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CounterPunch
September
23, 2002
Another Oil War
by Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Once again the world now waits with fear and trepidation
regarding the threat of a US attack on Iraq.
The President provides as justification
for this impending attack the Iraqi refusal to comply with UN
resolutions regarding weapons inspections, the alleged Iraqi
threat to its neighbors and the Iraqi government's mistreatment
of its own citizens.
The American people are being called
upon to send their young sons and daughters to go and kill young
Iraqi sons and daughters. This war, like all wars, will be brutal
and will leave many American and Iraqi families mourning the
loss of their children.
We're not allowed to publicly question
the Bush Administration for fear of being called unpatriotic.
Aren't we entitled to really know why we're being urged to go
to war? Aren't we entitled to be confident that the Administration
is telling the truth?
We know that this Administration has
some trouble with telling the truth.
You might recall that the White House
had a kind of amnesia a few months ago and didn't tell the truth
about September 11 until I asked some pretty straightforward
questions. In so doing, it seems I helped them remember that
they had in fact received a whole raft of reports warning of
terrorist attacks against this country.
And this is the same Administration,
which stole the 2000 election in Florida and then lied about
it.
There have been so many times I wished
our country could use its massive military resources for such
noble goals as protecting civilians and enforcing UN Security
Council Resolutions. I'd be their greatest supporter. But I've
sat upon this committee for 10 years and I have seen our country
repeatedly refuse to use to its military to save civilians from
slaughter.
I need only remind you of our country's
shameful failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 and in so doing
we allowed 1,000,000 Rwandan men, women and children to be butchered
with axes and machetes in 100 days.
And, yes, we are the same country that
abandoned the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban, that abandoned
the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the invading
Rwandans and the Ugandans, that abandoned the people of East
Timor to the invading Indonesians, that abandoned the people
of Sierra Leone to the brutal hand chopping killers of the RUF,
that abandoned the people of Chechnya to the brutal Russian Army,
that abandoned the people of the Philippines to brutalities of
Ferdinand Marcos, that abandoned the people of Chile to monstrous
crimes of General Pinochet and so on and so on.
But the President would have us believe
that this time things are different for once, he says, we're
going to war to save people's lives.
However, just last Sunday, September
15, 2002, the Washington Post's lead story carried the banner
headline "In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil is the Key Issue."
The article then went on to describe how US oil companies were
looking forward to taking advantage of the oil bonanza, which
would follow Saddam Hussein's removal from office.
Apparently, so the article says, CIA
Director James Woolsey, indicated that non-US oil companies who
sided with Hussein would most likely be excluded from sharing
in Iraq's massive oil reserves a*" reserves said to be second
only to Saudi Arabia.
And I find the current Bush fervor and
alleged urgent justifications for attacking Iraq startling because
I recall reading an article from the London Guardian on December
2, 2001 last year, which had a banner headline "Secret US
Plan for Iraq War." The article, almost a year old now,
is interesting because it reports that the President had already
ordered the CIA and his senior military commanders to draw up
detailed plans for a military operation against Iraq. The operational
commander was General Tommy Franks working out of the US Central
Command at McDill air force base in Florida. Apparently, other
key players were, low and behold, the CIA Director James Woolsey
and the Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.
What I found most incredible about the
article, especially after reading this week's Washington Post
article, was the last sentence which said:
"The most adventurous ingredient
in the anti- Iraqi proposal is the use of US ground troops .
. . significant numbers of [US] troops could also be called on
in the early stages of any rebellion to guard oil fields around
the Shia port of Basra in southern Iraq."
Isn't it amazing the London Times didn't
refer to US troops guarding the new parliament, or the schools
or hospitals full of ravaged civilians, or saving the men, women
and children brutalized under years of Hussein's rule.
I wonder why the President hasn't talked
about these plans, which were being cooked up nearly a year ago.
I learned this week from the Times of
London that Bush Administration plans to spend some $200m on
convincing a skeptical American and world public that the war
on Iraq is justified. I didn't realize that telling the truth
would be so expensive.
And surely if we were really interested
today in the truth about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
wouldn't this Committee want to hear from Scott Ritter. I just
cannot believe that he's not here today.
Before we send our young men and women
off to war, we need to really make sure that we're not sacrificing
them so that rich and powerful men can prosecute a war for oil.
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
On the
Contemporary Relevance of the Manchurian Incident
Will Youmans
Campus Watch: Vigilante Thought Police
Uri Avnery
The Murder
of Arafat
Steve Hendricks
Wild,
Wild West of Politics:
Being Green in Montana
Philip Farruggio
Democratic
Party Shams
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Another
Oil War
Rev. Robert Bowman
What Would
Jesus Do?
Lawrence Davidson
Web
War Comes to America
Chris Meyer
Six Weeks
of Quiet?
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
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September
21 / 22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
An Entire
Class of Thieves
Tom Gorman
The Press & Sabra and Shatila
Amelia Peltz
Anniversary with Life in Palestine
Susan Martinez
By the Hand of the Father
Ben Tripp
Advice from a Polemicist
Adam Engel
From Above:
Forgetting bin Laden
Chris Clarke
The Ann Coulter Test
Tariq Ali
Doing as the Romans Did
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Bush Victory in Iraq
Ralph Nader
Greed Without Limits
Thomas Croft
The Life of Jim Cummings
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: a serialized Novel, Episode One
Wolff, Dailey, Metres
& St. Clair
Poet's Basement
September
20, 2002
Joan Hoff
Debating
War:
the Forgotten Tradition
Norman Madarasz
Lessons from a Cyncial Master
Jean Chretien's New York
State of Mind
Mitchel Cohen
Toxic Wastes
and
the New World Order
Peter Lee
Why Bush
Wants This War
Bruce Jackson
20 Questions
About Bush's
War Against Arabs
Krystal Kyer
Greenwashing the Marketplace
September
19, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Cheney's
Vermont Breakfast
Ilija Trojanow
/ Ranjit Hoskote
Who Cares
for Human Rights?
It's a "Just" War
Jordy Cummings
How
to Silence
Pro-Palestinian Voices
Salam Rahal
The Rape
of a Nation
Richard Falk
& David Krieger
War with
Iraq:
It's Not Bush's Decision
Ralph Nader
How Congress
Can Fight Corporate Crime
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Senior:
Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons
September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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