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What should America do with Saddam?
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So this month’s big question, according to the Bush administration, the television and the New York Times, is: What should we do with a ruler who is so evil and so self-righteous that nothing will prevent him from vying for world domination? With someone who scorns world opinion by invading foreign countries?
What should we do with a nation that refuses to allow other countries to inspect, regulate or destroy its weapons of mass destruction, has murdered civilians, funded terrorists, maintained elite terrorist-producing training camps, flouted international law, refused to recognize rulings of the World Court and ignored or vetoed strong U.N. resolutions calling on it to obey international law?
What should we do with a nation that has made itself the enemy of democracy and freedom by overthrowing democratically elected governments, funding the murder and torture of political dissidents, and repressing minorities within its own population? What should we do with such a rogue state and its ruler?
Indeed, what should we do with the United States of America and its leader, George W. Bush?
For despite our lonesome ranger’s ferocious, if not grammatically correct, proclamations, the U.S. has acted in the above ways to the letter. And in the process, we have shattered our integrity. The question we should be asking (because much of the rest of the world is) is this: What shred of credibility do we have to do anything at all in regards to Iraq?
Lest we forget, it was the United States that knowingly enabled Mr. Hussein to carry out his worst atrocities at Halabja in March 1988, when he murdered 3,200-5,000 innocent civilians using chemical weapons. It says so right in the Senate’s record.
According to a 1994 U.S. Senate Committee Report, during the 1980s the U.S. exported Bacillus Anthracis (cause of anthrax), VX nerve gas, botulism and a host of other biological and chemical warfare agents to Iraq, as well as “chemical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment and missile-systems programs.”
All of this at the peak of Hussein’s most ravenous crusades – never, before or since, has he been more of a threat to his neighbors and the world.
Furthermore, it was the current Bush administration’s official, Donald Rumsfield, who was crucial in establishing and maintaining the ties with Baghdad that opened the floodgates of chemical doom.
Serving as Middle East Envoy to Ronald Reagan in 1983, Rumsfield delivered a hand-written letter from the president to Hussein explaining that Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations at any time (ties between the nations had been severed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war).
One year later, in March of 1984, amidst confirmed U.N. and U.S. State Department reports of Iraq’s use of “lethal chemical weapons” (e.g. mustard gas) in its war with Iran, Rumsfield returned to Baghdad for diplomatic talks with then-Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.
The New York Times reported of the meeting that “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name.” They would remain so at least until 1989.
Today, Rumsfield tours the publicity circuit singing warmonger cantatas about how dangerous Saddam is, while his boss intones foreboding backup harmony with sound bites about “American” values.
Where were they 15 years ago when Saddam was actually using chemical weapons to murder innocents and combatants right under their noses? Why is it that only now, when Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been thoroughly eradicated (according to Scott Ritter, Republican and former head of UNSCOM) and its population ravaged by war and years of sanctions that Saddam is suddenly identified as an intolerable menace?
It’s simple: Bush needs a lifejacket.
The fact is, he and his cronies have failed – breathtakingly. Their “free-market” religio-economic system has been desecrated by its own corruption, excess and ineptness (see: Enron, WorldCom, rolling blackouts in California, Argentina, et al.). Their foreign policy has “blownback”, tragically, in their faces; the stovetop at home is chock-full of boiling Cheney/ Bush scandals and rising citizen tempers and the Bushies don’t have a leg to stand on.
Luckily for them, they don’t need one. They get to sit in air-conditioned conference rooms launching pretty fireworks that amuse, distract and awe the crowds – as working-class U.S. soldiers and innocent Iraqis speed to their deaths.
And sadly, many of us “educated” norteamericanos are going to wave our flags and cheer them on, because that’s the new American way.
It’s not patriotic to furrow our brows and cock our jaws at a time like this. To ask our leaders tough questions about justice or self-interest is sedition. It fractures our unity. It’s partisan politics. It’s un-American.
Bullcrap. It’s conscience and it’s principle. It’s rejecting the Brave New World of G. W. Bush and his violent, rich friends because it’s a dangerous, unjust place – for me, for you, for Iraqi children, for everyone.
To resist tyranny is American. Where then, are the patriots?
Nate Williams
