Back to Main Political page
...where you can read more about our serious situation

Here’s the unpublished (until now) op-ed piece submitted to the Register Guard (local newspaper) and elsewhere right after the war began.  An almost identical earlier piece was submitted before the war started, which also languished unpublished.
 

America’s Missing Debate

Under the parliamentary systems of coalition partners Australia and the UK, their prime ministers were required to face vigorous public challenge and open debate.  No such process occurred here, with administration officials advancing their arguments for war through Sunday talk show appearances and carefully controlled White House press conferences accepting only pre-screened questions from selected reporters.  They protected themselves from robust, articulate and informed opposition, hiding behind slogans and escaping rigorous inquiry before the war, and have been protected during the war by a heavily sanitized American media coverage.

Where were the thousands of dead, burned, and mutilated Iraqi soldiers and civilians our overwhelming firepower inflicted?  Would the Oakland Raiders find satisfaction and honor in defeating Bucolic Hollow High School 127-0 and leaving its quarterback, running back and two wide receivers brain damaged and paraplegic?  No wonder the contest wasn’t televised.  How can Americans from the comfort and security of their living rooms approve carnage against a largely helpless adversary?  If they saw it I doubt they could, but we’ve been thoughtfully spared these distasteful realities.  One burned, orphaned and armless boy has aroused an outpouring of concern.  What if we were shown them all?  I would predict an outpouring of outrage.

This may account for the wide disparity between U.S. and world public opinion on the war.  James Madison, principal author of our Bill of Rights, once wrote, “a popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.@ In addition to the truth of the war, we need the truth about its motives.  We need a thorough examination of the following administration arguments (italicized) for invading Iraq, challenged by aggressive counter-arguments before the administration expands its bellicosity toward other nations using similar justifications.

•                     The issues had been debated for months.  Yes, and the administration lost the debate.  The U.N. and world opinion remain unpersuaded, and the American public had remained opposed without U.N. approval until the attack, after which opinions became clouded by concern for our troops.  A memory fits: I was once blindsided by a pickup truck in a hurry to turn left across three lines of traffic.  Out sprang the driver in an overstretched T-shirt reading “Let’s stop talking and wreck something.”

•                      Saddam was a brutal dictator who used poison gas on his own people.  These atrocities occurred in 1988 with the knowledge and complicity of the U.S. government supporting Saddam’s war against Iran.  A second genocide occurred in 1991 after the senior Bush encouraged Shiite rebellion with promises of US support and then abandoned them to be massacred.  In fact, the year following his Kurdish atrocities, we doubled Saddam’s subsidy to $1 billion.  Under UN scrutiny and US and UK overflights, Saddam had been prevented from further atrocities against Iraq’s Shiites and Kurds, and had invaded nobody in 12 years.

To remove Saddam we rained destruction upon a proud and ancient city, cherished by its citizens, and slaughtered thousands of the 24 million other Iraqis with other names who lived there too.  Half their population is under 15.  A newscast casually announces that American forces killed 1,000-2,000 Republican Guard troops, as if membership in that club justifies their extermination like termites.  How many grieving Iraqi widows and fatherless Iraqi children did this war produce in pursuit of one terrible man, who might have escaped in the end to a comfortable life in exile?

And when did we start deposing dictators?  The U.S. has tolerated, assisted and even installed many brutal dictators over the past half-century.  Covert CIA activities have supported assassinations, death squads, torture, and “disappearances” in Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, not to mention Iraq where we once empowered Saddam.

Of course most Iraqis are happy to be free of Saddam.  But is it our responsibility or right to invade and dislodge every ruthless regime in the world?  Amnesty International reported major human rights abuses in 152 countries last year, including extrajudicial imprisonment and executions, citizen “disappearances,” and torture.  Shall we depose all these regimes?  That should keep us busy for quite a while.

•                     Saddam ignored many U.N. resolutions.  That was the U.N.’s responsibility, and our responsibility as a model of democracy was to respect the U.N. will.  The Security Council majority voting in a democratic forum, reflecting world opinion, believed that intensified inspections would suffice at minimal cost and no loss of life.

Israel has ignored at least 71 U.N. resolutions, and this has contributed substantially to the Islamic rage behind 9/11.  Many believe that our one-sided support of Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has contributed far more to the terrorist threat than has Iraq.  But just on the grounds of U.N. resolution-flaunting, shall we invade Israel as well?  Or even reduce their allowance?

•                     Saddam wanted nuclear weapons, which could have been provided to terrorists.  He had tried without success since the 1970s and his production facilities had been dismantled and supply sources greatly reduced by U.N. inspections and scrutiny.  And why would he provide weapons to Islamic fundamentalists, who had long opposed his secular regime?  Iran, Syria, Sudan, and Libya have been better-documented terrorist havens, and our Center for Defense Information says there are over 50 countries with Al Qaeda cells.   How many are on the Bush secret agenda for takeover?

