THE LONG ROAD TO REMEMBERING
Never mind that the hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals. Two years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 69 percent of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein had a role in 9/11.
Welcome to the greatest American tour ever created. Welcome to a tour so popular 7 in 10 Americans are still tripping on it.
Welcome to Gullible’s Travels. (Filipinos interested in the tour can contact the local representative at www.malacañang.com.)
A US soldier is being killed each day on average in Iraq during what is supposed to be “peace time.” In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging attacks with increasing ferocity and frequency while women and girls continue to be abused and threatened. Vile warlords are in control once more as Afghanistan regains its ranking as the world’s largest source of heroin. “Everyone is back in business,” says Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai.
A closed mouth truly gathers no feet.
Didn’t Bush declare the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1? And wasn’t there supposed to be a similar end in hostilities when Bush announced in Arkansas in August 2002 that “we [have] liberated Afghanistan from the clutches of a barbaric regime”?
Excuse me. Righteous America liberated Afghanistan from a wicked regime?
Taliban officials were being entertained in Washington and Houston in 1997, for crying out loud. Far from the revulsion that was displayed just before the US reduced Kabul and Kandahar to rubble, according to Karl Inderfurth, who, as US Undersecretary of State oversaw relations with Afghanistan at the State Department from 1997 to 2000, “The feeling was, ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have some commercial undertakings?’”
On the anniversary of the day the war reached America’s shores, did the jingoist US media bring up the memory of the days when the US government boogied with the butchers it is hunting down today? Will America be made to reflect on the 10,000 Iraqi civilian casualties of the US invasion of their country? Are you kidding?
As with America’s past imperial adventures, the story of Iraq has been transformed into a narrative of the occupier, an American tale where US troops evince daily stoicism in the face of tribulations while locals are relegated to playing groveling or sinister roles.
We are reminded about the “steady progress” being made by the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), a body bestowed by imperial America with fussing rights minus the power to govern. (By the way, embezzler emeritus Ahmed Chalabi finally realized his dream -- it was finally his turn at the rotating presidency of the IGC on September 1.)
We are reminded about the many captured Ba’ath Party “evildoers” through Proconsul Paul Bremer’s press releases. There is a daily tally of wounded and killed US soldiers in reports that remind the world of the heavy toll being shouldered by America.
But what of the Iraqis in whose name the US invasion was launched? Apparently, they deserve no death tally.
“Up to 20 innocent Iraqi civilians a day are now believed to be dying -- in murders, revenge killings, at US checkpoints—and yet they no longer count,” reports The Independent’s Robert Fisk, who holds more journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent for his reporting of the Iranian revolution and the wars in Lebanon, the Gulf, Kosovo and Algeria.
“No wonder journalists now have to seek permission from the occupation authorities to visit Baghdad hospitals,” adds Fisk. “Who knows how many corpses they would find in the morgue?”
So many Iraqi souls liberated from their bodies courtesy of America’s “humanitarian” invasion. An intervention premised on denying the histories of the occupier and the occupied. An invasion based on an implicitly racist predicate -- that the peoples of Iraq were utterly incapable of breaking the iron grip of Ba’athist rule without the noble disinterested swagger of America.
Utterly incapable? Here’s a ridiculously abbreviated helping of a rarely discussed Iraqi tradition:
• June 1920: An armed Iraqi revolt breaks out against British rule, which kills 450 British troops. A major organized strike is held in 1927 demanding freedom of trade union organization. More uprisings in 1930.
• 1931: a general strike joined by thousands of Iraqis is held in protest of new draconian tax impositions.
• 1936: strikes break out throughout Iraq against the wave of repression launched by a newly installed military government.
• Bread strikes in 1943. An oil workers’ strike in 1946 demanding higher wages and other benefits. More strikes in the same year by printers and railway workers, which forces the Cabinet to resign. Strikes in 1947 against the proposed establishment of the Zionist state of Israel at the expense of the dispossessed Palestinians. A huge uprising in 1948. More strikes in the same year by thousands of Iraqi laborers.
• 1952: port workers strike for higher wages, more housing, better working conditions. Students go on strike in the same year leading to mass riots in most urban centers. Huge demonstrations and strikes in 1956 as Britain, Israel and France attack Egypt, which had nationalized the Suez Canal. The July 14 Revolution in 1958. A coup led by members of the Free Officers seizes power, abolishes the monarchy installed by Britain, carries out land reform, denounces imperialism and proclaims a republic.
Where was America in all this? In 1958, fearing the spread of rebellion throughout the Middle East, the US sent 14,000 Marines to Lebanon in preparation for a joint US-British invasion of Iraq, which came to nothing because “nobody could be found in Iraq to collaborate with.”
In 1963, Washington helped engineer a coup that not only overthrew Gen. Abdel Karim Kassem, the leader who had abolished the West-leaning Iraqi monarchy five years earlier. The putsch also installed—you guessed it—the Ba’ath Party, which included among its members an ambitious 25-year-old Iraqi named Saddam Hussein.
Hussein would reach the highest echelons of power by 1968 but not before purging the ranks of those he perceived to be his rivals in a bloodbath which claimed the lives of thousands of workers, including hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers, as well as military and political leaders.
According to Roger Morris, who served on the US National Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the efficiency with which Saddam carried out the slaughter was helped greatly by the lists of radicals and dissidents supplied by the CIA to the Ba’ath regime. A monstrosity that Morris asserts “was unquestionably midwived by the United States.”
Sounds familiar. Wasn’t it also the CIA who provided Suharto’s thugs with lists of people to slaughter, which led to the murder of a million Indonesians during the 1965-66 reign of terror?
Remember what Kissinger said about the US-spawned ouster of the democratically elected Allende government on September 11, 1973? “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” And so America decided for the hapless Chileans and proceeded to prop up the brutal regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
If only we remembered more, there would be far fewer events of infamy to commemorate.
It is a weary world that we will bequeath to our children and there will be a lot of difficult explaining to do. The road toward remembering will be long and arduous. We can begin by recounting to them the words of a wise American named Benjamin Franklin, who, 220 years ago -- on September 11, 1783 -- wrote: “There never was a good war nor a bad peace.”
* * *
Requests for notes and feedback, please e-mail xioi@excite.com.
Op-Ed TODAY and abscbnnews.com
Recent political and travel essays by Renato Redentor Constantino. Email Red at redcosmo(at)gmail(dot)com.
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Thursday, August 21, 2003
ANTI-AMERICAN OR ANTI-EMPIRE?
The title’s a good question.
Because we have forgotten how to remember, we fail to recognize the deceits of our leaders.
"We come not as conquerors, but as liberators," Bush declared as US forces entered Baghdad.
Imperial epiphanies do not even need to be original.
British Lieutenant-General Stanley Maude said it first in 1917 after the Anglo-Indian Army he commanded had invaded and occupied Iraq. Hoping to persuade Iraqis to “accept foreign occupation while Britain secured the country’s oil,” Gen. Maude proclaimed in Baghdad “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Years later, the British “liberators” watched stunned as the ground they were standing on crumbled beneath their feet.
After the US war machine was through gorging on Iraq, it was the turn of the oil corporations. Of this lot, one company managed to single itself out for its sheer obscenity, a gigantic but apparently ailing canker that fed on the blighted body of Iraq in order to nourish itself back to health.
Corporate welfare is rarely as ugly as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Co. which, after suffering a net loss of $498 million in 2002, swung a $26 million profit this year courtesy of the contracts it bagged in Iraq.
God bless America the Bush hooligans cheered. Indeed, echoed an intellectual pipsqueak in Malacañang as she sent off with her kisses a posse of Filipinos to join the US coalition of mercenaries in Baghdad.
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
Abraham Lincoln gave a prescient warning in 1864 that apparently went unheeded. “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country,” said Lincoln. “Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudice of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
What a change it would be if the Arroyo administration paid more attention to the progressive traditions of America instead of fawning over the United States of Big Business.
The great American novelist, John Steinbeck, whose genius lies equally with his works of non-fiction, was once asked which side he was for during the Spanish Civil War. “Your question as to whether I am for Franco is rather insulting,” Steinbeck replied. “I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions.”
But these words are of no use to the Arroyo government, which has preferred the perfunctory song and dance mimicking what it thinks is politically fashionable in Washington. Happily blind to the premises and consequences of the Bush cabal’s machinations.
“Homeland security is not a temporary measure for the current crisis, but will become permanent in American life. I think of it as normalcy,” said Dick Cheney on October 25, 2001, just a little over a month after the terrorist attacks on the US.
Well, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938 used the burning of the Reichstag as a ruse to convince the German President Paul von Hindenberg to sign an emergency decree suspending the basic rights of German citizens – a suspension which lasted until the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
History tends to heave pins that head straight for the bubbles of the supposedly noble and valorous.
Wasn’t it George W. Bush, Jr. who said that "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our homeland."
Ha ha.
The quote is actually from Chancellor Adolf Hitler who, in 1933, was providing the rationale for the creation of the Gestapo – for Germany’s “homeland security”.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” US Attorney General John Ashcroft recently warned, “my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."
Excellent form.
Before committing suicide at the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering had said “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
The title’s a good question.
Because we have forgotten how to remember, we fail to recognize the deceits of our leaders.
"We come not as conquerors, but as liberators," Bush declared as US forces entered Baghdad.
Imperial epiphanies do not even need to be original.
British Lieutenant-General Stanley Maude said it first in 1917 after the Anglo-Indian Army he commanded had invaded and occupied Iraq. Hoping to persuade Iraqis to “accept foreign occupation while Britain secured the country’s oil,” Gen. Maude proclaimed in Baghdad “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” Years later, the British “liberators” watched stunned as the ground they were standing on crumbled beneath their feet.
After the US war machine was through gorging on Iraq, it was the turn of the oil corporations. Of this lot, one company managed to single itself out for its sheer obscenity, a gigantic but apparently ailing canker that fed on the blighted body of Iraq in order to nourish itself back to health.
Corporate welfare is rarely as ugly as Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Co. which, after suffering a net loss of $498 million in 2002, swung a $26 million profit this year courtesy of the contracts it bagged in Iraq.
God bless America the Bush hooligans cheered. Indeed, echoed an intellectual pipsqueak in Malacañang as she sent off with her kisses a posse of Filipinos to join the US coalition of mercenaries in Baghdad.
"When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
Abraham Lincoln gave a prescient warning in 1864 that apparently went unheeded. “I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country,” said Lincoln. “Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudice of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
What a change it would be if the Arroyo administration paid more attention to the progressive traditions of America instead of fawning over the United States of Big Business.
