By Meraj Abedin
It seems the war fairy has granted George Bush his heart’s deepest desires to open a can of whup-ass on Saddam. For a while it appeared that the world was staunchly opposing American aggression on Iraq. But now that the U.S. has aggressively lobbied and persuaded’ (i.e. bribed, threatened) nations into supporting war, the tide has turned back in favour of the Americans.
But while alliances are always shifting, the absurdities and intentions of the proposed campaign against Iraq remain the same. The American war party works hard trying to fabricate as many ridiculous (and irrelevant) charges as possible to justify a bloody invasion of Iraq.
Saddam was behind the September 11 attacks. Saddam has gassed his own people. Saddam is evil. Just recently, the Wall Street Journal “suggested” the Iraqi regime was in fact the true author of the 1997 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And to add to the circus of allegations a U.S. senator is currently investigating whether the Arab Dr. Evil himself is behind the outbreak of the West Nile Virus.
Saddam Hussein has become a ‘floating demon’ gravitating between many characterizations by the Bush administration. The fact is Americans have no real case against Saddam, so they throw every fictitious idea they can think of at the world media in hope that at least one will stick.
But none of them have worked so far. No war can ever be justified by what someone might do. Iraq is a nation incapable of downing a single allied fighter in a decade of the U.S.-U.K. no-fly zone, so to say Iraq is months away from dropping the bomb is a gross exaggeration.
Of all the heated rhetoric against Saddam, only two of the accusations are actual facts. Saddam is in fact an evil man and has indeed violated United Nations resolutions.
But they are also irrelevant facts. Israel has violated far more U.N. resolutions, but Tel Aviv has yet to be ‘liberated’ (i.e. demolished, pulverized). Saddam is a cruel Stalinist tyrant, but wasn’t the American government Saddam’s best friend and ally in the 1980s when he gassed Iranians and Kurds?
So let me cut to the chase. The war pundits down south would do America a favour if they were just plain honest. Just cut the crap about spreading democracy, bringing stability, destroying evil and stick to the plain truth: this is a war for oil, period.
Capturing Iraq is central to the U.S. government’s quest to gain control of Mid-East oil. They did the same in Afghanistan by placing a former UNOCAL Oil employee, Hamid Karzai, as leader of Afghanistan.
As the Washington Post reported on Sept. 15, “American and foreign oil companies have already began manoeuvring for a stake in the country’s huge proven reserves of 112 billion barrels of crude oil.” The petro-lords of the corporate world are already scrambling to get their share of the war booty. This oil war is like the mercantilist wars of the colonial era.
After conquering Iraq, what’s next? Neo-conservatives in the White House have been clamouring for Saudi blood since September 11. Will the Saudi oil fields be the next target marked for ‘liberation’?
At his Sept. 12 address to the United Nations, George Bush reminded the world that “12 years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime’s forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources.” Twelve years later, America is about to invade Iraq without provocation and is ready to do just the same.