Re:The WAR! – Who is on Who’s side?
I want to start by saying that being against this war does NOT mean that one is against the soldiers, I think we all agree that we want the troops to be safe just as we want the civilians involved to be safe. It also does not mean that one is a coward. We all have the right to say what we think, and we should refrain from denigrating others for their opinions.
And just a note too–the peace movement in the U.S. has a very wide range of participants in terms of age and background, it has been very apparent in the marches in NY and Washington.
I’m also sorry this is rather lengthy, but there is a lot of background that hasn’t been talked about and that I think might be useful in looking at the reasons why we’re in this war.
From my point of view, we’ve been given several justifications for this war, and they’ve turned out to be specious. What we’re left with now are the old standbys that we’re doing it for the Iraqi people/and or that the government has some inside information and is doing what’s best for us.
The only thing I’m going to say about the former is that we (the U.S.) supported Saddam through the 80’s with both money and weapons (including biological weapons), and even Cheney had no objections to doing business with him then. Humanitarian concerns are rarely the guiding force behind any government’s policies, I’m not even going to bother to run down the list of dictators as bad as Saddam whom we’ve supported in the past–I think we can all come up with some names. I can’t accept this war as some sort of a moral crusade on the part of our government.
Do Bush and Blair have inside information that justifies their rush to war? I don’t buy it. Inside information is a kind of myth. A government agent may have some satellite photos and a few details here and there that we don’t have, but if you keep yourself relatively well informed and get your news from more than one source, you usually have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the world. We’re just as capable of thinking it through and analyzing it as the people in Washington or London. The outdated and plagiarized report from Britain that Powell used to try to prove the Iraq/Al Quaida link wasn’t that much of an anomaly. That [i]is[/i] the kind of information government analysts use to put their reports together.
The documents Powell used to bolster his case that Iran was building up its nuclear weapon capabilites (the alleged purchase of uranium from Niger) have turned out to be forgeries. Here’s an interesting article about them from Seymour Hersh:
[url]http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1[/url]
I thought the British board members would particularly enjoy the article, since it seems MI6 has their fingerprints all over the documents.
From my point of view this war should have been avoidable, the UN inspectors were making progress, and none of Iraq’s neighbors felt immediately threatened. But in reality there was no way to avoid this war because the will to avoid it wasn’t there. A lot of that has to do with the domestic political situation in the U.S. The Bush Administration, as difficult as it may be to accept, is a group of ideologues with a radical agenda . I think 9/11 set both their fears and their ideological certainties in stone.
The actual case for this war was laid out [i]before[/i] 9/11 in a report called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” issued in September 2000 by the “Project for the New American Century” (Sorry for the melodramatic names, but what do you expect from people who came up with the “Department of Homeland Security ” and the “Total Awareness Information Act”) Among the people who contributed to that report were:
Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy defense secretary. John Bolton , Undersecretary of State. Stephen Cambone, Head of the Pentagon’s Office of Program, Analysis and Evaluation. Eliot Cohen and Devon Cross, members of the Defense Policy Board, which advises Rumsfeld. I. Lewis Libby , Chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Dov Zakheim, Comptroller for the Defense Department.
It is basically the blueprint for a “Pax Americana”, and a lot of its recommendations (in more diplomatic language) can be found in the Bush Administration’s “National Security Strategy” document–released last September. Recommendations such as the “pre-emptive” strike policy, a total reversal of previous U.S. policies. I’m giving a link to a piece in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution newspaper which is a good run-down of the details and which also includes links to the original documents (they’re long pdf files which you may not want to bother with):
[url]http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/opinion/0902/29bookman.html[/url]
These are public documents, and I imagine that their content had something to do with the resistance other countries exhibited towards the U.S. push for this war. The same group of people by the way were advocating a war with Iraq for a number of years before that. Check out the Carnegie Endowment for Peace report on “Origins of Regime Change in Iraq”:
[url]http://www.ceip.org/files/nonprolif/templates/Publications.asp?p=8&PublicationID=1214[/url]
This is too long already, but domestically, 9/11 has been used not just to justify war with Iraq but also to push legislation (“Patriot Act”– another great name) through out supine Congress that abrogates some of our basic civil rights. Now a draft of the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003” (also known as Patriot II) has surfaced. The legislation picks up where the PATRIOT Act left off — more wiretaps and secret searches, government access to credit reports and other personal records, a database of DNA samples, and provisions allowing the attorney general to revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone who provides assistance to a group the government considers a “terrorist” organization.
And I’m not even going to start on the assaults on existing environmental protection legislation, on civil rights, on women’s rights, on the separation between church and state and on and on that started before 9/11.
George W. has talked about the war as a crusade and a mission from God. I think this is a very scary group of old white men whose hubris is covering up a deep fear of a world that doesn’t belong to them. And I choose not to live in the kind of fear they’re trying to shove down my throat, and I don’t believe their war is adding to anyone’s safety.
elmey