In October 2002,
after several days of full-dress debate in the House and Senate, the US
Congress fell into line behind almost-elected president George W. Bush, giving
him a mandate to launch a massive military assault against the already battered
nation of Iraq. The discourse in Congress was marked by its usual cowardice.
Even many of the senators and representatives who voted against the president’s
resolution did so on the narrowest procedural grounds, taking pains to tell how
they too detested Saddam Hussein, how they agreed with the president on many
points, how something needed to be done about Iraq but not just yet, not quite
in this way. So it is with Congress: so much political discourse in so narrow a
political space. Few of the members dared to question the unexamined
assumptions about US virtue, and the imperial right of US leaders to decide which nations shall
live and which shall die. Few, if any, pointed to the continual bloody stream
of war crimes committed by a succession of arrogant US administrations in
blatant violation of human rights and
international law.
Bush and other
members of his administration have given varied and unpersuasive reasons to
justify the “war” -- actually a one-sided massacre -- against Iraq. They claim
it is necessary to insure the safety and security of the Middle East and of the
United States itself, for Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction,
including nuclear missiles. But UN inspection teams have determined that Iraq
has no such nuclear capability and actually has been in compliance with yearly
disarmament inspections. As for the
fact that Iraq once had factories that produced chemical and bacteriological
weapons, whose fault was that? It was the United States that supplied such
things to Saddam. This is one of several key facts about past US-Iraq relations
that the corporate media have consistently suppressed. In any case, according
to UN inspection reports, Iraq’s C&B warfare capability has been
dismantled. Still the Bushites keep
talking about Iraq’s dangerous “potential”. As reported by the Associated Press
(2 November 2002), Undersecretary of State John Bolton claimed that “Iraq would
be able to develop a nuclear weapon within a year if it gets the right
technology.” If it gets the right
technology? What does that say about anything? The truistic nature of this
assertion has gone unnoticed. Djibouti, Qatar, and New Jersey would be able to
develop nuclear weapons if they got “the right technology.” Through September
and October of 2002, the White House made it clear that Iraq would be attacked
if it had weapons of mass destruction. Then in November 2002, Bush announced he
would attack if Saddam denied that he had weapons of mass destruction. So if
the Iraqis admit having such weapons, they will be bombed; and if they deny
having them, they still will be bombed--whether they have them or not.
The Bushites
also charged Iraq with allowing al Qaeda terrorists to operate within its
territory. But US intelligence sources themselves let it be known that the
Iraqi government was not connected to Islamic terrorist organizations. In closed
sessions with a House committee, when administration officials were repeatedly
asked whether they had information of an imminent threat from Saddam against US
citizens, they stated unequivocally that they had no such evidence (San
Francisco Chronicle, 20 September 2002). Truth be told, the Bush family has
closer ties to the bin Laden family than does Saddam Hussein. No mention is
made of how US leaders themselves have allowed terrorists to train and operate
within our own territory, including a mass murderer like Orlando Bosch.
Convicted of blowing up a Cuban airliner, Bosch walks free in Miami.
Bush and company
seized upon yet another pretext for war: Saddam has committed war crimes and
acts of aggression, including the war against Iran and the massacre of Kurds.
But the Pentagon's own study found that the gassing of Kurds at Halabja was
committed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis (Times of India, 18 September 2002).
Another seldom mentioned fact: US leaders gave Iraq encouragement and military
support in its war against Iran. And if war crimes and aggression are the
issue, there are the US invasions of Grenada and Panama to consider, and the
US-sponsored wars of attrition against civilian targets in Mozambique, Angola,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and scores of other places,
leaving hundreds of thousands dead. There is no communist state or “rogue
nation” that has such a horrific record of military aggression against other
countries over the last two decades.
With all the
various pretexts for war ringing hollow, the Bushites resorted to the final
indictment: Saddam was a dictator. The United States stood for democracy and
human rights. It followed that US leaders were obliged to use force and
violence to effect regime change in Iraq. Again, we might raise questions.
There is no denying that Saddam is a dictator, but how did he and his crew ever
come to power? Saddam’s conservative wing of the Ba’ath party was backed by the
CIA. They were enlisted to destroy the Iraqi popular revolution and slaughter
every democratic, left-progressive
individual they could get hold of, which indeed they did, including the
progressive wing of the Ba’ath party itself---another fact that US media have
let slide down the memory hole. Saddam was Washington’s poster boy until the
end of the Cold War.
