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[ Presenting plain-text part of multi-format email ] <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxiraq082802.html> The Case Against the Iraq War <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxzinn082802.html> What War Looks Like <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wx082802.html> Cheney's Oily Rhetoric -------------------------------------------------------- <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxiraq082802.html> The Case Against the Iraq War I'd like to spend the next few minutes with you discussing an issue of utmost urgency: the impending invasion of Iraq that the Bush Administration is planning. This invasion would be unconstitutional. It would be against international law. It would violate the Christian doctrine of "just war." It would further damage U.S. relations with its allies, relations that are already frayed by Bush's mindless unilateralism. It would wreak havoc in the Muslim world, where there's plenty of havoc already. It could shake the U.S. economy, which is trembling right now. And most importantly, it could result in the deaths of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of innocent people. Worst case: It could end with the United States dropping a nuclear bomb on Baghdad. President Bush acts as though he has the right to go attack Iraq anytime he wants to. That's false, and very dangerous for a democracy. Our founders gave the right to Congress and only to Congress to make the momentous decision of whether to take the United States to war or not. It's all there in Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. The founders knew that to give the President such power would risk dragging the country and its people into one senseless war after another. Sadly, since World War II, Presidents have usurped this power of Congress, and Congress has abdicated it. There has not been a Congressional declaration of war since December 1941, though there sure have been plenty of wars since then, most notably Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War, but also Panama, Grenada, the Dominican Republic, and myriad other nations the United States has assaulted directly or covertly over the last six decades. To this extent, we have a lawless Presidency. And if we are to restore our democracy, we need to insist that the Constitution be followed. That means Congress, not the President, has the sole power to declare war. In the current circumstance of Iraq, the President's apologists argue that he has the authority to wage war by virtue of two Congressional acts. First, in 1991, Congress gave the President the authorization to wage war against Saddam Hussein (though technically it did not declare war). But how open-ended is this authorization? Congress did not intend to give the President a blank check to wage war against Iraq forever, or anytime he happened to feel like it. The Congress did not grant the President the right to change the regime there more than a decade later. The second Congressional act that Bush's cheerleaders cite is the September 14, 2001, use of force authorization, which allows Bush to attack any person, group, or country that he believes was involved in the attack of 9/11. Now the Bush hawks have been doing their damnedest to pin some of the blame for that heinous act on Saddam Hussein, but there's hardly a tissue connecting the two. International law is quite clear: Country A cannot attack Country B unless Country B has already attacked Country A or is about to attack Country A. Iraq has not attacked the United States. And it's not about to. Saddam, as brutal as he is, loves to cling to power. He knows that attacking the United States would be suicidal. Actually, under international law, Saddam Hussein may have a better case for attacking the United States today than Bush has for attacking Iraq, since Bush is threatening an imminent war against Iraq. But no one wants to hear that! Furthermore, for the United States to take this aggressive action without the approval of the U.N. Security Council would be a violation of the U.N. charter, which the United States has ratified. To get around this, the Bush Administration is hyping the danger that Saddam poses to the United States. Cheney recently called Saddam a "mortal threat." That's getting a little carried away. The United States has a $400 billion Pentagon budget; Iraq's military budget is about $4 billion. The United States has thousands of nuclear weapons; Iraq doesn't have one yet, much less the means to deliver it. And even if Iraq obtained one nuclear weapon or two, would that present a "mortal" danger to the United States? Remember, the United States managed to survive for four decades against an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at us. The fact is, there is no justification under international law or under Christian "just war" theory for Bush to attack Iraq. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has said so. There is no causus belli--no precipitating act that Saddam Hussein has engaged in that would justify it. Nor has President Bush exhausted all peaceful means to resolve the issue, as required by just war theory. Quite the contrary: Rumsfeld and Cheney are openly disdainful of getting U.N. inspectors back in, which was and would be the best way to grind down whatever program Saddam Hussein has for weapons of mass destruction. (By the way, we hear a lot about Saddam Hussein kicking out weapons inspectors. But remember, President Clinton is as much to blame for those inspectors having left Iraq as anyone. Saddam did not kick them out. Clinton pulled them out right before he decided to wage his own little bombing attack on Iraq back in December 1998, to deflect attention from Monica Lewinsky.) In addition, just war theory requires that the risks of doing more harm than good with a war must be minimal. But with this invasion those risks cannot be dismissed lightly. Let's look at some of those risks. First, on the diplomatic front, a unilateral war against Iraq--or even one with our viceroy Tony Blair on board--would drive a wedge between the United States and many of its allies in Europe and around the world. The German government has already said it would not support such an adventure. The French are not enthusiastic. Nor are the Canadians, the Russians, and the Turks. And Saudi Arabia, whose kingdom--all right, whose oil--the United States fought to defend in the first Gulf War, won't even allow U.S. troops to use its land as a staging ground. Egypt and Jordan are also opposed to this war. This would be the second Muslim nation the United States has invaded in the last two years. Scenes of innocent Iraqis being killed on Al Jazeera will not, it is safe to say, enhance the image of the United States in the Muslim world, an image already badly, badly smeared by Ariel Sharon's offensive against the Palestinians and the 11-year embargo the U.S. insists that the U.N. impose on Iraq, an embargo that has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi kids. Bush can prattle on as long as he wants about the United States not being at war with Islam or the Muslim world, but after a while, many in that world will find the argument harder and harder to swallow. What will this mean? Well, for starters, the despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt, stooges of the United States, may lose their grip on power if the U.S. invasion galvanizes what Robert Fisk calls the sleeping Arab masses. Hard to see how that would be in the interests of the United States, as Bush defines them. And secondly, the more brutal the United States appears in the Muslim world, the more likely it is that suicide bombers will come to roost in the United States. It's a warning that we ignore at our peril. On the economic front, another war against Iraq is sure, in the short term at least, to spike the cost of oil, since Iraq is a leading oil supplier, and since other big oil suppliers--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran --are right next door. Now our economy is already in difficult straits. The invasion of Iraq could tip it back into recession. On the military front, and here's a sobering irony, Bush's invasion may actually increase the odds that Saddam Hussein would use chemical or biological weapons. Bear with me here. Back in 1991, he had chemical or biological weapons loaded onto missiles. Bush the Elder warned Saddam that if he used those weapons, he would face devastating retaliation. Everyone, including Saddam, understood that to mean the U.S. would drop a nuclear bomb on him. So what did he do? He backed down and didn't use those weapons. But today, Bush the Younger is making it quite clear that Saddam is going to be a goner, so Saddam has no incentive not to throw whatever vials of chemical or biological weapons he might have lying around at U.S. troops or at Israel. Brent Scowcroft made this point in his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on August 15. "Saddam would be likely to conclude he had nothing left to lose, leading him to unleash whatever weapons of mass destruction he possesses." This could inflict awful casualties on U.S. troops or Israeli civilians, and then what? Then, the worst case could come true and George W. could drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq, the first time in 57 years that the world has seen such a hideous device used in warfare. The lesson of 1991 should be that Saddam Hussein knows not to use his chemical or biological weapons. What evidence is there that he's more reckless and suicidal today than he was back in 1991? He hasn't recently invaded another country. He hasn't recently gassed the Kurds or the Iranians (which he did, it must be noted, when he was receiving military intelligence from the United States). He is still in that box that Colin Powell said he was in just a few months ago. He hasn't exactly been jumping out of it. The difference is, Bush is more eager than ever to go to war against him. As the President's popularity drops, and as the corporate scandals erode Republican strengths, Bush has a crass political imperative to do something popular. And, in the short term, wars boost a President's popularity. Plus, Bush and Cheney are overwhelmingly concerned about the control of world oil supplies. "Middle East