Oil Addiction: The World in Peril - 32
by Pierre Chomat (Universal Publishers, 2004)
translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder
Part IV. Our Suicidal Quest for Energy
Chapter 32. Imperial Attack
On March 20 2003, the coalition launched its first missile strike on a building in Baghdad purportedly housing a meeting of Saddam Hussein and his advisors. A few moments later, President Bush read a televised statement announcing the start of the preventive war: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly. Yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and their friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime."
Thus began the America's attempt to destabilize Iraq in order to funnel its riches to the "Empire of the Oil Addicts" and to secure continued access to its "drug".
The missiles that were officially aimed at Saddam Hussein did not reach him. The so-called meeting probably never existed except in White House press releases; surely President Bush would not try to execute a sitting head of state for violations that had yet to be proven! After all, the official justification for launching the preventive war was Iraq's possession and concealment of prohibited weapons, essentially weapons of mass destruction.
In the days leading up to the war, cultural organizations from America and other countries wrote to Bush, imploring him to preserve Iraq's historic sites: "As the cradle of human civilization, the Iraqi territory holds unique artistic, historic, archaeological and scientific evidence of the birth of the very civilization of which our Nation forms a part". {53} The coalition apparently got the message; cultural sites were spared from bombing. On April 10 2003, a televised and subtitled George Bush addressed the Iraqi people, referring to them as "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity". {54} But at the very moment he was pronouncing these words, the Baghdad Museum, the National library, and the Mosul Museum were being looted from top to bottom, their doors forced open by well organized thugs taking advantage of the fact that the sites had been left unguarded. The thieves made off with several thousand precious and unique artifacts. The Pentagon, which had thoroughly prepared the military attack, had omitted the names of these museums from the list of buildings to be protected after the invasion. At the time of their pillaging, US Marines had already occupied the Oil Ministry for some time, although it did not contain any items of critical importance.
This apparent disregard for culture on the part of those responsible for the invasion was picked up by the world press. The general sentiment was summed up well by two archeologists: "Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said: 'You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale?'" {55} Fortunately, Selma Nawala, Director of the Baghdad Museum, had taken the precaution of placing 8,000 archeological artifacts in safe keeping prior to the hostilities. Nevertheless, more than 3,000 museum pieces were lost. {56}
The greatest instance of cultural plundering in Iraq's history, however, remains that of the European archeologists who uncovered the ancient sites in the 18th and 19th centuries and helped themselves to the nation's artifacts in order to fill their own national museums - in particular, the British Museum in London, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and the Louvre in Paris. Nevertheless, the looting of Iraq's museums after the US invasion deeply shocked the international community. The White House has said virtually nothing about it.
On May 01 2003, President Bush announced that the United States' mission had been accomplished. The coalition army had lost just over a hundred soldiers, one hundred too many, of course, but still fewer than the number of people who die each year as victims of violence in the city of Washington DC alone. The deaths on the Iraqi side, civilian and military, were probably one hundred times as great. No one really counted them, but they were some ten thousand too many. A significant number were killed by anti-personnel fragmentation bombs, which are not considered to be weapons of mass destruction but, in reality, are.
The giant American oil addict had just hooked one of its fierce tentacles into Mesopotamia and now it would try to shape that land's future according to its interests.
The White House's plans were followed to the letter: all Baath party members had to resign from their occupations. Iraq's army was dissolved, its police force dismembered, and its government dismantled. It is no exaggeration to say that the country was stripped of its civil institutions. Neither the Persian Empire's Cyrus the Great, nor the Roman Empire's Julius Caesar, nor the Ottoman Empire's Selim I had so completely destabilized the societies that they annexed. Even the Germans, when invading France in 1940, did not take such a serious risk.
Those who understand the cultural and religious diversity of Iraq and the delicate balance that existed between its different religious and ethnic groups might even regard such a destabilizing act as an inducement to civil war, a true crime against any nation. It is difficult to know whether Iraq's society was destroyed deliberately, with full knowledge of the risks, or out of ignorance. Whatever the case, the invader's arrogance was unmistakable.