The great American novelist, John Steinbeck, whose genius lies equally with his works of non-fiction, was once asked which side he was for during the Spanish Civil War. “Your question as to whether I am for Franco is rather insulting,” Steinbeck replied. “I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions.”
But these words are of no use to the Arroyo government, which has preferred the perfunctory song and dance mimicking what it thinks is politically fashionable in Washington. Happily blind to the premises and consequences of the Bush cabal’s machinations.
“Homeland security is not a temporary measure for the current crisis, but will become permanent in American life. I think of it as normalcy,” said Dick Cheney on October 25, 2001, just a little over a month after the terrorist attacks on the US.
Well, Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938 used the burning of the Reichstag as a ruse to convince the German President Paul von Hindenberg to sign an emergency decree suspending the basic rights of German citizens – a suspension which lasted until the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.
History tends to heave pins that head straight for the bubbles of the supposedly noble and valorous.
Wasn’t it George W. Bush, Jr. who said that "An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to insure our domestic security and protect our homeland."
Ha ha.
The quote is actually from Chancellor Adolf Hitler who, in 1933, was providing the rationale for the creation of the Gestapo – for Germany’s “homeland security”.
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” US Attorney General John Ashcroft recently warned, “my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies."
Excellent form.
Before committing suicide at the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering had said “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
THE EXIGENCIES OF EMPIRE
There are many who feel today that the actuations of the Bush administration over Iraq represent a sharp break from US foreign policy and practice. Indeed, this feeling is partly justified by the brazenness that has accompanied the Bush government’s conduct as it prepares to seize the oil fields of Iraq and reshape the Middle East according to its interests. This sentiment, however, not only absolves the unmitigated slaughter of Iraqis perpetrated by preceding US administrations. It also fails to recognize continuities that mark the history of America’s aspirations for Empire.
We saw the millions marching in the streets in all the places where protest matters; but so did Washington. As America’s ugly oil war becomes more politically untenable by the day, we can be sure that the imperial fundamentalists in Washington are already scanning their options in order to regain the initiative they lost to the global no-war protests. The absence of evidence does not mean the evidence of absence, says Rumsfeld. For an America perennially weighed down by the necessities of justifying aggression, the triggers of war are everywhere, to be pulled expediently whether they are real or not. It can take the form of the Al-Samoud missiles or the shooting down of unmanned US aerial spy vessels flying over Iraqi territory. It can take the form of more terrible things, concocted by sick minds at the Pentagon, or simpler things such as the breach of a seemingly innocuous deadline. Anything will do.
When the administration of Lyndon Johnson launched the full-scale US invasion of Vietnam, it did so using the authority granted by the US Congress through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, named after the site where North Vietnam allegedly attacked US naval vessels on August 2 and 4, 1964. Faced with growing domestic hostility to the policy of escalating US military intervention, the Tonkin Gulf incidents gave the Johnson government the leverage to pressure the US Congress to authorize the open assault on Vietnam. Reports of the alleged attacks caused such a rumpus in the US that by August 7, 1964 the US Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution - with a vote of 416 to 0 in the House and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.
Only later was it revealed that a draft version of the resolution had actually been prepared prior to the alleged attacks on US vessels. It was also exposed later that the provocation on August 2 actually came from the US – when an American destroyer deliberately entered North Vietnam’s territorial waters - and that the reported August 4 attack did not take place at all. By the time the Johnson administration’s manipulation of the Tonkin Gulf incident was exposed, however, the imperial objective had already been reached - the US was already deeply “committed” to the Vietnam War.
Farther down history but much closer to home, we have a similar and no less bloody account of imperial script-writing. The last decade of 1890 was an invigorating time for Filipino revolutionaries. After 4 centuries of largely inchoate and separate revolts, Filipinos had united in 1892 under the banner of an organization whose goal was to overthrow Spanish colonial rule and create a democratic Filipino republic. By 1896, borne out of well-articulated aspirations for national economic and political independence, open revolutionary war had commenced against Spain. Three years later, in the first few days of 1899, the revolutionary movement had not only defeated Spain; they had already assembled a government ready to administer to the needs of a victorious but war-weary populace.
The dreams of the emergent republic were not to be, however, for US imperial interests had different designs for the islands. Behind the back of the Filipinos, the government of President McKinley had signed with Spain the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898 under which the Philippines was ceded to America. The US Constitution, however, prevented the implementation of the treaty annexing Asia’s first republic until a final cog was in place: ratification by the Senate with a two-thirds majority vote of its members.
McKinley knew he lacked the required two-thirds vote when the Paris accord was signed but this did little to stop him from pushing through the treaty. Facing reelection in 1900, McKinley was quite eager to please his benefactors, chiefly the American Sugar Refining Co., whose sway over McKinley’s government is so strikingly similar to the influence wielded today by oil giant ExxonMobil over the Bush administration.
The equation governing America’s annexation of the nascent republic was quite simple. If the US took possession of the islands, Philippine cane sugar was projected to enter the US without any tariffs, thus reducing costs for sugar refiners the biggest of which was the American Sugar Refining Co. Nevertheless, arguments were made in the US that taking possession of the Philippines was not necessary in order for America to enjoy the economic opportunities posed by the islands. But, as US Admiral George Dewey – who would play a major role in the bloody US occupation of the Philippines - put it, “capital would not feel safe to invest in the Philippines unless the United States annexed the islands.”
In the end, outright bribery would muster for McKinley a large portion of the needed votes. In order to tip the balance, however, McKinley would manufacture a trigger so effective it served as a precursor to the Tonkin Gulf scenario.
After the Paris treaty was signed, instructions were sent to American forces deployed in the Philippines to avoid clashes with Filipino troops. Hostilities breaking out at that time would have only given ammunition to anti-annexationists in the US. Similar to directives received recently by media outfits such as CNN, CBS and the New York Times with regard to their coverage of the impending US war on Iraq, American commanders also received instructions at the turn of the century to censor press dispatches from the Philippines to prevent further fueling opposition to the imperial plans of the McKinley government. Only when opposition to the treaty’s passage was considered close to being neutralized did the policy shift from military restraint to military provocation. In his testimony to the US Congress on the Filipino-American War, no less than Gen. Arthur MacArthur revealed that “We had a pre-arranged plan. Our tactical arrangements there were very perfect, indeed … I simply wired all commanders to carry out pre-arranged plans, and the whole division was placed on the firing line.” Presaging close to a century the scorn heaped by the war planners of Washington today on an ignorant US public, a shrewd American senator projected “As soon as one American soldier fell in an attack by the Filipinos, sentiment would vanish, and the American people would stand behind the Army as they had always done.”
On January 21, 1899 the commanding general of US forces in the Philippines ordered American warships to be positioned in Manila bay so as to give supportive fire to American troops. Announcements conditioning the US public were made by the War Department that “US forces would have to defend themselves” if attacked by ‘natives’ even as US troops were deployed to Manila. On February 2, together with the US Navy’s dismissal of Filipinos employed in US ships in the harbor, American regimental commanders were given orders to provoke a conflict with the Filipino army. On the same day, a US regiment deliberately occupied an area called Santol where Filipino republican troops were positioned. The Filipinos protested but, not wishing to ignite hostilities, eventually withdrew.
On the evening of February 4, 1899 US soldiers in Santol were instructed to venture into more territory held by Filipino troops, with the order “to shoot if the need arose.” The Americans naturally encountered Filipino sentries whom they immediately fired on, with a private who fired the first shot shouting “Line up, fellows, the niggers are in here all through these yards.” Hours later, McKinley announced to the US press “that the insurgents had attacked Manila.” McKinley dispatched instructions the next day to crush the Filipino army. An emissary from the Filipinos was sent to the American commanders to request for “a cessation of hostilities” and to explain that the provocation actually came from US troops. The envoy was rebuffed by the US Army commander, who told the Filipino that the fighting “having begun, must go on to the grim end.” News of “savages” and “barbarians” who had “fired on the flag” subsequently filled US newspapers. On February 6, the US Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of two-thirds plus one and the Philippines formally became a colony of the United States. Yet it would take the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in a decade-long orgy of pacification before America finally crushed armed resistance to US rule.
The US wishes to frame its impending occupation of Iraq with talk of liberation and democracy? To determine the looming fate of Iraq, why not hear out first the words of America as it was ‘liberating’ the first republic of Asia.
“You never hear of any disturbances,” said a Republican congressman just back from Manila at the time of McKinley’s campaign of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the Philippines, “… because there isn’t anybody left to rebel … The good Lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”
Before he took command, Filipino-American War Gen. J. Franklin Bell announced: “All consideration and regard for the inhabitants of this place cease from the day I become commander. I have the force and authority to do whatever seems to me good and especially to humiliate all those … who have any pride.” Explaining the brutality accorded by American soldiers to Filipinos, a Boston Herald correspondent covering the Philippine-US war said “Our troops in the Philippines … look upon all Filipinos as of one race and condition, and being dark men, they are therefore ‘niggers,’ and entitled to all the contempt and harsh treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior races.” As early as April 1899, a US commander was already predicting that “It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher place of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.” As it turns out, however, not that many died. As early as 1901, the number of Filipinos that had been killed or had died of disease as a result of America’s vile occupation was pegged by a US general at a ‘mere’ 600,000 – a horrific figure considering that it took America a decade after 1899 to literally wipe out Filipino resistance. And America has the temerity to ask “Why do they hate us?”
“We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of world,” said Senator Wayne Morse, who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in the US Senate. “It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that’s going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia.”
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Sources: Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 1991; Philippine-American War, Day One, Issues Without Tears, Volume 5, 1986; Recalling the Philippine-American War, Issues Without Tears, Volume 8, 1989; “The Iraq ploy and Resemblances to the Start of the Cold War,” Saul Landau, November 28, 2002; Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States and the Modern Historical Experience, Gabriel Kolko, 1985; Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, Daniel Boone Schirmer, 1972; Conspiracy for Empire: Big business, corruption and the Politics of Imperialism in America, 1876-1907, Jonathan Shephard Fast and Luzviminda Bartolome Fransisco, 1985.
There are many who feel today that the actuations of the Bush administration over Iraq represent a sharp break from US foreign policy and practice. Indeed, this feeling is partly justified by the brazenness that has accompanied the Bush government’s conduct as it prepares to seize the oil fields of Iraq and reshape the Middle East according to its interests. This sentiment, however, not only absolves the unmitigated slaughter of Iraqis perpetrated by preceding US administrations. It also fails to recognize continuities that mark the history of America’s aspirations for Empire.
