In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Clear Channel Communications, the largest owner of radio stations (1200+) in the United States, released a list of more than 150 "lyrically questionable" songs that the management at stations owned by Clear Channel may have wanted to temporarily pull from their play lists. Few of the songs portrayed explicit violence, but most had metaphoric themes that could be related to the tragedies. In many ways the list was likely a case of censorship run amok, since it contained music from almost every genre in popular music, but in any case it was disturbing that a song such as “Imagine” could have it’s lyrics deemed “questionable”. What exactly did the higher-ups at Clear Channel think listeners would find so questionable about a song espousing peace and brotherhood? Isn’t that what people needed to hear at such a trying time? Perhaps, this was a case of the personal biases of the Clear Channel executives coming out. When you really think about it, it would make perfect sense that a group of wealthy, older, (and probably white) men would find concepts such as peace, sharing, and brotherhood quite revolutionary, novel, and possibly frightening, especially when considering that they come from the same class of people leading the charge for the latest assault on Iraq.

What has been a little surprising and disappointing though, is the apathy and lack of interest being shown by much of the American public surrounding the threatened invasion of Iraq. Granted, I know better than to believe all those misleading “polls of Americans” designed to give an impression of popular support for war, and I know there is a concerted effort in the mainstream media to ignore, misreport, and underreport the “silent majority” of people who oppose the United States pending military action against Iraq, but I still can’t help but feel that for far too many people, the reaction to the warmongering of the current administration has been something along the lines of – “ho hum another war, doesn’t have anything to do with me, … what time is the game on?”.

Imagine waking up tomorrow, and attempting to turn on your lights and TV to catch today’s weather, only to find that neither will turn on. In fact none of your electrical appliances will be turning on for the foreseeable future, and it’s not because a fuse blew out in the basement. There will also be no streetlights in your neighborhood, no power in your home, and consequently no television (No MTV’s TRL- aahh man!!), no internet, no refrigerated food, no microwave, and no – a whole lot of other things people in the “industrialized world” are accustomed to using in their everyday lives. The first Gulf war of 1991 devastated Iraq. Over an approximately 5-week period several hundred thousand tons of bombs and high-powered explosives were dropped on Iraq by “coalition forces” spearheaded by the American military. In a little over a month a significant portion of Iraq was destroyed, and the conflict ended with the thorough humiliation of the Iraqi military and their withdrawal from Kuwait. As a result of the conflict it is estimated that the U.S. lost a few hundred soldiers meanwhile Iraqi casualties (civilian and military) numbered in the tens of thousands (at least 1,000,000 more estimated deaths from programs and actions in the wars’ aftermath). A significant portion of Iraq’s oil drilling infrastructure was also damaged. By the end of the conflict a U.N. inspection team assessed that “most means of modern life support have been destroyed”, especially in the south-central area of the country (damage to Iraq’s infrastructure was less extensive in Northern Iraq).

The unbearable inconvenience of being without electricity is driving you crazy so you decide to go visit friends and family in another part of the city. Imagine your surprise to find out that many of the local bridges and roadways are out, unfit for travel, and subject to bombing at the behest of a foreign power. You may also want to get used to badly damaged infrastructure and the anxiety of regular bombings because it will likely go on for the next decade or more. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War, with Iraq predictably coming out the loser, Iraq was forced to “agree” to a number of concessions with the United Nations designed to prevent any future buildup of “chemical and/or weapons of mass destruction”. In addition to the measures agreed upon, the U.S. and Britain have unilaterally maintained “No Fly-Zones” (France no longer participates and now condemns the zones) in the North and South of Iraq, a measure that is not and has never been approved by the U.N. These “No-fly zones” were allegedly set up to “protect Shi'a Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north”. But this is more than hard to believe considering the U.S. and Britain’s support for the suppression of such groups in the 80’s, when Saddam was an ally, and taking into account that Turkey has been engaged in a long and brutal suppression of it’s own Kurdish population, while being one of the top recipients of American “military aid” and arms sales. Taking into account that recreational travel may not be the safest thing to do right now, you decide that visiting friends and family no longer seems like such a good idea. You decide to head back to your home, your ears ringing from the sounds of air raid sirens. Maybe you still have some candles, matches, and canned food in the basement.

