The Wraps Come Off Bush's Colonialist
Agenda
Right-wing hawks have been calling the shots all along.
The war is getting messy, but the peace will be much
worse.
The Bush administration's plan to keep several hundred
thousand U.S. and British troops for years in a divided,
heavily armed Muslim country will make all Americans
"targets of opportunity" for terrorists and become a
rallying point for fundamentalist revolutionaries
throughout the world.
The post-Hussein strategy, formed by a
neoconservative clique close to the White House, is
another indicator that this is in no way a war "to disarm
Iraq." If disarmament were the central goal, the
U.S.-British alliance would need to control Iraq for
only months, not years. That would be enough time for
its weapons inspectors to do what it said the United
Nations could not accomplish.
Instead, unable to produce any real evidence of
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the
invasion or since it began, the administration publicly
shifted its rationale from disarmament to the
"nation-building" that Bush properly derided during the
2000 election.
However, there is ample evidence that "regime change"
and redrawing the map of the Mideast were the goals
of the Bush administration's neoconservative core all
along.
The Carnegie Endowment (www.ceip.org) last week
published "Origins of Regime Change in Iraq," a
thorough portrait of this "textbook case of how a small,
organized group can determine policy in a large nation,
even when the majority of officials and experts originally scorned their views."
The president, who seems to pride himself on knowing more about the mores of
Midland, Texas, than about the rest of the world's complex cultures, has bought
this cabal's naive and dangerous plan for a Pax Americana.
Bush already refers to warlord-controlled Afghanistan as "democratic," so
perhaps an Iraq run by an American general -- for the profit of Dick Cheney's
old company Halliburton and other defense contractors -- will justify for Bush
the war that spinmeisters are calling "Operation Iraqi Freedom." But it won't
wear well with most of the world, which has seen that even the best intentions of
colonialists inevitably go awry.
Lest we forget, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party were the preferred choice
of U.S. governments for most of the last 40 years. Even after Hussein gassed his
own people, the 1988 signature horror to which Bush constantly refers, the U.S.
government attempted to shift the blame to Iran and Bush's father extended to
Iraq an additional $1.2 billion in credits and loans.
The Commerce Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush had
long permitted U.S. companies to sell anthrax and other biological and chemical
supplies to Iraq, the Senate Banking Committee documented.
Furthermore, it was Reagan who signed National Security Decision Directive
114 on Nov. 26, 1983, committing the U.S. to do "whatever necessary and
legal" for Iraq to win its war against Iran, even after documented reports of Iraq's
use of what we now call weapons of mass destruction. It was at that time that
Donald Rumsfeld was dispatched by Reagan as a special envoy to reassure
Hussein of unwavering U.S. support.
It is an act of extreme hubris for this administration to repeatedly justify its
invasion of Iraq by citing Iraq's attacks on Iran decades ago and its use of
banned weapons in that war. Those old charges won't suffice for a world
demanding hard and more recent evidence supporting the need for a preemptive
attack.
If the U.S. fails to unearth weapons of mass destruction that U.N. inspectors
might have been able to discover -- if they had been given sufficient time -- the
imperial designs of this administration will stand exposed as the true cause of the
war.
If the weapons in question don't exist, however, some in the U.S. government
might be tempted to plant them, lest the Bush administration be accused of a
grand fraud. It was certainly suspicious that someone in the administration
Sunday leaked "evidence" of a chemical weapons factory in Najaf, which the
Pentagon ended up downplaying as "premature." The "news," not coincidentally,
was first and most aggressively carried by the Jerusalem Post and the Fox
network, both of which are far-right cheerleaders for the war.
Were Ted Koppel at his post on "Nightline" and not uselessly "embedded" in
some troop convoy, he might be asking the government tough questions about
the lack of evidence to back up its rationale for the war. Instead, like so many
others in the media, he fell for the illusion that war roadies hanging on to every
word of the Pentagon's spin performers can also be journalists.<b/>
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