Bush’s war against Iraq about power, not freedom

By Ali Moossavi

University Wire

George W. Bush is trying to wage war against Iraq in order to
topple a dictator who poses a threat to his neighbors and the
world, despite his diminished political and military importance. Is
that a good reason for it? No, but it doesn’t matter.

It’s a funny thing how three presidents ““ George
Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and now George W. Bush ““ dedicated
themselves wholeheartedly to dislodging Saddam Hussein and
installing a more “democratic” regime while ignoring
other undemocratic governments. It’s even funnier considering
most American allies in Europe and the Middle East oppose such a
war. But that doesn’t matter either.

First, it was George Bush, the father: a former CIA head in the
1970s who helped South American dictators hunt down and liquidate
leftists and dissidents. He prides himself on
“liberating” Kuwait from the threat of force ““
even though he spent the next 42 days invading the country.

Thousands of dead Iraqis don’t matter though. What
mattered was a liberated Kuwait.

While freeing Kuwait and securing the region’s oil supply,
Bush purposely targeted Iraq’s water supply and destroyed
Hussein’s antiquated Soviet-built military. Bush, who coined
the campaign phrase “a kinder and gentler nation,”
proceeded to blockade the country with a program of economic
sanctions.

The U.S. Navy barred basic commodities and supplies from coming
into the country, including medications, food and other raw
materials for production. But that didn’t matter because Bush
said Hussein was the “new Hitler,” and we had to oppose
aggression.

At the same time, Israel occupied Lebanon, actively suppressing
any rebellion in occupied territories.

Turkey was cleansing its southeastern area of Kurds, and Saudi
Arabia expelled about 850,000 Yemeni guest workers.

But none of this mattered to Dubya’s dad.

It didn’t even matter during the previous decade when
Hussein and his army were attacking the sovereignty of Iran, or
murdering and expelling hundreds of thousands of Kurds.

In fact, the United States supplied Hussein with weapons and
military intelligence ““ it was an operation Bush oversaw as
vice president under Ronald Reagan.

But apparently this didn’t matter either, since he was
quick to forget it as soon as he ascended to the presidency.

Then came Clinton: he bombed Baghdad soon after assuming office
under the pretext that Hussein was plotting to assassinate
Bush.

It turned out that the threat was bogus but the bombing killed a
lot of Iraqis anyway.

It didn’t matter when Clinton and his British pals set up
no-fly zones to protect Kurds and Shiites who his predecessor,
Bush, left to be slaughtered by Hussein.

It didn’t even matter that the zones weren’t based
on any U.N. resolution but on a purely arbitrary American and
British initiative.

What mattered was that the zones protected Kurds and Shiites
from Hussein as well as secured the region from the threat his
existence posed. Many Kurds and Shiites were killed in these air
raids, but that didn’t matter to the United States.

Clinton and his cronies stood aside and ignored Iraqi opposition
groups while encouraging a military coup through what then National
Security Advisor Samuel Berger called the most “stringent
sanctions in world history.” It didn’t matter to
Clinton that those sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of
people, especially children under 5 years old, according to the
United Nations, World Health Organization and numerous human rights
groups.

It especially didn’t matter that Clinton further violated
international law when he bombed Iraq in late 1998 because he was
trying to save the world from weapons of mass destruction,
stockpiles that a former CIA agent and weapons inspector Scott
Ritter claimed are non-existent.

So here we are now with a president who is eager to maintain his
post-Sept. 11 popularity and ready to attack a devastated country
because it could pose a threat to its neighbors with weapons of
mass destruction. But does the fact that the war will be used to
distance him from Enron-like scandals really matter?

Does it also matter that Vice President Dick Cheney, who was
secretary of defense during the Gulf War, sold oil-processing
equipment to Iraq as chief of Halliburton during the Clinton years?
Does it even matter that Iraq has the second largest oil reserves
in the Gulf after Saudi Arabia and that it’s
nationalized?

It surely doesn’t matter that no country in the world has
the right to invade another because it doesn’t like their
government.

The coming war will be about power and control, just like all
other ones waged in the name of peace, freedom and security.

That’s what matters.