So why has
George II, like his daddy, targeted Iraq? When individuals keep providing new
and different explanations to justify a particular action, they most likely are
lying. So with political leaders and policymakers. Having seen that the
pretexts given by the White House to justify war are palpably false, some
people conclude that the administration is befuddled or even “crazy”. But just because they are trying to mislead
and confuse the public does not perforce mean they themselves are misled and
confused. Rather it might be that they have reasons which they prefer not to
see publicized and debated, for then it would become evident that US policies
of the kind leveled against Iraq advance the interests of the rich and powerful
at much cost to the American people and every other people on the face of the
earth. Here I offer what I believe are the real reasons for the US aggression
against Iraq.
A central US
goal, as enunciated by the little Dr. Strangeloves who inhabit the upper
echelons of policymaking in the Bush administration, is to perpetuate US global
supremacy. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to insure
plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the
economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples
everywhere—including the people of North America --- the blessings of an
untrammeled “free market” corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who believe that the land, labor,
capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing
capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things
should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the
many.
The goal is to
insure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy
of US global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing
superpower or, for that matter, any potentially competing regional power. Iraq
is a case in point. Some nations in the Middle East have oil but no water;
others have water but no oil. Iraq is the only one with plenty of both, along
with a good agricultural base—although its fertile lands are now much
contaminated by the depleted uranium dropped upon it during the 1991 Gulf War
bombings.
In earlier
times, Iraq’s oil was completely owned by US, British, and other Western
companies. In 1958 there was a popular revolution in Iraq. Ten years later, the
rightwing of the Ba’ath party took power, with Saddam Hussein serving as point
man for the CIA. His assignment was to undo the bourgeois-democratic
revolution, as I have already noted. But instead of acting as a compradore
collaborator to Western investors in the style of Nicaragua’s Somoza, Chile’s
Pinochet, Peru’s Fujimora, and numerous others, Saddam and his cohorts
nationalized the Iraqi oil industry in 1972, ejected the Western profiteers,
and pursued policies of public development and economic nationalism. By 1990,
Iraq had the highest standard of living in the Middle East (which may not be
saying all that much), and it was evident that the US had failed to rollback
the gains of the 1958 revolution. But the awful destruction delivered upon Iraq
both by the Gulf War and the subsequent decade of economic sanctions did
achieve a kind of counterrevolutionary rollback from afar.
Soon after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, US leaders decided that Third World development
no longer needed to be tolerated. Just as Yugoslavia served as a “bad” example
in Europe, so Iraq served as a bad example to other nations in the Middle East.
The last thing the plutocrats in Washington want in that region is independent,
self-defining developing nations that wish to control their own land, labor,
and natural resources.US economic and military power has been repeatedly used
to suppress competing systems. Self-defining countries like Cuba, Iraq, and
Yugoslavia are targeted. Consider Yugoslavia. It showed no desire to become
part of the European Union and absolutely no interest in joining NATO. It had
an economy that was relatively prosperous, with some 80 percent of it still
publicly owned. The wars of secession and attrition waged against
Yugoslavia---all in the name of human rights and democracy---destroyed that
country’s economic infrastructure and fractured it into a cluster of poor,
powerless, right-wing mini-republics, whose economies are being privatized,
deregulated, and opened to Western corporate penetration on terms that are
completely favorable to the investors. We see this happening most recently in
Serbia. Everything is being privatized at garage sale prices. Human service,
jobs, and pension funds are disappearing. Unemployment, inflation, and poverty
are skyrocketing, as is crime, homelessness, prostitution, and suicide. Welcome
to Serbia’s free market paradise.
Judging from
what has been happening in Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Panama, Grenada, and
elsewhere---we can anticipate that the same thing is in store for Iraq
following a US occupation: An Iraqi puppet government will be put in place,
headed by someone every bit as subservient to the White House as Tony Blair.
The Iraqi state-owned media will become “free and independent” by being handed
over to rich conservative private corporations. Anything even remotely critical
of US foreign policy and free market capitalism will be deprived of an
effective platform. Conservative political parties, heavily financed by US
sources, will outspend any leftist groupings that might have survived. On this
steeply unleveled playing field, US advisors will conduct US-style “democratic
elections,” perhaps replicating the admirable results produced in Florida and
elsewhere. Just about everything in the Iraqi economy will be privatized at
giveaway prices. Poverty and underemployment, already high, will climb
precipitously. So will the Iraqi national debt, as international loans are
floated that “help” the Iraqis pay for their own victimization. Public services
will dwindle to nothing, and Iraq will suffer even more misery than it does
today. We are being asked to believe that the Iraqi people are willing to
endure another massive bombing campaign in order to reach this free-market paradise.
