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CounterPunch
February
17, 2003
Let Us, Like the Iraqis,
Have No Illusions
An American
Crisis
by JOE QUANDT
Let us have no illusions.
In Baghdad, once I'd gotten to know someone
fairly well, they'd often ask me point blank: "The war,
Joe... when is it coming?" And searching my eyes, it was
clear that they weren't looking for comfort. They wanted the
unmitigated truth.
They need, of necessity, to ask these
hard questions. The 8-year war with Iran in which 200,000 died;
the Gulf War, which took possibly another 300,000 besides wrecking
the entire infrastructure; 12 years of U.S.-enforced U.N. sanctions,
which have cost them an additional million lives-23 years of
sustained economic and military conflict have simply made the
Iraqi people immune to illusions, in the matter of war.
Let us, like the Iraqis, have no illusions.
I was in the states at the end of September
when the House of Representatives handed the president a gun.
I was in Baghdad when the Senate loaded it for him. History repeats
itself, as the power to make war is now invested in the person
of one, fallible man. Was not the American Revolution fought
to prevent a king from making war at his subjects' expense?
As the "Old Europe" of Germany
and France makes waffling attempts to assert their independence
from Washington realpolitik, Eastern European nations are lining
up to take their places at the table. Washington will not lack
for lackeys, because power makes money makes power makes money,
and this is the first lesson of politics. Have no illusions;
other nations will not come to our moral rescue. It may seem
ridiculously obvious to you that if the inspectors remained in
Iraq for the next 75 years it would still be just plain cheaper
than any other solution.
You may be angry at how deeply your civil
rights are being slashed at, and recreated in the image of a
neo-conservative New World Order.
Or you grasp all too well that it is
U.S. arms sales around the world that make inevitable the endless
cycle of big and little wars to come, for the next hundred years.
Maybe it's equally clear to you that
any future U.S. treaty is a thing of convenience, to be abrogated
when its purpose has been served... That the International
Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords, bans on nuclear and conventional
weapon testing, research into alternative energy sources, all
of these are only impediments to "preserving the American
way of life"...
That the War on Terrorism is simply a
convenient place to focus American fears now that Communism is
dead, and the Pentagon needs a new justification for its ever-expanding
budget...
That this war on terrorism, the war in
Afghanistan to secure right of way for the natural gas reserves
of central Asia, the war for the oil of Iraq, the not-so-coincidental
turmoil in Venezuela...these are only the opening gambits in
the U.S. bid to secure the fossil fuel resources of the entire
planet, in order that we may dictate terms to the rest of the
industrialized world.
Ask the shoeshine boys, the art dealers,
the doctors, the cafe operators, the hotel staff, ask anyone
in Iraq why the United States is coming there. They have no illusions.
"It's the oil, we know," they say, shrugging their
shoulders as though this is a commonplace, known to every child.
In ancient Assyria, war was not dressed
up in Patriotism or the tattered gown of Democracy or a distorted
Moral Righteousness fabricated from the loving words of long
dead Holy Men. War was an undisguised grab for the wealth of
another state, the losers impaled or sold into slavery. And you
had to face your "enemy".
Will the government of Pakistan, a nation
that possesses nuclear weapons, be destabilized? Will the Israelis
use the occasion to push the Palestinians into Jordan? Will Turkey
finally move on Iraqi Kurdistan? Will the Shia'a majority of
southern Iraq link up with Iran or simply demolish itself in
endless revolt against the American invaders? How many more Saudi
terrorists will be inspired to action? How long before the New
Hiroshima, and what unfortunate land will suffer it?
Hundreds of thousands would die in such
a war, but that is academic, an historical footnote, statistics.
Lives mean nothing to this administration, yours, mine, or the
Iraqis'. Have no illusions.
Dare we note that, should the Iraqis
put up a stiff resistance, the American military machine will
merely back up, and then, oh my fellow citizens, then we will
see a demonstration of Weapons of Mass Destruction such as the
world has not previously witnessed.
Debate or forget all of the above, but
be assured of one thing: the present crisis is over nothing less
than the American Soul.
So why, in a world pitching giantly out
of control, would you bother to raise your tiny voice, against
a din of violence, waste, fear, greed, and "gut feelings",
that seeks to drown out any rational consideration of events?
We raise our voices because we are Americans...unlike the
Iraqis, we can still raise them. We raise our voices because
we have children...and parents...and loved ones...and cherished
ideals that we'd like to hang onto, and we realize that everywhere
an American bomb falls, an Osama bin Laden seed is sown.
We raise our voices because the right
of assembly has not yet been taken from us. We raise our voices
because our government's arrogant denial that all the peoples
of this planet are beautiful and necessary parts of creation,
this arrogance is now attributed to the American people as well,
and soon it will be unsafe for us to travel outside of our borders.
We raise our voices because the incontrovertible
result of war is more war.
We raise our voices because we have galloping
inequities in our schools, in Corporate America, in our inner
cities, and the 100 or 200 or 900 billion dollars we would squander
on further brutalizing our brothers and sisters in Iraq would
be better spent otherwise than in financing the theft of that
nation's natural resources, to fill the pockets of the conglomerate
that is running this country.
* *
*
Writing in the early Baghdad evening,
I often watched the sun setting over the Tigris River. There,
in the Cradle of Civilization, one was, perhaps, more keenly
reminded of the flickering and snuffing out of civilizations,
and by a small leap, to grasp the historical illogic of war as
a problem solving device.
We raise our voices because we must.
Because our hearts tell us that the clock is ticking, not quite
as loudly as it's ticking for the Iraqis, but time is running
out on the American Dream. Have no illusions: An attack against
Iraq will be one of the cataclysmic events in American history,
on a par with The Civil War and the Great Depression. Would it
not signal to the world that democratic principals and Jeffersonian
humanism have no more significance in the American ethos than
they did in Nazi Germany? And to send that message is to invite
a return to international barbarism, but on a scale we must shudder
to contemplate.
We raise our voices because there's a
drunk at the wheel. Approaching the wall, the catastrophe ever
more imminent, we begin to see, with growing and terrible clarity,
who and what drives the American State. There is precious little
time left in which to grab the keys and avert this self-inflicted
disaster.
We raise our voices in the certainty
that even should the dreaded Battle of Iraq come, it need not,
must not, will not stun us into silence.
And the clock is still ticking...
Joe Quandt
is a 52-year old actor/cab driver/activist/teacher/poet living
in the Albany, NY area. He traveled to Baghdad on the 49th Voices
in the Wilderness delegation, during the month of October, 2002.
He can be reached at: Ytonthemoon@aol.com
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