We saw the millions marching in the streets in all the places where protest matters; but so did Washington. As America’s ugly oil war becomes more politically untenable by the day, we can be sure that the imperial fundamentalists in Washington are already scanning their options in order to regain the initiative they lost to the global no-war protests. The absence of evidence does not mean the evidence of absence, says Rumsfeld. For an America perennially weighed down by the necessities of justifying aggression, the triggers of war are everywhere, to be pulled expediently whether they are real or not. It can take the form of the Al-Samoud missiles or the shooting down of unmanned US aerial spy vessels flying over Iraqi territory. It can take the form of more terrible things, concocted by sick minds at the Pentagon, or simpler things such as the breach of a seemingly innocuous deadline. Anything will do.
When the administration of Lyndon Johnson launched the full-scale US invasion of Vietnam, it did so using the authority granted by the US Congress through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, named after the site where North Vietnam allegedly attacked US naval vessels on August 2 and 4, 1964. Faced with growing domestic hostility to the policy of escalating US military intervention, the Tonkin Gulf incidents gave the Johnson government the leverage to pressure the US Congress to authorize the open assault on Vietnam. Reports of the alleged attacks caused such a rumpus in the US that by August 7, 1964 the US Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution - with a vote of 416 to 0 in the House and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.
Only later was it revealed that a draft version of the resolution had actually been prepared prior to the alleged attacks on US vessels. It was also exposed later that the provocation on August 2 actually came from the US – when an American destroyer deliberately entered North Vietnam’s territorial waters - and that the reported August 4 attack did not take place at all. By the time the Johnson administration’s manipulation of the Tonkin Gulf incident was exposed, however, the imperial objective had already been reached - the US was already deeply “committed” to the Vietnam War.
Farther down history but much closer to home, we have a similar and no less bloody account of imperial script-writing. The last decade of 1890 was an invigorating time for Filipino revolutionaries. After 4 centuries of largely inchoate and separate revolts, Filipinos had united in 1892 under the banner of an organization whose goal was to overthrow Spanish colonial rule and create a democratic Filipino republic. By 1896, borne out of well-articulated aspirations for national economic and political independence, open revolutionary war had commenced against Spain. Three years later, in the first few days of 1899, the revolutionary movement had not only defeated Spain; they had already assembled a government ready to administer to the needs of a victorious but war-weary populace.
The dreams of the emergent republic were not to be, however, for US imperial interests had different designs for the islands. Behind the back of the Filipinos, the government of President McKinley had signed with Spain the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898 under which the Philippines was ceded to America. The US Constitution, however, prevented the implementation of the treaty annexing Asia’s first republic until a final cog was in place: ratification by the Senate with a two-thirds majority vote of its members.
McKinley knew he lacked the required two-thirds vote when the Paris accord was signed but this did little to stop him from pushing through the treaty. Facing reelection in 1900, McKinley was quite eager to please his benefactors, chiefly the American Sugar Refining Co., whose sway over McKinley’s government is so strikingly similar to the influence wielded today by oil giant ExxonMobil over the Bush administration.
The equation governing America’s annexation of the nascent republic was quite simple. If the US took possession of the islands, Philippine cane sugar was projected to enter the US without any tariffs, thus reducing costs for sugar refiners the biggest of which was the American Sugar Refining Co. Nevertheless, arguments were made in the US that taking possession of the Philippines was not necessary in order for America to enjoy the economic opportunities posed by the islands. But, as US Admiral George Dewey – who would play a major role in the bloody US occupation of the Philippines - put it, “capital would not feel safe to invest in the Philippines unless the United States annexed the islands.”
In the end, outright bribery would muster for McKinley a large portion of the needed votes. In order to tip the balance, however, McKinley would manufacture a trigger so effective it served as a precursor to the Tonkin Gulf scenario.
After the Paris treaty was signed, instructions were sent to American forces deployed in the Philippines to avoid clashes with Filipino troops. Hostilities breaking out at that time would have only given ammunition to anti-annexationists in the US. Similar to directives received recently by media outfits such as CNN, CBS and the New York Times with regard to their coverage of the impending US war on Iraq, American commanders also received instructions at the turn of the century to censor press dispatches from the Philippines to prevent further fueling opposition to the imperial plans of the McKinley government. Only when opposition to the treaty’s passage was considered close to being neutralized did the policy shift from military restraint to military provocation. In his testimony to the US Congress on the Filipino-American War, no less than Gen. Arthur MacArthur revealed that “We had a pre-arranged plan. Our tactical arrangements there were very perfect, indeed … I simply wired all commanders to carry out pre-arranged plans, and the whole division was placed on the firing line.” Presaging close to a century the scorn heaped by the war planners of Washington today on an ignorant US public, a shrewd American senator projected “As soon as one American soldier fell in an attack by the Filipinos, sentiment would vanish, and the American people would stand behind the Army as they had always done.”
On January 21, 1899 the commanding general of US forces in the Philippines ordered American warships to be positioned in Manila bay so as to give supportive fire to American troops. Announcements conditioning the US public were made by the War Department that “US forces would have to defend themselves” if attacked by ‘natives’ even as US troops were deployed to Manila. On February 2, together with the US Navy’s dismissal of Filipinos employed in US ships in the harbor, American regimental commanders were given orders to provoke a conflict with the Filipino army. On the same day, a US regiment deliberately occupied an area called Santol where Filipino republican troops were positioned. The Filipinos protested but, not wishing to ignite hostilities, eventually withdrew.
On the evening of February 4, 1899 US soldiers in Santol were instructed to venture into more territory held by Filipino troops, with the order “to shoot if the need arose.” The Americans naturally encountered Filipino sentries whom they immediately fired on, with a private who fired the first shot shouting “Line up, fellows, the niggers are in here all through these yards.” Hours later, McKinley announced to the US press “that the insurgents had attacked Manila.” McKinley dispatched instructions the next day to crush the Filipino army. An emissary from the Filipinos was sent to the American commanders to request for “a cessation of hostilities” and to explain that the provocation actually came from US troops. The envoy was rebuffed by the US Army commander, who told the Filipino that the fighting “having begun, must go on to the grim end.” News of “savages” and “barbarians” who had “fired on the flag” subsequently filled US newspapers. On February 6, the US Senate ratified the treaty by a vote of two-thirds plus one and the Philippines formally became a colony of the United States. Yet it would take the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in a decade-long orgy of pacification before America finally crushed armed resistance to US rule.
The US wishes to frame its impending occupation of Iraq with talk of liberation and democracy? To determine the looming fate of Iraq, why not hear out first the words of America as it was ‘liberating’ the first republic of Asia.
“You never hear of any disturbances,” said a Republican congressman just back from Manila at the time of McKinley’s campaign of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the Philippines, “… because there isn’t anybody left to rebel … The good Lord in Heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under the ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”
Before he took command, Filipino-American War Gen. J. Franklin Bell announced: “All consideration and regard for the inhabitants of this place cease from the day I become commander. I have the force and authority to do whatever seems to me good and especially to humiliate all those … who have any pride.” Explaining the brutality accorded by American soldiers to Filipinos, a Boston Herald correspondent covering the Philippine-US war said “Our troops in the Philippines … look upon all Filipinos as of one race and condition, and being dark men, they are therefore ‘niggers,’ and entitled to all the contempt and harsh treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior races.” As early as April 1899, a US commander was already predicting that “It may be necessary to kill half the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher place of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.” As it turns out, however, not that many died. As early as 1901, the number of Filipinos that had been killed or had died of disease as a result of America’s vile occupation was pegged by a US general at a ‘mere’ 600,000 – a horrific figure considering that it took America a decade after 1899 to literally wipe out Filipino resistance. And America has the temerity to ask “Why do they hate us?”
“We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of world,” said Senator Wayne Morse, who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in the US Senate. “It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that’s going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia.”
Comments are welcome at xioi@excite.com
Sources: Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 1991; Philippine-American War, Day One, Issues Without Tears, Volume 5, 1986; Recalling the Philippine-American War, Issues Without Tears, Volume 8, 1989; “The Iraq ploy and Resemblances to the Start of the Cold War,” Saul Landau, November 28, 2002; Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States and the Modern Historical Experience, Gabriel Kolko, 1985; Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, Daniel Boone Schirmer, 1972; Conspiracy for Empire: Big business, corruption and the Politics of Imperialism in America, 1876-1907, Jonathan Shephard Fast and Luzviminda Bartolome Fransisco, 1985.
Saturday, February 15, 2003
The Imperial War and the Empire of Memory
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO, TODAY, February 15, 2003
If the empire of memory is vast and its arsenal as abundant as one’s awareness of the past, the wealth of experience concerning the ruthless nature of imperial ambitions should be guiding us away from the path of America’s insane campaign to “wage war to force peace.”
RENATO REDENTOR CONSTANTINO, TODAY, February 15, 2003
If the empire of memory is vast and its arsenal as abundant as one’s awareness of the past, the wealth of experience concerning the ruthless nature of imperial ambitions should be guiding us away from the path of America’s insane campaign to “wage war to force peace.”
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
UNMASKING US HYPOCRISY AND ITS IMPENDING WAR ON IRAQ
The empire-reflex has not left the consciousness of governing elites in the US ever since it began its brutal subjugation of the Philippine Republic in 1899. Indeed, the desire for empire has become even more acute with each intervention Washington has sponsored. Though the raiment of justifications used for its interventionism has become more complex and sophisticated, every now and then the imperial arrogance of the US is exposed naked to the global public in all its nastiness.
A year before the fateful 9/11 terrorist attack on the US, an organization seeking to promote “American global leadership” released a report that laid out with astounding clarity the imperial vision of America. Titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” the report noted that the US “is the only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership and the world’s largest economy . . . At present, the US faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
The report should be required reading for those who have used the inane slur of “anti-Americanism” with increasing promiscuity when confronted with facts showing how and why US war plans in Iraq are simply reflective of America’s aspirations for oil and empire.
A war for freedom in Iraq? Really?
The US provided the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein the capacity to acquire, develop and use chemical and biological weapons via transactions that in the early eighties were shepherded by a Reagan envoy named Donald Rumsfeld. This is the same Rumsfeld who sits today as George Bush Junior’s secretary of defense and who is at present busy preparing hundreds of thousands of US troops ostensibly to bring “freedom and democracy” to wretched Iraqis.
“We are forced to take military action against Iraq to confront the threat Saddam poses to the free world, in particular America,” says Bush of the premise behind the US buildup for war. True?
Not so, says the report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which completely strips the Bush administration of its oft-repeated “noble” intentions on Iraq and the Middle East. Published by the prominent group Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the report states how “the US 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.”
