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PEOPLE
& POLITICS The Anglo-American War on Iraq By Mohammed Haruna Last week I wrote on the Anglo-American axis of war, seeing how the war-mongering American Establishment and its British lapdog have been isolated by the rest of the world over their planned aggression against Iraq. Inspite of their so-called compelling evidence of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, the world has remained unimpressed. If any one had any doubt that the world has rejected the option of war on Iraq, the mass global demonstrations last weekend, especially in cities all over Europe, America, Asia and the Middle-East, should banish those doubts. For most of the world, America’s real motive in mounting its aggression on Iraq is not any sympathy with the people of Iraq. The real motive is Iraq’s oil and the need to cover up the greed and incompetence of Big Business which has led to the collapse of business giants like Enron, which some senior members of the Bush administration, including the president himself, have close links with. One of the most incisive articles that exposes the direct link between, on the one hand, the Anglo-American war on Iraq and, on the other, America’s desire for cheap oil and its attempt to divert the attention of its citizens from the country’s economic problems, is an article by Robert Fisk, a British journalist, in The Independent of Britain dated December 31, 2002. It is an article that should get the widest circulation possible so that people can see through the excuses the Anglo-Americans have been giving for waging an absolutely unnecessary war. The article, is titled EXPLORING THE WORLD FOR NEW HATE FIGURES IN THE SEARCH FOR OIL. Happy reading: Who
would have believed, a year ago, that it would be the beardless features
of Saddam Hussein we’d have to hate rather than the unshaven Osama bin
Laden? When did it take place, this transition from “the evil one” (Newsweek)
to the Beast of Baghdad? As
usual, our newspaper and television journalists connived at it all.
Wasn’t it their job to point out that something funny was going on?
Wasn’t it the task of reporters to say: hang on, I thought the enemy
was Bin Laden—you’ve just changed the picture? But
no; Osama faded from our screens, to be replaced by Saddam. Our enemy no
longer lived in Afghan caves, but on the banks of the Tigris. And
instead of graphics of Afghan mountains and al-Qu’ida networks, we get
stories of weapons of mass destruction and human rights abuses in Iraq. I
recall a similar phenomenon more than a decade ago. Saddam had been our
hate figure ever since he invaded Kuwait, but we had driven the Iraqis
out of our favourite emirate and, all of a sudden, General Colin Powell
turned up in Northern Iraq—the Kurdish bit we had decided to save
rather late in the day—talking about “Iraqi officials”. I was at
Mr. Powell’s press conference that day, and I asked him why he no
longer mentioned Saddam. And he just shrugged his shoulders and went on
talking about “Iraqi officials”. Saddam had been airbrushed out of
the US administration’s script—just as he was written back in,
centre stage, earlier this year. So
I owe it to Professor Robert Alford of the City University of New York
Graduate Centre, who enlightened me about the mythical transition the
Americans accomplished. A series of tables he has drawn up show
something remarkable: that the “Iraq” story started growing – and
the Osama saga diminishing – just as the Enron scandal broke. Back in
January, Enron was receiving 1,137 “mentions” in the New York
Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times,
and Iraq only 200. Iraq stories grew almost 100 percent by early spring
as Enron mentions declined by 50 percent to 618. After a dip in early
summer, Iraq soared to 1,529 mentions, with Enron down to 310.
Remarkable, isn’t it, how you can clear a messy economic scandal off
the front pages by renaming your hate figure? Of
course, it’s also a good idea to change hate figures when your closest
ally, Israel, is in danger of producing one in the form of Ariel Sharon.
If we hadn’t had Bin Laden and Saddam to worry about, we might all
have been taking a closer look at Mr. Sharon, the man who greeted the
slaughter of one Hamas man and nine children as “a great success”.
We might also have been taking a closer look at his involvement in the
Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982 when – as is now clear – more
than a thousand male survivors of the original massacres were handed
back by the Israeli army to the Phalangist mass murderers. But the
failure of a few survivors to prosecute Mr. Sharon in Brussels scarcely
made a headline. Then
there was the Middle East peace conference that was going to take place
this summer. Colin Powell announced just that in the spring. But it
never happened. The “peace” conference vanished, just like Bin
Laden. And we never even asked why. In a new world of secrecy, we
don’t bother to do that. And oddly, that’s what this past year has
produced: a kind of lethargy about the tragedy of the Middle East, a
failure to respond to real injustice and occupation and misery. Instead,
we are allowing ourselves to wander off to war in Iraq. So
let’s go back – post-Enron – to the UN arms inspectors. They got
into Iraq and – horror – didn’t find a single microbe. Then we had
to get our hands on Iraq’s weapons manifesto. And when it arrived –
all 12,000 pages – we complained there was too much of it. The
Americans – who would have screamed foul if Saddam had handed a mere
10 pages – announced it was a “blizzard”, a deliberate attempt to
obscure what we all know to be true but couldn’t actually find out;
that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. At which point, the
Americans simply hijacked the whole document because – so we were
informed – they had better security with photocopying machines and
faster translators. This, remember from the country that failed to warn
us about September 11 because – yes – the interpreters couldn’t
translate Arabic fast enough. It
was also the year of “regime change”. Not just Saddam’s, Yasser
Arafat’s too. Arafat must go, his corrupt regime replaced by a
state-of-the-art democracy amid the ruins left by Israel’s air aids.
Or so we were told. Bush’s decision that Arafat had to pack up ensured
that the dreadful old man would be re-elected the following month. But
when the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, referred to the
“so-called” occupied territories – presumably thinking that the
soldiers all over the West Bank were Swiss – it looked as if the US
administration had lost its grip on Middle East reality. So
let’s talk oil. Bush was an oil man. Vice-President Cheney was an oil
man. Condoleezza rice was an oil lady. And we owe it to the New York
Time’s most right-wing columnist, William Safire – well connected to
both the Bush administration and, personally, to Ariel Sharon – to
learn what all this means. In a remarkable article in October, he gave
the game away about our forthcoming war in Iraq. “The government of
New Iraq,” he wrote, “…would reimburse the United States and
Britain for much of their costs in the war and transitional government
out of future oil revenues and contracts….” The evolving democratic
government of New Iraq “would repudiate the corrupt $8billion
‘debt’ Russia claims was run up by Saddam. Far more disturbing for President Putin of Russia, according to Safire, would be “the heavy investment to be made by the US and British companies that will sharply increase the drilling and refining capacity of the only nation (Iraq) whose oil reserves rival those of Russia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.” I wonder if we will remember that when we go to war in the next month or so? Certainly we won’t be talking about Enron. |