oil producers will remain central to world oil security" in the coming decades, said last year's Cheney Report on energy. And in his speech before the VFW on August 26, Cheney noted that Saddam Hussein has "a seat atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves." Cheney added that if Saddam acquires weapons of mass destruction, he "could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East [and] take control of a great portion of the world's oil supplies." Back in 1991, the peace movement had a slogan: No Blood for Oil. It's a slogan that's even more relevant today. Now Bush is dreaming of an antiseptic war, a quick strike that would topple the regime at little cost. This is the so-called "Baghdad First" strategy, but I doubt it will succeed. Instead, it could very well lead to some gruesome door-to-door fighting. And let's remember, Baghdad is a city of more than three million people, and they aren't all named Saddam Hussein. This is the biggest reason to fear Bush's invasion of Iraq, whether it's Baghdad First or Baghdad Last: It is likely to lead to the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of innocent Iraqis. It is a fundamental moral precept that every human being is of equal value. We, in the United States, cannot turn our eyes from the great mass murder the United States could be committing by waging this war. It is the arrogance of empire to even contemplate such an act. If you're opposed to this war, for any of the reasons I've sketched just now, I urge you to do whatever you can, nonviolently, to express yourself. Yes, write your Senators and Representative. But also talk to your friends, family members, neighbors, colleagues. You'd be surprised how many people agree with you that this war in the making is a fool's and a bully's errand. And don't stop there: You and those who agree with you should organize rallies, teach-ins, and demonstrations in your community, at the nearest high schools and colleges, and in the union halls and churches and mosques and synagogues close by. Bush wants to take us off a cliff. And it's up to us to stop him, using our words, our arguments, our morality, and our nonviolent activism to prevent this horrendous war before it starts. And we must do it together. One person is a crank. Two persons a curiosity item. Three persons a cabal. Four persons a sect. But ten people, and you've got a decent picket line. A hundred people is a good demonstration. And a thousand people: that's practically the Paris Commune. As the great poet and essayist June Jordan, who died just a few months ago, wrote: "We are the people we've been waiting for." Peace! -- Matthew Rothschild <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxzinn082802.html> What War Looks Like In all the solemn statements by self-important politicians and newspaper columnists about a coming war against Iraq, and even in the troubled comments by some who are opposed to the war, there is something missing. The talk is about strategy and tactics, geopolitics and personalities. It is about air war and ground war, weapons of mass destruction, arms inspections, alliances, oil, and "regime change." What is missing is what an American war on Iraq will do to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings who are not concerned with geopolitics and military strategy, and who just want their children to live, to grow up. They are not concerned with "national security" but with personal security, with food and shelter and medical care and peace. I am speaking of those Iraqis and those Americans who will, with absolute certainty, die in such a war, or lose arms or legs, or be blinded. Or they will be stricken with some strange and agonizing sickness that could lead to their bringing deformed children into the world (as happened to families in Vietnam, Iraq, and also the United States). True, there has been some discussion of American casualties resulting from a land invasion of Iraq. But, as always when the strategists discuss this, the question is not about the wounded and dead as human beings, but about what number of American casualties would result in public withdrawal of support for the war, and what effect this would have on the upcoming elections for Congress and the Presidency. That was uppermost in the mind of Lyndon Johnson, as we have learned from the tapes of his White House conversations. He worried about Americans dying if he escalated the war in Vietnam, but what most concerned him was his political future. If we pull out of Vietnam, he told his friend Senator Richard Russell, "they'll impeach me, won't they?" In any case, American soldiers killed in war are always a matter of statistics. Individual human beings are missing in the numbers. It is left to the poets and novelists to take us by the shoulders and shake us and ask us to look and listen. In World War I, ten million men died on the battlefield, but we needed John Dos Passos to confront us with what that meant: In his novel 1919, he writes of the death of John Doe: "In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of John Doe, the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki." Vietnam was a war that filled our heads