Putting Out Fire With Gasoline
Sunday, 22 February 2004
By ziggy
Truth is the first casualty of war but in George W. Bush's attack on Iraq, truth never even got off the boat. For those of you infected by Dumberica's historical amnesia, here's a quick refresher course. When Saddam' Husseins Ba'ath party seized power in 1963, murdering thousands of political opponents, it had U.S. support.
In 1968 the U.S. backed the Ba'ath party when Saddam was installed as vice-president.
In 1975 the U.S. helped Saddam and the Shah of Iran to crush the Kurdish nationalist movement.
The U.S. increased its support for Saddam in 1979, the year he made himself president, and helped him attack Iran in 1980.
Fully aware that Saddam was using chemical weapons on Kurds and Marsh Arabs, the U.S. backed him throughout eight appalling years of war (1980 to 1988), in which a million Iranians and Iraqis were slaughtered.
In 1990 the U.S. encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait when the Arabic-speaking US ambassador in Baghdad, April Glaspie, assured him that the US had "no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts", when she knew that Saddam's forces were within a week of invading.
The U.S. backed Saddam in 1991 when Bush the Elder suddenly stopped the war, exactly 24 hours after the start of the great March uprising that engulfed the south and Iraqi Kurdistan (US aircraft were flying over the massacre as Iraqi gun-ships helped Saddam's ground forces crush the uprising).
The U.S. continued to back Saddam as the "lesser evil" from March 1991 to September 11 2001 under the umbrella of murderous sanctions and the policy of "containment".
Eventually, having destroyed critical drinking water infrastructure and caused the death of about half a million Iraqis, mostly children, through sanctions, Bush the Younger and Blair the Lapdog declared that containment and sanctions had failed and that Saddam posed an immediate global threat.
Immediate!
The slippery reasoning used to 'justify' this latest attack on Iraq has by now been exposed for what it always was: deception, duplicity and outright lies.
U.S. Vice President Dick touted the propaganda that September 11 had set, "a whole new standard about how we're going to deal with terrorist-sponsoring states".
But terrorism was - and remains - the excuse for attacking Iraq, not the reason.
For more than a dozen years U.S. hawks have advocated invading Iraq - not to liberate the Iraqi people, or to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction, but to impose US hegemony on a strategically important country.
Like putting out fire with gasoline, the obscene U.S. foreign policy of 'pre-emptive' war has now managed to incite the very thing Bush the Younger self-righteously proclaimed it would stem: terrorism.
Support for such a policy is not "patriotism", it's ignorance.
If only we can get the hell out of there before the November poll, hey George?
