Image courtesy of duncan c under CC BY-NC 2.0.
As is well-known to all who follow world politics, the term “New World Order” gained common currency following America’s victory over Iraq in the first Gulf War. Gloating triumphantly over the smashing of Baghdad, in his speech of March 6, 1991, then-President George H.W. Bush proclaimed,
Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfil the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.
These words more or less set, or at the very least reflected, an ideological and geopolitical agenda that has been steadily carving away the autonomy and right to internal self-determination of sovereign nations. Throughout the world, the sovereign nation-state is now being replaced by a vassal-state whose economic and political life is to be determined by a cabal of transnational corporations, currency speculators, and above all a mythical “International Community” ever vigilant for “human rights violations” which set the pretext for invasion and destruction by well-armed acronyms such as the UN and NATO. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was to be merely the beginning, for after 1991 the apparatchiks of the New World Order found numerous other whipping boys in the form of omnipresent “Hitlers of the month” to destroy. Of course, every such destruction campaign and the Quisling hegemony which followed was inevitably accompanied by hypocritical references to meaningless but noble-sounding phrases such as “freedom and respect for human rights,” or, in more recent incarnations coming from the comopolitan Left, “global democracy.”
Today the same clique, under the stewardship of a younger, more aggressive, and more inept member of the Bush clan, is again poised to attack Iraq, with not so much as the slightest legitimate pretext. One will recall that even in 1990, the case for an attack on Iraq was by no means clear or well-established. Prior to the war, the first President Bush himself was more than happy to arm and support the man who weeks later became “worse than Hitler.” Even on the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990, then Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz was assured by ambassador April Glaspie and the US State Department that the dispute over Kuwaiti theft of oil from what was indisputably Iraqi territory was “an Arab affair” on which the US has “no position,” and that the Iraqis should resolve as they see fit. All of which set a trap for the Iraqis and a precedent for the first post-Cold War intervention by the US, and of course, the omnipresent “International Community.”
So on what grounds was that war effort sold to us? The more gullible were of course told that US troops were fighting for “freedom” and “democracy” in the Middle East. The fact that there was not much of either to be found in Kuwait mattered little to a television-addled populace who eagerly supported a war against a nation they couldn’t even find on a map. The more sober were assured that the war would secure the US oil supply in the Middle East and give us lower prices at the pump. The fact of the matter is that A) the US only receives a small fraction of its oil from either Iraq or Kuwait to begin with, B) tales to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no evidence that Iraq would charge anything other than market or OPEC prices for the oil from the conquered territory of Kuwait and C) the embargo against Iraq following the war actually (for self-evident reasons) raised oil prices rather than lowered them. It seems that the only beneficiaries of Gulf War I were the elder Bush’s approval ratings, the corrupt monarchy of Kuwait, and of course Israel’s sole regional superpower status in the Middle East. The public never seemed to ask whether the effort was worth the enormous expenditure of money and resources by the US, and as for the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed as a consequence of the war effort and the subsequent sanctions, well, we had no less trustworthy and honorable a creature than Madeleine Albright to tell us a decade later that it was all well worth it.
Hence, now that our special-ed President wishes to finish the job that the craftier old man began, the masters of deceit in our presses and television networks are again hard at work manufacturing approval from the trained seals among their readers and viewers. Fortunately, their job has been made easy by the events of 9/11, not due to any logical connection between Iraq and the attacks of course, but because a perverse game of guilt by association plays well with those who want “revenge,” however non-specific the target. What justifies an unprovoked invasion of Iraq in the public mind is nothing more than the thought, “The 9/11 terrorists were Arab. The Iraqis are Arab. You see…close enough.” It brings to mind the story about the man who, after being beaten up in a bar fight, goes home and beats his kid to reaffirm his manhood. While few would actually come forward and say this, it is hard to see how an attack on Iraq could otherwise be so easily sold in connection with 9/11.
And what of the “legitimate” reasons we are given for the invasion? By their own admission, the Bush administration and the State Department have absolutely not a scintilla of convincing evidence that links Hussein’s government to the 9/11 attacks. What it has on the subject consists of hearsay rumors (such as a sensationalist interview with one of Hussein’s alleged mistresses) more worthy of the pages of National Inquirer than the CIA’s files, mythical documents “proving” the sale of WMD’s to Al Quaeda, and a now-refuted tale of a meeting between one of the hijackers and an Iraqi official in Prague (at a time when the perpetrator was actually in the United States).
