Tuesday February 4, 2003
The Guardian
There's never been a time that I can think of when there's been such
massive opposition to a war before it
was even started. And the closer you get to the region, the higher
the opposition appears to be. In Turkey
polls indicated close to 90% opposition, in Europe it's quite substantial.
In the United States the figures you see in polls, however, are quite
misleading because since September
there's been a drumbeat of propaganda trying to bludgeon people into
the belief that not only is Saddam a
terrible person but in fact he's going to come after us tomorrow unless
we stop him today. And that reaches
people.
They have to terrify the population to feel there's some enormous threat
to their existence and carry out a
miraculous, decisive and rapid victory over this enormous foe and march
on to the next one.
Remember the people now running the show in Washington are mostly recycled
Reaganites, essentially
reliving the script of the 1980s. So one year it was an airbase in
Grenada which the Russians were going to
use to bomb the US. Nicaragua was "two days marching time from Texas".
Nicaragua might conquer us on
its way to conquer the hemisphere. A national emergency was called
because of the threat posed to national
security by Nicaragua.
I don't want to suggest that they have no reasons for wanting to take
over Iraq. Of course they do.
Controlling Iraq will put the US in a very powerful position to extend
its domination of the major energy
resources of the world. That's not a small point.
North Korea is a different case. What they are demonstrating to the
world with great clarity is that if you want
to deter US aggression you better have weapons of mass destruction,
or else a credible threat of terror.
That's a terrible lesson to teach, but it's exactly what's being taught.
In this particular case you can't predict what will happen once a war
starts. In the worst case it might be what
the intelligence agencies and the aid agencies are predicting - namely
an increase in terror as deterrence or
revenge, and for the people of Iraq, who are barely on the edge of
survival, it could be the humanitarian
catastrophe of which the aid agencies and the UN have been warning.
On the other hand, it's possible it could be what the hawks in Washington
hope - a quick victory, no fighting
to speak of, impose a new regime, give it a democratic facade, make
sure the US has big military bases
there, and effectively controls the oil.
The chances that they will allow anything approximating real democracy are pretty slight.
One major problem is that 60% of the population roughly is Shiite. If
there's any form of democratic
government, they're going to have a say, in fact a majority say, in
what the government is. Well they are not
pro-Iranian but the chances are that a Shiite majority would join the
rest of the region in trying to improve
relations with Iran and reduce the levels of tension generally in the
region by reintegrating Iran within it.
That's the last thing the US wants. Iran is its next target.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003