THE US may soon wage war against Iraq whether or not UN weapons inspectors
find evidence of what the Bush administration calls “Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction.” As events in the Middle East theater
will likely again illustrate, there is only one thing that matters
to the US government. Not freedom or democracy, even though the US
brandishes these words more fondly than any nation today. Not the
wretched victims of tyrants and despots, even though the US has shown
the world how deep its linguistic arsenal is when describing its concern
for peoples brutalized by those it considers evil. For the leaders
of the lone superpower today, the only interest that matters is what
fattens their favored corporate pockets. Their message to the world
is quite simple—if you are not helping our cause, you’d
best stay out of the way.
However much the US government tries to conceal its true intentions
in toppling Saddam Hussein with nice talk about freedom and democracy,
it can never completely hide what motivates it most in its present
desire to occupy Iraq—oil. Currently possessing the second largest
oil reserves in the world, Iraq’s oil production is expected
in the future to surpass even what is currently generated by Saudi
Arabia.
Oil and Power
World requirements for Middle East oil are expected to double in the
next two decades, and much of this demand is anticipated to take place
in petroleum-addicted America. US corporate control of oil in locations
such as the Middle East is therefore essential for an American government
conscious of its superpower status and currently run by a President
and Vice-President very close to big oil interests. This is the logic
that continues to drive official US policy in the region and its neighboring
environs.
Many may be unaware that the US had planned to intervene not just
in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and other Central Asian states prior
to the September 11 tragedy in order to control areas with identified
enormous petroleum reserves. Today, after the carpet-bombing of Afghanistan
which punished victims of the Taliban more than the Taliban itself,
the US maintains a military presence not just in Afghanistan but also
in oil-and-gas rich Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. After the Afghan
campaign, Iraq is obviously the next move in the Bush administration’s
increasingly menacing gambit to shape the world according to its interests.
Iraq as Prize
Just how big a prize is Iraq? It is huge—Iraq’s oil reserves
are presently valued at nearly $3 trillion. Is it any wonder then
that the team of George Bush junior, whose petrol-lineage goes back
generations, is so focused on initiating and achieving a quick favorable
outcome of hostilities in Iraq?
A recently released Deutsche Bank report, for instance, noted how
US companies like Halliburton Co. would be among the firms that would
most quickly benefit from a victorious US war in Iraq. Halliburton
is one of the largest oil-servicing companies in the world today;
it was run by Richard Cheney before he became the US Vice President.
In fact, during the time Cheney was running the oil services company,
Halliburton sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company.
Despite the call of the government of George Bush senior after the
1991 Gulf War to economically isolate the tyrannical Iraqi regime,
US oil companies continued to do business with Iraq, with US imports
of Iraqi petroleum even surpassing the amounts imported by the US
from Iraq prior to the Gulf War. At the forefront of this petrol trade
are companies like ChevronTexaco, which, since 1999 has given more
than $1 million to the coffers of the Republicans, the party of Bush
junior who is now preparing to invade Iraq. ChevronTexaco’s
board included, until 1999, Bush junior’s National Security
Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, who even has an oil tanker named after her
and who today calls Saddam “an evil man.”
Reagan’s Special Envoy
In the war against terrorism, Bush said after September 11, “we’re
going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how
long it takes.” A nation such as Iraq, said Bush, must not be
allowed “to threaten our very future by developing weapons of
mass destruction” such as nuclear and chemical and biological
weapons.
For the moment, let us set aside the fact that the US alone has the
distinction today of having waged nuclear war at least three times—against
Japan, and against Iraq and Yugoslavia where the radiation from depleted
uranium shells is still killing people. Let us not mind for now the
fact that the US conducted chemical and biological warfare in its
wars versus Korea, China, Cuba and Vietnam. Let’s just talk
about one of the secrets which the US government has been loath to
discuss. Let us talk about December 1983, when then President Reagan
sent a special envoy named Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein
in Baghdad—the same Rumsfeld who now sits as the US Secretary
of Defense and who is currently mobilizing the US war machine against
the man he now calls the “Butcher of Baghdad.”
