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CounterPunch
September
20, 2002
Why Bush Wants
this War
by
PETER LEE
"Why does a dog lick its own balls?"
the joke goes. "Because he can." And so the justification
for the Iraq war has drifted from urgency to necessity to facility,
and now simple gratification.
The new selling point for the invasion
is that it will be easy and painless. That $200 billion isn't
real money--it's just government budget numbers. And the thousands
of dead aren't real lives--guaranteed 99% foreigners. And it's
good for the economy. It is hard to take Bush's war seriously
as retribution against the murderers of 9/11, or an episode in
an eternal crusade against terrorism, or even as a struggle to
protect us against disgruntled Arab dictators. It's just business
as usual for the world's only superpower.
In fact, in the uneasy calm after Bush's
U.N. speech as U.S. diplomats worked the phones and criss-crossed
the globe to twist arms and grease palms for America's assault,
there was a depressing realization that nothing mattered, that
Bush's decision to attack Iraq was a private affair, made long
before 9/11, and that the real world, the people in it, logic,
and a sense of decency are simply irrelevancies to be contemptuously
bulldozed by Washington's money, arms, and mulish intransigence.
To understand the war fetish, perhaps
we have to look beyond 9/11, beyond the Middle East, even beyond
the precious black crude, to behavior that seems to be genetically
coded into Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan's time.
You might remember Reagan invaded Grenada on rather dubious grounds,
sending a message to the Russkies (and anybody else who might
stand in the way of America's imperial prerogatives) that the
U.S. had shaken off its Vietnam malaise and was back, taking
names and kicking ass. Bush I continued the tradition, invading
Panama to put the kibosh on our proxy-turned-whipping-boy, Manuel
Noriega, and putting Nicaragua and the rest of Central America
on notice that the gringos were back in their backyard heavy
with armament and attitude.
From this perspective, Bush II is simply
working from the same playbook. In this case, the marginalized,
militarily impotent, nuisance strongman to be brutalized by U.S.
forces is Saddam Hussein. The only difference is, the country's
a little bigger and the stakes are a little higher (all that
oil). And in place of the Monroe Doctrine (which, we might remember,
has justified pre-emptive military assaults against our little
amigos in the Western Hemisphere for 200 years), we have the
Bush Doctrine (pre-emptive military assaults everywhere).
It's now abundantly clear that war with
Iraq was on the agenda from the moment Bush was elevated to office.
The war fit very well with the new administration's knee-jerk
repudiation of all things Clinton (peace process in the Middle
East, globalization, diplomatic yack-yack, treaties, the U.N.,
touchy-feely bullshit in general) and would show the world that
the only superpower was back in the war business big-time. Putting
the Middle East oil fields in play with a chance to seize Iraq's
reserves (and wash away any opposition and the consequences of
the inevitable errors or miscalculations with a tidal wave of
crude) was no doubt a strong, additional incentive.
Sept. 11 was seized upon by the warhawks
as a great opportunity to accelerate the Iraq agenda. Ironically,
while the world granted America unlimited license to bomb, arrest,
detain, and mislead in the name of justice, reconciling the facts
of Sept. 11 with the White House's pre-existing, brutishly simplistic
desire to give Iraq a good ass-kicking proved to be an intellectual
burden too heavy to bear. And so the justifications of the war
have grown more extravagant and unrealistic, and the rebuttals
to reasoned concerns more flippant and unpersuasive.
It is almost amusing to hear the escalating
frustration in George W. Bush's voice as he is compelled to come
up with complex rationalizations and forced to schmooze with
Democrats and foreigners in order to do something that should
be as simple and natural as shooting holes in roadsigns from
a pickup--pounding the daylights out of some designated-victim
regime so the world remembers to crap its pants in fright anytime
it sees the American flag.
There are reasons for invading Iraq.
And pretty much all of them under Bush's bomb-happy scenario
are bad ones. But that's just the point. The White House is demonstrating
that facts, logic, domestic and world opinion, and international
organizations offer no protection against American violence.
Bush wants to show the world, war on Iraq may be mean, it may
be stupid, it may be dangerous, it might be deadly, it might
even be catastrophic to our security and interests, but even
so, he wants to say, interrupting his genital lavage on the Oval
Office carpet and favoring us with an angry snarl, I'm doing
it BECAUSE I CAN!
Even those of us who don't get our foreign
policy from bumper stickers and Harley-Davidson t-shirts don't
remember losing lots of sleep after Grenada and Panama. So it's
tempting to look the other way and just grumble in the kitchen
a little bit about the human, civil, and diplomatic risks of
dropping the hammer on Hussein. We might even feel a guilty frisson
of pleasure basking in our government's badass aura of reckless,
pitbull invincibility.
But this time it is different. September
11 did change things, proving that the our no-cost empire is
a delusion promoted by bloodthirsty and greedy bureaucrats. There
is a tremendous human and social cost to America's unilateral
projection of power across the globe, and it is borne both by
the people of the world and the citizens and residents of the
United States. It is not borne, or even acknowledged, by vicious
and cynical leaders who look at the problems of the world and
see only the opportunity for another war.
It is sobering to consider that, on the
anniversary of September 11, George W. Bush's eyes brimmed with
tears for the victims of 9/11, his mouth was filled with the
obligatory platitudes of his speechwriters, but his heart and
mind were filled with thoughts of war on Iraq. It is time for
the nation to pull this feckless leader, and the world, back
from the abyss, stop the war with Iraq, and turn the efforts
and resources of this country from the manufactured threat of
Saddam Hussein to the real challenges of justice, security, and
prosperity facing our world.
Peter Lee
writes for Halcyon
Days. He can be reached at: halcyondays@attbi.com
copyright 2002 Peter Lee
Today's Features
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Goodbye
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Jeffrey St. Clair
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Peggy Thomson
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After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
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William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
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September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
September
17, 2002
Adam Federman
All
That Matters is Oil
Linda S.
Heard
Paranoid
Americans
Hussein Ibish
The Incident
at Shoney's
Francis Boyle
Is Bush's
War Illegal?
Let Us Count the Ways
Heidi Lypps
Bush's
Crackdown on
Medical Marijuana
Riad Z. Abdelkarim,
MD
Why
Do They Hate Us?
September
16, 2002
Wayne Madsen
The Shoney's
Snoop
America's Horst Wessel
Tariq Ali
Debating
Daniel Pipes
on Bush's Wars
Ahmad Faruqui
American
Primacy at Bay
Kurt Leege
Voices
for Peace
M. Shahid
Alam
A New Theology
of Power
Robert Fisk
Bush's War
Dossier:
Blindness, Hypocrisy & Lies
Dave Randall
Mad, Mad World:
J. Edgar Hoover's Obsession with Mad Magazine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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