At the time, George W Bush was still basking in the glory of his Afghanistan operation. He had accomplished there in just a few days what the powerful Russian army had not managed to do in many years of combat. Perhaps this gave him a sense of innate invincibility that he believed exempted him from having to face reality, "Truth" being on his side.
Essentially, the American attitude toward colonization had not changed much in fifty years; it had simply become more aggressive. It is worth recalling here the words of the British representative to Jeddah in 1944: "Among American businessmen and in the Republican Party there are fairly clear ideas about a system of informal empire by which the United States would control economic resources without formal annexation". According to these principles, American egosystems are not supposed to look like egosystems. They must be discreet and only be revealed, if at all, under the guise of development tools offered in an atmosphere of free trade. By no means should they give the impression that America is influencing the politics of the country being exploited! Thus, the American government had to avoid the appearance of meddling in Iraq's internal affairs while at the same time doing everything possible to ensure the country's future enslavement to its corporations.
The coalition quickly established an administration in Baghdad led by an American "proconsul". In early July, it appointed an Iraqi Governing Council consisting of 25 members who would govern the country for an interim period under the authority of the US administrator for Iraq. The Council represented the diversity of Iraqi society in broadly proportionate terms: thirteen Shiites, five Sunnites, five Kurds, one Christian and one Turkmen. Three of these new dignitaries were women; sixteen were returning from exile. To the outside world this Council appeared very democratic, despite the fact that it had no legitimacy. To the Iraqi people, it was a puppet organization set up to satisfy the concerns of Western intellectuals.
The United States then asked the interim Iraqi Governing Council to select one of its members as President of Iraq. Unable to settle on just one, the Council, on July 28, established a nine-member rotating presidency composed of five Shiites, two Sunnites and two Kurds, each of whom would assume leadership of the country for a month at a time. A sort of presidential merry-go-round had been added to the circus.
The White House, which had based all of its plans on the assumption that a pro-US president would take things rapidly in hand, had just received its first wake-up call. But the diluted authority of the rotating presidency was not an entirely unwelcome development; it had the advantage, at least, of justifying the coalition government's continued presence in Iraq.
This show of democracy was designed to obscure the fact that Iraq would actually have no choice but to accept the will of the United States. No other nation believed for a moment that the political system being installed in Baghdad was for the good of the Iraqi people. Yet many Americans have a hard time believing that the rest of the world sees these political maneuverings as a hypocritical charade. Americans' absolute belief in the moral values espoused by their country often prevents them from objectively analyzing the response to their government's actions around the globe. They have even greater difficulty putting themselves in the place of the Iraqi people, victims of this unjustified war, who continue to suffer its consequences. If Americans could picture for a moment what it was like to live in Iraq during the invasion of 2003, they might have a very different view of what the United States has done.
Try to imagine, if you will, that you live in Texas and that an oil-addicted superpower from the other side of the world has just anchored its battleships off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico. Now imagine that this superpower subjects the state to massive bombardment, followed by an armed invasion, all because its president believes that your governor should allow it to pump out all the Texas oil that it desires. Imagine also that, during this invasion, the superpower destroys any edifice whose use or function it deems questionable, and that, after killing tens of thousands of your fellow citizens, it takes your governor and his deputies prisoner and replaces them with puppets. Imagine that this superpower dismantles the police force and other institutions charged with keeping order and that it decrees that the 4th of July is no longer a national holiday! And all of this under the pretense of establishing democracy!
This scenario might seem incredible, but it is exactly what the Iraqis have experienced at the hands of their Anglo-American "liberators". Of course, one could always say that this would never happen because the United States is already a democracy and, because its leaders have never behaved as tyrants like Saddam Hussein, an armed invasion by another country would never be justified or necessary. But it is by no means certain that the people of Iraq consider George W Bush to be any less dangerous than Saddam Hussein. Many Middle Easterners are far more aware of the unstated intentions of the giant American oil addict than are their American counterparts, and were so long before the invasion of March 2003.
Notes
{53} Letter dated 16 April 2003, to President George W Bush by the American Anthropological Association, Arlington, Virginia.
{54} Frank Rich, "Operation Iraqi Looting", New York Times, 27 April 2003.
{55} Ibid.
