For those of us who are students of American History these three articles have a familiar ring.
REH www.sfgate.com Everybody Loves A War Thug On the verge of Bush's brutal war for oil, the U.S. proves its arrogance, and the world is disgusted By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, February 7, 2003 ©2003 SF Gate URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/02/07/note s020703.DTL So let's see if we have this straight. We still don't seem to have this straight: Because there stands emasculated and completely Cheney-whipped Colin Powell, up in front of the U.N. Security Council and the world's TV cameras, scowling and pounding his fist and making a big show of indignation and showing everyone -- what? Some blurry satellite photos with little red squares? An audiotape of an alleged phone conversation between members of the Iraqi military, proving the existence of some biological agents we probably sold to them? Is he serious? There is no real evidence. There is no smoking gun. There isn't even a smoking spit wad. There is only, basically, a smoking middle finger. We are going to war with another impoverished, petty country for largely fabricated, faux-patriotic reasons. "Let's roll!" smirks Shrub during an appallingly vague State of the Union address, sending in 180,000 U.S. troops and gearing up to bomb the living crap out of a country that is no direct threat to us whatsoever. Do we not see? Let's get it even straighter: There is zero proof that Iraq is producing any sort of serious WMD of any significant threat or lethal potential, certainly nothing remotely dangerous to the United States, and even the weapons we do think they might be hiding and even those few the inspectors actually found are either empty canisters with a range of about 12 miles or rusty hulls of weapons we knew they had back in 1992. Swell. Straighter still: There is zero direct threat to the United States from Iraq. None whatsoever. No long-range nukes, no Hefty bags of anthrax, no seething cells of bearded Islamic fundamentalists heading over to sodomize our daughters and steal our Ford Expeditions and use up all the credit on our Starbucks cards. Clear? Poor Colin. He used to be so smart, so judicious and calm and fair minded and restrained. He fits poorly into that hawk costume. There is no reason to send in nearly a quarter-million U.S. troops to slaughter a half-million Iraqi people and create another estimated one million refugees. This is the U.N. estimate. Saddam's a brutal thug? Is this the reason? Well, join the club. And he's a pipsqueak compared to, say, North Korea's Kim Jong-il. Or how about the two million or so massacred in Rwanda a few years ago? Should we discuss them and the United States not giving much of a damn? No? I see. Saddam intentionally gassed his own people? Yes, apparently he did. No question, he's a vile and barbarous dictator -- exactly as he was when he was our ally. And we knew about the gassing of the Kurds all along, as it was happening, and we did nothing to stop it -- in fact, we were more than happy to help Saddam gas all the Iranians he could during the Iran-Iraq war, employing many of the same chemical agents the United States (via its key Iraq liaison at the time -- hi, Mr. Rumsfeld!) supplied to him. What, us? Hypocrites? Never. The sad fact remains, the United States is, right now, as you read this, acting very much exactly like the arrogant and thuggish hypercapitalist rogue nation all these hate-filled countries claim we are. Oh, and that goes for much of the European Union too. In greater Europe, and beyond, George W. Bush is far scarier than Saddam could ever be. 9/11 sympathy? Not anymore. France knows it, Germany knows it -- hell, even Russia and China know it, and those ravenous wolves love nothing more than to eviscerate surrounding countries and throttle their own people for no other reason than to expand their power base. Environmental atrocities? Logging in national forests? Massive unemployment? Gouging women's rights? Weakening the Clean Air Act? Bigger tax breaks for buying gluttonous SUVs? Failed economic stimulus? Record deficits? A trillion-dollar national debt? No wonder ShrubCo is positively salivating over this war. What a wonderful way to distract the populace from the Enron President's other ongoing failures and embarrassments and cultural molestations. This is not an easy stance to voice. Such sentiments frequently elicit the following reaction, full of indignation and hissing patriotism: How dare you disrespect our president in a time of war! Don't you remember 9/11? Have you no heart? No sympathy for the thousands who died so horribly? Saddam must be stopped! Terrorism must be annihilated! We are threatened! This is brilliant. And terribly sad. Because shocking indeed are the numbers of Americans who truly believe Saddam carried out the 9/11 attack, or at least had a significant role in it. He didn't. Let us repeat: The war on Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks are completely separate issues, forcibly joined in the minds of fear-drunk Americans (and huge numbers of media lapdogs) by an incessant barrage of White House spin and thin-lipped Cheney-speak. Do you get it? Once more, with feeling: bin Laden/al Qaeda = Sept. 11 and terrorism. Saddam/Iraq = oil and power. Clear? But wait, Saddam is reportedly sympathetic to terrorists, you might argue, parroting exactly what the White House has spun your way. Right. So are roughly 153 other Third World nations and sociopathic tyrants, many of whom will hate us even more once we start bombing. Another reminder: The majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis and Egyptians. No Iraqis at all. Is it interesting to note how we aren't exactly eager to drop $10 billion worth of deadly ordnance on downtown Riyadh? Of course it's not. Extremely sensitive, extremely orgiastic, extremely complicated power relations having to do with billions in oil and money and U.S. corporate investment, is why. No such complications with Iraq. Ain't no McDonald's in Baghdad, honey. We're about to bomb the living hell out of Iraq for the oil and the expansion of our power base. Simple. Even Bush can understand it. A-ha. Now it becomes clearer. Oh, North Korea? That little bastard? A much larger, far more lethal military than Iraq, a couple working nukes, a loathed and ruthless dictator, despised by its neighbors, a horribly impoverished nation trembling on the edge of chaos, much more volatile and dangerous than Iraq could ever be. Shrub just shrugs. No time for that now, already have two false wars to run. Not to mention a record $300 bil deficit to justify for 2003, another projected $350 bil for next year, the biggest in history, gutting the economy, the biggest deficits since Bush Sr. was president. How sweet. And those numbers don't even include the tens of billions it will cost to massacre Iraq. Guess who picks up the tab? Guess whose economy gets reamed? Guess whose voice of protest or restraint or peace doesn't matter in the slightest? See that mirror? Look. Look closer. The terrorists have not won. The White House PR machine has won. We are not winning the war on terror. We are merely perpetuating it. We are guaranteeing it will last for decades to come. It is a vicious and bloody downward spiral. We are going to massacre Iraq very soon now, no matter what anyone says, no matter which appalled U.N. member nation vetoes the decision. Poll after poll, protest after protest show the American people don't want it, the int'l community is horrified and disgusted, our U.N. standing is a joke and we are quickly becoming the sanctimonious self-righteous laughingstock brat child of the entire global community. Problem is, ShrubCo's got all the bombs. A-ha. Now it becomes clearer. The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal ============================ By Harold Pinter Daily Telegraph December 11, 2002 Earlier this year, I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive. However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. "If you are not with us, you are against us," President George W. Bush has said. He has also said: "We will not allow the world's worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders." Quite right. Look in the mirror, chum. That's you. America is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and is prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke. America believes that the 3,000 deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence. The 3,000 deaths in Afghanistan are never referred to. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead through American and British sanctions which have deprived them of essential medicines are never referred to. The effect of depleted uranium, used by America in the Gulf war, is never referred to. Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high. Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood. The 200,000 deaths in East Timor in 1975 brought about by the Indonesian government but inspired and supported by America are never referred to. The 500,000 deaths in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Argentina and Haiti, in actions supported and subsidised by America, are never referred to. The millions of deaths in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are no longer referred to. The desperate plight of the Palestinian people, the central factor in world unrest, is hardly referred to. But what a misjudgment of the present and what a misreading of history this is. People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back. The atrocity in New York was predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of America over many years, in all parts of the world. In Britain, the public is now being warned to be "vigilant" in preparation for potential terrorist acts. The language is in itself preposterous. How will - or can - public vigilance be embodied? Wearing a scarf over your mouth to keep out poison gas? However, terrorist attacks are quite likely, the inevitable result of our Prime Minister's contemptible and shameful subservience to America. Apparently a terrorist poison gas attack on the London Underground system was recently prevented. But such an act may indeed take place. Thousands of schoolchildren travel on the Underground every day. If there is a poison gas attack from which they die, the responsibility will rest entirely on the shoulders of our Prime Minister. Needless to say, the Prime Minister does not travel on the Underground himself. The planned war against Iraq is in fact a plan for premeditated murder of thousands of civilians in order, apparently, to rescue them from their dictator. America and Britain are pursuing a course that can lead only to an escalation of violence throughout the world and finally to catastrophe. It is obvious, however, that America is bursting at the seams to attack Iraq. I believe that it will do this not only to take control of Iraqi oil, but also because the American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless. Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's declaration - "We are not the doctors. We are the disease". http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nyhen243101485jan24,0,5355570.colu mn A Warrior Against War Ellis Henican January 24, 2003 When war gets as close as this one is, I don't go looking for a dove. Ramsey Clark, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, the Quakers and college professors and European diplomats - I already know where they all stand. I want to do my war talking with a warrior. A real American military man who fought for his country time and again, a soldier who stood in harm's way as the bullets and bombs flew in, as wars of grave national interest were lost and won. Get me Hack. David Hackworth is one of the most celebrated soldiers in modern U.S. history. He joined the merchant marine at 14, the Army at 15, and he's never looked back. He was the youngest U.S. captain in the Korean War, the youngest colonel in Vietnam. As a soldier and later a war correspondent, he's been on a dozen battlefields, hot and cold. And he never became a Pentagon bureaucrat. Of all the medals that have been pinned to his uniform, it's the Combat Infantryman's Badge he's proudest of. Now his country is tilting toward war again. "Having thought long and hard about war with Iraq," Hackworth told me, measuring his words carefully, "I cannot find justification. I don't see a threat. They are not Nazi Germany. This is not the Wehrmacht. In no way does the situation in Iraq affect my nation's security. That is the bottom line of analyzing threats. 'Does this country threaten my country's security?' In this case, absolutely not." The awesome risks of this war, he said, far outweigh the potential rewards. "Focus on protecting the American homeland, which is not adequately defended," Hack said. "Nine-eleven proved that. All of the machinations that have gone on since then are more lip service and crowd-pleasing than real. Our borders are still wide open. Our ports are vulnerable, too. And there are plenty of sleeper cells - Middle Eastern terrorists living among us, waiting to do their thing." Compared to that dark picture, Saddam Hussein should be an afterthought. "I don't think militarily it will be a big deal to smack this little broken pussycat out of the way," Hackworth said. "Four weeks, he's history. He'll be tacked up on the barracks wall. Iraq is not a tiger that is roaring with nuclear weapons in each paw like North Korea. "If you want to look at enemies facing our country, No. 1 is international terrorism, the folks that brought us 9/11. No. 2 is North Korea, which has a huge Army, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons - and ability to deliver them. The third is Iran." But attacking Iraq could cost far more than most American's imagine, Hackworth said. "There's a real possibility we take catastrophic casualties." With house-to-house combat in Baghdad, he said, the numbers could go a whole lot higher than the 148 battle deaths and 460 battle wounded from the first Gulf War. Higher even than the "160,000 disabled and almost 10,000 dead as a result of Gulf War illness. All of us that were there, we look in the mirror and still wonder if something is going happen to us." Then there's the troubling question of once in Iraq, how do we ever get out? "We're still in Japan, Korea and Germany 57 years after World War II," he said. "My guess is at least 60 years" in Iraq, costing as much as $2 trillion to $3 trillion. And finally, what about all the anti-American sentiment this war will generate? "One and a half billion Muslims, who don't like us anyway. Now they're gonna look and say, 'Here come the crusaders again.'" >From their ranks rise the terrorists of tomorrow. As he travels across the country, Hackworth told me, the vast majority of military veterans he meets see this war as a rotten idea. "They've been there," he said. "They know war is not a blood sport, as cable news make it out to be. Cheney and Bush and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld - they've never stood and faced the elephant. These are the people who gush for war." But don't expect the generals and the admirals to raise their own private doubts. "Through the long eight-year bloodbath of Vietnam, not one general sounded off and said, 'Bad war, can't win it, let's get out.' They went along to get along. It's true again. The top generals are head-shakers." As for the public, just watch how quickly the pro-war sentiment will evaporate. "My parachute brigade was the first to go to Vietnam," Hackworth recalled. "Eighty-five percent of Americans were saying, 'Hey, hey, all the way with LBJ.' We were there a year, shipping body bags back home as fast as we could. Suddenly, the American public, which is so fickle, did a 180. 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?'" But smart or not, we're going again, this life-long warrior warned, before getting back to his veterans, his bleak scenarios and his battle plans. Even though the UN inspectors have barely begun their work. Even though containment has been working. Like a battle-sharp soldier, he's seen the pattern before. "That comes from my experience in barroom fights - sad to say I've had a few - and on the battlefield," Hack said. "When the fist is drawn back and cocked and locked, it generally gets flung." 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