This
is the focus. On this campaign. On who won which debate. Or on
whether the occupation of Iraq is a colossal failure or not.
What
is lost is, why isn’t it being debated why the man who
currently resides in the White House (when he isn’t at his
ranch in Crawford, Texas) went to great lengths to sell the
invasion to the American people.
First,
by the inculcated message that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda.
Not one link has been found to prove this, a fact even Mr. Bush
himself had to admit over a year after the occupation began when
he said, “We, we, we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein
was involved with the September the 11th.”
Second,
by his insistence that there were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq. “[Saddam Hussein] possesses the most deadly arms of our
age,” said Mr. Bush. Meanwhile the US itself maintains the
largest stockpiles in the world of nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons and not one shred of evidence of the existence
of the aforementioned has been found in Iraq. At this point,
unless they are planted there, it seems highly unlikely that a
single weapon of mass destruction will turn up in Iraq prior to
the election.
Have
the American people forgotten this while they have been so
enthralled with the debates?
Remembering
Cheney’s Ties
The
current man sitting as the Vice President of the United States,
Dick Cheney, is also partaking in the political debates. He,
too, supported the myth of weapons of mass destruction when he
said, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons
of mass destruction.” Of course, he also has other dark ties
to the debacle in Iraq that the corporate media have chosen so
carefully to continue to overlook during the election campaign.
Although many people in America are unaware of the neocon agenda, people in Iraq know it by heart. |
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Ties
like the fact that after the first Bush was defeated in the 1992
election, Dick Cheney left the Defense Department and within
three years became the CEO of Halliburton. Between the years
1995-2000 and under his supervision, Brown and Root, a
subsidiary of Halliburton, accumulated $2.3 billion in
government contracts. This figure nearly doubled the amount the
company earned from government contracts during the five years
prior to Cheney’s arrival at the CEO position.
One
of the methods Halliburton used to generate the nearly 100
percent increase in profits under Cheney’s reign was to
rebuild the oil fields of Saddam Hussein—the same oil fields
which Cheney was instrumental in destroying while he was
secretary of defense of the Bush Sr. administration.
Who
will remember the conflict of interests this man maintains to
this day while watching him debate Mr. Edwards?
While
he continues to deny ties to Halliburton, his old company
continues to profit from the occupation in Iraq today by
building, supporting, and maintaining military bases throughout
Iraq. There are four permanent bases being built in Iraq right
now—in Ar-Rutbah, Irbil, Baghdad and Basra—while the US,
thanks in large part to the maintenance, construction, and
support services of Halliburton, maintains 725 others around the
world.
Empires
Rise…
The
United States of America had the support of every country on the
globe after the events of September 11, 2001, yet, due primarily
to the policies of the Bush administration and a war on the
people of Afghanistan, on February 15, 2003, less than one and a
half years after that massive display of empathy and support,
millions of people around the world marched in protest of the US
plans to invade Iraq.
Today,
anti-American sentiment around the world is higher than it has
ever been.
Now,
fast-forward to April 10, 2004, to a small clinic inside
besieged Fallujah. I spoke with a man there who was managing the
clinic. He hadn’t slept in days because of the incessant
influx of casualties from US aggression.
“For
48 years I believed in democracy and the good spirit of the
American government,” he said while bombs from US warplanes
blasted into yet another part of the city, “but now I know it
took me 48 years to wake up to the fact that they are a brutal,
heartless empire. A government-led empire which cares nothing
about the Iraqi people. It has taken my entire life, but I am
not asleep to this fact any longer.”
This
has become the predominant attitude amongst Iraqis under this
brutal, bloody occupation of their country by the so-called
liberators.
Yet
many people in the United States continue to wonder why the
occupation is going so horribly astray.
Debating
the Ambitions of the Neocons
Another
reason to be considered is the team behind Mr. Bush.
We
mustn’t forget that behind Mr. Bush are the radical
conservatives, commonly referred to as the neocons, who wrote up
their plans for global domination in the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) for everyone to read,
just as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.