Another reason
for targeting Iraq can be summed up in one word: oil. Along with maintaining
the overall global system of expropriation, US leaders are interested in more
immediate old-time colonial plunder. The present White House leadership is
composed of oil men who are both sorely tempted and threatened by Iraq’s oil
reserve, one of the largest in the world. With 113 billion barrels at $25 a
barrel, Iraq’s supply comes to over $2.8 trillion dollars. But not a drop of it
belongs to the US oil cartel; it is all state owned. Baghdad has offered
exploratory concessions to France, China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia.
But with a US takeover of Iraq and a new puppet regime in place, all these
agreements may be subject to cancellation. We may soon witness the biggest oil
grab in the history of Third World colonialism
by US oil
companies aided and abetted by the US government. One thing that US leaders
have been interested in doing with Iraqi oil---given the glut and slumping price
of crude in recent years---is keep it off the market for awhile longer. As the
London Financial Times (24 February 1998) reported, oil prices fell sharply
because of the agreement between the United Nations and Iraq that would allow
Baghdad to sell oil on the world market. The agreement “could lead to much
larger volumes of Iraqi crude oil competing for market shares.” The San
Francisco Chronicle (22 February 1998) headlined its story “IRAQ’S OIL POSES
THREAT TO THE WEST.” In fact, Iraqi crude poses no threat to “the West” only to
Western oil investors. If Iraq were able to reenter the international oil
market, the Chronicle reported, “it would devalue British North Sea oil,
undermine American oil production and---much more important---it would destroy
the huge profits which the United States [read, US oil companies] stands to
gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production, especially in
Azerbajian.” We might conclude that direct control and ownership of Iraqi oil
is the surest way to keep it off the world market and the surest way to profit
from its future sale when the price is right.
War and violence
have been good to George W. Bush. As of September 10, 2001, his approval
ratings were sagging woefully. Then came the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, swiftly followed by the newly trumpeted war against terrorism
and the massive bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Bush’s approval ratings
skyrocketed. But soon came the corporate scandals of 2002: Enron, WorldCom, and
even more perilously Harken and Halliburton. By July, both the president and
vice-president were implicated in fraudulent corporate accounting practices,
making false claims of profit to pump up stock values, followed by heavy
insider selling just before the stock was revealed to be nearly worthless and
collapsed in price. By September, the impending war against Iraq blew this
whole issue off the front pages and out of the evening news. Daddy Bush did the
same thing in 1990, sending the savings and loan scandal into media limbo by
waging war against that very same country.
By October 2002,
the Republican party, reeling from the scandals and pegged as the party of
corporate favoritism and corruption, reemerged as the party of patriotism,
national defense, and strong military leadership to win control of both houses
of Congress, winning elections it should never have won. Many Americans rallied
around the flag, draped as it was around the president. Some of our compatriots,
who are cynical and suspicious about politicians in everyday affairs, display
an almost child-like unlimited trust and knee-jerk faith when these same
politicians trumpet a need to defend our national security against some alien
threat, real or imagined. War also distracts the people from their economic
problems, the need for decent housing, schools, and jobs, and a recession that
shows no sign of easing. Since George II took office, the stock market has
dropped 34 percent, unemployment has climbed 35 percent, the federal surplus of
$281 billion is now a deficit of $157 billion, and an additional 1.5 million
people are without health insurance, bringing the total to 41 million. War has
been good for the conservative agenda in general, providing record military
spending, greater profits for the defense industry, and a deficit spending
spree that further enriches the creditor class at the taxpayer’s expense, and
is used to justify more cuts in domestic human services.
Liberal intellectuals are never happier than when, with patronizing smiles, they can dilate on the stupidity of George Bush. What I have tried to show is that Bush is neither retarded nor misdirected. Given his class perspective and interests, there are compelling reasons to commit armed aggression against Iraq---and against other countries to come. It is time we dwelled less upon his malapropisms and more on his rather effective deceptions and relentless viciousness. Many decent crusaders have been defeated because of their inability to fully comprehend the utter depravity of their enemies. The more we know what we are up against, the better we can fight it.
Michael Parenti is a noted author and
political commentator. Among his widely read books are The Terrorism Trap,
Democracy For the Few, History as Mystery, and Against Empire.
His forthcoming book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History
of Ancient Rome, will be published in the spring by New Press. For more
information, visit his web site, www.michaelparenti.org.