Established in 1997, the PNAC includes on its roster of founding signatories the current US Vice President, Richard Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (now deputy defense secretary), I. Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff), William Bennett (Bush Jr.’s education secretary) and Zalmay Khalilzad (former official of Unocal, the US oil company that negotiated with the Taliban in the ’90s to build a pipeline and the White House’s envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan).
The Gift and the Curse
The PNAC report appears like a plan drawn up in 2003 to provide ideological scaffolding for America’s impending war on Iraq. Indeed, the announcement of Bush’s war intentions in the opening days of 2003 explicitly stated the primary objective of “the quick takeover of [Iraq’s] oil fields” with “the American military . . . running the country for some time.”
The PNAC report was not published this year or last year, not even in 2001, but in September 2000.
Breathtaking in its brazenness and lucidity, the plan, however, could not be executed because of a vital deficiency. “[T]he process of transformation,” said the PNAC report, “is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.” On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden gave them this event.
Unfortunately, as the US unwittingly gets slowly sucked into the imperial overreach quagmire, it is not the instance of Pearl Harbor that is increasingly being conjured; the imagery is bearing the likeness more and more of Mogadishu, a sentiment that is virtually echoed today even by sections of the US Establishment.
Bruce Hoffman of the influential US think tank Rand Corp. is worried. “It’s impossible to think something won’t happen,” he says. Last year, we began to see things we only imagined years ago, like a missile attack on [a] passenger airliner . . . . It’s just a matter of time before we’re not as successful or lucky.” This was an echo of the foreboding expressed by another US official who asked and answered his own question: “Can we get through 2003 without some major attack? The odds are against it.”
Looking back at 2002, Hoffman adds that “terrorists’ determination . . . hasn’t flagged or flattened [despite] the greatest worldwide effort ever against terrorism.”
Never mind the CIA appraisal that the not-so-new “war on terror” waged by the US on Afghan soil last year ensured that senior operatives of the al-Qaeda network would be more spread out and thus even more difficult to secure. The war inflicted by the US on Afghanistan managed to kill over 4,000 civilians, not one of whom was named Osama bin Laden. Has anyone asked lately how many more “bin Ladens” were created by that war?
Slaughter: an acceptable consequence?
When the US wages war anew on Iraq, it will likely follow the pattern of the first Gulf War where water treatment plants were bombed directly along with electrical grids. This will immediately knock out the 70 percent of water treatment plants that have no functioning back-up generator. Today at least 40 percent of Iraq’s “drinking water” is contaminated.
We make this example if only to show how the impending US war on Iraq will again target the weakest of Iraqis: the hundreds of thousands of children -- not Saddam -- who will suffer more. According to UN officials, the impact of a new US military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein would likely be worse than the humanitarian crisis caused by the 1991 Gulf War.
The UN estimates the number of those likely to be put at risk of acute hunger and disease to be 10 million Iraqi civilians, including more than 2 million homeless and refugees. Such numbers have not been known, however, to faze the US government, which has displayed a face of humanity so harrowingly similar to the Israeli mien.
Echoing the sentiments of his commanders and the leaders of his government, an Israeli army officer commented on their deliberate shelling in 1996 of the UN station at Qana, Lebanon, that slaughtered 106 Lebanese refugees who, fleeing from the artillery Israel had directed against them, sought shelter in the UN compound. “It’s a war; in a war these things happen . . . It’s just a bunch of Arabs. Why are you taking it so hard?”
Former general Ehud Barak, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister, dismissed the Qana slaughter as an “unfortunate mistake.”
Does anyone still remember the reaction of Colin Powell (today reinvented as a peacenik) when he was asked 10 years ago if he knew how many Iraqis died in the 1991 Gulf War? To tell you the truth, said Powell, “that is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
Downright dirty double standards
Who can blame the good general for such a response? If the only reaction that the Reagan/Bush government gave to the 200,000 Iranians killed during the eighties by Iraqi soldiers using weapons of mass destruction supplied by the US was for the young Saddam to “step up its air war and bombing of Iran,” why should Powell be interested in a mere 130,000 Iraqi civilians who died in the 1991 war?
Israel inevitably rises from any discussion of the Middle East crisis. How can it not be so? Israel -- a state intent on destroying the Palestinian people -- continues to be central to the rage that has for so long been seethed in the Arab world. Israel ultimately bears the heaviest responsibilities for the awesome cruelty of the doomed Palestinians -- a people who will soon enter their 36th year of occupation under Israel. Israel is central to any discussion concerning Iraq and the spate of UN resolutions that Saddam’s regime has been accused of violating.
The UN Resolutions directed at Iraq -- the latest, 1441, Washington shamelessly slavered for -- call for renewed and more intrusive weapons inspections. In its latest regurgitation of its war mantra, Washington warns Iraq that “[e]ven the slightest resistance could constitute the ‘material breach’ of the resolution that triggers war.”
As if to prove its seriousness, the US has sent its warships and troops and conducted its war exercises for all to see. Believers in the US as an objective global dispenser of justice would have exclaimed “What bravery! What righteousness!” their mouths surely agape at the high-tech weaponry, massive aircraft carriers and destroyers and tanks of America.
“That’s what you get, Saddam, for thumbing your nose at the UN!” the believer would have said. Sure. Israel has violated 29 UN resolutions, all of which are supposed to be binding. In May 2000 Israel finally obeyed a UN Resolution -- Security Council Resolution 425 -- which called for the total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Southern Lebanon. This, only after the Hezbollah had exacted from Israeli forces a daily casualty rate so horrific the Israeli public was no longer willing to support the presence of its troops in Lebanon. Israel complied with Resolution 425 a little bit late, however. The resolution was passed in 1978. Did Washington even protest any UN resolution violation of its vile Middle East gendarme, at any point from the issuance of each resolution to the present?
Why does the US feel incredulous when, due to its unquestioning support of Israel, it is accused of being the biggest stumbling block to resolving the Middle East predicament? There was no remonstration from the US when Israel slaughtered the Qana refugees. America continues to block yogurt-making equipment, child vaccines, dialysis equipment, and printing equipment for school textbooks in Iraq for the absurd reason that these could be “potential military dual use materials and weapons of mass destruction.” But the US -- over its usual diplomatic and financial support -- will send Patriot missiles and 600 troops to Israel this January in fact, just like in 1991.
UN resolution violations = war?
The air is thick today in the mainstream media about war, weapons inspections, UN resolution violations, geopolitics and “regime change.”
The line of the US that violations of UN resolutions are tantamount to war is accepted as fact rather than utter foolishness. If this equation were true, there would be war against Morocco; its occupation of the Western Sahara violated a Security Council resolution. What resolutions were violated by Indonesia when it occupied of East Timor?
What about Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, which has been condemned by the Security Council? The text of the UN Charter, the supreme instrument of international law, is the one most often neglected today. It states that all nonmilitary solutions must be used before war can even be considered.
At the time the UN inspection team in Iraq left in 1998, the weapons inspectors had said that up to 95 percent of what they were looking for had already been found and accounted for. This is not a measly amount, yet it also states that the job is still not done. Why did the inspection team leave Iraq then? Today, the mainstream US media say Saddam had kicked out the UN inspectors in 1998.
The same media, however, reported in 1998 that it was the UN that ordered the inspectors to leave Iraq because the US government then had warned the UN that they intended to bomb Iraq and did not wish to kill UN inspectors. Recall the UN inspection team assessment in 1998 -- 5 percent of inspection work remained.
Is it anti-American to ask whether the US seriously wants an unsullied implementation of the inspection process or just war as a prelude of its occupation of Iraq?
Somehow, the PNAC vision resonates anew in the answer.
Regime change roulette
What about the US-articulated basis for “regime change” in Iraq? Few things can match the ludicrousness of this idea.
What happens when nuclear India decides it is time for “regime change” in Pakistan? Time to deploy the nuke warheads to the border, put the Indian troops on red alert and hope for regime change in Islamabad? So Israel decides one of these days to openly aim the 400 nuclear bombs in its armory and tell Syria “It’s time for a regime change”? What if Damascus does a similar buildup but does so ahead of Israel and makes the case more eloquently with the massing of Syrian troops that “It is time for regime change in Tel Aviv”?
All these -- in furtherance of the US “threat of war” doctrine -- is supposed to contribute to world peace?
And yet even more contradictions. North Korea, Iraq’s support cohort in what Bush calls “axis of evil,” announces it has nuclear weapons. Washington’s immediate response is that it will confront the “evil regime” in Asia with diplomacy and the aid carrot even as it threatens Iraqis with annihilation due to the specter, not the actuality, of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Maybe it’s because Dear Leader does not sport the same bushy mustache of Saddam? Maybe it’s the wild hairdo? Or maybe it’s just because North Korea does not have oil? Ah, but if I insist it’s about oil, I’m likely to be accused of anti-Americanism.
Promoter or enemy of peace?
Considered to carry one of the more acute concentrations of redneck patriots, the US defense establishment and the weapons industry continue to receive a gargantuan share of the US budget. This year, total military spending is pegged at $396.1 billion, with a further $38 billion to be spent on “homeland defense.” Washington predicts that the war budget will increase by 30 percent by 2007, equivalent to over $451 billion. According to the Federation of American Scientists (FASI), the US weapons industry is second only to the US agriculture industry in its receipt of US taxpayer subsidies, receiving over $10 billion a year.
Should US citizens -- and the rest of the world -- feel more secure with the kind of attention the US government has lavished on its military and defense apparatus? America’s fantastically shortsighted foreign policy, which has created more wars and deeper resentment among developing nations, says otherwise. Unfortunately for US citizens -- and, again, the rest of us – it’s not just US foreign policy that’s the problem. The problem is also from within -- the very weapons sector in the US which continues to be given mind-boggling billions of dollars.
In 2001 the US weapons industry controlled approximately 50 percent of the world arms market. Of the 42 active conflicts in 1999, the US supplied arms or military technology to parties in more than 92 percent of the conflicts. During virtually the same period, the US delivered almost $6.8 billion in armaments to nations widely considered to regularly violate basic standards of human rights and to countries that continue to recruit children for their official armed forces. An authority on national security affairs calls the US “an equal opportunity death merchant” with good reason. Democratic political systems or morally desirable leaders have never been the currency of the US weapons industry, only greenbacks.
In October 2002, for instance, an annual weapons conference and exhibition was held in Jordan. On display during the exhibit were the Stars and Stripes and the usual array of ultramodern arms manufactured by US firms such as Sikorsky, Raytheon, Harris Corp., JPS, Pratt & Whitney, AM General and Environmental Tectonics. The roster of buyers for whom, presumably, the event was organized was equally impressive. They included delegates from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya -- official representatives of regimes that the Bush administration finds repugnant. Officially, that is.
