|
CounterPunch
February
18, 2003
Who Poses the Biggest Threat?
A
Vet on Bush's Hypocrisy on the War Against Iraq
by CHRIS WHITE
I
am a Veteran for Peace, and just like every other veteran with
a peace agenda, the hypocrisy pervading my military experience
largely informs my decision to resist the injustices perpetrated
by my own government on the world. Just as it is hypocritical
to train millions of men and women to mindlessly kill on command
in order to defend the world from evil, the Bush administration's
case for war on Iraq is also hypocritical in every aspect.
The president-select, thief in chief,
dubya, or whatever his name shall be for the 82 percent of this
country that did not vote for him, has three main reasons for
invading Iraq: 1) Saddam is an oppressive ruler. 2) Saddam may
possess weapons of mass destruction; 3) Saddam may have connections
to terrorists. To accurately assess the validity of each reason,
we need to both compare the equal record of both ourselves and
our allies to each, in order to understand why Iraq is so worthy
of invasion.
Reason #1: Saddam is an oppressive ruler.
Well, Saudi Arabia has an oppressive monarchy that whips hundreds
of children every year, and is brutally oppressive to its female
population, and yet it receives massive U.S. military aid because
it is a crucial ally. Turkey carries out massive torture and
extrajudicial killings each year, and Kurdish culture is punishable
by imprisonment, and yet it is a top recipient of U.S. military
and economic aid because it is a crucial U.S. ally. Indonesia,
Guatemala, Colombia, Pakistan, Israel, China, Russia, and several
others also commit massive human rights abuses either against
their own people, or against others, such as Russia's role in
Chechnya, and yet each is a crucial U.S. ally. Why do we not
invade them?
Reason # 2: Saddam may possess WMD. Again,
many of our allies possess these. Israel, Pakistan, China, and
Russia, to name a few, all possess nuclear weapons, AND oppress
people on a large scale, and yet they are not worthy of invasion.
But there is much more to this story. The details of the administration's
case are also more than fuzzy. The major story in Europe and
Australia last week was the revelation that Powell's case before
the UN was partly plagiarized. Here's the story, reported very
little in the U.S., but widely in the Mirror UK, the New Zealand
Herald, and the Guardian: British intelligence, which recently
came out with a document stating their belief that NO connection
exists between Al Qaeda and Iraq, was also central in the intelligence
gathering for Powell's case to be made against Iraq at the UN.
It was discovered that "large chunks" of their dossier
were taken from academic journals, not intelligence sources.
The most shocking part of this story
is that Powell himself has not been entirely discredited. We
have a history of lying in order get into war in this country.
Whether it was the false declaration that the Mexican army had
crossed into U.S. territory in 1846, which legitimated our entry
into the Mexican-American War, or the false claim that the Spanish
had sunk the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Cuba in 1898, which
justified our entry into the Spanish-American War, or the lies
surrounding the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964, which facilitated
our entry into the Vietnam War, or the false testimony that Iraqi
soldiers had murdered incubator babies upon invasion of Kuwait
in 1990, further enhancing the desirability of our entry into
the first Gulf War in 1991, or a number of other engagements,
this country has consistently used half-truths and deception
to justify bloodshed. Why should this time be any different?
The Bush administration's deception continues.
According the Guardian, Hans Blix dismissed Powell's central
claim in his presentation about the alleged mobile biological
weapons labs, and he denied that Iraqis had attempted to hide
equipment before UNMOVIC arrived. Blix's teams had already searched
two of the alleged biological weapons lab vehicles, and stated
that they were food-testing trucks. U.S. tips had led him to
inspect them in the first place.
Powell, who has been a hawk ever since
his days as National Security Advisor to Reagan, according to
CNN, recently asserted that the ricin "bouncing around Europe"
originated in Iraq. This has been refuted by British and French
intelligence, who say "There is no, repeat, no suggestion
that the ricin was anything but locally produced." "It
was bad quality, not technically sophisticated." Here Powell
goes badly off the rails. Although we didn't supply Saddam with
ricin, we did supply him with a number of other horrible weapons,
all itemized in the Riegle Report, and produced by Congress in
1994. It states that we supplied Saddam with such chemical nerve
agents as sarin, soman, tabun, and VX, as well as mustard gas.
Of course, this report has only received scant attention from
the U.S. mainstream, but it can be downloaded from the web.
In short, the Bush administration's case to prove that Saddam
has WMD is largely based on plagiarism and hypocrisy.