Seven
of the authors of the Project for the New American Century now
hold positions in the Pentagon and State Department.
“When you come by terrorism, you create terrorism.” |
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These
men are Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon
Policy Advisor Richard Perle, Deputy Secretary of State Richard
Armitage, National Security Council Elliot Abrams, Under
Secretary of Arms Control and International Security John
Bolton, and Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay
Khalilzad.
In
addition, most of these men have long-standing ties with the
interests of the government of Israel.
Harlan
Ullman of the National War College and author of Shock and
Awe—Achieving Rapid Dominance, a 1996 Advisor Report as well
as the theory of warfare which was adopted and used by the Bush
administration to attack Iraq, wrote, “The aim of modern
warfare is not merely to achieve military victory. But also, by
means of sheer intimidation, to inflict a deep psychological
injury. To scare and terrorize potential rivals into
submission” (emphasis added).
Many
Americans have asked, “Why do they hate us?”
This
theory of warfare used by Mr. Bush and his administration in
Iraq (and Afghanistan) is designed to use “[m]assively
destructive strikes directly at the public will.”
This
advisor report is essentially the application of the doctrine
penned by Paul Wolfowitz, which is a doctrine of both
pre-emptive war and global domination through force. For this
doctrine states clearly that one of the goals for America should
be “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf
oil.”
The
aforementioned neo-conservative members of the Bush
administration are all well aware of the geo-political
significance of southwest Asia for their agenda of global
dominance, as they have written in the PNAC.
The
Shock and Awe advisor report continues, “Intimidation and
compliance are the outputs we seek to obtain. ... The intent
here is to impose a regime of shock and awe through delivery of
instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive
destruction...”
“The
objectives ... are to achieve Shock and Awe and hence compliance
or capitulation through very selective, utterly brutal and
ruthless, and rapid application of force to intimidate.”
The
place in which this country has found itself today was predicted
long ago by someone right here in the United States. “A nation
that continues year after year to spend more money on military
defense then on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death,” warned Martin Luther King.
Americans
are now seen as hypocrites, liars, and a savagely brutal
imperial power the world over.
Yet
here inside the American bubble it is all too easy to languidly
slip into the comfortable anesthesia that is American life for
so many: Work, eat, watch a debate, talk some politics, and then
get some sleep.
Run
out and rent a movie if it gets too heavy.
Meanwhile,
the rest of the world is infuriated and completely distrusting
of the US. In Iraq, car bombs, civilians being bombed by US
warplanes, 70% unemployment, electrical outages, medicine
shortages, and Hepatitis E outbreaks have become the daily
reality.
When
I recently asked him if he was OK, a friend of mine in Baghdad
said, “It is hard because each day the list of my friends who
have been killed grows longer.”
Empires
Fall…
“I
was against Saddam,” said a man in the Al-Adhamiya district of
Baghdad this past May. “I was jailed by his regime in 1996 for
making pastries because sugar was being rationed due to the
sanctions. But the US policy now in Iraq will fail 100%! No
people here support them now.”
He
took a deep breath after this and calmly, yet firmly stated,
“The managers of the US policy here are not clever people.
When you come by terrorism, you create terrorism.”
Although
many people in America remain unaware of the neocon agenda
driving the Bush administration, people in Iraq know it by
heart.
This
is another reason why instead of watching debates or wondering
which movie to rent, the vast majority of Iraqis want the US
military out of Iraq, even at the risk of a possible civil war.
As
a man in Baquba told me in June, “If you have two wounds,
first you treat the one which is causing you the most pain. We
must first deal with the occupiers, then we will sort out our
other problems.”
The
United States of America was led into an illegal war by the lies
of a radical neoconservative-backed administration, which has
led to over 13,000 Iraqi civilian casualties, over 1,000 dead US
soldiers, a once sovereign country in shambles, and an ongoing
military presence that is costing the US taxpayer $1.1 Billion
per week. This is what should figure into the debate.
That
is, if any of the candidates running for president or vice
president will concern themselves with the truth.
Dahr Jamail is an American freelance journalist who visited and reported from Iraq April - June 2004