What do we do with the US?
“What do we do with the US?” This is the question printed on a widely distributed shirt at Bali, Indonesia, in a conference held in the middle of 2002 in preparation for the Earth Summit Part 2 of Johannesburg, South Africa. The T-shirt wasn’t really well-designed; in fact, with its dull blue ink printed on plain white cloth, not even pure cotton, it looked positively boring. But its limited prints ran out swiftly, lapped up by both country delegates to the event and NGOs alike.
The question on the T-shirt was to be repeated a number of times in the lobby of the conference center during the proceedings, in the gardens outside, in the bars at night after the day’s frustration with the efforts of the US delegation to stymie attempts to make various vital environmental agreements more binding, lasting and effective.
The question would return to haunt the halls of conference centers in Johannesburg, where the Earth Summit 2 was taking place. It bears relevance to bring this concern up; after all, chief among the targets for “preemptive strikes” of the US delegation during the green conference was the Kyoto Protocol. Yes, the climate treaty, the one that intends to reduce the grave dangers posed by climate change -- the biggest environmental threat facing the planet today -- by phasing out society’s dependence on fossil fuels.
We all know that petroleum-addicted America is the largest consumer of fossil fuels today and, thus, the biggest emitter, too, of greenhouse gases. You would think that by pushing for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, the US would not just help in protecting the global commons but also, by consequence, help in strengthening global security. Reducing the malevolent influence of oil obviously plays some part in reducing the potential for and source of many of today’s conflicts. But no, the US will have none of it.
Stop the war; do something, anything
“What do we do with the US?” actually begs the question of what to do with a Philippine government so enamored with its role of cheerleader to the wildest and by far the most dangerous rogue policeman the world has ever known. Because it is here, in our country, where we can and should contribute the most for peace. We do not have to follow the path of war that the US wishes the whole world to take.
But the government does not listen, you will say. If so, then we must make our government listen. Speak out. You don’t have to wait for a mammoth demonstration (but it would be wise to join if you come across one). Wear a pin. Send out e-mails. Write letters, sign petitions. Hang a banner on your gate and let your neighbors know that you will not allow Bush and bin Laden to speak for you. Help give out antiwar leaflets.
Do something, anything. As William Pitt of Media Lens says, “It will make others in the country who feel isolated in their fear that something has gone terribly wrong understand that they are not alone. Big storms gather around small particles . . . The moment is here, now, upon us all.”
1. “US plans to grab Iraqi oil fields,” David E. Sanger and James Dao, Today, January 7, 2003.
2. See www.newamericancentury.org. See also “No war, No WTO,” Norm Dixon, Green Left Weekly, November 13, 2002.
3. “Dark days ahead as Bush faces troubles worldwide,” Robin Wright, Today, January 6, 2003.
4. “The Case Against the War,” transcript of CBC interview with Phyllis Bennis, TNI Fellow, CBC Radio, November 2, 2002.
5. “Iraq war could put 10M people in need of aid-UN,” Colum Lynch, Today, January 8, 2003.
6. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: the Abduction of Lebanon, Thundermouth Press/Nation Books, New York, 2002.
7. Quote is from the article “What war looks like” by the eminent US historian Howard Zinn. See http://www.medialens.org
8. “The Iraq ploy and the resemblances to the start of the Cold War,” Saul Landau, TNI Fellow, Progreso Weekly, November 28, 2002. See also Aliran Monthly, December 2001.
9. “Awesome cruelty of a doomed people” is borrowed from the title of The Independent’s Robert Fisk’s dispatch from a satellite phone, on board an airliner turning away from New York, on September 11, 2001.
10. “Angry Saddam accuses UN inspectors of spying,” Neil MacFarquhar, Today, January 8, 2003.
11. “US sends troops, Patriots to Israel,” Michael R. Gordon, Today, January 17, 2003.
12. “The Iraq Ploy …” Saul Landau.
13. “Arming for Armageddon: Boomtime for the Military-Industrial complex,” John Stanton, December 30, 2002. Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security matters. For the October 2002 weapons conference, see http://www.sofex.com.jo/htm/index.html
14. “Here. Now.” William Rivers Pitt, November 26, 2002. http://www.medialens.org
The empire-reflex has not left the consciousness of governing elites in the US ever since it began its brutal subjugation of the Philippine Republic in 1899. Indeed, the desire for empire has become even more acute with each intervention Washington has sponsored. Though the raiment of justifications used for its interventionism has become more complex and sophisticated, every now and then the imperial arrogance of the US is exposed naked to the global public in all its nastiness.
A year before the fateful 9/11 terrorist attack on the US, an organization seeking to promote “American global leadership” released a report that laid out with astounding clarity the imperial vision of America. Titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” the report noted that the US “is the only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership and the world’s largest economy . . . At present, the US faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.”
The report should be required reading for those who have used the inane slur of “anti-Americanism” with increasing promiscuity when confronted with facts showing how and why US war plans in Iraq are simply reflective of America’s aspirations for oil and empire.
A war for freedom in Iraq? Really?
The US provided the despotic regime of Saddam Hussein the capacity to acquire, develop and use chemical and biological weapons via transactions that in the early eighties were shepherded by a Reagan envoy named Donald Rumsfeld. This is the same Rumsfeld who sits today as George Bush Junior’s secretary of defense and who is at present busy preparing hundreds of thousands of US troops ostensibly to bring “freedom and democracy” to wretched Iraqis.
“We are forced to take military action against Iraq to confront the threat Saddam poses to the free world, in particular America,” says Bush of the premise behind the US buildup for war. True?
Not so, says the report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which completely strips the Bush administration of its oft-repeated “noble” intentions on Iraq and the Middle East. Published by the prominent group Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the report states how “the US 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.”
Established in 1997, the PNAC includes on its roster of founding signatories the current US Vice President, Richard Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (now deputy defense secretary), I. Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff), William Bennett (Bush Jr.’s education secretary) and Zalmay Khalilzad (former official of Unocal, the US oil company that negotiated with the Taliban in the ’90s to build a pipeline and the White House’s envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan).
The Gift and the Curse
The PNAC report appears like a plan drawn up in 2003 to provide ideological scaffolding for America’s impending war on Iraq. Indeed, the announcement of Bush’s war intentions in the opening days of 2003 explicitly stated the primary objective of “the quick takeover of [Iraq’s] oil fields” with “the American military . . . running the country for some time.”
The PNAC report was not published this year or last year, not even in 2001, but in September 2000.
Breathtaking in its brazenness and lucidity, the plan, however, could not be executed because of a vital deficiency. “[T]he process of transformation,” said the PNAC report, “is likely to be a long one absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor.” On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden gave them this event.
Unfortunately, as the US unwittingly gets slowly sucked into the imperial overreach quagmire, it is not the instance of Pearl Harbor that is increasingly being conjured; the imagery is bearing the likeness more and more of Mogadishu, a sentiment that is virtually echoed today even by sections of the US Establishment.
Bruce Hoffman of the influential US think tank Rand Corp. is worried. “It’s impossible to think something won’t happen,” he says. Last year, we began to see things we only imagined years ago, like a missile attack on [a] passenger airliner . . . . It’s just a matter of time before we’re not as successful or lucky.” This was an echo of the foreboding expressed by another US official who asked and answered his own question: “Can we get through 2003 without some major attack? The odds are against it.”
Looking back at 2002, Hoffman adds that “terrorists’ determination . . . hasn’t flagged or flattened [despite] the greatest worldwide effort ever against terrorism.”
Never mind the CIA appraisal that the not-so-new “war on terror” waged by the US on Afghan soil last year ensured that senior operatives of the al-Qaeda network would be more spread out and thus even more difficult to secure. The war inflicted by the US on Afghanistan managed to kill over 4,000 civilians, not one of whom was named Osama bin Laden. Has anyone asked lately how many more “bin Ladens” were created by that war?
Slaughter: an acceptable consequence?
When the US wages war anew on Iraq, it will likely follow the pattern of the first Gulf War where water treatment plants were bombed directly along with electrical grids. This will immediately knock out the 70 percent of water treatment plants that have no functioning back-up generator. Today at least 40 percent of Iraq’s “drinking water” is contaminated.
We make this example if only to show how the impending US war on Iraq will again target the weakest of Iraqis: the hundreds of thousands of children -- not Saddam -- who will suffer more. According to UN officials, the impact of a new US military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein would likely be worse than the humanitarian crisis caused by the 1991 Gulf War.
The UN estimates the number of those likely to be put at risk of acute hunger and disease to be 10 million Iraqi civilians, including more than 2 million homeless and refugees. Such numbers have not been known, however, to faze the US government, which has displayed a face of humanity so harrowingly similar to the Israeli mien.
Echoing the sentiments of his commanders and the leaders of his government, an Israeli army officer commented on their deliberate shelling in 1996 of the UN station at Qana, Lebanon, that slaughtered 106 Lebanese refugees who, fleeing from the artillery Israel had directed against them, sought shelter in the UN compound. “It’s a war; in a war these things happen . . . It’s just a bunch of Arabs. Why are you taking it so hard?”
Former general Ehud Barak, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister, dismissed the Qana slaughter as an “unfortunate mistake.”
Does anyone still remember the reaction of Colin Powell (today reinvented as a peacenik) when he was asked 10 years ago if he knew how many Iraqis died in the 1991 Gulf War? To tell you the truth, said Powell, “that is really not a matter I am terribly interested in.”
Downright dirty double standards
Who can blame the good general for such a response? If the only reaction that the Reagan/Bush government gave to the 200,000 Iranians killed during the eighties by Iraqi soldiers using weapons of mass destruction supplied by the US was for the young Saddam to “step up its air war and bombing of Iran,” why should Powell be interested in a mere 130,000 Iraqi civilians who died in the 1991 war?
Israel inevitably rises from any discussion of the Middle East crisis. How can it not be so? Israel -- a state intent on destroying the Palestinian people -- continues to be central to the rage that has for so long been seethed in the Arab world. Israel ultimately bears the heaviest responsibilities for the awesome cruelty of the doomed Palestinians -- a people who will soon enter their 36th year of occupation under Israel. Israel is central to any discussion concerning Iraq and the spate of UN resolutions that Saddam’s regime has been accused of violating.
The UN Resolutions directed at Iraq -- the latest, 1441, Washington shamelessly slavered for -- call for renewed and more intrusive weapons inspections. In its latest regurgitation of its war mantra, Washington warns Iraq that “[e]ven the slightest resistance could constitute the ‘material breach’ of the resolution that triggers war.”
