It is human nature to look for historical parallels and references. Indeed, a parallel was readily available – Junior Bush’s war could have easily been described as a sequel to ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ (the post 9/11 global war on terror) or ‘Operation Desert Storm’ (the codename for Gulf War I, when the US was merely talking of ‘liberating’ Kuwait and not Iraq as yet). But around the world, people immediately remembered a much more sinister parallel. Bush’s declaration of war on Iraq reminded people of Hitler’s proclamation of war on Poland on 1 September 1939. The ‘shock and awe’ strategy sounded so ominously close to the Nazi blitzkrieg.
Fascism or Nazism is the term that is increasingly being used to describe Bush’s militarist mission to create a unipolar world where the words of an American President would be the ultimate global law. It has become impossible to treat Iraq as an isolated instance, everywhere people are looking at it as just a test case, as a trial run. As the CNN and BBC discuss the possible theatre of the next war, the world wars are back in public discussion. Indeed, Mr. James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA has described the present war as World War IV – he treats the cold war as the third world war – and has warned that “this fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us.”
While Mr. Woolsey is candid enough to put the present war in perspective, he downplays the greater similarities of the present war with the Second World War scenario than with the framework of cold war. Indeed the complete contempt shown by the Anglo-American axis for the UN takes us back to the pre-UN situation, that is to say, to the era of the Second World War. And now with the forcible American occupation of Iraq, the world is increasingly being thrown back to the League of Nations era when victorious powers of World War I used to be granted mandates to administer foreign territories.
Following World War II, the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders had clearly established the framework of international jurisprudence for dealing with wars of aggression: “To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The trials had rigorously upheld the doctrine that “planning and launching an aggressive war is illegal, whatever may be the factors that caused the defendants to plan and to launch (such a war). Contributing causes may be pleaded by the defendants before the bar of history, but not before the tribunal.” The US government knows it very well that it is guilty of waging an absolutely illegal war and this is precisely why it refuses to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.
The only law Washington accepts is the jungle law that ordains ‘might is right’. The only language the US recognises is Orwellian Newspeak: War is Peace. Occupation is Liberation. Plunder is Reconstruction. Washington is also aware that its war on Iraq is bound to attract the inescapable analogy with the role of Hitler’s Germany in the Second World War. This is why American propagandists are now trying to perfect the ‘pre-emptive ideological strike’ by painting Saddam Hussein as Hitler and Ba’athist Iraq as Nazi Germany!
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The Fiction of Iraqi WMDs
During the war on Iraq, US troops claimed to have found a nerve gas facility. When independent journalists took a closer look, they found it was just a pesticide factory!
In the early days of the war, US marines posed for photographs wearing bulky special suits to protect them from ‘chemical and biological’ WMDs. But they never actually used those suits. Clearly, they knew the truth – that Iraq did not have the dreaded WMDs that were one of the major excuses peddled for the war.
The lie stands totally exposed today. After all, the United Nations weapons inspection team did 400 inspections of 300 sites … and found no sign of WMDs. In an interview on April 9, the head of the UN Weapons Inspection Team, Hans Blix, said, “There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their (US’s) attitude to inspections.”
How Supplied Suddam with WMDs?
It is well known that Saddam used chemical and biological weapons against the Iran army and Kurdish civilians. Take a look at where he got his supplies from:
— US multinational Dow Chemicals shipped chemicals to Iraq for use on humans.
— US provided Iraq with ‘crop-spraying’ helicopters to spread the deadly chemicals.
— US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) provided Iraq with detailed battle plans. It drew up the plans for the Iraqi capture of the Fao peninsula, which involved extensive use of mustard gas. Was the US, then, shocked? Did it call the use of such weapons ‘evil’?
DIA veterans of that war programme report that the Pentagon “wasn’t horrified by Iraq’s use of gas”; for them, “It was just another way of killing people – whether with a bullet or by phosphene, it didn’t make a difference!” (Behind the Invasion of Iraq)
— During the Iran-Iraq war, all the samples for strains of germs to make biological weapons were sent to Iraq, by the US’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (!) and American Type Culture Collection. (Times of India, 2-10-02)
— When Iraq was actually using these WMDs, the US, of course, went all out to protect Iraq from UN intervention or action. In 1982, the US removed Iraq from its list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism’. The US blocked condemnation of Iraq’s chemical attacks in the UN Security Council. The US was the sole country to vote against a 1986 Security Council Statement condemning Iraq’s use of mustard gas against Iranian troops. No wonder – after all, the US was directly helping Iraq to procure it and use it.
The Real WMDs
It is true that throughout the 90s, and during Gulf War II, WMDs were used in Iraq. These WMDs were:
— Sanctions, which claimed the lives of 5,00,000 Iraqi children through diseases, epidemics caused by collapsed civilian infrastructure, and blocking of basic medicines.
— Deliberate Bombing of Civilian Infrastructure: Both in Gulf War I and II, the US army deliberately hit water treatment facilities, hospitals, electricity, waste disposal, etc. … The US did so, knowing what this would cause. In 1991, US intelligence documents clearly recommend bombing of water purification facilities on the grounds that it will cause “epidemics of disease”.
— Radioactive Uranium Deposits: of munitions fired by the US. Since Gulf War I, these caused a drastic increase in cancer, especially leukemia. This time too, fresh uranium deposits will kill Iraqi civilians for years to come.
— Cluster Bombs: These bomblets, spread out in civilian localities, tempt children to pick them up. The result: the little ones’ bodies are riddled with tiny shrapnel, leading to painful death. The cluster bombs left over from Gulf War I continue to kill kids – the fresh ones will do so for several more years.
Clearly, the US’s only policy on WMDs is that it insists on having the right to decide when and where to use them. After all, whether it be against the Red Indians of America, the people of Hiroshima or those of Vietnam: it is the US which is responsible for most of the chemical, nuclear or biological weapons used in the world.
