The Truth About Bush’s War With Iraq

The military build up in the Middle East continues to escalate and the reality of an invasion of Iraq, within the next 8-12 weeks, seems almost certain due to the somnolence of the American populace with regards to this atrocity in the making.  President Bush has effectively draped his imperialist right wing policies in the American flag under the auspices of removing a threat to the U.S. homeland and decrying evil.  The critics on the left, in particular the Democratic party, are afraid to challenge this act of lunacy by the President, primarily because they don’t want to be perceived as being “soft on fighting terror’ and defending our borders.  Unfortunately, millions of Americans have now associated an invasion of Iraq as coinciding with the “War on Terror” and the inexorable task of preventing another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11.  The “September 11 effect” has obscured the lucidity of this imperious scheme instigated by the President and the ideologues that surround him in Washington to realize the fruition of a covert policy initiative that has been in place since 1992.  Detailed aspects of this policy will be discussed later, but for the time being the emphasis will be placed on the fabrication and hypocrisies that highlight the unsubstantiated case for war with Iraq.

The humanitarian faction of the Bush administration vehemently argues that the U.S. should go to war with Iraq in order to liberate its citizens and install democracy.  However, the U.S. has been one of the biggest impediments to democracy in the Middle East due to its annoying proclivity to mollify the dictatorial and oppressive regimes of countries in the region.  Prince Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, Iran under the Shah and other Gulf monarchies in the region have been backed by the U.S. for decades and there is no clear sign, excluding cosmological intervention, that the Bush administration will reform the status quo.  Except, of course, when handling the madman that resides in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates.  We never here President Bush talking about “regime change” in Pakistan where General Pervez Musharraf took the liberty of rewriting the countries constitution in order to give him even more power that was amassed after the coup.  Israel is praised as a model democracy even though Palestinian citizens within its borders are subject to second-class citizenship and the IDF is “OCCUPYING THE WEST BANK AND THE GAZA STRIP.”  The hypocrisy and the absurdity of the “liberate Iraq and spread democracy” pretext for war is only the beginning of the specious reasoning that the administration is using to justify this war.

“Saddam Hussein is such a crazed madman that he used chemical weapons on his own people.”  We here this sentence, or something to that effect, echoed over the airwaves of all media outlets by those individuals who attempt to justify war by the demonization of Saddam Hussein.  What they fail to mention is that during this time Hussein was a patron of the United States.  What they also failed to mention is that the Kurds had dissolved their tumultuous relationship with Saddam and decided to side with Iran during the Iraq-Iran war.  Historically, few if any countries have treated treasonous acts by its subjects leniently, especially a minority group which in this case the Kurds fit that description.  I am in by no means attempting to attenuate the abhorrence of the acts committed by Saddam’s regime, however, I intend to put it into a context that the administration and the media seem to purposely overlook. Saddam’s behavior is not dissimilar from that of any individual or group that seeks to maintain its power structure.  After all the U.S. has tested chemical and biological weapons not only on soldiers, but on civilian populations as well.  So which act holds moral superiority?

The notion that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction that could threaten the United States or its allies is an incantation that has been thoroughly brainwashed into the mental apparatus of Americans.  The Times has reported that Iraq has no more than 40 missiles with a range of over 90 miles and none of them have a range of more than 390 miles.  Israel, our most prized possession in the region, is some 600 miles from Iraq and if Saddam were to set his sights on the U.S. he would come up a tad short of the more than 7000 miles needed to reach American shores.  We crushed Iraq in a matter of days in 1991 when it had the fourth largest military arsenal in the world.  Now, after 11 years of the most brutal and unyielding sanctions known to modern civilization, Bush now contends that Iraq is “a threat to civilization.”  If weapons of mass destruction are now the primary criterion for military intervention abroad, then Bush’s aims should be directed in a more westerly motion towards Israel.  It has been well documented that Israel possesses at least 200 nuclear weapons in its arsenal and if historical actions are any indicator of contemporary behavior, then calendars’ past have clairvoyantly enlightened us that Israel will use these weapons.

As stated earlier, the real reason for this war is directly related to a secret policy initiative that was adopted in 1992 by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney along with Paul Wolfowitz and other ideologues.  The doctrines vision showed a post-Cold War world where the U.S. main foreign policy objective would be to “prevent the reemergence of a new rival.”  The doctrine also stated that “this is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”  These ideologues have asserted a notion that gives the U.S. a “Napoleonic type” power to intrude in global affairs regardless of its pertinence to our national security. 

The reasons for the sense of urgency involving attacking Iraq relate to the legitimacy that the President has grossly manipulated due to the calamities of 9/11.  Blind patriotism is a disease that has infected millions of Americans and fear has paralyzed our ability to discern truth from fabrication.  The Bush administration has engaged obscurantism at massive levels and they will continue to obfuscate the facts unless Americans and other members of the global community demand clarity and ask probing questions.  Authority is preserved through ignorance, and the world is on the verge of witnessing a gross injustice if we stand by and allow this to happen without letting rational voices be heard.

Mr. Girard Newkirk contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN) from North Carolina, USA. He writes on most of the issues regarding the Middle East, religion and its tremendous impact on the world as a Political Theorist.