with statistics, of which one stood out, embedded in the stark monument in Washington: 58,000 dead. But one would have to read the letters from soldiers just before they died to turn those statistics into human beings. And for all those not dead but mutilated in some way, the amputees and paraplegics, one would have to read Ron Kovic's account, in his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, of how his spine was shattered and his life transformed. As for the dead among "the enemy"--that is, those young men, conscripted or cajoled or persuaded to pit their bodies against those of our young men--that has not been a concern of our political leaders, our generals, our newspapers and magazines, our television networks. To this day, most Americans have no idea, or only the vaguest, of how many Vietnamese--soldiers and civilians (actually, a million of each)--died under American bombs and shells. And for those who know the figures, the men, women, children behind the statistics remained unknown until a picture appeared of a Vietnamese girl running down a road, her skin shredding from napalm, until Americans saw photos of women and children huddled in a trench as GIs poured automatic rifle fire into their bodies. Ten years ago, in that first war against Iraq, our leaders were proud of the fact that there were only a few hundred American casualties (one wonders if the families of those soldiers would endorse the word "only"). When a reporter asked General Colin Powell if he knew how many Iraqis died in that war, he replied: "That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in." A high Pentagon official told The Boston Globe, "To tell you the truth, we're not really focusing on this question." Americans knew that this nation's casualties were few in the Gulf War, and a combination of government control of the press and the media's meek acceptance of that control ensured that the American people would not be confronted, as they had been in Vietnam, with Iraqi dead and dying. There were occasional glimpses of the horrors inflicted on the people of Iraq, flashes of truth in the newspapers that quickly disappeared. In mid-February 1991, U.S. planes dropped bombs on an air raid shelter in Baghdad at four in the morning, killing 400 to 500 people--mostly women and children--who were huddled there to escape the incessant bombing. An Associated Press reporter, one of the few allowed to go to the site, said: "Most of the recovered bodies were charred and mutilated beyond recognition." In the final stage of the Gulf War, American troops engaged in a ground assault on Iraqi positions in Kuwait. As in the air war, they encountered virtually no resistance. With victory certain and the Iraqi army in full flight, U.S. planes kept bombing the retreating soldiers who clogged the highway out of Kuwait City. A reporter called the scene "a blazing hell, a gruesome testament. To the east and west across the sand lay the bodies of those fleeing." That grisly scene appeared for a moment in the press and then vanished in the exultation of a victorious war, in which politicians of both parties and the press joined. President Bush crowed: "The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian peninsula." The two major news magazines, Time and Newsweek, printed special editions hailing the victory. Each devoted about a hundred pages to the celebration, mentioning proudly the small number of American casualties. They said not a word about the tens of thousands of Iraqis--soldiers and civilians--themselves victims first of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and then of George Bush's war. There was no photograph of a single dead Iraqi child, no names of particular Iraqis, no images of suffering and grief to convey to the American people what our overwhelming military machine was doing to other human beings. The bombing of Afghanistan has been treated as if human beings are of little consequence. It was been portrayed as a "war on terrorism," not a war on men, women, children. The few press reports of "accidents" were quickly followed with denials, excuses, justifications. There has been some bandying about of numbers of Afghan civilian deaths--but always numbers. Only rarely has the human story, with names and images, come through as more than a flash of truth, as one day when I read of a ten-year old boy, named Noor Mohammed, lying on a hospital bed on the Pakistani border, his eyes gone, his hands blown off, a victim of American bombs. Surely, we must discuss the political issues. We note that an attack on Iraq would be a flagrant violation of international law. We note that the mere possession of dangerous weapons is not grounds for war--else we would have to make war on dozens of countries. We point out that the country that possesses by far the most "weapons of mass destruction" is our country, which has used them more often and with more deadly results than any nation on Earth. We can point to our national history of expansion and aggression. We have powerful evidence of deception and hypocrisy at the highest levels of our government. But, as we contemplate an American attack on Iraq, should we not go beyond the