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by Peter Matthiessen, February 23, 2003 Photos by
Doug Beasley The country today is very much concerned about the young Americans in the military whose lives will be endangered in an attack upon Iraq. But in the event of that attack, who in the White House will take responsibility for the never-mentioned yet inevitable slaughter of Iraqi civilians whose sole offense was getting in the way of a regime change? In our name, a half million human beings are being threatened with death in the next few weeks -- dreadful deaths not unlike those of the victims of 9/11, except that far greater numbers will be burned and crushed and suffocated, and the horror will be painfully intensified by the shrieking of maimed and dying children. Nobody in this closed government, and almost nobody in the compliant mainstream media, is dealing squarely and honestly with this subject.
One can only pray that strategic bluster is at work when a Bush Team official boasts on television of planned "shock and awe" armadas of bombs and rockets --nearly eight hundred in the first two days -- that will effectively remove any impulse to resist, especially in those who have been killed. Bluster
or not, such words can only terrify the essentially defenseless people
who wait in expectant horror for the American Armageddon. And if that
boast has any truth in it, the mortality in Baghdad will be many times
more terrible than Bush War I's grim slaughter of hapless fugitives
along the Basra Road in 1991, when at least one fighter pilot and a
tank commander refused to participate further in a massacre that no
longer had a point. In the military, taking such a stand requires unusual
bravery, and these young men should have been decorated as true heroes
whose moral code spared our country further shame. Should a "holocaust" (Nelson Mandela's very apt term) be ignited by this proposed destruction, the conflagration will be scorched onto the darkest pages of American history. Such slaughter for so suspect a purpose can only be rewarded by grievous shame and an even worse retribution -- terror upon terror that will permeate everyday existence in the western world, as it has in Israel, to a degree that Bush and his mentors clearly have not faced as they go about their war games. The White House seems less interested in the peaceful resolution to an exaggerated crisis largely of its own construction, than in self-justifying rhetoric about freeing the Iraqi millions from the tyrant -- an aging, weakened tyrant not appreciably different from the many brutal and obliging thugs (Saddam among them) whom U.S. governments have propped up and subsidized throughout the past century. The Bush Team promises to install an Iraqi democracy to serve as a beacon to other oppressed peoples in the Muslim states. Will "shock and awe" suffice the Iraqis as their first taste of democracy? Will violent death be their first experience of freedom?
Iraqis
will be made to pay for inhabiting a land with the earth's second-largest
known reserves of oil. Despite endless cant and propaganda to the contrary
(contradicted in To be sure, there are other reasons besides oil -- Saddam's villainous character and record, his unacceptable pursuit of massively dangerous weapons, and his nebulous association with Al Qaeda, for a start. (And on that Al Qaeda allegation rests the Bush Team's justification and excuse, though few authorities have found it to be anything more than a convenience.) Americans, ever more inured to spin and lies, hypocrisy and cover-up, in this corporate-enslaved administration whose path is smoothed by a corporate-owned media, can perhaps be forgiven for not suspecting that a diversion from domestic politics and problems is, in the end, what this crusade is actually about. From now until 2004 we must look hard at everything this administration says, especially its un-American insinuations that anyone who dissents or has no faith in our fine fellows is no patriot, perhaps even a traitor. But a traitor is one who does grave harm to his country, and by far the most harm done to our nation in recent times has been accomplished by the fundamentalist ideological agenda of the "Enron A-team" in the White House. From environmental pillage and the pointed curtailing of civil rights, to huge subsidies of the obsolete fossil fuel industry at the expense of the clean energy the world cries for, and grotesque tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, coupled with the most mean-spirited cutbacks of even modest assistance to the poor, the administration agenda has so far contained something for everyone to deplore. Contrary to its public relations image, this is neither a strong administration nor a moral one. Indeed in its arrogance, its lack of wisdom, and its self-serving ethics, it seems to me the weakest in my lifetime. Before 9/11, less than a year into his presidency, the president was slipping sadly in the polls; since 9/11, swathed in smoke and fire and the American flag, his opportunist administration has buttressed itself by terrorist scare talk and patriotic bullying in a clever and loathsome exploitation of a national tragedy. Let us not permit that tragedy to be compounded by another slaughter of innocents in the Middle East -- or not, at least, until it is made known to the American people just why it is we have "no choice" about it. Whatever one's views on the morality of an invasion whose underlying purpose is to gain control of another country's oil -- Saddam's invasion of Kuwait is one example, but the successive Bush Wars may be others -- the precedent set by a pre-emptive attack upon Iraq may one day be seen as the single most catastrophic blunder in American history.
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