The Senate just passed a bill that would spend $96 billion for our occupation in Iraq, and the money will only last six months (until the end of the fiscal year), according to The New York Times. And now there is a nonbinding resolution to withdraw our troops on March 31, 2008, in exchange for the dollar. President George W. Bush (easy target these days, but several people still remain fooled) can’t help but throw us the words “liberty” and “terror,” yet he declines to define them. He also hasn’t defined “success” when it comes to our involvement with Iraq. No matter how we define success, we have to ask, “at what cost?” The billions of dollars that could have gone into our public schools? Or the lives of our most fervent citizens? Perhaps we should feel good about ourselves for “liberating” a country from a tyrant, except for the historical evidence that a democracy cannot be given to any nation, especially from a country that can’t function as a democracy itself, due to its obsession with big money. True freedom, in my opinion, starts in the mind, and the first step toward that freedom is awareness that we are not as free as we think.
To understand how our government relates to other countries, we should understand how it relates to us. Though the haves would rather us ignore the growing class war, it is happening. The rich are richer by the day, while the poor are getting poorer, though the mass media and consumerism pacifies them enough that they stay ignorant. Consuming, however, is not what the poor does or even what the decreasing middle class does. They give, and the other takes – money, that is. For a country where the abuse of capitalism is too similar to the abuse of communism, our dictator-in-chief has replaced the PR language from “communist” threat with “terrorist” threat. We once took from other countries, by infiltrating democratically elected societies under the media radar as often as we wished, all the while claiming they were a communist threat. The public and even Congress knew about only a few of them. American “foreign policy,” more appropriately called “foreign expansion,” is not a policy but an expansion of our dollar.
If we really were trying to liberate Iraq, we would have done it the first time we had the chance. Instead, we placed sanctions on them for the “sake of Kuwait,” but really for the sake of oil. What we really wanted to do was to assert our power in countries that abundantly produced our most precious natural resource.
Once upon a time, the United States, France and Britain owned 95 percent of Iraq’s oil revenues, until Iraqis revolted against King Faisal II and established sovereignty. Before the sanctions, Iraq used its oil to import 70 percent of the country’s food and medicine. But we wanted to bring it back to a virtual colony. We wanted to cripple the country by taking away their food and water. We bombed their water plant and their powdered milk factory, vital for the nutrition of babies, according to Frank Dorrel’s video compilation “What I’ve Learned about U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World.”
The U.S. also blocked any chlorine imports that the Iraqis could use to purify the water. The results of these sanctions – mass starvation, dysentery and diarrhea in children – were against the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter for Economic Rights. The last year before sanctions, 1989, the death rate for children was 593. In 1997 it was 4,578, a 672-percent increase. Madeline Albright and Bill Clinton both opposed lifting the sanctions, according to Dorrel.
We have started wars for profit since before the Civil War. In 1846, President James Polk justified the war with Mexico with the claim that Mexicans shed blood on our soil. According to candid historian Howard Zinn, Polk and the slave-owning aristocracy were just greedy for half of Mexico, according to Howard Zinn in “America’s Blinders.” Woodrow Wilson claimed he wanted America to keep its safety and democracy when he brought us into World War I, when really he wanted to lay the foundation for Western imperialism, according to Zinn.
Enter World War II. The nationalist Japanese attacked one of our naval bases and killed 2,403 people, but we did a shoddy job of defending ourselves. Vital intelligence information about the attack surfaced but was never passed to Navy commander Adm. Husband E. Kimmel and Army Cmdr. Walter Scott, Dorell said. In 1933 the U.S. Navy performed a pretend attack on the Pearl Harbor base, which was considered a success, while the defense failed. Yes, the Japanese military was extremely nationalist under Vice Adm. Chuichi Nagumo.
But the United States has serious egocentric problems as well, especially when under Truman, with whom Bush loves to compare himself. We had to hit them where it hurt. Never mind the estimated 140,000 civilians who died in Hiroshima and the 75,000 in Nagasaki. These were attacks on cities, not war, but we gained a quick surrender and whatever else we wanted. Japan was at our mercy at the cost of thousands of nonmilitary lives.
Editor’s Note: This article is the first part of a series. The second part will be in Tuesday’s edition of The Reflector.