[wgscott]

Our Responsibility to Oppose Attacking Iraq


William Scott

Copyleft, 2003


http://homepage.mac.com/smorourke/mystuff/anti_war.html


Those opposed to the US attack on Iraq, both in the United States and abroad, are frequently characterized by their critics as being the functional equivalent of 1938 Nazi appeasers. _Anti-war activists, according to this analysis, are unwilling or intellectually incapable of understanding the true nature of the Iraqi threat to world peace. _Their vacuous analyses are said to resort to naive sloganeering like "give peace a chance" or "give the UN weapons inspectors a chance" in place of intelligent, unemotional, critical thinking. _Opponents of the war seem reluctant to answer this attack head on. I would like to do so now.

Implicit in the accusation that anti-war protesters are fascist appeasers are several assumptions that deserve to be stated explicitly and examined for whatever merit they might possess. _These assumptions include:


1. _The upcoming attack on Iraq is the moral equivalent of the Allied invasion of Normandy that helped to bring about the demise of Nazi Germany.

2. _Iraq is playing the role analogous to that of Nazi Germany in 1938, the United States is playing the role of anti-fascist protectorate, and the anti-war crowd are the nervous Nellies.

3. _The anti-war crowd fails to realize the extent to which Saddam Hussain has inflicted horrors upon Iraqis and their neighbors.

4. _Iraq possesses so-called "weapons of mass destruction" that, along with its violation of UN resolutions, legitimize a US (or nominally UN) attack upon the country.

5. _Morality and International Law require us to attack Iraq.



Each of these is a dangerously misleading presupposition. _Each of these assumptions is also demonstrably false.


Assumption #1:

By 1943, the Nazi German war machine had conquered much of Europe and had installed Fascist governments, and had invaded a large portion of the Soviet Union. _The Nazis were well on their way to exterminating over six million Jews in death camps as well as 20 million Slavs in various contexts. _The moral case for Allied intervention was clear, and indeed there was an urgent need to stop a massive Holocaust underway as well as to thwart further Nazi invasion plans.

By 2003, the essentially fascist (or national socialist) Ba'ath Party remained in control of Iraq, ruling its people with all of the benevolence of a typical US-supported and financed Latin American torture and terror state (eg, Guatemala from 1953 to the 1990s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Nicaragua prior to 1979, Colombia from the 1950s to today, etc.). However, Iraq had not attacked another country since being driven from Kuwait in 1991, had not undergone a significant military buildup since its military forces were decimated in 10 years of war with Iran and then crushed in 1991, and had not undertaken a large-scale extermination campaign since those of March 1991 conducted with full US complicity. _Indeed, no evidence has been produced to suggest Iraq had any plans to attack or invade any of its neighbors. _The Iraqi population had been subjected to 12 year of economic and military sanctions that have left the civilian population decimated from starvation and disease.

Hence the claimed analogy between Iraq in 2003 and Nazi Germany is completely fraudulent.


Assumption #2:

There is no doubt that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussain is essentially a fascist, murderous police-state. _The Iraqi government clearly rivals in this respect those installed by the United States in Iran (under the Shah), in Guatemala, in El Salvador, in Nicaragua, in Colombia, in South Korea, in South Vietnam, in Indonesia, etc. both in terms of its brutality and repression and in terms of the death toll the dictator inflicts upon his own population. _We are constantly reminded, in fact, that Saddam Hussain used poison gases on his "own" people (where the term "own" should be understood in the same way as in the context of Pres. Andrew Jackson exterminating his "own" Native American Indian population.)

The United States, however, has been at war with Iraq continuously since (at least) January 17, 1991. During this period, the United States has killed in Iraq more than 100,000 people during the 1991 phase of the bombing campaign, has then killed well in excess of 600,000 children (a 1997 UNICEF figure) thanks to the starvation and lack of medical aid imposed by the "sanctions," has killed many thousands more during the greater than weekly aerial bombardments between 1991 and now, has permitted (with US complicity) the murder of over 50,000 Shi'ites and Kurds in 1991, and will likely kill many hundreds of thousands more Iraqi civilians as the US military plans to destroy Baghdad (pop. 4.8 million) with over 400 cruise missiles on the first day of resumption of the high-intensity bombardment.

It has become increasingly clear that the main goal of this war that has been waged since 1991 has been to depopulate Iraq, and to render the next generation physically stunted, diseased from plutionium-contaminated depleted uranium dust, and mentally retarded due to malnutrition._ The next phase of bombing could see Iraq (and possibly the United States) unleash biological and chemical weapons._ If this happens, the US response will likely include a nuclear retaliation._ Apparently the US desires the Iraqi oil fields to be in a low population density country similar to Saudi Arabia._ A decimated Iraqi population will likely offer little resistance to oil exploitation in the next 100 years._ A massive and truly horrific war crime is about to unfold with the upcoming resumption of bombing and invasion.

Hence it is clear that while neither country possesses a monopoly on evil, the scale of the extermination that the United States has inflicted upon the Iraqi people is several orders of magnitude greater than anything that Saddam Hussain has been able to accomplish with his charnel house dictatorship. _That is quite an accomplishment, and it places the United States government in a position in which its many apologists for the upcoming war are in fact more accurately compared to fascist appeasers than are the anti-war protesters. _In an honest world, the architects of the first bombing campaign as well as the sanctions would have a free trip to the Hague.

Again, the assumption that the anti-war protesters are akin to fascist appeasers can be dismissed as completely spurious. The United States simply has no claim to the moral high ground in Iraq.