As if to prove its seriousness, the US has sent its warships and troops and conducted its war exercises for all to see. Believers in the US as an objective global dispenser of justice would have exclaimed “What bravery! What righteousness!” their mouths surely agape at the high-tech weaponry, massive aircraft carriers and destroyers and tanks of America.
“That’s what you get, Saddam, for thumbing your nose at the UN!” the believer would have said. Sure. Israel has violated 29 UN resolutions, all of which are supposed to be binding. In May 2000 Israel finally obeyed a UN Resolution -- Security Council Resolution 425 -- which called for the total withdrawal of Israeli forces from Southern Lebanon. This, only after the Hezbollah had exacted from Israeli forces a daily casualty rate so horrific the Israeli public was no longer willing to support the presence of its troops in Lebanon. Israel complied with Resolution 425 a little bit late, however. The resolution was passed in 1978. Did Washington even protest any UN resolution violation of its vile Middle East gendarme, at any point from the issuance of each resolution to the present?
Why does the US feel incredulous when, due to its unquestioning support of Israel, it is accused of being the biggest stumbling block to resolving the Middle East predicament? There was no remonstration from the US when Israel slaughtered the Qana refugees. America continues to block yogurt-making equipment, child vaccines, dialysis equipment, and printing equipment for school textbooks in Iraq for the absurd reason that these could be “potential military dual use materials and weapons of mass destruction.” But the US -- over its usual diplomatic and financial support -- will send Patriot missiles and 600 troops to Israel this January in fact, just like in 1991.
UN resolution violations = war?
The air is thick today in the mainstream media about war, weapons inspections, UN resolution violations, geopolitics and “regime change.”
The line of the US that violations of UN resolutions are tantamount to war is accepted as fact rather than utter foolishness. If this equation were true, there would be war against Morocco; its occupation of the Western Sahara violated a Security Council resolution. What resolutions were violated by Indonesia when it occupied of East Timor?
What about Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus, which has been condemned by the Security Council? The text of the UN Charter, the supreme instrument of international law, is the one most often neglected today. It states that all nonmilitary solutions must be used before war can even be considered.
At the time the UN inspection team in Iraq left in 1998, the weapons inspectors had said that up to 95 percent of what they were looking for had already been found and accounted for. This is not a measly amount, yet it also states that the job is still not done. Why did the inspection team leave Iraq then? Today, the mainstream US media say Saddam had kicked out the UN inspectors in 1998.
The same media, however, reported in 1998 that it was the UN that ordered the inspectors to leave Iraq because the US government then had warned the UN that they intended to bomb Iraq and did not wish to kill UN inspectors. Recall the UN inspection team assessment in 1998 -- 5 percent of inspection work remained.
Is it anti-American to ask whether the US seriously wants an unsullied implementation of the inspection process or just war as a prelude of its occupation of Iraq?
Somehow, the PNAC vision resonates anew in the answer.
Regime change roulette
What about the US-articulated basis for “regime change” in Iraq? Few things can match the ludicrousness of this idea.
What happens when nuclear India decides it is time for “regime change” in Pakistan? Time to deploy the nuke warheads to the border, put the Indian troops on red alert and hope for regime change in Islamabad? So Israel decides one of these days to openly aim the 400 nuclear bombs in its armory and tell Syria “It’s time for a regime change”? What if Damascus does a similar buildup but does so ahead of Israel and makes the case more eloquently with the massing of Syrian troops that “It is time for regime change in Tel Aviv”?
All these -- in furtherance of the US “threat of war” doctrine -- is supposed to contribute to world peace?
And yet even more contradictions. North Korea, Iraq’s support cohort in what Bush calls “axis of evil,” announces it has nuclear weapons. Washington’s immediate response is that it will confront the “evil regime” in Asia with diplomacy and the aid carrot even as it threatens Iraqis with annihilation due to the specter, not the actuality, of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Maybe it’s because Dear Leader does not sport the same bushy mustache of Saddam? Maybe it’s the wild hairdo? Or maybe it’s just because North Korea does not have oil? Ah, but if I insist it’s about oil, I’m likely to be accused of anti-Americanism.
Promoter or enemy of peace?
Considered to carry one of the more acute concentrations of redneck patriots, the US defense establishment and the weapons industry continue to receive a gargantuan share of the US budget. This year, total military spending is pegged at $396.1 billion, with a further $38 billion to be spent on “homeland defense.” Washington predicts that the war budget will increase by 30 percent by 2007, equivalent to over $451 billion. According to the Federation of American Scientists (FASI), the US weapons industry is second only to the US agriculture industry in its receipt of US taxpayer subsidies, receiving over $10 billion a year.
Should US citizens -- and the rest of the world -- feel more secure with the kind of attention the US government has lavished on its military and defense apparatus? America’s fantastically shortsighted foreign policy, which has created more wars and deeper resentment among developing nations, says otherwise. Unfortunately for US citizens -- and, again, the rest of us – it’s not just US foreign policy that’s the problem. The problem is also from within -- the very weapons sector in the US which continues to be given mind-boggling billions of dollars.
In 2001 the US weapons industry controlled approximately 50 percent of the world arms market. Of the 42 active conflicts in 1999, the US supplied arms or military technology to parties in more than 92 percent of the conflicts. During virtually the same period, the US delivered almost $6.8 billion in armaments to nations widely considered to regularly violate basic standards of human rights and to countries that continue to recruit children for their official armed forces. An authority on national security affairs calls the US “an equal opportunity death merchant” with good reason. Democratic political systems or morally desirable leaders have never been the currency of the US weapons industry, only greenbacks.
In October 2002, for instance, an annual weapons conference and exhibition was held in Jordan. On display during the exhibit were the Stars and Stripes and the usual array of ultramodern arms manufactured by US firms such as Sikorsky, Raytheon, Harris Corp., JPS, Pratt & Whitney, AM General and Environmental Tectonics. The roster of buyers for whom, presumably, the event was organized was equally impressive. They included delegates from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya -- official representatives of regimes that the Bush administration finds repugnant. Officially, that is.
What do we do with the US?
“What do we do with the US?” This is the question printed on a widely distributed shirt at Bali, Indonesia, in a conference held in the middle of 2002 in preparation for the Earth Summit Part 2 of Johannesburg, South Africa. The T-shirt wasn’t really well-designed; in fact, with its dull blue ink printed on plain white cloth, not even pure cotton, it looked positively boring. But its limited prints ran out swiftly, lapped up by both country delegates to the event and NGOs alike.
The question on the T-shirt was to be repeated a number of times in the lobby of the conference center during the proceedings, in the gardens outside, in the bars at night after the day’s frustration with the efforts of the US delegation to stymie attempts to make various vital environmental agreements more binding, lasting and effective.
The question would return to haunt the halls of conference centers in Johannesburg, where the Earth Summit 2 was taking place. It bears relevance to bring this concern up; after all, chief among the targets for “preemptive strikes” of the US delegation during the green conference was the Kyoto Protocol. Yes, the climate treaty, the one that intends to reduce the grave dangers posed by climate change -- the biggest environmental threat facing the planet today -- by phasing out society’s dependence on fossil fuels.
We all know that petroleum-addicted America is the largest consumer of fossil fuels today and, thus, the biggest emitter, too, of greenhouse gases. You would think that by pushing for the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, the US would not just help in protecting the global commons but also, by consequence, help in strengthening global security. Reducing the malevolent influence of oil obviously plays some part in reducing the potential for and source of many of today’s conflicts. But no, the US will have none of it.
Stop the war; do something, anything
“What do we do with the US?” actually begs the question of what to do with a Philippine government so enamored with its role of cheerleader to the wildest and by far the most dangerous rogue policeman the world has ever known. Because it is here, in our country, where we can and should contribute the most for peace. We do not have to follow the path of war that the US wishes the whole world to take.
But the government does not listen, you will say. If so, then we must make our government listen. Speak out. You don’t have to wait for a mammoth demonstration (but it would be wise to join if you come across one). Wear a pin. Send out e-mails. Write letters, sign petitions. Hang a banner on your gate and let your neighbors know that you will not allow Bush and bin Laden to speak for you. Help give out antiwar leaflets.
Do something, anything. As William Pitt of Media Lens says, “It will make others in the country who feel isolated in their fear that something has gone terribly wrong understand that they are not alone. Big storms gather around small particles . . . The moment is here, now, upon us all.”
1. “US plans to grab Iraqi oil fields,” David E. Sanger and James Dao, Today, January 7, 2003.
2. See www.newamericancentury.org. See also “No war, No WTO,” Norm Dixon, Green Left Weekly, November 13, 2002.
3. “Dark days ahead as Bush faces troubles worldwide,” Robin Wright, Today, January 6, 2003.
4. “The Case Against the War,” transcript of CBC interview with Phyllis Bennis, TNI Fellow, CBC Radio, November 2, 2002.
5. “Iraq war could put 10M people in need of aid-UN,” Colum Lynch, Today, January 8, 2003.
6. Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: the Abduction of Lebanon, Thundermouth Press/Nation Books, New York, 2002.
7. Quote is from the article “What war looks like” by the eminent US historian Howard Zinn. See http://www.medialens.org
8. “The Iraq ploy and the resemblances to the start of the Cold War,” Saul Landau, TNI Fellow, Progreso Weekly, November 28, 2002. See also Aliran Monthly, December 2001.
9. “Awesome cruelty of a doomed people” is borrowed from the title of The Independent’s Robert Fisk’s dispatch from a satellite phone, on board an airliner turning away from New York, on September 11, 2001.
10. “Angry Saddam accuses UN inspectors of spying,” Neil MacFarquhar, Today, January 8, 2003.
11. “US sends troops, Patriots to Israel,” Michael R. Gordon, Today, January 17, 2003.
12. “The Iraq Ploy …” Saul Landau.
13. “Arming for Armageddon: Boomtime for the Military-Industrial complex,” John Stanton, December 30, 2002. Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security matters. For the October 2002 weapons conference, see http://www.sofex.com.jo/htm/index.html
14. “Here. Now.” William Rivers Pitt, November 26, 2002. http://www.medialens.org
Friday, December 27, 2002
THE NOT-SO-NEW-WAR IN IRAQ
The US may soon wage war against Iraq whether or not UN weapons inspectors find evidence of what the Bush administration calls “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.” As events in the Middle East theater will likely again illustrate, there is only one thing that matters to the US government. Not freedom or democracy, even though the US brandishes these words more fondly than any nation today. Not the wretched victims of tyrants and despots, even though the US has shown the world how deep its linguistic arsenal is when describing its concern for peoples brutalized by those it considers evil. For the leaders of the lone superpower today, the only interest that matters is what fattens their favored corporate pockets. Their message to the world is quite simple - if you are not helping our cause, you’d best stay out of the way.
