COLUMN: Congratulations, you’ve been duped into war
U.S. Senator Robert Byrd recently delivered an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, titled, “Today, I weep for my country.”
We witness a pre-meditated war waged on a nation that poses no threat to America by a government whose ideological divestment from the value of human life over momentary material and geopolitical ambition is inhuman.
Basic international principles that humanity solemnly agreed upon a half century ago are being discarded in a single election cycle. The war (a term that implies some parity – human pinball would be better) being waged against Iraq is not a small closet-cleaning of a single dictator in isolation. It is groundwork for the conquest of material profit and imperial dominance over all humanity has created that is worthy of redemption.
If you believe that the administration is concerned about Iraq’s weapons programs, Hussein’s human rights record, or Iraq’s violation of U.N. resolutions, you are sorely deceived. The militaristic hawks of the Bush administration, including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Lewis Libby, and others, have a long history of criminalism and warfare before George W. Bush.
In the 1990s, these characters were aggressively trumpeting the need to overthrow regimes that are unfavorable to America – Iraq in particular. On Sept. 11, 2001, war cheerleader William Kristol said on PBS Newshour, “We are basically looking at finishing the job we began in 1990 with Saddam Hussein.”
The Bush administration’s “case against Saddam,” which was to be highlighted by Colin Powell’s star-studded presentation of U.S. intelligence wizardry to the United Nations, has been discredited as a series of forged arms-sales documents, misinterpreted aerial photographs, plagiarized college papers, bizarre and contorted attempts to connect Iraq to al-Qaida, and outright lies.
Despite repeated declarations by the U.N. weapons inspectors that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programs (and little else of military value), the administration continues to publicly promote this misinformation. The inspectors have protested the consistent misrepresentation of their work by the administration, but to no avail.
While Dick Cheney was foolish enough to accuse the weapons inspectors of inaccuracy while on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the rest of the Bush team has wisely laid low and trusted in the failure of the corporate media to highlight their lies for more than a few days, before returning to their 24-hour “Showdown With Saddam” programming that better resembles a video game than a serious discussion involving real human lives.
As Peter Teeley, press secretary for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, observed, “You can say anything you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it. If it happens to be untrue, so what. Maybe 200 people read [the correction] or 2,000 or 20,000.”
The administration’s moralistic grandstanding about Saddam’s human rights abuses would be admirable if it were sincere, or if Bush officials were committed to the heavy-lifting that lies beyond the military conquest. The administration has abandoned Afghanistan (Bush requested precisely $0 in development assistance in fiscal 2004).
Furthermore, top-level Bush officials have their hands all over some of America’s most deplorable moments, including bloodshed in Panama, East Timor, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile and other sinkholes of death created by the Ford and Reagan administrations.
Hussein’s abuses most often cited by the administration (including chemical attacks ‘on his own people’ at Halabja) were committed with the direct assistance of many officials back in power, including Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Even today, this administration actively promotes human rights abuses wherever it is strategically convenient, including Latin America and Central Asia, with oil as the common denominator.
This shabby record explains the assessment of Youssef Ibrahim of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Arabs would … welcome more democracy and … to be liberated from the police states … It does not follow that they would trust America to do this for them.” That logical disconnect is the gap that the history-blind, pro-war crowd cannot comprehend.
By the time you read this, more people may have died in “Shock and Awe” (a cute military name for this massacre), than perished on our soil on 9/11, in a war action that destroys the heart of international law, as well as the U.S. Constitution.
Bush, by any legal definition, is now a criminal and a terrorist. He will stand trial before a war crimes tribunal, and spend the remainder of his natural life in a prison with his ideological soulmates from other terrorist regimes.
Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war is decades old, and was specifically condemned in the U.N. charter.
“All of us have heard this term ‘preventive war’ since the earliest days of Hitler,” said President Eisenhower in 1953, when presented with such plans for the Soviet Union. “I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously … about such a thing.”
Ike’s level-headed assessment became international law, and humanity’s survival is a direct result now jeopardized by Bush. I pray that his psychopathic breed are eliminated politically before damage is done.
Fortunately, he will find much in common with his cellmates to discuss.
“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” said Adolf Hitler’s No. 2 man, Hermann Goering, at the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal. “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Jim Steitz is awaiting graduation.Comments may be sent to jimsteitz@envirolink.org.