In fact, anybody with even a cursory knowledge of the politics of the Arab world should be able to see that the claim of a Hussein-Bin Laden link is unlikely at best and in all likelihood patently absurd. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party has from day one sold itself as a secular Arab nationalist movement, an alternative to superficial westernization on the one hand and Islamicization on the other. This fact, combined with Hussein’s long and bloody war with the Islamist regime in Iran, has actually put him close to the top of Al Quaeda’s hit list. Far from wanting to collaborate, Bin Laden would like to see nothing more than Hussein and his secular regime removed from power to make room for a Taliban-style Muslim theocracy where his cronies would feel much more at home. If anything, Hussein stands as a valuable bulwark against Taliban-like sponsors of terrorism rather than a candidate for sponsorship himself.
Of course, we are assured by such political whores and pathological liars as Stephen Schwartz (a true man of principle who managed to seamlessly make the transition from rattling the can for Daniel Ortega as “Comrade Sandalio” to a Muslim shill for the narco-trafficking, terrorist pimp Hashim Thaci in his “Suleyman Ahmed” days, to his present form as neoconservative crusader against “Islamofascism” without breaking stride) that Hussein is one and the same as the supporters of Al Quaeda. One has to wonder whether any member of Al Quaeda or the Taliban would appoint a Nestorian Christian like Tariq Aziz as Deputy Prime Minister, or for that matter why by Comrade Sandalio’s own admission, Saddam Hussein backed the Orthodox Christian Serbs while Al Quaeda and the Taliban (together with every apparatchik and talking head who now rails against Al Quaeda) threw their support behind Sandalio’s Islamist friends in Kosovo and Bosnia.
As a result of an utter lack of any concrete evidence for a Bin Laden – Saddam Hussein link, we are fed vague platitudes about how “Hussein is a threat to the region,” that he “destabilizes the Middle East,” that he “threatens our oil supply,” that he is “poised to attack his neighbors,” and most of all, that he is an irrational, evil, sadistic despot who is, after all, “worse than Hitler.” Send in the drummer boys (perhaps Jonah Goldberg, the Pillsbury Doughboy of National Review Online, could volunteer for this charge).
Not surprisingly, most of these above accusations are either false, vacuous, or equally applicable to other leaders or nations in the region. Let us begin (and later end) with supposedly most damning yet most vacuous charge, that Hussein is an “irrational despot” and that we would be “liberating his oppressed people” from his iron fist. The first thing one should ask (apart from the question of just why it is a Western charge to “liberate” people inside the borders of a sovereign Arab nation) is just how many of the bizarre stories of Hussein “gassing his own people” and more recently, throwing his enemies into acid vats, have even a grain of truth to them. Hopefully collective myopia and amnesia is not so strong that the tales of Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators during Gulf War I are not still fresh in people’s minds? That little piece of propaganda certainly managed to rouse the masses and even draw tears from the Senate floor, until it was discovered the “nurse” telling the weepy tale was instead a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and that the entire story was a carefully-crafted fabrication.
Of course, the Kuwaiti baby story is just one course of an entire diet of propaganda and lies that Americans have been fed over the years during wartime. During the Balkans wars, we were told that Slobodan Milosevic was committing “genocide” against “hundreds of thousands” in Kosovo, which today even the Pentagon admits was a lie (or at least hyperbolic by a good two or three orders of magnitude). Going back further, John Q. Public was told that German soldiers were bayoneting French babies and carving the hands off Belgian POW’s during the First World War. And even during World War II, it was the case that Hitler’s authentic crimes didn’t offer enough grist for the propaganda mill, so the media juggernaut had to embellish the indisputable atrocities with grotesque stories of non-existent soap made from human fat and lampshades made from human skin. It seems that macabre tales spun in the name of propaganda are a long-standing tradition even in “Democracies” such as ours, and one would think that after a certain point the public would be smart enough to say “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” but apparently that is asking far too much.
With the gift of historical hindsight, there is little reason to have any more faith to the stories we are told today about Hussein’s regime than the countless lies we were told about our “official” enemies in the years or decades past. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that a good portion of the tall tales being spun about Saddam Hussein are just that, implying that there should be no reason to believe any other story we are told about Iraq without independent corroboration.