In addition to the imposed “No-Fly zones” Iraq is subject to a sanction based “oil-for-food” program, where Iraq can export oil but all payments are sent to a UN controlled escrow account, and only after paying much of the cost for the UN operation in Iraq, are some of the surplus funds in this accounts allowed to be used. In addition, for Iraq to purchase any necessities or agree to any contracts they must pass a “review list” of the UN sanctions committee over which the United States holds veto powers. By the spring of 2002 over $5 Billion worth of contracts were being held up almost exclusively at the direction of the U.S. government. Items blocked on the review list range from, medical and computer equipment, spare parts, and air-conditioned trucks - to basic chemicals like chlorine - all necessary elements to sustaining modern, human life and society

Back at your candle lit home the gravity of your situation begins to set in. Perhaps some food will lighten your mood. One small problem however, not only does your lack of electricity and disruption in power, make it near impossible to prepare food, you realize that you no longer have running water. Turning the faucet produces a brown, grainy substance, and as the hours pass, eventually turning the knob produces nothing! NO clean running water and NO sanitation breeds disease and malnutrition among other things (just imagine how difficult it must be living without running water and sanitation, especially when you’ve had these things before – you couldn’t even take a shit in your own house!).

Despite the cynical claims by the current president and his predecessors, that the past 12 years of military and economic warfare are not directed at the Iraqi people, but at Saddam Hussein, it by now must be clear that this is nonsense. This claim is ridiculous at both face value and upon further review. In fact declassified documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency prove beyond a doubt that the U.S. government deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water supply and completely understood that the people who would pay the highest price would be children and the infirm (elderly & sick).

The primary document, "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," is dated January 22, 1991. It spells out how sanctions will prevent Iraq from supplying clean water to its citizens stating, "Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline. With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations Sanctions to import these vital commodities. Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease." The document then goes on to note that Iraq's rivers "contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden with bacteria. Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid could occur." The document also goes on to mention how chlorine is crucial to any hopes of cleaning up the water supply but the U.S. blocks it through the embargo/sanction program. Other documents also illustrate the premeditated and intentional affects of the bombing and sanction campaign against Iraq, are titled and dated “Disease Information" - January 22, 1991, "Disease Outbreaks in Iraq" - February 21, 1991, "Medical Problems in Iraq" - March 15, 1991, and "Status of Disease at Refugee Camps" - May 1991. Recently, the World Food Program estimated that in Iraq, access to potable water is currently 50 percent of the 1990 level in urban areas and only 33 percent in rural areas. And contrary to the misinformation reported in the press, the sanctions will not be lifted with the return of weapons inspectors, but are tied to the U.S. policy of "regime change". In other words, until the U.S. government is able to install someone acceptable to them as Iraq’s ruler, the Iraqi people will continue to starve and suffer.

It should then come as no surprise that in addition to those killed in the initial conflict, that it is estimated that hundreds of thousands have died as a result of the sanctions that have followed. The UN reports that 5,000 Iraqi children die each month as a result of the sanctions. An August 1999 UNICEF report found that the under-five mortality rate in Iraq has more than doubled since the imposition of sanctions. Many independent authorities assert that at least 500,000 Iraqi children under five-years old have died since 1990, in part as a result of the sanctions and the effects of the Gulf War. Former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday has remarked that the death toll [children] is "probably closer now to 600,000 and that’s over the period of 1990-1998. If you include adults, it’s well over 1 million Iraqi people." In 1998 Halliday, a 36-year veteran of the UN, left his job as Humanitarian Coordinator with the United Nations in Iraq, citing major problems in U.N. administration and calling the program “genocide”. Less than two years later his successor Hans Von Sponeck also announced his resignation to protest the impact of sanctions on the Iraqi people. Both Halliday and Sponeck have has been writing and speaking out against U.S. sanctions ever since.

Still without power, lights, water, and a host of other necessities you find some batteries and decide to turn on the radio to hear the latest updates on the ongoing disaster. You tune in just in time to find out that, the previously nameless and faceless assassins, that have bombed your nation from afar for so long have decided to take the conflict to a new level. Previously their stated goal was “containment” and control of your nation through a policy of endless bombing and economic strangulation. When that was the stated goal much of the initial conflict took place outside or on the outskirts of the city, however, this time the goal is different. This time the assassins have come to take over the government, replace it with one set up by the assassins, and occupy your homeland. In order the to do this they will need to use actual ground troops. The assassins are coming to your neighborhood.

Pentagon war plans leaked to the New York Times and other media outlets beginning in early July of 2002 indicated that at least 250,000 troops and hundreds of warplanes would be used to participate in the planned invasion of Iraq. Although there are several schemes and plots being floated around in American presidential and military complex, one theme remains the same, military action would begin with a devastating air war directed at thousands of targets, both military and civilian. For the US to topple the Iraqi regime and install a puppet government, even savage bombing on the scale of the first Gulf War will not suffice. US military planners are preparing to devastate Baghdad and every other major city, and combine carpet-bombing with urban warfare against soldiers and civilians alike. The death toll could reach into the tens or hundreds of thousands. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee September 23, Gen. Joseph Hoar, who was the senior US commander in the Middle East after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, cautioned that US invaders could confront 100,000 Iraqi troops with thousands of artillery pieces defending Baghdad. Hoar argued that the US would eventually conquer the city, but went on to say, “…at what cost? And at what cost as the rest of the world watches while we bomb and have artillery rounds exploded in densely populated neighborhoods?” In house-to-house fighting, he warned, “you could run through battalions a day at a time ... because of casualties,” adding that such combat would resemble “the last 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan.”

