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EDITORIAL More and more Americans have been questioning the threatened war on Iraq. Is it about fighting terrorism? The evidence of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda has never been found. Is it about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? A former UN weapons inspector says they don’t exist. Is it about getting rid of a dictator, who is indeed terrible? Then why did the United States support Saddam Hussein for years, even when he was massacring Kurdish people?
Bookman began to explore the missing pieces. The war is not really about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism or Saddam, he wrote. “It is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire.” With the Soviet Union gone as a second superpower, this ambition can now be realized. On Sept. 20, the National Security Strategy, a report produced by each administration, called for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region in the world, unlimited by international treaties or concern. It would require a giant expansion of the military. In September 2000, a rightist group called the Project for the New American Century urged the United States not to blow its chance of becoming a global empire. It should, for example, reject the anti-ballistic missile treaty—which the administration has done. Six of the authors of that document have since assumed key defense and foreign policy positions under Bush. Even before that, in 1992, the Defense Department, then headed by Dick Cheney, issued a document that envisioned the United States as a colossus astride the world, imposing its will through military and economic power. None of this means that removing Saddam Hussein isn’t a real goal or that oil is not a key piece in the war plan. But the picture is so much bigger. Think global empire. THE COSTS OF GLOBAL EMPIRE We also need to think about what a war to consolidate the global empire could do to life on the planet. Modern warfare, with its toxic weapons, is literally poisonous to the land, water, air, human beings and all other life. We remember the monstrous fires, petroleum lakes and an ocean thick with oil during the Gulf War. But we do not hear about the tens of thousands of British and U.S. soldiers who have died or are dying from pollution from those fires, radiation from depleted uranium shells, and other causes. Over 150,000 U.S. vets have had their claims granted for illness from Gulf War Syndrome. In the Vietnam War, the defoliant Agent Orange not only devastated the land and people of Vietnam but also sickened an estimated 300,000 U.S. veterans. In the United States, the effects of an inflated military budget on social services is scary to contemplate. For example, over 40 million Americans have no medical insurance, Medicaid programs have been cut, and seven states have slashed childcare and child development. Bush’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay says the war on Iraq would cost between $100 and $200 billion. Only $3 or $4 billion would fund childcare for the next year and a half. Such are some of the effects we can anticipate all over the world from U.S. ambitions to create a global empire. This is a war that must be stopped before it starts. We cannot allow Bush to set the precedent of launching pre-emptive strikes, thereby opening the door to an unending march of death. In our first issue, War Times said that after Sept. 11, we the people stand at a crossroads and must choose our country’s future. Today that is truer than ever, with more at stake than ever. Shall we let those who walk the halls of power make our nation a global empire? Or shall we stand up and shout louder than ever: No, no, no! Not in our name. Another world must be possible. |
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Bush’s case for attacking Iraq is so weak that even an editor of
the mainstream newspaper The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jay Bookman,
wrote last Sept. 29, “The official story on Iraq has never made
sense.” Something else has to be going on.