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FROM: http://www.iacenter.org/maj_war-effect.htm
WARS FOR EFFECT
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 5/24/03]
"No
going to law with nations; cannons are the barristers of Crowns; and
the sword, not of justice, but of war, decides the suit."
-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
The late 'war'
with Iraq is fast becoming fading memory, and the 'reasons'
set forth for the conflict by the nation's chief executive are fading
even faster.
Although it may hurt
us to concentrate - way, way back into the days of...two months ago
- let us try to recall the urgencies that led the 'world's sole Superpower'
into the dusty and bloody fields of battle. The Bush Administration
assumed a high-toned stridency when they brow-beated
and threatened the nation into why this war--Now!--
was necessary:
a) Weapons of Mass Destruction;
b) Close ties with bin Ladin's Al-Qaeda network and;
c) Iraq's responsibility for the horrors of 9/11.
The 'war'
with Iraq, (if it may be called that) was, by any real measure, a walk-through
of a vastly inferior fighting force, one greatly diminished by the long
'quiet war' waged by Britain and
the U.S., a decade of incessant bombings
of Iraq's air defenses and southern provinces, as the
UN quietly looked elsewhere. Pelted with the diabolically
deadly depleted-uranium tipped shells for years,
their economy staggering as a by-product of the UN-approved sanctions,
its people tired, hungry, desperate and disillusioned,
Iraqis had little energy to muster up any sustained resistance to the
world's only 'superpower.'
A month after this quasi-war,
and the urgent reasons to engage in war are
all but forgotten, there is absolutely no evidence of -
'weapons
of mass destruction',
no
evidence of close Iraqi ties with Al-Qaeda,
nor
any evidence whatsoever in support of the widely- believed claim of
Iraqi involvement in the events of 9/11.
The big story in every
newspaper, and on every network and cable channel, is the Jayson Blair
'story'; how one journalist lied to his editors about the sources and
quotes for his stories. What is important, to most major media, is the
race of the perpetrator of these heinous deeds (Mr.
Blair is Black). His misdeeds have evoked loud and overt
critiques of affirmative action, and of the New York Times, Blair's
employer.
One disturbed young
man lies to his employers about his stories and it becomes a national
scandal.
The
Bush administration lies to the nation's media and its people
about war; a war in which thousands of people lost their lives,
and the nation's reaction is:
silence.
The corporate media solutes
the war as a great and noble enterprise; they toss bouquets and laurel
wreaths to the Emperor---oops, I mean, President, for his victory; and
the nation swells with martial pride. It has
defeated [TVOTW Insert - "ANNIHILATED
AND MASSACRED"] a fourth-rate power,
and enriched itself with the vanquished nation's vast oil reserves;
the spoils of war.
The reasons for the war?
A century hence, some historians will write a footnote in a 400-page
tome about the Bush presidency, Part 2 (whom novelist Arundhati Roy
deliciously terms, "George the Lesser").
The Iraq war, if mentioned at all, will be a small drop in the Pax Americana
bucket. They will probably cite the evils of the Saddam Regime as a
justification for the war. Perhaps, if the scholar is bold, there will
be some intimation of oil interests.
What will probably be
missing is this observation, from a resident scholar of a major American
think tank, whose insights explain the first
Iraq adventure, the Philippine invasion, the four Cuban invasions, the
five Nicaraguan invasions, the three Mexican invasions, and the others
since the 1890s.
In
the words of the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen:
"Every
ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little
country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean
business."
There it is. A huge nation,
still smarting from the ghosts of Vietnam, wants to prove to the world
how strong it still is.
Like
a bully that beats up cripples, it will not be denied.
IRAQ
WAS JUST AN EXAMPLE.
Text © copyright
2003 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
FROM: http://www.iacenter.org/maj_war-effect.htm
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