El Salvador, the population was allowed to have an election after popular organizations had been obliterated. The people were allowed to move toward democracy by having a choice between Duarte, one who presided over one of the greatest mass murders in modern time, and the Nazi-like D’Aubuisson. Vides Casanova, Duarte’s Minister of Defense, “explained in 1980 that the country had survived the massacre of 30,000 peasants in the 1932 Matanza” – in his words, “today, the armed forces are prepared to kill 200,000-300,000, if that’s what it takes to stop a Communist takeover.” In both countries, the U.S. supported the terrorist military forces. These three countries provide rich examples of what terms such as humanitarian intervention, democracy and what being part of the free world means to Washington.

As always with heavily indoctrinated societies, the defenders of the official doctrine seem to suffer from collective amnesia when remembering state sponsored terrorism or contemporary history when it is not to their liking. The state and its parrots are willing to brandish “outrage over the crime of others”, as Chomsky puts it, but lashes out when others call for them to accept responsibility for their own crimes. The destruction of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua and El Salvador are only few of the examples which prove the intellectual bankruptcy of those who dismisses the discourse of the protesters as unwise and foolish. Such criticism is empty and hypocritical if they are unwilling to apply to themselves the same criteria they willingly apply to official enemies. As a word of encouragement, it remains true that September 11, 2001 is an important turning point in history, why it is so remains an open question. The choice remains for us to make, whether to allow the affluent private powers, who also staffs the government ranks, to utilize it to advance their personal agendas or for the masses to utilize it to create a more just and democratic world in the interest of human welfare rather than that of multinationals. In light of the showings of the anti-war movement, abhorring unjustified an war and past crimes, I am inclined to believe that they have a clear idea just how to go about creating one.

In the spirit of resistance,
Critical Mood