{56} "Actualites", Sciences et Avenir, September 2003, Paris, France: 22.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
translated from the French by Pamela Gilbert-Snyder
Part IV. Our Suicidal Quest for Energy
Chapter 32. Imperial Attack
On March 20 2003, the coalition launched its first missile strike on a building in Baghdad purportedly housing a meeting of Saddam Hussein and his advisors. A few moments later, President Bush read a televised statement announcing the start of the preventive war: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly. Yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and their friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime."
Thus began the America's attempt to destabilize Iraq in order to funnel its riches to the "Empire of the Oil Addicts" and to secure continued access to its "drug".
The missiles that were officially aimed at Saddam Hussein did not reach him. The so-called meeting probably never existed except in White House press releases; surely President Bush would not try to execute a sitting head of state for violations that had yet to be proven! After all, the official justification for launching the preventive war was Iraq's possession and concealment of prohibited weapons, essentially weapons of mass destruction.
In the days leading up to the war, cultural organizations from America and other countries wrote to Bush, imploring him to preserve Iraq's historic sites: "As the cradle of human civilization, the Iraqi territory holds unique artistic, historic, archaeological and scientific evidence of the birth of the very civilization of which our Nation forms a part". {53} The coalition apparently got the message; cultural sites were spared from bombing. On April 10 2003, a televised and subtitled George Bush addressed the Iraqi people, referring to them as "the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity". {54} But at the very moment he was pronouncing these words, the Baghdad Museum, the National library, and the Mosul Museum were being looted from top to bottom, their doors forced open by well organized thugs taking advantage of the fact that the sites had been left unguarded. The thieves made off with several thousand precious and unique artifacts. The Pentagon, which had thoroughly prepared the military attack, had omitted the names of these museums from the list of buildings to be protected after the invasion. At the time of their pillaging, US Marines had already occupied the Oil Ministry for some time, although it did not contain any items of critical importance.
This apparent disregard for culture on the part of those responsible for the invasion was picked up by the world press. The general sentiment was summed up well by two archeologists: "Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said: 'You'd have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale?'" {55} Fortunately, Selma Nawala, Director of the Baghdad Museum, had taken the precaution of placing 8,000 archeological artifacts in safe keeping prior to the hostilities. Nevertheless, more than 3,000 museum pieces were lost. {56}
The greatest instance of cultural plundering in Iraq's history, however, remains that of the European archeologists who uncovered the ancient sites in the 18th and 19th centuries and helped themselves to the nation's artifacts in order to fill their own national museums - in particular, the British Museum in London, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and the Louvre in Paris. Nevertheless, the looting of Iraq's museums after the US invasion deeply shocked the international community. The White House has said virtually nothing about it.
On May 01 2003, President Bush announced that the United States' mission had been accomplished. The coalition army had lost just over a hundred soldiers, one hundred too many, of course, but still fewer than the number of people who die each year as victims of violence in the city of Washington DC alone. The deaths on the Iraqi side, civilian and military, were probably one hundred times as great. No one really counted them, but they were some ten thousand too many. A significant number were killed by anti-personnel fragmentation bombs, which are not considered to be weapons of mass destruction but, in reality, are.
The giant American oil addict had just hooked one of its fierce tentacles into Mesopotamia and now it would try to shape that land's future according to its interests.
The White House's plans were followed to the letter: all Baath party members had to resign from their occupations. Iraq's army was dissolved, its police force dismembered, and its government dismantled. It is no exaggeration to say that the country was stripped of its civil institutions. Neither the Persian Empire's Cyrus the Great, nor the Roman Empire's Julius Caesar, nor the Ottoman Empire's Selim I had so completely destabilized the societies that they annexed. Even the Germans, when invading France in 1940, did not take such a serious risk.
Those who understand the cultural and religious diversity of Iraq and the delicate balance that existed between its different religious and ethnic groups might even regard such a destabilizing act as an inducement to civil war, a true crime against any nation. It is difficult to know whether Iraq's society was destroyed deliberately, with full knowledge of the risks, or out of ignorance. Whatever the case, the invader's arrogance was unmistakable.
At the time, George W Bush was still basking in the glory of his Afghanistan operation. He had accomplished there in just a few days what the powerful Russian army had not managed to do in many years of combat. Perhaps this gave him a sense of innate invincibility that he believed exempted him from having to face reality, "Truth" being on his side.