Assumption #3:

If death tolls are any measure of the horror inflicted upon neighbors, it is worthwhile to assess what Iraq did to Iran and Kuwait and to compare this to how the United States has behaved in its good neighbor policy. In the case of the United States and the countries it interacts with, over 2,000,000 were killed in South-East Asia during the Vietnam war, over 750,000 were killed by Indonesia in its US-financed anti-communism campaign and its subsequent US-authorized invasion of East Timor, over 150,000 were killed in Guatemala with US aid and complicity, another 75,000 in El Salvador, another 45,000 in Nicaragua, another 100,000 in Colombia, etc. _Saddam Hussain is clearly an amateur when it comes to extermination campaigns.

Two of Saddam Hussain's worst reported crimes consisted of gassing the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and exterminating Kurds and Shi'ites in the uprisings that took place in March of 1991. _How did the United States react to each of these? _

In the case of the gassing of Kurds, the US response was actually to increase economic aid to its then ally, Saddam Hussain. _Even now, when Iraq is the official enemy of the day, Tony Blair's "dossier" of Iraqi human rights violations curiously omitted any reference to the Iraqi gassing experiments of 1980 in which 5,000 men and women held in detention camps were used for experiments with gas and biological warfare agents. _This was quite possibly Saddam Hussain's single worst Crime Against Humanity. _It is likely unmentionable because this gassing was done with the full complicity of its then ally, the United States, who also supplied the ingredients for these experiments to Saddam Hussain. _(Robert Fisk, Independent, 13 December 2002).

In the case of the Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings in March of 1991, Pres. George H. W. Bush encouraged rebellion and then refused to supply any military assistance to either the Shi'ite or Kurdish populations. _The rebels in fact only asked for access to captured Iraqi military hardware, but even this was denied. _Saddam Hussain's brutal suppression of the rebellion was conducted with full knowledge and complicity of the United States.

The proponents of the attack upon Iraq are therefore are in no position to claim that those opposed to the attack have ignored Saddam Hussain's ruthlessness. _Rather, they are in fact complicit in covering up some of his worst crimes.


Assumption #4:


The cliché "weapons of mass destruction" is now routinely invoked to describe Iraq's arsenal, whatever it may be. _To date, no evidence has yet emerged that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons. _Iraq has possessed both chemical and biological agents, but in this respect is hardly unique. _In fact, the United States government has supplied various biological and chemical agents to Iraq, including anthrax, west nile virus, and various materials for the manufacture of chemical weapons, so presumably the fact that Iraq possesses materials given to them by the United States is hardly newsworthy, and it is quite disingenuous to claim that suddenly Iraq poses more of a threat to the world than it did in the 1980s when the US supplied these materials and Iraq made use of them.

It is of course no more possible to prove that Iraq no longer has any chemical or biological weapons of any type in some corner of that country (or even out at sea) than it is to prove that God does not exist without checking every corner of the Universe. _But the whole premise somehow misses the main point, which is that the entire "threat" posed by the so-called Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" was simply dreamed up and announced one day less than a year ago, with not a shred of documentary evidence, as the single largest threat to world peace since World War II. _The impossible burden of proof has been shifted to the Iraqi government. _If inspectors find these weapons, Iraq must be attacked. _If the inspectors do not find these weapons, it demonstrates the Iraqis are simply hiding them, so Iraq must be attacked. _The unstated presupposition is that these weapons must exist, so Iraq must be destroyed. _Within the confines of this Salem Witch Trial idiot-logic, the need to attack Iraq follows axiomatically from a premise whose truth cannot be assessed. _Even if inspectors find a biological, chemical or even a nuclear weapon tomorrow, the United States is no more justified in attacking Iraq than they would be in attacking Israel. _Israel of course does not officially possess nuclear weaponry, because doing so would violate the non-proliferation treaty and would make it illegal for the United States to supply them with economic or military aid. _Even ignoring this legal fiction, it is worth recalling that Israel, with full US backing and complicity, has repeatedly violated large numbers of UN resolutions. with impunity. _The response of the international community, notably, has not been to launch bombing raids and an invasion of Israel. _It does not logically or morally follow that violations of UN resolutions must lead to wars.

Hence the attack on Iraq cannot be justified on the basis of Iraq's possession of certain types of weapons and its violation of UN mandates. _The real motives must therefore be different from (or additional to ) those claimed falsely as justification. _The UN is however justified in destroying any such dangerous weapons found in Iraq, or in any other country, including North Korea, the United States and Israel.



Assumption #5:




As just noted, Iraq's alleged possession of chemical or biological weaponry and its violation of UN resolutions hardly qualifies as unique. _Nonetheless, we must examine whether International Law permits an attack upon a country based upon the presupposition that the country might, at some future date, pose a military threat to other countries. _This has in fact been done, and in essence, the United States would be in violation of international law by mounting an attack on Iraq unless Iraq had attacked the United States or one of its allies, or could at least prove that such an attack was imminent.





However, this analysis can be taken further by examining the Nuremberg Principles. _Crimes Against Peace include "(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; _(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)." _Hence the United States is currently committing Crimes Against Peace by planning and preparing for a war of aggression.





In addition, "Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law." _Because of this, those who argue in favor of a war of aggression against Iraq are in fact also committing Crimes Against Peace. _The Nuremberg Principles also state that you are complicit in such a crime if you are in a position to stop it but instead do nothing to prevent it. _It therefore follows that actively preventing the war, through protest or whatever other means are available, is legally incumbent upon those who choose to avoid violating International Law.





Hence, morality and International Law, far from requiring participation in an attack upon Iraq, in fact require US citizens act in such a way as to prevent the attack from occurring.