Reason # 3: Saddam may have connections
to terrorists. So do two of our closest allies, and of course,
ourselves. According to the New Zealand Herald, Al Qaeda received
1 million dollars from the royal family of Qatar, and according
to Newsweek, money that reached the 9/11 hijackers was
traced back to an account held by Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife
of the Saudi ambassador to Washington. What would be the response
if the same connection were made with Iraq? Of course, we don't
have to point out the most obvious hypocritical aspect of all:
fifteen of the hijackers were Saudi, and not one was Iraqi.
But, what's so hypocritical about that?
After all, we don't apply any of the above standards to ourselves,
so why should we apply them to our allies? It could be argued
that we fit all three of the criteria cited above beyond any
other nation. 1) We support oppression by supplying more military
assistance to more nations than any other, by far. Not to mention
the fact that we have used our military or CIA to intervene in
forty-five nations over the past fifty-eight years, and we are
the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons against civilians.
2) We possess more nuclear weapons than any other nation on Earth,
period. 3) Our connections to terrorists go deeper than any
Muslim nation. We have the School of the Americas (now under
new name, but same management), which has turned out hundreds
of thousands of Latin American soldiers, many of whom have committed
atrocities on a scale that compare to 9/11.
What if the U.S. government were held
to the FBI's official definition of terrorism? ("the unlawful
use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate
or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment
thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives")
Would our list of victims be any shorter than Iraq's? How is
our military and CIA involvement in the following nations any
better than Saddam's invasion of Kuwait or his oppression of
his own people?
Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua,
El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, Mexico, Chile, Granada,
Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Ecuador, Zaire,
Namibia, Lebanon, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Iran, South
Africa, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Cambodia,
Libya, Israel, Palestine, China, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia,
East Timor, Turkey, Angola, and Somalia.
According a Reuters article from December
26, our own CIA has recently been using tactics bordering on
torture to extract information from Afghani prisoners of our
bombing campaign that may have cost up to 5,000 civilian lives
in and of itself. Who are we to call anyone else the bad guy
when not only is our foreign policy history morally bankrupt,
but we support some of the worst human rights violators on the
planet, and still we claim to have a case against Saddam Hussein,
a pebble in a shining sea of oppression that we otherwise hold
quite dear to our hearts.
To sum up, the case for invasion of Iraq
lacks proof, and is based on plagiarism, false assertions, and
lies. In addition, the reasons we use for wanting to invade
Iraq could apply to a number of our closest allies in the world.
So, if the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq is unfounded,
then why do they want to invade? I posit that not only is it
for oil, which is certainly central, but it is also for maintaining
legitimacy with our allies in the region. Allies such as
Kuwait and Israel in particular enjoy the reassurance that we
will pressure anyone who menaces them, and we take pride in reassuring
them because that maintains our legitimacy as the nation they
are dependent on for protection. This also sends the message
to other "rogue states" that may get the silly idea
to not follow us as their leader.
So, inevitably people will want answers
on what we should do with Iraq. First of all, we have to admit
that the case to invade could be made in many other countries,
all of which are close U.S. allies. Therefore, we have to ask
ourselves if we are willing to invade all of them, too. I think
we realize that the answer would be a resounding NO, especially
since we are talking about nations that, collectively, make up
more than half of the Earth's population. So, instead we pick
on tiny little Iraq. Does it make the sense they say it does?
Chris White
is an ex-Marine infantryman who is currently working on his doctorate
in history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He served from
1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan,
and Doha, Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace. He
can be reached at: juliopac@swbell.net
Yesterday's
Features
Elizabeth Connell
And
You Thought It Was Cold in New York: Exclusive Photos from Antarctica
Ron Jacobs
The
Streets Belong to the People
The Liberation of Midtown Manhattan
Joanne Mariner
Scenes
from the Streets of New York:
A Cold, But Exhilarating Saturday
Tariq Ali
Regime
Change: Here and in Iraq
Vanessa Jones
"Somewhere in Texas a Village Has Lost Its Idiot"
Joe Quandt
An
American Crisis:
Let Us, Like the Iraqis, Have No Illusions
Willliam Hughes
Mayor
Bully:
Bloomberg's March Restrictions Spark Outrage
Sam Husseini
Compass
Roses
Robert Jensen and Rahul
Mahajan
People of Conscience can Change History
Wayne Madsen
After the Fall
Anthony Gancarski
Return
to the Stone Age?
The Last Days of Bill Buckley
Robert Fisk
The US is a Nation Divided
Ralph Nader
Big
Oil and the War on Iraq
Adam Engel
Live from New York, It's:
Lizard Brain on Line for the Log Flume
Website of the Day
Compass
Roses
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
Katz, Scott Handleman, and Bruce Tomczak
Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
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
|