However much the US government tries to conceal its true intentions in toppling Saddam Hussein with nice talk about freedom and democracy, it can never completely hide what motivates it most in its present desire to occupy Iraq -- oil. Currently possessing the second largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq’s oil production is expected in the future to surpass even what is currently generated by Saudi Arabia.
Oil and power
World requirements for Middle East oil are expected to double in the next two decades, and much of this demand is anticipated to take place in petroleum-addicted America. US corporate control of oil in locations such as the Middle East is therefore essential for an American government conscious of its superpower status and currently run by a President and Vice-President very close to big oil interests. This is the logic that continues to drive official US policy in the region and its neighbouring environs.
Many may be unaware that the US had planned to intervene not just in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and other Central Asian states prior to the September 11 tragedy in order to control areas with identified enormous petroleum reserves. Today, after the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan which punished victims of the Taliban more than the Taliban itself, the US maintains a military presence not just in Afghanistan but also in oil-and-gas rich Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. After the Afghan campaign, Iraq is obviously the next move in the Bush administration’s increasingly menacing gambit to shape the world according to its interests.
Iraq as prize
Just how big a prize is Iraq? It is huge - Iraq’s oil reserves are presently valued at nearly $3 trillion. Is it any wonder then that the team of George Bush junior, whose petrol-lineage goes back generations, is so focused on initiating and achieving a quick favorable outcome of hostilities in Iraq?
A recently released Deutsche Bank report, for instance, noted how US companies like Halliburton Co. would be among the firms that would most quickly benefit from a victorious US war in Iraq. Halliburton is one of the largest oil-servicing companies in the world today; it was run by Richard Cheney before he became the US Vice President. In fact, during the time Cheney was running the oil services company, Halliburton sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company.
Despite the call of the government of George Bush senior after the 1991 Gulf War to economically isolate the tyrannical Iraqi regime, US oil companies continued to do business with Iraq, with US imports of Iraqi petroleum even surpassing the amounts imported by the US from Iraq prior to the Gulf War. At the forefront of this petrol trade are companies like ChevronTexaco, which, since 1999 has given more than $1 million to the coffers of the Republicans, the party of Bush junior who is now preparing to invade Iraq. ChevronTexaco’s board included, until 1999, Bush junior’s National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, who even has an oil tanker named after her and who today calls Saddam “an evil man.”
Reagan’s special envoy
In the war against terrorism, Bush said after September 11, “we’re going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.” A nation such as Iraq, said Bush, must not be allowed “to threaten our very future by developing weapons of mass destruction” such as nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.
For the moment, let us set aside the fact that the US alone has the distinction today of having waged nuclear war at least three times - against Japan, and against Iraq and Yugoslavia where the radiation from depleted uranium shells is still killing people. Let us not mind for now the fact that the US conducted chemical and biological warfare in its wars versus Korea, China, Cuba and Vietnam. Let’s just talk about one of the secrets which the US government has been loath to discuss. Let us talk about December 1983, when then President Reagan sent a special envoy named Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad -- the same Rumsfeld who now sits as the US Secretary of Defense and who is currently mobilizing the US war machine against the man he now calls the “Butcher of Baghdad.”
Past buddies
Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983 based on a clear agenda -- to arrange the re-opening of the US embassy in Iraq “in order to secure better trade and economic relations” with the “Butcher of Baghdad” and to firm up plans to run a pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba that would benefit mainly the US giant Bechtel Corporation. This is just one half of the story, however. When Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983, he was fully aware that Iraq had already initiated that year the use of mustard gas - the deadly blister agent - and the lethal nerve agent tabun (the first recorded use of the nerve agent in history) in its war against Iran. Rumsfeld was to meet with Saddam again in March 1984, ironically on the same day that the UN released a report exposing Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran.
Did the US government decry Saddam’s use of what are called today “weapons of mass destruction?” No. The Reagan administration did a curious thing: it armed the man George Bush senior describes as “a brute ... who used poison gas on his own people.”
Arming the Butcher of Baghdad
In 1982, Iraq was removed from the US list of states that support terrorism. This paved the way for the sale to Iraq in 1983 of 60 Hughes helicopters that could be weaponised within hours of delivery. Then US Secretary of State George Schultz lobbied for the delivery of “crop spraying” Bell helicopters that are believed to have been used in the 1988 gas attack of Iraqi troops on a Kurdish village which killed 5,000 people. It is interesting to note that four months later, the US firm Bechtel corporation inked the contract to build a massive petrochemical plant that would give Saddam the capacity to produce chemical weapons.
During the period when Saddam’s troops were using poison gas against Iranians, then Vice President Bush senior intervened personally to ensure that the US Export-Import Bank guaranteed loans to Iraq worth $500 million to build an oil pipeline. In 1988, the year Saddam was gassing thousands of Kurds, President Bush senior provided the Butcher of Baghdad with $500 million in US government subsidies to buy US farm products. The year after the genocide, Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1 billion and sent with the package germ seed for anthrax, more helicopters and “dual use materials” that could be used for making the very chemical and biological weapons that the Iraqi despot is accused today of harboring. European companies also supplied Iraq with “dual use materials” which Saddam’s regime easily purchased based on loans guaranteed by the US agriculture department’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). German firms even sold Iraq whole “dual use materials” factories - capable of mass-producing poison gas - on the strength of the CCC’s credit guarantees.
Sponsoring biological warfare
According to a US Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, from 1985 to 1990, “the US government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application.” A 1994 US Senate report also disclosed that US companies were licenced by the US commerce department to export biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism) while the American Type Culture Collection company made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
If Saddam Hussein’s government is indeed the evil regime (and it is) that the Bush government says it is, what do we call those responsible for arming the Butcher of Baghdad?
History’s cruel lessons
It is important to bring out these little known facts about US complicity with the Iraqi regime to stress key points. It is crucial to strip a US government preparing for war of the supposed noble intentions it has without shame used to legitimize its impending occupation of Iraq. The looming war in Iraq is not a just war; it is an ugly war fueled by America’s imperial ambitions to control Iraqi oil, tighten its grip on the world’s most important resource and impress once more on everyone the costs of defying the world’s remaining superpower. As we have shown, it matters little if a country is ruled by a monster like Saddam; the only important yardstick for the US government is whether or not one serves the economic interests ruling Washington.
Indeed, this is the deadly lesson that has been surely learned by the Taliban, whose very members, including the terrorist Osama bin Laden, were once financed by the US government. Before the US government tried to wipe them off the face of the earth, bin Laden and company were regarded by then president Reagan as “freedom fighters ... the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” when they were still fighting in Afghanistan America’s battle against the Soviet Union. Even the fundamentalists call for jihad, simultaneously abhorred and feared today by the Bush government, was once upon a time equated by Washington as a kind of dagger of freedom to be plunged into the breast of the Soviet tyranny. Jihad has not been used for hundreds of years according to the distinguished scholar Eqbal Ahmad; the term was only resurrected with America’s help to provide Osama’s mujahideen with a moral context in their war versus the Soviets. Once the Russians were driven out, the US swiftly forgot about Afghanistan. Today, a little over a year after the US ‘war on terror’ punished mostly Afghan victims of the Taliban, Afghanistan is already yesterday’s problem, abandoned once more by the US to drug barons and warlords.
Expect more war?
A 1997 report by the US Department of Defense states how “historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.” By itself, the conclusion of the report is nothing new to people who have kept track of the results of US foreign policy, yet it is highly revealing. A department associated with initiating foreign interventionist activities has now begun to realize the deadly consequences of US government interference with the affairs of other countries. The conclusion is thus unavoidable - rather than make the world more secure, the US government’s ‘war on terror’ is in fact making its own citizens, along with the rest of us, more vulnerable to terrorism.
According to William Blum, a former US State Department officer, since 1945 the US “has attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes” many of which were propped up by the US government. In the Middle East, the US continues to embrace Ariel Sharon, Israel’s own butcher who masterminded in 1982 the cold-blooded slaughter in Lebanon of hundreds of Palestinian refugees, mostly women and children. Sharon is the present Prime Minister of Israel, a state determined to annihilate the Palestinian people. Notwithstanding numerous condemnations by the UN Security Council for its protracted massacre of Palestinians, Israel continues to receive billions of dollars from the US each year along with the diplomatic support of Washington due to the role it plays as America’s gendarme against obstinate Arab governments. These are but some of the reasons that have spawned the awesome cruelty of a growing number of desperate elements in the Arab world determined to bring the US, and Israel, to their knees.
US hatred is not confined to the Middle East. Asia, for instance, once populated by US-propped despots like Suharto and once the locus of US government atrocities, continues to harbor feelings of animosity towards America. The same situation prevails in Latin and Central America.
US destroyed the most effective weapons vs. terror
As the horrible 9/11 on the US has proven, America’s vaunted military might is useless in the face of a decentralized and frighteningly deliberate terrorist network. The only effective weapons that could be used to bring down groups such as al-Qa’eda have been destroyed by the US itself.
In December 2001, the US government effectively terminated the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention when it killed a proposed enforcement and verification mechanism in the pact that could have been used to decisively neutralize Saddam Hussein and create the basis for the genuine eradication of biological and chemical weapons all over the world. (The US feared that the Convention may be used on US biotech companies). The US continues to block global efforts to set up an International Criminal Court designed to prosecute individuals and organizations that have perpetrated crimes against humanity - crimes of wickedness epitomized by bin Laden and al-Qa’eda. The US could have initiated the end of the bloody history of oil by supporting the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which intends to significantly reduce the consumption of petroleum and thus avert dangerous climate change. Instead, the Bush administration withdrew from the treaty and castigated it for “attempting to change the American way of life.”
Only one way to resist
If we seek lasting solutions to today’s increasingly deadlier conflicts, remaining silent on the US government’s ‘war on terror’ and its intentions to invade Iraq cannot be an intelligent option. Unless we add our voice in opposition to American aggression, it will be the Bushes and bin Ladens who will speak for us. There is only one way to resist the US government’s intention to plunge the world into more war, as the film-maker John Pilger counsels, and that is by speaking out and urgently.