agendas of the politicians and the experts? (John le Carré has one of his characters say: "I despise experts more than anyone on earth.") Should we not ask everyone to stop the high-blown talk for a moment and imagine what war will do to human beings whose faces will not be known to us, whose names will not appear except on some future war memorial? For this we will need the help of people in the arts, those who through time--from Euripedes to Bob Dylan--have written and sung about specific, recognizable victims of war. In 1935, Jean Giraudoux, the French playwright, with the memory of the first World War still in his head, wrote The Trojan War Will Not Take Place. Demokos, a Trojan soldier, asks the aged Hecuba to tell him "what war looks like." She responds: "Like the bottom of a baboon. When the baboon is up in a tree, with its hind end facing us, there is the face of war exactly: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig." If enough Americans could see that, perhaps the war on Iraq would not take place. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Howard Zinn, a columnist for The Progressive, is the author of "A People's History of the United States." (This column will be part of the upcoming October 2002 issue of The Progressive magazine.) <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wx082802.html> Cheney's Oily Rhetoric Dick Cheney's big speech on Iraq was an act of rhetorical desperation. He called Saddam Hussein a "mortal threat," and "as grave a threat as can be imagined." And then he whipped out the tattered analogy between Iraq today and Germany and Japan in the 1930s. A few facts might be in order here. The United States has a $400 billion Pentagon budget; Iraq's military budget is about $4 billion. The United States has thousands of nuclear weapons; Iraq doesn't have one yet, much less the means to deliver it. And even if Iraq obtained one nuclear weapon or two, would that present a "mortal" danger to the United States? Remember, the United States managed to survive for four decades against an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at us. (Cheney also mentioned that Saddam "has already shown his willingness to use" weapons of mass destruction. But he didn't note, for obvious reasons, that the United States was giving Saddam material intelligence and advice at the same time he was using chemical weapons against the Iranians in the 1980s.) Iraq is no "mortal threat" to the United States, and I doubt Saddam Hussein is amassing weapons of mass destruction to use in a first strike against us, as Cheney suggested. Saddam Hussein knows full well that if he attacked the United States, he would be wiped out. He has already proven that he is not suicidal. Back in 1991, during the first Gulf War, the United States warned him that if he used his chemical and biological weapons, which he had on hand, he would face annihilation. And so he didn't use them. There's no reason to believe he's more suicidal now than he was then. He is barbaric, yes; but he's a power monger. The more realistic threat that concerns Cheney and the Bush Administration is Saddam's control over oil. Cheney mentioned that three letter word in a key passage when he said that Saddam has "a seat atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves." With weapons of mass destruction, "Saddam Hussein could be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, [and] directly threaten America's friends throughout the region." Back in 1991, the peace movement had a slogan: No Blood for Oil. It's an even more relevant slogan today. Cheney also revealed that the Bush Administration really has no interest whatsoever in returning U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq, even though these weapons inspectors did more to identify and destroy Saddam's weapons program than all the bombing during the Gulf War, and even though our European allies urgently want those inspectors back in. Said Cheney: "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with U.N. resolutions." The U.N. has not deputized the United States to enforce those resolutions with a war, but the niceties of the U.N. don't concern the Bush Administration, which has shown no interest in going to the Security Council to seek authorization for the coming U.S. aggression. Any war by the United States without Security Council approval would violate the U.N. charter, which the United States is a signatory to. Nor does Cheney take his legal obligations to uphold the U.S. Constitution seriously. He said the Administration would "consult widely with the Congress." But that's not what the Constitution requires. Article 1, Section 8, says only Congress has the power to declare war. The Bush Administration is preparing to take the country down a lawless road to war. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of innocent people could die along the way. We need to be clear: The Bush Administration has no right, under international law or the U.S. Constitution, to wage this war. And conjuring up a "mortal" threat to the United States is the worst kind of scare tactic. -- Matthew Rothschild _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk