Us Imperialism & War On Iraq 1 08/25 21:47:19
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NO CREDIBLE evidence has emerged to link Iraq with the terrorist attacks on the U.S., yet speculation on this subject has been a recurrent theme, prominently featured throughout the media’s 'crisis coverage' since September 11. Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the warmongers began lining up to seize the opportunity provided by the attacks to drag their hawkish agendas from the margins to the mainstream of political discussion. Media outlets have been only too happy to comply.
The media have contributed directly to the anti-Iraq hysteria. The Weekly Standard featured a 'WANTED' sign, above sinister-looking photos of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. On October 22, the New York Post carried the screaming headline, 'Heads up, Hussein, you’re next,' and an op-ed piece declaring, 'Saddam is a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot…. It’s now time to go full speed ahead and see that Saddam departs–from Iraq if not from this earth.'1 On October 18, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was equally vitriolic, writing, 'Saddam and his bloody bugs have to go.'2
Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was among the first of the hawks to take to the airwaves to call for a war against multiple targets, including Iraq, in retaliation for September 11. For the most part, the mainstream media neglected to mention Wolfowitz’s public statements before September 11 calling for the U.S. to strike Baghdad as soon as 'we find the right way to do it.'3 The Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board–a group of hard-line conservatives whose careers peaked long ago, from Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger to Dan Quayle and Newt Gingrich–shuttled former CIA director James Woolsey off to Britain to gather evidence of a link between Osama bin Laden and Iraq.
Ostensibly on a mission to construct a 'legal case against Iraq,' Woolsey came up short on evidence–and what little he had was exceedingly thin. Woolsey’s claim that Mohammed Atta, one of the alleged September 11 hijackers, had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague last year was later denied by the Czech officials who were Woolsey’s main witnesses to the meeting.4 'Czech officials say they do not believe that Mohammed Atta…met with any Iraqi officials during a brief stop he made in Prague last year,' wrote reporter John Tagliabue in the October 20 New York Times.5 A week later, Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross reversed that statement, saying that the meeting had in fact taken place between Atta and an Iraqi agent in April 2000. Furthermore, security experts in Germany were following up on a claim by Israeli intelligence sources that Iraqi agents gave Atta anthrax spores at the meeting, which he then carried in his luggage to the United States
As Mushahid Hussain has argued, 'This gap between what America says at home–liberties, rule of law, democracy–is rarely practiced in American foreign policy.'66 This is true of imperialist ventures historically. As Frank Furedi wrote in The New Ideology of Imperialism, 'The moral claims of imperialism were seldom questioned in the West. Imperialism and the global expansion of the Western powers were represented in unambiguously positive terms as a major contributor to human civilization.'67
Should the U.S. military once again go to war against Iraq, expanding the 'war against terrorism' will be nothing more than a convenient excuse to justify it. Defense Policy board member Newt Gingrich candidly stated in Newsweek’s September 26 issue the real reasons why the U.S. would attack Iraq–a week before the anthrax scare surfaced. Gingrich said the U.S. should strike against Iraq simply because bombing Afghanistan is not an adequate U.S. response to September 11:'There’s a feeling we’ve got to do something that counts–and bombing caves is not something that counts.'68
And once again, the Iraqi population will pay the price.
FROM: ISReview.org |
