The cowboys currently charging upon the people of Iraq have done nothing but provide contradiction after contradiction in making the case for their war.
At first we were supposed to be eradicating terrorism. As anyone with half a brain intuitively knows, international non-state terrorists commit their heinous acts for a political cause, most commonly American imperial domination of their countries. George W. Bush, however, set out to eradicate terror by terrorizing the Iraqi people, and increasing American imperial presence worldwide.
We were also told that Iraq is a “rogue state,” a concept that supposedly describes states which break UN statutes and resolutions. The allegation is especially serious since the circumvention of the United Nations erodes the legitimacy of that institution, thereby weakening the diplomatic system set up to ensure the solution of international conflict by peaceful means. Leaving aside the fact that Israel is the world’s leader in violating UN resolutions, the United States has completely circumvented the UN by going ahead with this bloody war without UN support.
One of the great indicators of Iraq’s evil, according to Bush et al., was Saddam Hussein’s superhuman propensity to lie and deceive. In proving this, the team forgot to mention that the tiny part of the top-secret CIA intelligence that they did share with the rest of the world was either plagiarized from a PhD dissertation written a decade before, sketchy information from defectors, or photographs of missile stores that upon inspection turned out to be elementary schools. The one solid piece of evidence was a vial of anthrax that had never visited Iraq.
Most important is the contradiction with regards to establishing a democratic Iraq. At first this elusive Iraqi democracy was supposed to be achieved after the first Gulf War. For some reason, though, Bush (Senior) withdrew his support for the Iraqi activists just as they prepared to topple Saddam. Plan B was to impose sanctions that would be easily avoided by Saddam himself, but would prevent Iraqis from getting such dangerous items as detergent, water treatment equipment, medical journals, and of course pencils. The new plan is to introduce democracy by way of the Iraqi opposition. The only problem is the two leading candidates to bring democracy to Iraq are a Hashemite monarch and the number-one embezzler in Jordanian financial history.
Even if we want to leave aside the problems of introducing democracy through hereditary monarchy, how can anyone accept the United States as a spreader of democracy? Less than half of voting-age U.S. citizens actually vote, and the majority of those who did vote voted for Al Gore (who, incidentally, got the second-largest number of votes in U.S. electoral history). Furthermore, the real decision-makers in the U.S. (Wolfowitz, Ashcroft, and Perle) are themselves not elected. They in turn serve the purposes of a very rich clan (that of military and businessmen) who are barely talked about, let alone elected.
By accepting the U.S. as the defender and spreader of democracy, we fall into the largest contradiction of all: allowing a tiny minority of men to dictate terms to the rest of the world under the guise of democracy, simply because we’ve been fed the lie that anything the U.S. does must by definition be in the interests of democracy.
