Response to war

By Bukka Rennie
March 22, 2003

War on TV! What war? The US/ British invasion of Iraq is not a war. War presupposes an equal element of danger to both sides. This surely is not the case. When the weaponry available to either side is compared it would seem that America and Iraq are centuries apart. When one considers the smart-bombs and guided missiles in the armoury of the US, Saddam might as well have had "bows and arrows".

If this so-called war continues it will be tantamount to a massacre. As said before in this space, the US will virtually be "swatting flies". And the whole world will be there sitting before TV sets looking at this "war", as if it were some movie, with a surrealist plot, only in this case real blood will flow and men, women and children will be decimated.

There comes a sickness to the stomach watching all these news outfits and anchor newscasters producing these "action slots", interviewing generals and colonel-this and colonel-that talking about "strategy". What strategy, when you have the advantage that allows you to simply march and roll straight in and kill everybody?

It would be good comedy, mind you, if human beings were not at the receiving end, watching all these various analysts and experts, dressed up in their lounge suits and ties, speculating about this and that, trying their best to appear knowledgeable and intelligent answering rather idiotic, nonsensical, repetitious questions.

And these infernal reporters out there wanting most of all to impress on viewers the sense of impending danger to wit they have subjected themselves to bring the news, in fact their heroics, all the while also answering stupid questions such as: "So what do you see now", put to them by anchors.

If these reporters happen to die there they will be given posthumous awards, much like the Hollywood scenario. The blurring of perspective is what makes it so painful. And the fact that this production will cost US$70 billion while in much of the world people are starving.

But how is all this justified? The US and Britain have fabricated all kinds of evidence to prove that Iraq possesses "weapons of mass destruction", particularly of a chemical and biological nature and therefore given Saddam's propensity for evil, they conclude that Iraq is a serious threat to the US and the world.

Ashton Brereton's commentary, "Lies, damn lies, stats and fabrications", in the Guardian of March 20, is recommended reading in this context. In that article he shows clearly how the fabrication of evidence against Iraq was manufactured by Bush, Blair, Colin Powell et al even to the point of "forged documents" that the FBI has been asked to investigate.

Electronic mapping has provided these 21st century warmongers with the capacity to see every move in Iraq and yet no hard, definite evidence has been presented. What threat can Iraq be when the US can see every move and anticipate Saddam's intentions. That is why 75 per cent of the world's population cannot accept this "war" as justified.

What was most telling to me, however, was the appearance again of none other that Zibignew Brezinski. How I remember this "hawk"! Zibig, a long standing member of the think-tanks - the Trilateral Commission and the Brookings Institute - that cut across Republican and Democratic Party lines, have for decades been helping to chart US foreign policy, US view of the world and its exaggerated sense of imperialist empire. Zibig was on the TV saying to the world that America has never won a war; "we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam", he said and then went on to insinuate that it is time that America wins a war.

In other words go and kick somebody's arse, but win, in order to boost the American psyche. He did not attach much significance to their "victory" in Grenada.

Those people who pose that America has been the greatest contributor to humanitarian causes and to world development and wish us to see the invasion of Iraq as an extension of America's philanthropy need to understand that there is no free aid, that every dollar of aid that comes in to the peripheral undeveloped areas of the world facilitates the expropriation of approximately $10 back to the epicentres, and such people should listen carefully to the likes of Zibignew Brezinski who are the policy formulators behind the throne of power.

The balance of power in the world and the control of the key resources of the world are what these empire hawks are about, everything else is secondary or a means to that end. And they amass superior weapons and fight wars because that is the nature of empire building, that is the objective and subjective nature of all industrial-military complexes.

What does a country do with $800 billion worth of weaponry? And if its economy is fired by such production, how does it recharge its economic batteries? Replacement is equivalent to recharge in this context. War is the mechanism.

It is the lack of morality displayed by the Big Powers that forces insecure countries to want to arm themselves. One cannot expect equal treatment across the board. Saddam was alright and his ambitions were facilitated when he was attacking Iran. The whole western world turned a blind eye then to his development of chemical and biological weapons. In the same way every atrocity committed by Israel in its zeal for expansion from 1948 onwards was overlooked until Palestine as a country was no more.

Every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel over the years has been vetoed by the US. And we can go on and on showing examples of this logic that "my kith and kin can do anything, but others dare not" and "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".

There are only two positives that can be derived from this war :

1. The rise of the EU with its federal co-ordination of sovereign States as an opposing counter-power to the US which in fact will trigger the final burial of any further concept of super power and the eventual strengthening of the UN structure.

2. It may serve to pull the entire Arab region kicking and screaming into the modern world, since all of them are as thuggish as Saddam's regime, given their hybrid mix of monarchal-theocracy - royal families and religious fundamentalism - and give rise to real Parliamentary democracy as limited as this may be.