Wrong and strong
By Dr. Winford James
November 14, 2004
The American electorate has duly retained George Bush as president of the world's only superpower, and one immediate predictable consequence was a stepping up of American aggression against Iraq. In pursuance of Bush's kind of leadership – one based on firmness, certainty, and steadfastness, and not on justice – American troops concentrated their offensive on Fallujah, pushing deep into the city to kill and neutralise the Iraqi insurgents based there and thereby 'win the peace'. They have already killed more than 100,000 Iraqis, many, many of them civilians, and they will kill thousands more before they 'win the peace'. And why? Because, Bush tells us all, Saddam Hussein was a threat to both America and his neighbours in the Arab-Israeli region.
What form did this threat take? Bush told us that it was crucially, according to the intelligence provided to him, in the shape and form of the possession by Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and a terrorist alliance between that country and Al Qaeda. He would add that Saddam also had a well-known record of brutal repression of his own people as well as a longstanding ambition to violently expand his empire to include (some of) his Arab neighbours. He had to act pre-emptively in the interest of America and the vulnerable Arab world.
He has turned out to be a liar on the crucial matters and, astonishingly, even though he protests that he acted on intelligence which he later came to realise was badly flawed, he insists that his invasion of Iraq was justified on the grounds that Saddam was a 'threat'.
It is extremely difficult not to see him as a liar but even if we suspended our disbelief, it could not be denied that he made war on Iraq erroneously and that his war has so far killed over 100,000 people and, let's not forget it, wounded and maimed other thousands. One hundred thousand people dead on an error of information. That's twice the population of Tobago! So imagine Tobago wiped out clean as a result of an error of Bush's, repopulated again with 50,000 people, and wiped out again.
Who is the terrorist here? Who the war criminal? Which country is the axis of evil?
We must remember that Bush tried to get a United Nations resolution to invade Iraq and failed because his basis was hardly convincing. We must remember that he tried and failed to browbeat this august body to act in collusion with him. We must remember that he tried and failed to get influential nations like France and Germany to support him in his misguided, bloodthirsty, nefarious intention. We must remember that he was bent on invading despite the fact that the United Nations inspectors had found no weapons of mass destruction, not even remotely.
If it were Saddam who had invaded America (clearly he couldn't!) or Kuwait (a far easier target), he would have been unquestionably labelled a terrorist, a madman, a butcher, a Satan. But it is a case of different folks, different strokes; of might is right; of being wrong and strong.
So Saddam was a threat. Why then, having removed him (and his sons), did Bush not exit Iraq and leave the rebuilding to the United Nations? Why, having gone in itself and found no weapons of mass destruction, did America not exit, its fears shown to be unfounded, the threat erased.
No, when you look at America's behaviour in this disgraceful tragedy, you cannot but look for reasons other than those offered. The most plausible that I (and many independent others) have found is that America invaded Iraq to control that country's oil for its own benefit in the foreseeable future, and to control it before the European Union did. They knew that the majority of the countries of Europe would not have gone along with their transparently bogus misadventure, so they calculated that the oil would be theirs to appropriate.
And now that I am looking for other reasons, I would not discount a sinister collusion between the Bush administration and Bin Laden himself, as suggested by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, 100,000 lives being a mere bagatelle in the business of expanding the wealth of the Bush family and the American economy.
How can Bush and America be punished for the mayhem they have been wreaking on Iraq? How can they be brought to justice when they refuse to support the International Court of Justice? How long will they go on being wrong and strong?
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