Invading Iraq has little to do with "War on Terrorism"
By Jackson Thoreau
Online Journal Contributing Writer
onlinejournal.com
All wars come down to the possession of wealth.—Plato
August 1, 2002—I have studied pacifism, but I'm not a pacifist. I try to practice Christianity, but I don't always turn the other cheek. I don't own a gun, but I keep a baseball bat under my bed, and if someone broke into my house with the intent of harming my family, you better believe I'd use it.
I guess you could say I'm a realistic idealist.
So when it comes to this question that the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee is tackling, whether we have the right to invade Iraq again, I do not approach this without some heavy pondering, unlike the illegitimate one in the White House who displays little signs of a conscience.
It's difficult to say which country has been ravaged more by war and economic woes in the past decade, Afghanistan or Iraq. In the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91, when our bombs destroyed many Iraqi civilian facilities, such as homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals, more than 100,000 Iraqis died, along with 148 Americans. Since the United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990, more than one million additional Iraqis—many of them children under the age of five—have died of sanctions-related causes, such as amoebic dysentery and starvation.
Diseases could have been treated, and thus many lives saved, had relief workers with such groups as the Red Cross, Voices in the Wilderness, and Veterans for Peace been able to get basic medicines to these children. Meanwhile, companies like Halliburton can make millions by selling Iraq oil equipment through European subsidiaries, somehow getting around the sanctions. It's no coincidence that Halliburton did this when Dick Cheney headed that Texas-based firm, as he is quite adept at getting around laws most of us have to live by, such as the 12th Amendment to the Constitution.
Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. Attorney General, reported to the UN Security Council in 1997 that the number of Iraqi children under age five who died increased from about 7,000 in 1989 to 57,000 in 1996. That number continued to rise to 78,000 dead in 1998, according to the Iraq Resource Information Site.
Clark reported touring hospitals with bloated babies not expected to live a day, facilities without clean water or air conditioning or enough basic supplies. While many people blamed the harsh conditions on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait and ignoring the needs of many citizens, Clark called the situation "a human disaster created by the United Nations, a genocide intended to destroy a national, religious and ethnic group."
Compare Iraq, with its 2,000 tanks and several hundred aircraft, to our country, arguably the most powerful, sophisticated military machine in known history. We spend about $396 billion a year on the military—and that number is expected to increase substantially in the coming years (at the height of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, we spent about $300 billion). The closest country in military spending is Russia at $60 billion annually, according to the Center for Defense Information. Iraq spends a piddling $1.4 billion on defense, less than Vietnam, Columbia, and Kuwait. Another country in that "axis of evil" Bush wants us to fear so much, North Korea, spends even less at $1.3 billion. Iran, the third "evil" country, is up there at $9.1 billion but still only ranks thirteenth in the world in military spending (see www.cdi.org/issues/wme/spendersFY03.html for a list of what other countries spend).
Why are we supposed to fear a country that we outspend almost 300 times more on defense? Is it because much of what we spend actually goes to defend the security of other countries like Germany, or more accurately, the security of U.S.-owned multinational corporations in those countries? Much of our defense dollars line already more than wealthy pockets in our country. In keeping with the wave of fraudulent accounting in private corporations, the Pentagon cannot properly account for $1.2 trillion in past transactions, according to the U.S. Inspector General's office.
I'm all for combating terrorism—Clinton and Gore tried to get airport security beefed up several years ago, but the Republican-led Congress said no—but this "War on Terrorism" is simply an excuse and an opportunity for some fat cats to get fatter at the expense of the rest of us, just as the Cold War was in earlier decades. It is the biggest welfare program known to man, not to mention Bush's ticket to continue occupying an office he has no business holding. We can spend $1 trillion a year on defense, and someone will still figure out how to plant a bomb somewhere. The British learned that in dealing with the Irish Republican Army, which confounded them for decades.
Why is our publicly-financed military defending the rights of privately-owned companies to make more bucks? Because people like Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld want it to, that's why. Our last elected president, Bill Clinton, tried to rein in military spending, and the right wing in this country did everything it could to attempt to drive him from office.
So now we plan to again bomb weak, ravaged Iraq and kill thousands more. That's despite several U.S. military leaders and analysts wanting to continue the policy of containment of Hussein, rather than invade Iraq, according to a recent article in the Washington Post. Jim Cornette, a former Air Force biological warfare expert who participated in the Gulf War, told the Post, "We've bottled [Hussein] up for 11 years, so we're doing OK. I don't know the reason the administration is so focused on Iraq. I'm very puzzled by it."
A few in the administration, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, have reservations about a military attack. At the very least, most U.S. military leaders want to wait until next year to give them time to develop a plan.
