Like Hitler, a mad dash for the oil
He claimed he wanted to avoid a repetition of the appeasement at Munich, and so he gave the world the kind of ultimatum that led inexorably to the guns of August. Instead of being the leader of the free world, he sounded like an Austrian emperor demanding capitulation from the Serbs who had assassinated an Austrian archduke.
But no one really tried to kill his Dad. George W. Bush has been acting truer to the traditions of the “old Europe” his secretary of defense claims to despise than the leader of the New World.
Never has America embarked on such naked aggression, on such brazen imperialist behavior, without even the tiniest fig leaf of morality. In the past century of American world power, one cannot find a case where America acted as it does now.
In 1898 America went to war with Spain to avenge the (accidental) explosion of the USS Maine, claiming at the same time to be liberating the oppressed Cuban people -- only to establish one brutal native regime after another until Fidel Castro came along. Castro may well be the next leader to be deposed -- but only after Hugo Chavez, because Venezuela, like Iraq, has vast reserves of oil which a US president needs to buy a way out of the worst deficit in US history and secure his reelection.
The United States did the same in the Philippines, only to annex a country which had already liberated itself. It invaded Mexico to get Pancho Villa before he became the Mexican masses’ first real president. It invaded Nicaragua when a civil war threatened its interests there, and supported a terrorist campaign to the same end. So in Haiti.
But all the world’s great powers were doing it too: Great Britain, way ahead of the wolf pack, could pretend to be more restrained. But France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, coming late to the table, left all manners and morals behind.
World War I, like World War II, was fought to prevent another world power from commanding the resources of the world outside the continental US. In Korea and Vietnam, the US may have been genuinely misled that the world was on the brink of communist conquest. Yet it faked an attack on a US Navy vessel to justify dropping more bombs on a very poor and very small country than on Nazi-occupied Europe. The US at least fought the first Gulf War to repel an invasion, though US diplomats appear to have encouraged it. Saddam was then America’s favorite mass murderer against Iran.
The catalog of American involvement in international conflicts is spelled out to show where America may be holding fast to its usual economic ambitions and yet gravely departing from the mantle of moral ascendancy with which it has hitherto cloaked its actions.
It holds no such mantle today; it can invoke no credible casus belli; this is not, by any means, America’s finest hour. On the contrary, George W. Bush’s tendentious speech Tuesday morning represents the nadir of international law since Hitler said somewhat the same thing about his invasion of Russia. But Germany at least had the guts to come up against the biggest country in the world. In oil-rich Iraq, the US will be swatting a fly with a cannon. We would be surprised if the US suffered a single casualty outside of friendly fire.
For all that the US President offered only a glib, even petulant, nod toward international opinion; a potent force for good that America helped create during World War II but which it curtly ignored when it became clear that neither bribes nor threats could sway world opinion in America’s favor.
America is going into this war publicly announcing it is even prepared to violate one of the central tenets of its traditional military strategy: the annihilation of the economic strength of its enemy before striking at its armies.
There will be no bombing of the industrial heartland as in Nazi Germany; no strangulation of raw materials as in Imperial Japan; no Agent Orange and carpet-bombing as in Vietnam: all carried out to bring the enemy economically to its knees. Instead there will be a mad dash -- like Hitler’s tanks for the oil fields of Russia. To break the Arab grip on the world’s oil and give it back to Standard Oil in A World Restored, to borrow from Kissinger.
This war is about trading blood for oil. But only Iraqi blood, because the United States and Great Britain will be striking very hard from very vast and therefore totally safe distances -- before taking over the country and milking it dry. For the US fully intends to make the Iraqis pay for the destruction and reconstruction of their country -- the more of one, the more of the other -- to the greater profit of Richard Cheney’s companies.
Bush said it himself in a speech of magisterial simplicity. A speech that very nearly convinced the world, friend and foe, of the sincerity of American motives. That is, if he had not said -- addressing the Iraqi people directly -- for them to steer clear of US troops who may shoot them on sight while urging everyone to secure Iraqi oil.
That’s right. The Iraqi people must take their chances. You can’t pump blood into a Ford Expedition. But Iraqi oil wells should not be put at risk. Bush was just shy of asking the Iraqi people to form a wall of flesh around the oil wells to protect them from a possible scorched-earth policy by Saddam Hussein.
He could have ended with a plea for Iraqi flesh not to get in the way of American bullets. He could have spelled out how a combatant had only to raise his arms to be spared. But no. He saved the best for oil.
When the trenches filled with burning oil have burned themselves out; when some Iraqi puppet has been selected to pose like a blinking Hirohito next to a general who will be no MacArthur but just a security guard of Halliburton; when the same children trotted out to wave at Saddam Hussein do the same for gum-chewing G.I.’s., and the world is told that freedom has come to Iraq and this is shown by mustachioed Iraqi politicians giving American proconsuls the kiss of peace -- then, yes, the world will know that America has brought one conflict to a swift and successful conclusion and started a conflagration throughout the region.
The Americans point to Germany and Japan as examples of how liberation and freedom can be imposed on those who do not want it. Yet they forget that these same people, particularly the Germans, have learned the meaning of freedom and democracy so well they will not, for any price, consent to a war that owes more to the imperialist and racist history of a European legacy successfully exported to America but which they have outgrown, than the brave new world that exists only in Bush’s imagination.
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