Genocide is best way to describe US war plans
US military action will forcibly privatize Iraq's publicly-owned oil deposits which since the 1950's have financed the most advanced social infrastructure in the Arab world
Dateline: Monday, March 03, 2003
by John McMurtry
Genocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War II. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as "progress" and "spreading civilization".
I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam Chomsky say that genocide was America's "defining political tradition". Then I realized that the United States (like Canada to a much lesser extent) was based on destroying the lives and cultures of the 25 million or so first peoples who had lived in America for millennia. The American Revolution itself was largely motivated by George III's prohibition of "molesting" the Indians west of the 13 Colonies and the Appalachian Mountains.
The story continued with the forcible seizure of Texas in 1845 from Mexican farmers and indigenous peoples, and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California and other state territories shortly afterward in 1849. US troops under the slave-owning General Zachary Taylor unilaterally invaded its southern neighbour under the false pretext of avenging "American blood", and General Taylor soon vaulted into the White House as a presidential "war hero" - even though a young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, exposed the pretext, and connected it to a Anglo-British business strategy to impose "free trade" on the regions by financing the prior president, James Palk, into the White House as General Taylor's commander. The tradition of ramming a war bill through Congress on a false pretext was initiated.
In 1898, once again under the false pretext of "self-defence" (when the USS. Maine sank from an internal explosion), the Philippines, Guam, Cuba in part, and Puerto Rico were seized from their peoples by another unilaterally provoked war. This war of aggression and occupation, like so many US interventions since, was preceded by a media campaign of whipping up public hysteria and war fever. Media baron William Randolph Hearst made the famous remark, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war"- not unlike the US cable and network media daily drumbeat in recent months for war on Iraq. War is a major violence entertainment, and in close partnership with the Pentagon it can go on for months to divert the masses.
The war party in the US is overextended. It has wreaked havoc again and again from Vietnam and Cambodia through the Middle East to Guatemala and El Salvador. But this is the third millennium. Before a demagogic glorification of genocidal attack is allowed to terrorize and kill countless innocent people again, we need to think and act on the basic facts which have been repressed.
The Bush administration's preparation and threat of military invasion against a country thousands of miles from its borders is unequivocally a war crime under international law, including Articles 1, 2 and 6(a)1 of the Nuremberg Charter and Article 54 of the Geneva Convention. The fact that this war crime of preparing for and planning an invasion of Iraq by US-led armed forces "whatever the UN decides" is not openly discussed in even UN debate shows the reign of fear which now rules.
The terrorized and harmed victims of the US planned war of aggression are least of all likely to be Saddam Hussein or his henchmen, just as in 1991. The victims will be the already decimated and young civilian population and, in particular, the infants and children which will die by US "Operation Shock and Awe" (as it is called by the Pentagon) which - if 1991 is any guide - will again deliberately cause mass infectious disease, child dysentery and birth mutilation by destroying civilian sewage and water treatment facilities and deploying nuclear waste in shells and weapons.
Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction", about which the Bush government endlessly trumpets its concern, were sold to Saddam at great profit by the US, Britain and other Security Council members
Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction", about which the Bush government endlessly trumpets its concern, were sold to Saddam at great profit by the US, Britain and other Security Council members. This is why Bush officials took the original Iraq report to the UN from the Council chair (then the military client state, Colombia), and deleted all the pages documenting these military sales before distributing the text to non-permanent members. Secretary of State Rumsfeld, meanwhile, has refused to work with the Congress's Foreign Relations Committee to expose and ensure against continued military sales to Iraq by private US armament manufacturers.
US demands for "Iraq's compliance with UN resolutions" are not really its concern since far more UN resolutions, over far more years, have been ignored by the US's military client, Israel. Thus continuing war crimes and crimes against humanity by Israeli administrations are still perpetrated with impunity in the illegally occupied territories of Palestine - for example, by land and property seizures and continuous enlargement of the illegal occupation, collective punishments of the population, and destruction of civilian infrastructure. No double standard of international law has been so long-term, blatant and systematic, except by the US itself.
The "regime change" demanded by the Bush administration will not benefit the Iraqi people as promised because the projected US military occupation will forcibly privatize Iraq's publicly-owned and -controlled oil deposits which since the 1950's have financed the most advanced social infrastructure in the Arab world, free school and college education, and universal health care. Even today, Iraq's public oil revenues enable a government program of guaranteed food for all citizens by a distribution system which the UN World Food Program recently described as "the most efficient in the world.”
The real enemy of the US war party is the public ownership and use of the second greatest, if not now the greatest, high-quality oil reserves on the planet. The Bush oil cabal wants it, and US-led war on Iraq is the method of getting it. But world public opinion is not buying. Turkey's polls are 96 percent against invasion of Iraq, and Britain's anti-war forces are soaring towards 90 percent. The US president's response is revealing. He tells the world that the UN itself is on trial, with him as judge. The Security Council either agrees to a US-led criminal invasion of Iraq for control of its government and oil, or it is "irrelevant".
In the meantime, pervasive aerial and ground inspections totally expose Iraq's meagre defences, while demands for stripping Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" escalate, without anyone noticing, to demands that Iraq "disarm", period. Even the country's radar devices are now being bombed by U.S-British sorties, apparently to ensure a completely defenceless country against the US invasion. Has history ever witnessed such a corruptly one-sided scheme to destroy a people's country and loot their needed resources?
Some think that the Bush cabal will get away with it until a government like Canada's puts the facts on the table at the UN. Others think only a global general strike against oil delivery systems will stop the war machine. Certainly we can pretend no longer.
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-I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy than a bottle in front of me
CANADIAN CENTER FOR POLICY ALTERNATIVES
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