But Bush and many in his regime are pushing them to invade by October, a month before the mid-term elections, to boost Republicans' re-election campaigns in a wave of renewed patriotism, divert attention from domestic scandals, and finish what his father left uncompleted. To Bush's drug-and-alcohol-warped mind, Hussein is an insult to his father's legacy, and Bush is selfish enough to see thousands die to help change how some perceive his family, not to mention the history books. Never mind about the moral implications of one country declaring its plans to overthrow another country's leader. That worked so well with Fidel Castro and Cuba, didn't it?
Bush says Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction it plans to use on the U.S. and we need to stop Iraq from doing so. Some who would know, like Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, say that Iraq has no such capabilities. Bush says Iraq had ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist network that carried out the Sept. 11 acts. Even some officials with the CIA and Israel's intelligence agency have said Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11, although our CIA director has testified about Iraq's alleged links to al-Qaeda. Bush says Hussein could be responsible for sending anthrax spores through the mail. Others believe the likely source of anthrax terrorism is domestic.
Most allies in Europe oppose our invasion of Iraq, saying among other things, that it would make conditions in the fiery Middle East worse. They note the hypocrisy of Bush telling Israel not to bomb Palestinian camps, as he prepares to unleash a more potent bombing attack on Iraq. But Bush doesn't care about looking like a hypocrite; there is little evidence he even is aware that he looks like a hypocrite. I mean, he was trying to be a champion of corporate responsibility when he practiced the opposite in his own business dealings; he claims to be an environmentalist while raking over the environment; he tells kids not to drink, take drugs, and have sex before marriage, unlike what he actually did.
Again, the Iraqi war effort is proceeding full-speed because Republicans want to be re-elected and Bush also wants to shift attention from these corporate scandals that are tearing apart his regime. Wag the dog, that's a lot of what invading Iraq is about.
There is also the economic component. A more favorable leader in Iraq could give U.S. oil companies that are so close to Bush more leeway at moving into that lucrative Mideast trade. The war will at least divert many Americans' attention from the recession that threatens to escalate into a depression. A war in Iraq does come down to the possession of wealth, as Plato said, mainly keeping—and growing—wealth in the hands of those who now have it in this country.
I do believe we have fought just wars. My father fought in one, World War II, when we were attacked and the Nazi criminals threatened to dominate our world. If I was of age during such a war as that, I would have gladly answered the call. It's sad that I now have to say we now seem more like the ones who want world domination than the ones who would fight against the forces that want to rule the planet.
I understand why we're bombing Afghanistan—we had to bomb somebody after Sept. 11, didn't we?—but I hate to see civilians killed and the fact that Osama bin Laden was never captured or his ties to Sept. 11 proven in court. Contrast that to our response after the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, an act of terrorism that admittedly was different from Sept. 11. Did we bomb the neighborhoods where Timothy McVeigh lived, hoping to draw him out or get more of his conspirators? No, we treated it like the horrendous crime it was and sought justice through the courts.
Some call me un-American for opposing the way the Bush administration is fighting the "War on Terrorism"—with its crackdowns on Americans' basic freedoms, development of a more sophisticated domestic spying network, bombing campaigns that hit civilians, secrecy, military tribunals that suspend the Bill of Rights, ignoring the United Nations and international treaties, cynical use of tragedy for unrelated political purposes, and other abuses. They tell me to "love it or leave it." I have to respond that I almost joined the Marines out of high school and would have gone if called upon back then. I was in the "junior military"—the Boy Scouts—and earned the highest rank of Eagle Scout while doing numerous community service projects. I did unpaid civilian service for two years on a special project after college.
As an American, I have the right state my opinion that Bush-Cheney and most others in the right wing in this country (surprisingly some traditional right-wingers like U.S. Rep. Dick Armey have opposed certain aspects like the domestic spying program) are leading us down into the gutter. I believe I have an obligation to stand up and state my true beliefs while I still have the chance, before our country slides further down the slippery slope to a dictatorship. What's the use of having freedom of speech if you live in a country where everyone marches to the same drumbeat? You don't have a country, you have a dictatorship if everyone worships those in power and refrains from criticizing that regime.
I will stay here and stand up to the Bush-Cheney administration the way our forefathers did the British and patriotic Americans have done throughout our country's existence. I will battle for my children's future here. I will not run away to another country.
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Jackson Thoreau is co-author of "We Will Not Get Over It: Restoring a Legitimate White House." The 110,000-word electronic book can be downloaded at geocities.com or at legitgov.org. Thoreau can be emailed at jacksonthor@justice.com. |