Essentially, the American attitude toward colonization had not changed much in fifty years; it had simply become more aggressive. It is worth recalling here the words of the British representative to Jeddah in 1944: "Among American businessmen and in the Republican Party there are fairly clear ideas about a system of informal empire by which the United States would control economic resources without formal annexation". According to these principles, American egosystems are not supposed to look like egosystems. They must be discreet and only be revealed, if at all, under the guise of development tools offered in an atmosphere of free trade. By no means should they give the impression that America is influencing the politics of the country being exploited! Thus, the American government had to avoid the appearance of meddling in Iraq's internal affairs while at the same time doing everything possible to ensure the country's future enslavement to its corporations.
The coalition quickly established an administration in Baghdad led by an American "proconsul". In early July, it appointed an Iraqi Governing Council consisting of 25 members who would govern the country for an interim period under the authority of the US administrator for Iraq. The Council represented the diversity of Iraqi society in broadly proportionate terms: thirteen Shiites, five Sunnites, five Kurds, one Christian and one Turkmen. Three of these new dignitaries were women; sixteen were returning from exile. To the outside world this Council appeared very democratic, despite the fact that it had no legitimacy. To the Iraqi people, it was a puppet organization set up to satisfy the concerns of Western intellectuals.
The United States then asked the interim Iraqi Governing Council to select one of its members as President of Iraq. Unable to settle on just one, the Council, on July 28, established a nine-member rotating presidency composed of five Shiites, two Sunnites and two Kurds, each of whom would assume leadership of the country for a month at a time. A sort of presidential merry-go-round had been added to the circus.
The White House, which had based all of its plans on the assumption that a pro-US president would take things rapidly in hand, had just received its first wake-up call. But the diluted authority of the rotating presidency was not an entirely unwelcome development; it had the advantage, at least, of justifying the coalition government's continued presence in Iraq.
This show of democracy was designed to obscure the fact that Iraq would actually have no choice but to accept the will of the United States. No other nation believed for a moment that the political system being installed in Baghdad was for the good of the Iraqi people. Yet many Americans have a hard time believing that the rest of the world sees these political maneuverings as a hypocritical charade. Americans' absolute belief in the moral values espoused by their country often prevents them from objectively analyzing the response to their government's actions around the globe. They have even greater difficulty putting themselves in the place of the Iraqi people, victims of this unjustified war, who continue to suffer its consequences. If Americans could picture for a moment what it was like to live in Iraq during the invasion of 2003, they might have a very different view of what the United States has done.
Try to imagine, if you will, that you live in Texas and that an oil-addicted superpower from the other side of the world has just anchored its battleships off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico. Now imagine that this superpower subjects the state to massive bombardment, followed by an armed invasion, all because its president believes that your governor should allow it to pump out all the Texas oil that it desires. Imagine also that, during this invasion, the superpower destroys any edifice whose use or function it deems questionable, and that, after killing tens of thousands of your fellow citizens, it takes your governor and his deputies prisoner and replaces them with puppets. Imagine that this superpower dismantles the police force and other institutions charged with keeping order and that it decrees that the 4th of July is no longer a national holiday! And all of this under the pretense of establishing democracy!
This scenario might seem incredible, but it is exactly what the Iraqis have experienced at the hands of their Anglo-American "liberators". Of course, one could always say that this would never happen because the United States is already a democracy and, because its leaders have never behaved as tyrants like Saddam Hussein, an armed invasion by another country would never be justified or necessary. But it is by no means certain that the people of Iraq consider George W Bush to be any less dangerous than Saddam Hussein. Many Middle Easterners are far more aware of the unstated intentions of the giant American oil addict than are their American counterparts, and were so long before the invasion of March 2003.
Notes
{53} Letter dated 16 April 2003, to President George W Bush by the American Anthropological Association, Arlington, Virginia.
{54} Frank Rich, "Operation Iraqi Looting", New York Times, 27 April 2003.
{55} Ibid.
{56} "Actualites", Sciences et Avenir, September 2003, Paris, France: 22.
Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/
posted by Bill Totten at
8:43 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home