“The
Americans Are Coming!
The
Americans Are Coming”!
by
Dennis Rahkonen
Dissident Voice
March 17, 2003
Jimmy
Carter has written that Bush's war against Iraq would be unjust.
The Pope has said the same.
Kofi Annan believes an
American attack without UN approval would violate the UN Charter.
Forty-three Australian legal
scholars recently also declared the UN Charter would be violated, as well as
international law pertaining to proper conduct between states.
Several observers have
pointed out that the White House is proposing the same thing we tried and
convicted Nazis for at Nuremberg.
Charges against them were brought for “planning, preparation, initiation
or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international
treaties, agreements or assurances.”
How does Bush’s intention
differ from Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia?
Or Hitler's Panzers roaring into Poland? Or Tokyo's strike on Pearl Harbor?
Aggression is Aggression is Aggression.
The stark truth behind such
reality-softening euphemism's as "regime change" and "preemptive
attack" is that America would be invading a sovereign country, without
provocation or credible basis, to violently overthrow its government.
Remember, treaties that
we're a party to have the Constitutional weight of the "law of the
land". Breaking them would very
definitely be un-American.
We'd also kill untold
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians with our massively destructive superpower
arsenal.
We're not talking about
Germany, Italy, Japan or any other nation tarred by history for being a bloody,
bellicose bully, but the United States of America.
How can we honestly keep our
consciences at ease -- and validly invoke "patriotism" -- when our
country is about to be firmly placed in such a wicked context?
Bush says he
"knows" Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. But Hans Blix keeps reporting none can be
found. A recent Newsweek piece detailed
a key Iraqi defector's assertion that Baghdad destroyed its remaining WMD in
1995. Pardon me, but I'm not disposed
to risk Armageddon based on anything Dubya claims he...knows.
Prove to us -- using documented,
cross-corroborated evidence -- that Iraq poses any sort of external danger to
anyone. Neighboring states have
expressed no fear of an "imminent Iraqi threat". What scares them is
the prospect of an apocalypse being unleashed in their region by "mad
cowboy" Bush.
We all know Saddam is bad --
as bad as he was back when Rumsfeld cozied up to him as Reagan’s special envoy
seeking Baghdad’s help against Iran.
But it isn't effigies of the Iraqi leader that are being burned in angry
protests all around the world. It's
representations of our president, and our flag, that are torched. Most of humanity thinks, with justifiably
fearful reason, that Bush is a greater threat than Hussein.
Should they, then, organize
to attack the United States and strive to get rid of him?
Wait...
That was already done, on
9/11.
Two wrongs don't make a
right.
There's simply no way of
looking at what Bush and the military-industrial complex's rightwing hardliners
are pushing that doesn't boil down to a cynical, unconscionable
oil-and-hegemony grab.
Are body bags filled with
recent U.S. high school graduates an acceptable trade for barrels of crude?
Did Tom Paine and the Sons
of Liberty envision America as an oppressive, exploitative empire?
How unsettling it is to
think that soon a contemporary Iraqi equivalent of Paul Revere may race through
neighborhoods of Baghdad to warn of advancing U.S. troops: “The Americans are
coming! The Americans are coming!”
Time is tight.
Do everything peaceful
within your imagination and power to stop the criminal, treasonous folly that
Bush and his fellow extremists want to foist upon us, besmirching America's
honor forever.
Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, WI, has been writing
commentary and verse for various progressive outlets since the '60s. He can be
reached at dennisr@cp.duluth.mn.us