As mentioned above, for all of the neoconservative agitprop about “radical Islam” and (how can we forget) “Islamofascism,” Iraq is a rather unlikely candidate even if these alleged ideologies were legitimate targets. For instance, the followers of the ancient non-Calcaedonian Church in Iraq actually look upon the Hussein regime as protectors, realizing that in the absence of his secular dictatorship they would most likely fall to the mercy of an Ayatollah-style theocracy imposed by a radical Shi’ite majority. No doubt if Hussein were removed from power these are precisely the sorts of individuals that would fill the power vacuum after US troops pull out. Of course, self-styled US “Christians” seem far more concerned with red heifers and waving Ariel Sharon’s (Weekly?) Standard than they are with the fate of their alleged co-religionists in Iraq.
A good deal of the agitprop about “Islamism” and “human rights violations” in Iraq has been tailor-made to appeal to liberal and leftist sensibilities in order to broaden the coalition beyond the neocon faithful, so to speak. In a strange, ironic twist, many leftists support an attack on Iraq in the name of “women’s liberation,” this in spite of the fact that women probably enjoy more political and economic rights in Iraq than in any other Arab country in the region. While the author is certainly no friend of the despicable feminism that has taken hold in the West, one can’t help but be disgusted by the ignorance and hypocrisy of individuals who sanctimoniously screech about “human dignity” and “women’s rights” while not even bothering to get their choice of enemy targets straight. It’s almost reminiscent of those bizarre individuals who, wanting revenge on Arabs after 9/11, attacked Indian Sikhs instead. In another strange irony, Hussein’s secular Iraq is probably the one Arab nation where Oriental Jews have enjoyed the best treatment (for the same reason that Iraq’s native Christian population is unpersecuted), yet that doesn’t stop the usual suspects from indicting Hussein for his “Hitlerian” tendencies. Then again, considering how willingly many Jewish neoconservatives (in spite of Serbian efforts on behalf of Balkans Jews during World War II) threw the Serbs to the Muslim Kosovar lions, their hostility and ingratitude towards Iraqi “nazis” certainly comes as no surprise.
This of course brings us to the other wonderful tidbits of propaganda the long newspaper spoon feeds to us on a daily basis, that of Hussein the “imperialist aggressor” who wishes to conquer the entire region. As exhibits A and B, we are given Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and his scud missile attacks against Israel during the Gulf War (one would suppose that it’s rather hypocritical to cite his war against Iran, as at the time the US was his sponsor, but that doesn’t seem to stop anybody from doing so). So let us examine the first two in order.
It was mentioned in passing above that Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was hardly an act of unprovoked aggression or irrational behavior on his part. It is a matter of the record that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was precipitated to a large part by Kuwait’s theft of oil from Iraqi territory, and that initially neither the United States nor any transnational authority voiced any objections to giving the Iraqis an implicit green light. Hardly an “irrational” act of a “madman”, the invasion was a retaliation on the part of the Iraqis combined with an attempt to gain a port of entry to the Persian Gulf. It really should matter very little to anybody in America whether the oil we buy comes from a territory known as “Kuwait” or from a renamed province of Iraq. In view of the fact that fighting-age Kuwaiti men were busy partying in nightclubs in Monaco and the Riviera while US troops fought on their behalf tells us all we need to know about those we “defended.”
As for Hussein’s “nefarious” bombing of Israeli targets during the war, it would seem that neoconservative agitprop has once again accomplished its goal of establishing collective historical amnesia, even over matters of public record in the recent past. One should recall that in 1981, long before Hussein thought of launching the first scuds against Iraq, the government of Menachim Begin launched a “preemptive strike” against Iraq’s newly-built nuclear reactor. The utterly unprovoked bombing campaign killed not only several Iraqis, but also a French nuclear physicist who was assisting in the project. A similar act on the part of Iraq would have of course precipitated a full-scale war, but the Israelis got scarcely a slap on the wrist from the “International Community” (much less the United States) for their act of nefarious aggression. As such, the “insane” bombings of Israel by the Iraqis can be seen as little more than the settling of old scores between enemy nations, an action that could hardly be considered any more immoral than Begin and Sharon’s initial attack. How at once amusing and nauseating it is that what Patrick Buchanan aptly named “the amen corner” more than a decade ago is so busy condemning Iraq for actions that Israel itself perpetrates on a regular basis. Need anybody be reminded which Middle Eastern nation is definitively in violation of the Geneva Convention’s ruling on nuclear non-proliferation? All of the chest-thumping about Hussein’s WMD’s notwithstanding, it isn’t Iraq.
So now we return to the last straws the warmongers grasp at when backed into a corner by uncovered lies, distortions, and half-truths. They will tell us all, “that may be so, but Hussein remains an evil despot who terrorizes his own people!” They will cite as examples Hussein’s treatment of Kurdish and Shi’ite rebels on his own territory, conveniently forgetting to mention that both of these “oppressed peoples” eagerly sided with Iran (and recently, with al Quaeda and the Taliban) during Iraq’s wars. Far from being “his own people” in any sense of the word, they were enemy combatants. While one may not agree with the methods the Hussein government used to deal with enemy combatants on his own soil, one should remember that in the bloody world of Middle Eastern realpolitik, the game is one of kill or be killed. To see that this is the case, one need only notice that NATO ally Turkey gets a carte blanche for doing precisely the same things to the Kurds as Hussein is regularly berated for doing. But as the babblers at theWeekly Standard will assure us, Hussein is guilty of killing the “good Kurds” while NATO ally Turkey only kills “bad Kurds,” and very reluctantly at that. It’s all elementary.
In reality, Hussein’s regime offers much for any objective observer to praise. Prior to the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure by Gulf War I and the economic crisis precipitated by sanctions, Iraq had the most thriving middle class of any Arab nation, as well as one of the best-educated and best provided for. The Hussein regime turned what was little more than another Arab backwater into one of the most advanced and (at least economically, technologically, and militarily) “modern” nations in the Arab world. Meanwhile, his regime maintained good working relations with the Western world without compromising the ideals of Arab nationalism which brought his party to power on “Arab street” (as the only viable alternative to Ayatollah-style rule on the one hand and puppets of transnational plutocracy such as the Shah or the oil Emirates on the other).
If idealistic armchair crusaders believe that at the very least the Iraqi people will be “liberated” by this war effort, they need a short reality check. An obvious litmus test for how well-received a ruler is by his subjects is whether the ruler tolerates an armed populace. It comes as no surprise that the Soviet Union did not allow its subjects to bear arms – it was virtually impossible for a Soviet civilian to purchase a handgun or even a hunting rifle, and even purchasing a shotgun required extensive wading through bureaucratic red tape. In contrast, there seem to be gun shops selling virtually any firearm to any bidder on every other corner of Baghdad:
The sense of impending conflict means business is picking up at the capital’s 43 gun shops, even though they are only licensed to sell hunting guns or pistols. Customers are stockpiling bullets or shotgun cartridges, says Wiham Ghazi of the “Free Bird” gun shop, whose 12-gauge shotguns and .22 caliber rifles hang from gun racks on the wall of his shop, emanating a faint scent of gun oil….Shotguns here go for just $100; Iraqi-made “Tariq” 7.65 mm pistols cost $200. AK-47 assault rifles, the same gun being offered to Baath Party members, sell for $250
Curious, how in the capital of “Stalinist” Iraq, firearms are freely available to every citizen! Surely, if the Hussein regime was “hated” and on the brink of being overthrown, gun stores would be the first thing the government would crack down on. What should really give Americans pause is the fact that the gun restrictions under Saddam Hussein are in fact milder than what US citizens would enjoy had Bill Clinton and his administration gotten their way, and for that matter the restrictions they enjoy in many states of the union already!
In summary, as is almost always the case with every frenzy of jingoism, be it precipitated by crisis or whether it arises spontaneously from the bowels of the New World Order’s machinations, the Emperor has no clothes. There is absolutely no convincing case to be made in favor of an attack against Iraq. In making this “preemptive strike,” the Bush administration and whatever overseas cheerleaders it can find are committing an act of unprovoked aggression, in the name of settling the old scores of the Bush clan, guaranteeing a gang of Soros-style financiers and other bandits unlimited access to Iraqi resources, and appeasing what every objective, honest voice, from Noam Chomsky on the Left to Joseph Sobran on the Right, has called the most vicious and powerful lobby in Washington – the one which wishes to eliminate Iraq and every other threat to Israel’s sole powerbrokers status east of Suez.
Right now, on the eve of an imminent attack on a sovereign nation that never wanted conflict with America or any other Western nation, the author humbly asks his readers to take whatever stand they can take against the New World Order and on behalf of a courageous nation and people who have once again dared to stand up to it. However, much we may disagree with the ideological particulars of the rulers and nations chosen as the New World Order’s whipping boys, we must recognize that the sovereign nations and peoples of the world (including those who value America’s autonomy from the “International Community’s” ruling clique of financiers and bureaucrats) must either hang together or hang separately.
For Iraq is only the beginning of the end, as the fates of various other relatively defenseless nations have shown and will continue to show in coming years. Judging from recent rhetoric from the ever-growing list of neoconservative mouthpieces of the NWO, the now-dreaded “Old Europe” is next on the hit list. That in the very least should give us all pause.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”