That being stated it will be interesting to see what images and reporting the American people would receive regarding the war. If the rapidly deteriorating and heavily censored media coverage witnessed in recent conflicts in Kosovo and then Afghanistan, is any indication then once again the American people will be shielded from the truly horrific and genocidal acts being committed in their name. The carnage that may soon befall Iraq will once again be reduced to grey-white or green-black, grainy images of unidentifiable objects and people being incinerated by high-tech weaponry. Already there are stories running in the corrupt, complicit, and cowardly mainstream media outlets such as USA Today, The New York Times, and Washington Post where “journalist” have been attempting to shift the blame for America’s planned barbarism in Iraq. True to the form of an “honesty-challenged” journalist, columnist in all of the aforementioned newspapers (and probably several others) have run prominent stories attributing the high number of expected civilian casualties to the Iraqi military using civilians as “human shields - as if it is possible to conquer a nation, remove it’s government, install a puppet regime, and maintain such oppression/occupation without attacking it’s major metropolitan areas.

So what does it all mean you ask?

I don’t think that I, or many other people, could do justice to the carnage that this war will, and all past wars have produced. I am humble enough to know there is no way to put into words the suffering that the previous war, and more importantly the aftermath (embargo, sanctions, etc) have heaped upon the people of Iraq. There’s no way to express on a computer screen what it must be like to watch your homes turned to rubble, cities leveled, and your civilian, neighbors, friends, family, and compatriots ripped to pieces by a slow and deliberate campaign of conquest like the one the U.S. is preparing to execute. And living under an oppressive, tyrant like Saddam Hussein certainly doesn’t help the situation. However let us be clear, the war being pursued by the current presidential administration has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with “liberating” Iraq from Hussein’s iron-fist rule or improving human rights in that nation. Any honest reflection on The United States history of military assaults and interventions worldwide reveal that they have historically been about protecting the strategic and/or geopolitical interest of the people who run this country – the wealthy heads of capitalist industry!

This drive for war in Iraq is about American (and British) control of Iraq’s oil reserves, which are the second largest proven oil reserves of any country in the world! This is a war of plunder by the most powerful nation in the world against one of the weakest. When Bush speaks of “regime change” he means the replacement of an independent Iraq by a semi-colonial regime, headed by an American stooge like Hamid Karzai, the US-installed president of Afghanistan, which would cede effective control of the country’s resources to American and British interests.

When the current administration makes public declarations through it’s representative, and trumpets the tired clichés and LIES about “chemical weapons”, “weapons of mass destruction”, “resuming U.N. inspections”, al-Qaeda links to Iraq, Iraq being a threat to it’s neighbors and the U.S., etc – they do this will the full confidence that the corrupt media owned by the same interest they represent, and the pseudo-intellectual establishment will not expose them by stating the obvious.

Iraq is, in terms of population, the forty-fourth largest country in the world. In terms of land area it is only fifty-sixth, ranking on both counts even lower than Afghanistan. Iraq had a GDP (Gross Domestic Power) of $57 billion in 2000 - less than the personal wealth of a single American, Bill Gates. The $11 trillion US economy is 200 times larger than that of Iraq, whose economic output places it just below Burma and Sri Lanka and just ahead of Guatemala and Kenya.

As for military power, the gap is even greater. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, tens of thousands of Iraqis were incinerated by US bombs, missiles and other high-tech weapons, while only a few hundred American soldiers lost their lives. The U.S has steadily and regularly bombed Iraq for more than 10 years without losing an American soldier in such bombing runs, yet this is the nation that we are told is a military threat to America and it’s allies. Over the past approximately 12 years Iraq has been subjected to a ruthless and cruel economic blockade and the Iraqi military has shrunk to one third its 1990 size. Meanwhile the Pentagon has been built up to the point where the US military budget now exceeds the combined total military spending of the next 25 countries in the world!