The US may soon wage war against Iraq whether or not UN weapons inspectors find evidence of what the Bush administration calls “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.” As events in the Middle East theater will likely again illustrate, there is only one thing that matters to the US government. Not freedom or democracy, even though the US brandishes these words more fondly than any nation today. Not the wretched victims of tyrants and despots, even though the US has shown the world how deep its linguistic arsenal is when describing its concern for peoples brutalized by those it considers evil. For the leaders of the lone superpower today, the only interest that matters is what fattens their favored corporate pockets. Their message to the world is quite simple - if you are not helping our cause, you’d best stay out of the way.
However much the US government tries to conceal its true intentions in toppling Saddam Hussein with nice talk about freedom and democracy, it can never completely hide what motivates it most in its present desire to occupy Iraq -- oil. Currently possessing the second largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq’s oil production is expected in the future to surpass even what is currently generated by Saudi Arabia.
Oil and power
World requirements for Middle East oil are expected to double in the next two decades, and much of this demand is anticipated to take place in petroleum-addicted America. US corporate control of oil in locations such as the Middle East is therefore essential for an American government conscious of its superpower status and currently run by a President and Vice-President very close to big oil interests. This is the logic that continues to drive official US policy in the region and its neighbouring environs.
Many may be unaware that the US had planned to intervene not just in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and other Central Asian states prior to the September 11 tragedy in order to control areas with identified enormous petroleum reserves. Today, after the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan which punished victims of the Taliban more than the Taliban itself, the US maintains a military presence not just in Afghanistan but also in oil-and-gas rich Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. After the Afghan campaign, Iraq is obviously the next move in the Bush administration’s increasingly menacing gambit to shape the world according to its interests.
Iraq as prize
Just how big a prize is Iraq? It is huge - Iraq’s oil reserves are presently valued at nearly $3 trillion. Is it any wonder then that the team of George Bush junior, whose petrol-lineage goes back generations, is so focused on initiating and achieving a quick favorable outcome of hostilities in Iraq?
A recently released Deutsche Bank report, for instance, noted how US companies like Halliburton Co. would be among the firms that would most quickly benefit from a victorious US war in Iraq. Halliburton is one of the largest oil-servicing companies in the world today; it was run by Richard Cheney before he became the US Vice President. In fact, during the time Cheney was running the oil services company, Halliburton sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company.
Despite the call of the government of George Bush senior after the 1991 Gulf War to economically isolate the tyrannical Iraqi regime, US oil companies continued to do business with Iraq, with US imports of Iraqi petroleum even surpassing the amounts imported by the US from Iraq prior to the Gulf War. At the forefront of this petrol trade are companies like ChevronTexaco, which, since 1999 has given more than $1 million to the coffers of the Republicans, the party of Bush junior who is now preparing to invade Iraq. ChevronTexaco’s board included, until 1999, Bush junior’s National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, who even has an oil tanker named after her and who today calls Saddam “an evil man.”
Reagan’s special envoy
In the war against terrorism, Bush said after September 11, “we’re going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.” A nation such as Iraq, said Bush, must not be allowed “to threaten our very future by developing weapons of mass destruction” such as nuclear and chemical and biological weapons.
For the moment, let us set aside the fact that the US alone has the distinction today of having waged nuclear war at least three times - against Japan, and against Iraq and Yugoslavia where the radiation from depleted uranium shells is still killing people. Let us not mind for now the fact that the US conducted chemical and biological warfare in its wars versus Korea, China, Cuba and Vietnam. Let’s just talk about one of the secrets which the US government has been loath to discuss. Let us talk about December 1983, when then President Reagan sent a special envoy named Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad -- the same Rumsfeld who now sits as the US Secretary of Defense and who is currently mobilizing the US war machine against the man he now calls the “Butcher of Baghdad.”
Past buddies
Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983 based on a clear agenda -- to arrange the re-opening of the US embassy in Iraq “in order to secure better trade and economic relations” with the “Butcher of Baghdad” and to firm up plans to run a pipeline from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba that would benefit mainly the US giant Bechtel Corporation. This is just one half of the story, however. When Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983, he was fully aware that Iraq had already initiated that year the use of mustard gas - the deadly blister agent - and the lethal nerve agent tabun (the first recorded use of the nerve agent in history) in its war against Iran. Rumsfeld was to meet with Saddam again in March 1984, ironically on the same day that the UN released a report exposing Saddam’s use of poison gas against Iran.
Did the US government decry Saddam’s use of what are called today “weapons of mass destruction?” No. The Reagan administration did a curious thing: it armed the man George Bush senior describes as “a brute ... who used poison gas on his own people.”
Arming the Butcher of Baghdad
In 1982, Iraq was removed from the US list of states that support terrorism. This paved the way for the sale to Iraq in 1983 of 60 Hughes helicopters that could be weaponised within hours of delivery. Then US Secretary of State George Schultz lobbied for the delivery of “crop spraying” Bell helicopters that are believed to have been used in the 1988 gas attack of Iraqi troops on a Kurdish village which killed 5,000 people. It is interesting to note that four months later, the US firm Bechtel corporation inked the contract to build a massive petrochemical plant that would give Saddam the capacity to produce chemical weapons.
During the period when Saddam’s troops were using poison gas against Iranians, then Vice President Bush senior intervened personally to ensure that the US Export-Import Bank guaranteed loans to Iraq worth $500 million to build an oil pipeline. In 1988, the year Saddam was gassing thousands of Kurds, President Bush senior provided the Butcher of Baghdad with $500 million in US government subsidies to buy US farm products. The year after the genocide, Bush senior doubled this subsidy to $1 billion and sent with the package germ seed for anthrax, more helicopters and “dual use materials” that could be used for making the very chemical and biological weapons that the Iraqi despot is accused today of harboring. European companies also supplied Iraq with “dual use materials” which Saddam’s regime easily purchased based on loans guaranteed by the US agriculture department’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). German firms even sold Iraq whole “dual use materials” factories - capable of mass-producing poison gas - on the strength of the CCC’s credit guarantees.
Sponsoring biological warfare
According to a US Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, from 1985 to 1990, “the US government approved 771 licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application.” A 1994 US Senate report also disclosed that US companies were licenced by the US commerce department to export biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism) while the American Type Culture Collection company made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
If Saddam Hussein’s government is indeed the evil regime (and it is) that the Bush government says it is, what do we call those responsible for arming the Butcher of Baghdad?
History’s cruel lessons
It is important to bring out these little known facts about US complicity with the Iraqi regime to stress key points. It is crucial to strip a US government preparing for war of the supposed noble intentions it has without shame used to legitimize its impending occupation of Iraq. The looming war in Iraq is not a just war; it is an ugly war fueled by America’s imperial ambitions to control Iraqi oil, tighten its grip on the world’s most important resource and impress once more on everyone the costs of defying the world’s remaining superpower. As we have shown, it matters little if a country is ruled by a monster like Saddam; the only important yardstick for the US government is whether or not one serves the economic interests ruling Washington.
Indeed, this is the deadly lesson that has been surely learned by the Taliban, whose very members, including the terrorist Osama bin Laden, were once financed by the US government. Before the US government tried to wipe them off the face of the earth, bin Laden and company were regarded by then president Reagan as “freedom fighters ... the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” when they were still fighting in Afghanistan America’s battle against the Soviet Union. Even the fundamentalists call for jihad, simultaneously abhorred and feared today by the Bush government, was once upon a time equated by Washington as a kind of dagger of freedom to be plunged into the breast of the Soviet tyranny. Jihad has not been used for hundreds of years according to the distinguished scholar Eqbal Ahmad; the term was only resurrected with America’s help to provide Osama’s mujahideen with a moral context in their war versus the Soviets. Once the Russians were driven out, the US swiftly forgot about Afghanistan. Today, a little over a year after the US ‘war on terror’ punished mostly Afghan victims of the Taliban, Afghanistan is already yesterday’s problem, abandoned once more by the US to drug barons and warlords.
Expect more war?
A 1997 report by the US Department of Defense states how “historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.” By itself, the conclusion of the report is nothing new to people who have kept track of the results of US foreign policy, yet it is highly revealing. A department associated with initiating foreign interventionist activities has now begun to realize the deadly consequences of US government interference with the affairs of other countries. The conclusion is thus unavoidable - rather than make the world more secure, the US government’s ‘war on terror’ is in fact making its own citizens, along with the rest of us, more vulnerable to terrorism.
According to William Blum, a former US State Department officer, since 1945 the US “has attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes” many of which were propped up by the US government. In the Middle East, the US continues to embrace Ariel Sharon, Israel’s own butcher who masterminded in 1982 the cold-blooded slaughter in Lebanon of hundreds of Palestinian refugees, mostly women and children. Sharon is the present Prime Minister of Israel, a state determined to annihilate the Palestinian people. Notwithstanding numerous condemnations by the UN Security Council for its protracted massacre of Palestinians, Israel continues to receive billions of dollars from the US each year along with the diplomatic support of Washington due to the role it plays as America’s gendarme against obstinate Arab governments. These are but some of the reasons that have spawned the awesome cruelty of a growing number of desperate elements in the Arab world determined to bring the US, and Israel, to their knees.
US hatred is not confined to the Middle East. Asia, for instance, once populated by US-propped despots like Suharto and once the locus of US government atrocities, continues to harbor feelings of animosity towards America. The same situation prevails in Latin and Central America.
US destroyed the most effective weapons vs. terror
As the horrible 9/11 on the US has proven, America’s vaunted military might is useless in the face of a decentralized and frighteningly deliberate terrorist network. The only effective weapons that could be used to bring down groups such as al-Qa’eda have been destroyed by the US itself.
In December 2001, the US government effectively terminated the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention when it killed a proposed enforcement and verification mechanism in the pact that could have been used to decisively neutralize Saddam Hussein and create the basis for the genuine eradication of biological and chemical weapons all over the world. (The US feared that the Convention may be used on US biotech companies). The US continues to block global efforts to set up an International Criminal Court designed to prosecute individuals and organizations that have perpetrated crimes against humanity - crimes of wickedness epitomized by bin Laden and al-Qa’eda. The US could have initiated the end of the bloody history of oil by supporting the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which intends to significantly reduce the consumption of petroleum and thus avert dangerous climate change. Instead, the Bush administration withdrew from the treaty and castigated it for “attempting to change the American way of life.”
Only one way to resist
If we seek lasting solutions to today’s increasingly deadlier conflicts, remaining silent on the US government’s ‘war on terror’ and its intentions to invade Iraq cannot be an intelligent option. Unless we add our voice in opposition to American aggression, it will be the Bushes and bin Ladens who will speak for us. There is only one way to resist the US government’s intention to plunge the world into more war, as the film-maker John Pilger counsels, and that is by speaking out and urgently.
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