Would Saddam have used such weapons himself?  For 40 years we contained a far more dangerous and heavily armed adversary, relying on deterrence. Why would Saddam be any different, risking retaliatory annihilation?  Only if facing personal destruction would Saddam have been likely to use catastrophic weapons in a "psychopathic rage" resembling that of Hitler who ordered the destruction of Paris as the end approached.  Fortunately he didn’t, but we created the situation most likely to have precipitated that which we feared.

•                     We are liberating the people of Iraq, which will become a democratic example for the region.  This Napoleonic fantasy of imposing the American model with less than subtle American influence upon the entire Middle East threatens all other governments in the region.  This is a flagrant appeal to American political vanity and our self-image as rescuers of less-enlightened mankind.  Rescuers often become victims in the games played by humans, the script we followed in Vietnam.  The huge costs of this war in blood and dollars, and anti-American demonstrations worldwide, suggest many repercussions to come.  I don’t plan any foreign travel.

•                     9/11 changed everything; the new terrorism threat justifies pre-emptive war.   This plan to remove Saddam by armed intervention was developed long before 9/11.  It was proposed to the first President Bush by the same cadre surrounding his son, including our current Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense, and again to President Clinton and congressional leaders in 1998 after this group had formed an organization called Project for the New American Century.  Both former presidents wisely rejected this very costly and very risky idea based upon an apocalyptic fantasy of Saddam’s future power.  Their fantasy envisioned an Iraqi government “bent on dominating the Middle East and its oil reserves” which could only be prevented by forcibly deposing Saddam.  With counter-balances Iran and Egypt, NATO-member Turkey, and U.S. protection for other Arab states, this seems a highly improbable vision.  How many thousands of Iraqi citizens, civilian and military, have been killed, burned, or mutilated to prevent this unlikely development?
 

Moreover, Mr. Bush opposed “nation-building” during his campaign.  Were prospective Bush voters directed to the newamericancentury.org website and advised that this jingoistic worldview would control our Defense Department, ready to force American and Iraqi citizens to fight, kill and die at the first credible pretext for war?  Is this an impeachable deception, or does Mr. Bush need to do something really serious, like lie about extramarital sex?

And who now has terrorized another nation that had no credibly established role in 9/11 with history’s most destructive war machine?   What is “shock and awe” but high-tech terror?  Recent surveys reflect that Mr. Bush is now widely perceived around the world as the power-mad leader to be most feared.

•                     We cannot appease an aggressor:  Remember 1939.  Germany and Japan had the most powerful military machines on earth, with ambitions of world domination.  Invasions and conquests of France and China hardly compare with Kuwait as presages of grave international peril.  To compare their power and imminent threat to the world with that of Saddam is ludicrous.
 

Beyond these questions now that the terrible dogs of war have been unleashed, we are entitled to answers from our political leadership and an aggressive, uncompromising press on the war’s costs and consequences, specifically:

      •           U.S. and Iraqi casualties, civilian and uniformed.  How many Iraqis, forced by a tyrant to fight or enraged by this violation of their native land, will die?

      •           Infrastructure destruction.  We rage and mourn not only for loss of life in 9/11, but loss of familiar, cherished structures.  Are another nation’s public structures less valuable than ours?  Have we the right to wantonly destroy what others have proudly and painstakingly created, the symbols of another culture’s collective identity?

      •           A careful and skeptical accounting of any weaponry found in Iraq which the administration will use to justify its invasion, and statements from the departed inspectors about the likelihood they would have found these given the opportunity we denied them.

•     The dollar costs of Iraq’s destruction and reconstruction to American taxpayers, what priorities will be neglected or eliminated to pay these costs, and what burdens this will impose on coming generations already facing diminishing resources to pay escalating social security costs.

•     Who will profit from the reconstruction of Iraq.  For example, the administration invited Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney was CEO before becoming Vice President, to bid for the $600 million prime contract, and one of its divisions was awarded the Iraqi oil infrastructure restoration contract without competitive bidding.

•     Who will control post-war Iraqi oil?  Before nationalization in 1972, Iraq’s oil was primarily developed by U.S. companies Standard and Mobil, British BP, and Dutch Shell of coalition nations.  Iraq has currently signed oil agreements with French and Russian companies and China, nations opposing the war.  In a Washington Post interview last year, former CIA Director James Woolsey stated that countries not supporting the war might find it “difficult...to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them.”  Is this war, as much of the world believes, really about oil?   Funny, I don’t recall the administration mentioning that among its high-sounding rationales.

      Can reasonable people not suspect that we may have inflicted massive destruction upon another nation and killed thousands of its citizens in the service of American corporate interests and our insatiable appetite for energy?  Is world opinion right or wrong in their cynicism about the motives of our administration?  We need these answers and soon, before death and devastation begin again in Syria, Iran, North Korea or elsewhere.

      And if the world is right, hell should have no fury surpassing ours as a democracy deceived.
 
 

Add your comments, or read more in our blog...
 
 

Back to Flights of Thought