Past buddies
Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983 based on a clear agenda—to
arrange the re-opening of the US embassy in Iraq “in order to
secure better trade and economic relations” with the “Butcher
of Baghdad” and to firm up plans to run a pipeline from Iraq
to the Jordanian port of Aqaba that would benefit mainly the US giant
Bechtel Corporation. This is just one half of the story, however.
When Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983, he was fully aware that Iraq
had already initiated that year the use of mustard gas—the deadly
blister agent—and the lethal nerve agent tabun (the first recorded
use of the nerve agent in history) in its war against Iran. Rumsfeld
was to meet with Saddam again in March 1984, ironically on the same
day that the UN released a report exposing Saddam’s use of poison
gas against Iran.
Did the US government decry Saddam’s use of what are called
today “weapons of mass destruction?” No. The Reagan administration
did a curious thing: it armed the man George Bush senior describes
as “a brute ... who used poison gas on his own people.”
Arming the Butcher of Baghdad
In 1982, Iraq was removed from the US list of states that support
terrorism. This paved the way for the sale to Iraq in 1983 of 60 Hughes
helicopters that could be weaponised within hours of delivery. Then
US Secretary of State George Schultz lobbied for the delivery of “crop
spraying” Bell helicopters that are believed to have been used
in the 1988 gas attack of Iraqi troops on a Kurdish village which
killed 5,000 people. It is interesting to note that four months later,
the US firm Bechtel corporation inked the contract to build a massive
petrochemical plant that would give Saddam the capacity to produce
chemical weapons.
During the period when Saddam’s troops were using poison gas
against Iranians, then Vice President Bush senior intervened personally
to ensure that the US Export-Import Bank guaranteed loans to Iraq
worth $500 million to build an oil pipeline. In 1988, the year Saddam
was gassing thousands of Kurds, President Bush senior provided the
Butcher of Baghdad with $500 million in US government subsidies to
buy US farm products. The year after the genocide, Bush senior doubled
this subsidy to $1 billion and sent with the package germ seed for
anthrax, more helicopters and “dual use materials” that
could be used for making the very chemical and biological weapons
that the Iraqi despot is accused today of harboring. European companies
also supplied Iraq with “dual use materials” which Saddam’s
regime easily purchased based on loans guaranteed by the US agriculture
department’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC). German firms
even sold Iraq whole “dual use materials” factories—capable
of mass-producing poison gas—on the strength of the CCC’s
credit guarantees.
Sponsoring Biological Warfare
According to a US Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports
to Iraq, from 1985 to 1990, “the US government approved 771
licenses for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological
agents and high-tech equipment with military application.” A
1994 US Senate report also disclosed that US companies were licensed
by the US commerce department to export biological and chemical materials,
including bacillus anthracis and clostridium botulinum (the source
of botulism) while the American Type Culture Collection company made
70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
If Saddam Hussein’s government is indeed the evil regime (and
it is) that the Bush government says it is, what do we call those
responsible for arming the Butcher of Baghdad?
History’s Cruel Lessons
It is important to bring out these little known facts about US complicity
with the Iraqi regime to stress key points. It is crucial to strip
a US government preparing for war of the supposed noble intentions
it has without shame used to legitimize its impending occupation of
Iraq. The looming war in Iraq is not a just war; it is an ugly war
fueled by America’s imperial ambitions to control Iraqi oil,
tighten its grip on the world’s most important resource and
impress once more on everyone the costs of defying the world’s
remaining superpower. As we have shown, it matters little if a country
is ruled by a monster like Saddam; the only important yardstick for
the US government is whether or not one serves the economic interests
ruling Washington.
