| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"GODS CREATOR" |
| Date: |
08 Apr 2004 07:37:57 PM |
| Object: |
- THE BEGINNING OF THE END - |
RE-POST OF "- LITTLE HITLER -" <OIL_MOB@yahoo.com>
By Robert Scheer, AlterNet
April 6, 2004
It is the beginning of the end for the United States in Iraq. No
amount of glib optimism from Bush administration soothsayers can
conceal that reality. Sure, the U.S. possesses the military might to
hang on indefinitely, but only through the continuous sacrifice of
lives in a reckless venture that never had an honestly stated purpose.
Now that thousands of rioting Shiites have been added to the
persistent Sunni insurrection targeting the U.S.-led occupation, it is
absurd to define the enemy as only foreigners or agents of the
captured tyrant Saddam Hussein. The "coalition" forces are the
foreigners, in fact, and the U.S.-financed quisling local government
fools no one, regardless of the planned "handover" of power.
Under the false conceit that the adventure made sense as part of the
fight against terror, the U.S. seized a country containing a major
portion of the world's most valued and scarce resource. Yet our
leaders expect the natives to believe that the corporate camp
followers of the U.S. military are only swarming over their country
for the purpose of humanitarian reconstruction.
Just how dumb do we think they are? After all, Iraqis know their own
tortuous history. Theirs is a country patched together at the end of a
gun barrel by previous colonizers. The common denominator of those
imperial designs was the exploitation of oil rather than the desire to
produce a harmonious, let alone democratic, society.
Nor does the U.S. have clean hands. During the Cold War, Washington
tried to break any government or leader in the region unwilling to
bend to its will, including popular nationalists Mohammed Mossadegh in
Iran and Abdul Karim Kassem in Iraq. Never heard of Kassem? He's the
guy the CIA hired young Hussein and other unsavory thugs to overthrow
(and then kill) because he dared to challenge the strong U.S. role in
the region after World War II.
And so it goes. Hussein's rule emerged from U.S. inability to allow
yet another country to find its own way, just as Al Qaeda was blowback
from our "freedom-fighting" team in the cynical Cold War proxy
conflict that destroyed Afghanistan. The only link between Osama bin
Laden and Hussein is that they are both monsters of our creation.
To its credit, the U.S. is also the nation that genuinely sought to
advance the Mideast peace process under every recent president until
George W. Bush. From Jimmy Carter through the first President Bush to
Bill Clinton, the U.S. aimed to undermine the region's irrational and
fundamentalist forces with a genuine peace between Palestinians and
Israelis. For once, the United States deserved high praise for
attempting to mitigate rather than exploit the grievances that have
left the region a breeding ground for terrorism and rage.
Yet, under the current administration, this good-faith effort has been
discarded, further disillusioning U.S. friends in the Mideast and
stoking the fire of those in the region who spew hateful rhetoric
against Jews and "infidels."
And even when that rhetoric again manifested itself in violence with
the deadly attacks on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, it was of bare
interest to then-candidate Bush. He rarely referenced terrorism during
the campaign and, the record is now clear, all but ignored the Al
Qaeda terror threat in the months leading up to the attacks on 9/11.
Instead, his focus was the irrelevant target of Iraq, defanged by 10
years of sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections but still possessing
huge reserves of black gold. Few in the rest of the world, least of
all the Iraqi people, are buying the administration's current line,
that the prime goal of the occupation is simply to turn Iraq into a
good place to live.
Consequently, while it would be great if that country were to end up
in the column of democratic societies, the tragic events of recent
days once again remind us that it is an outcome made less likely by
each additional day we presume to know what is best for the rest of
the world – and we impose those views with our awesome military power.
Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us
About Iraq.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18345
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