It would be a reach to say there is not a shred of material that could be used for making biological or chemical weapons in Iraq, but that would the case for most of the world. The vast majority of people who were involved in the inspections program who have commented, report that Iraq for all intents and purposes was disarmed in the period after the previous Gulf War. The current administration knows this, and this is why they continue to make incredible claims of Iraq’s capabilities but never produce any proof. Raymond Zilinskas, who was appointed to UNSCOM in 1994 and inspected biological research and production facilities in Iraq, writes: "Iraqi facilities and equipment that could produce nuclear and chemical weapons already have been destroyed and cannot be resurrected for some years. Therefore bombings cannot be expected to weaken Iraq's already poor capacity in this regard. ….And biological weapons? If the Iraqis managed to hide stockpiles of pathogens or toxins from the gulf war--which I find doubtful--the short shelf-lives of these agents ensure that they have since become inactive. The routine monitoring by the UN inspectors and the destruction of relevant sites would have prevented the Iraqis from restocking their supply.” In addition, card-carrying conservative, Republican, and former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter who was a leading weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nation Special Commission (UNSCOM) acknowledge that the inspections succeeded in effectively disarming Iraq by 1998, when WASHINGTON pressured the UN to pull out of the country on the eve of a US bombing campaign (Operation Desert Fox). Ritter has recently traveled to much of the world, even Iraq, carrying this same message. In a recent interview with the Portuguese daily Diario de Noticias, Ritter charged that the new Security Council resolution backed by the US is “designed so that Saddam Hussein will reject it and refuse to allow the return of weapons inspectors.” He added: “It is not a resolution that has as a goal the disarmament of Iraq; its goal is to humiliate Iraq. The only purpose is to provoke Iraqi obstruction, which will then allow the US to start a war.” Furthermore, the U.S. originally pushed for the return of weapons inspectors but since Iraq has agreed - despite the fact that many previous inspector teams turned out to be filled with CIA and AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE SPIES who were gathering information, for future bombing campaigns and assassination attempts – the U.S. has now changed it’s demands clearly stating that a “regime change” is still necessary.

Saddam Hussein has no capability to, or interest in, attacking the United States directly. Iraq has no long-range missile capability and has never sought to develop one. Nor did it use chemical weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in the face of the threat of American nuclear retaliation, and assurances from the first Bush administration that its goal was to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, not to occupy Baghdad. In addition, Hussein has no reason to deliver weapons or assistance to terrorists who are his political enemies. An Iraqi-Al Qaeda alliance is politically improbable at best. As Daniel Benjamin, who served as the US National Security Council’s director of transnational threats in the 1990s, wrote in the New York Times: “Iraq and Al Qaeda are not obvious allies. In fact, they are natural enemies. A central tenet of Al Qaeda’s jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and plunged Islam into a historic crisis. Hence, a paramount goal of Islamist revolutionaries for almost half a century has been the destruction of the regimes of such leaders...”. It was precisely this political hostility that earned such movements extensive support from the US, which sought to undermine secular regimes bent on nationalizing oil wealth. And, unlike the alleged links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, those between Osama bin Laden and US intelligence are thoroughly documented.

Lastly, besides the obvious plunder, rape, and robbery that is behind the U.S. and Tony Blair's (Britain) war drive against Iraq; is the domestic situation in the United States. A corporate crime wave, that has always been present, but has seemingly sunken to new depths and is now being exposed, has left the administration scrambling for cover. Even more disturbing is the fact that many of the leading figures in the current administration have at one time or another have been guilty of acts of “corporate crime” identical or similar to the acts of that they have vowed to crack down on. The stock market is hemorrhaging exposing contradictions and fundamental flaws in the capitalist economic model that no Alan Greenspan “rate cut magic” can fix. A government, not elected, but installed by a reactionary dominated “Supreme Court” is proclaiming the doctrine of “preemptive attack” — in other words, war initiated for aggressive purposes - the principal crime for which leaders of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were placed on trial after World War II, convicted and executed. In doing so they have laid bear their arch-criminal nature. Greed, and the need to dominate and control the planet has driven then to the point where they are willing to sacrifice the lives of possibly thousand of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis all in pursuit of their interest. If this assault is successful this will be but the first in a long string of assaults on sovereign nations by America in it’s quest for world domination. Although it is a start, it’s far from adequate to oppose the planned attack on Iraq simply on the basis of not wanting to see American soldiers die or your tax money wasted, for human life is valuable on both sides. A connection must be made between Imperialism; it’s victims; it’s perpetrators; and the economic/social system that make it inevitable. This is a pivotal moment in world history, now is not a time for apathy. I’d hate to imagine what would happen if nobody cared.

[Here is a link to a first step for those who do care. See you there. http://www.internationalanswer.org]

Released: October 2002

Suggested Websites:

http://www.wsws.org

Voices in the Wilderness

Suggested Reading:

Against Empire by Michael Parenti

Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs by Noam Chomsky

Weapons in Space by Karl Grossman

Killing Hope by William Blum

Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News Media by Michael Parenti

The views and opinions expressed herein by the author do not necessarily represent the opinions or position of Playahata.com.