Indeed, this is the deadly lesson that has been surely learned by
the Taliban, whose very members, including the terrorist Osama bin
Laden, were once financed by the US government. Before the US government
tried to wipe them off the face of the earth, bin Laden and company
were regarded by then president Reagan as “freedom fighters
... the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” when they
were still fighting in Afghanistan America’s battle against
the Soviet Union. Even the fundamentalists call for jihad, simultaneously
abhorred and feared today by the Bush government, was once upon a
time equated by Washington as a kind of dagger of freedom to be plunged
into the breast of the Soviet tyranny. Jihad has not been used for
hundreds of years according to the distinguished scholar Eqbal Ahmad;
the term was only resurrected with America’s help to provide
Osama’s mujahideen with a moral context in their war versus
the Soviets. Once the Russians were driven out, the US swiftly forgot
about Afghanistan. Today, a little over a year after the US ‘war
on terror’ punished mostly Afghan victims of the Taliban, Afghanistan
is already yesterday’s problem, abandoned once more by the US
to drug barons and warlords.
Expect More War?
A 1997 report by the US Department of Defense states how “historical
data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international
situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United
States.” By itself, the conclusion of the report is nothing
new to people who have kept track of the results of US foreign policy,
yet it is highly revealing. A department associated with initiating
foreign interventionist activities has now begun to realize the deadly
consequences of US government interference with the affairs of other
countries. The conclusion is thus unavoidable—rather than make
the world more secure, the US government’s ‘war on terror’
is in fact making its own citizens, along with the rest of us, more
vulnerable to terrorism.
According to William Blum, a former US State Department officer,
since 1945 the US “has attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign
governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements
struggling against intolerable regimes” many of which were propped
up by the US government. In the Middle East, the US continues to embrace
Ariel Sharon, Israel’s own butcher who masterminded in 1982
the cold-blooded slaughter in Lebanon of hundreds of Palestinian refugees,
mostly women and children. Sharon is the present Prime Minister of
Israel, a state determined to annihilate the Palestinian people. Notwithstanding
numerous condemnations by the UN Security Council for its protracted
massacre of Palestinians, Israel continues to receive billions of
dollars from the US each year along with the diplomatic support of
Washington due to the role it plays as America’s gendarme against
obstinate Arab governments. These are but some of the reasons that
have spawned the awesome cruelty of a growing number of desperate
elements in the Arab world determined to bring the US, and Israel,
to their knees.
US hatred is not confined to the Middle East. Asia, for instance,
once populated by US-propped despots like Suharto and once the locus
of US government atrocities, continues to harbor feelings of animosity
towards America. The same situation prevails in Latin and Central
America.
US Destroyed the Most Effective Weapons vs Terror
As the horrible 9/11 on the US has proven, America’s vaunted
military might is useless in the face of a decentralized and frighteningly
deliberate terrorist network. The only effective weapons that could
be used to bring down groups such as al-Qaeda have been destroyed
by the US itself.
In December 2001, the US government effectively terminated the Biological
and Toxin Weapons Convention when it killed a proposed enforcement
and verification mechanism in the pact that could have been used to
decisively neutralize Saddam Hussein and create the basis for the
genuine eradication of biological and chemical weapons all over the
world. (The US feared that the Convention may be used on US biotech
companies). The US continues to block global efforts to set up an
International Criminal Court designed to prosecute individuals and
organizations that have perpetrated crimes against humanity—crimes
of wickedness epitomized by bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The US could have
initiated the end of the bloody history of oil by supporting the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming, which intends to significantly reduce
the consumption of petroleum and thus avert dangerous climate change.
Instead, the Bush administration withdrew from the treaty and castigated
it for “attempting to change the American way of life.”
Only One Way to Resist
If we seek lasting solutions to today’s increasingly deadlier
conflicts, remaining silent on the US government’s ‘war
on terror’ and its intentions to invade Iraq cannot be an intelligent
option. Unless we add our voice in opposition to American aggression,
it will be the Bushes and bin Ladens who will speak for us. There
is only one way to resist the US government’s intention to plunge
the world into more war, as the film-maker John Pilger counsels, and
that is by speaking out and urgently.
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