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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 2003)
PAX AMERICANA DAVID McLIMAS BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion .. and you shall allow him to make war at pleasure. -ABRAHAM LINCOLN “Remember I can do anything to anybody." -CALIGULA Martin Luther King Jr. sadly and ironically said that “Wait” almost always means “Never”. For him deferment of civil rights was generally perpetual, but there is a more positive possibility to wait’ meaning ‘never’ and this regards the impend ing war with Iraq. Rather than failure and frustration this would be the best possible result of wait’ signifying 'never'. The USA is aimed like an arrow or nuclear missile at Iraq and millions of people all over the world are probably waiting for invasion as it waited for Hitler in the summer of 1939 to start World War 2 The desire to invade Iraq is of course for dominance of the vast Iraqi oil resources. We need oil if we are to dominate the world. Oil is power. In the short term, with oil beginning to run dry the U.S. government is determined to secure the nation’s grasp on Middle East oil supply to maintain its position as the world’s last superpower. The causa belli for the Bush administration’s impatience to invade Iraq is Saddam Hussein’s imputed possession of so-called “weapons of mass destruction" — which seem closer to launch against the USA every speech and press conference even though their existence has not been verified. The certainty among the Bushies that Hussein does have these weapons is because his father George Sr. (who was vice-president) and Ronald Reagan (president) supplied many of DENIS BOURLAND DENIS C. BOURLAND 1932—2003 them including poisonous and deadly biological weapons such as anthrax and bubonic plague back in the 1980s during the Iraq-Iran war These were hastily given to Hussein because of fears that Iran threatened Iraq on the Basra front which was believed would destabilize Kuwait, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia and jeopardize U.S. oil supplies. Piously harsh accusations by the Bushies that Hussein has used those weapons, such as anthrax and other biocides on Iranians and Kurds, are shrilly hypocritical. Bush anointed his doctrine of preemptive war last summer in a speech at West Point and hoped to unilaterally initiate it on Iraq. However United Nations Security Council resolutions do not allow preemptive assaults on nations, even if they are in violation of those resolutions. Bush Jr. has changed beasts for us to hate, switching from Osama bin Laden to Hussein to justify sending in the troops, hundreds of thousands of whom have been deployed tq the Middle East and await the red flare. Hussein is compared to the 20th century’s worst citizen Hitler (which originated with the elder Bush to stimulate support for the first Persian Gulf War a dozen years ago); even the infamous old Russian czar Ivan IV, known as “The Terrible" has been conjured up as a Hussein doppelganger. But Bush himself imitates Joseph McCarthy who never revealed the names of “known communists” he claimed to have in his possession, insisting that he knows exactly where sites of weapons of mass destruction are in Iraq but that they must be kept secret for “interests of national security.” Bush complains about nations such as Iraq and North Korea attaining weapons of mass destruction as if the USA’s PEACE! PEACE! LOVE You should love LOVE not hate. Hate is bad LOVE ftand so is war. LOVE 9^/ do not like war. LOVE ^Many people have LOVE Vlost their lives in war. LOVE JPThey should stop LOVE 1?having war. We should LOVE 1?be free from war LOVE JFand those that LOVE JFwant war made a bad LOVE ^decision. LOVE 1?No more war LOVE 1?No more war LOVE 1?No more war LOVE 1?No more war at all. -LILY DEUFEL (AGE 7) RIVERLEA enormous stockpiles of nukes, biocides and chemical weapons are benign; yet he implicitly flexes them in every manifesto, which detrimentally hardens responses. Hussein especially, will probably unleash everything he’s got if the U.S. invades, which will of course determine once and for all if he indeed has the disputed weapons. Hussein’s son has said publicly that if the U.S. gets “honest" and admits it “wants our oil, we'll sell it to you. It's for sale. You don’t need to kill anybody to get it." TV networks in the U.S. seemed to have deleted that part of his statement in their broadcasts, concentrating on his bravado remark that if the USA invades Iraq, the response will make “the twin towers seem like a picnic.” And despite assertions by Bush that Iraq is an ally of Osama bin Laden and the al-Quaida terrorists, nothing has emerged that would hold up in court. As with his claim of proof of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, his allegations of Hussein’s links with terrorists are freighted with innuendo and doubletalk. The Bush administration’s refusal to sanction the World Court makes a mockery of its insistence upon international pursuit and prosecution of terrorists (and other “political criminals"), and also serves in a sense as acover for other nations the ICC might be interested in investigating, such as Israel and Pakistan. Rather than secularize and treat terrorists as inter national criminals to be captured and tried before the world court, the Bush administration has raised 9/11 to an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil that Osama bin Laden would surely admire; he has been transfigured from an ideological psychopath into a comic book Satan who must be destroyed by Captain America. Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 has been manipulated as a rallying cry for revenge and war: “You're either with us or against us," Bush declared to the world’s nations. It is not our values but their abandonment the terrorists attacked on 9/11. Terrorism has risen from our political, military and financial support of repressive jingoistic regimes in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. As it is, we use up much more of the world’s resources than any other country (and more than many countries combined), and the people whose wealth we appropriate are denied their equable shares, which makes them upset with us and often quite desperate. The real fight against terrorists and terrorism is to remove their justification for it and to do that the USA must be more modest in its worldly ambitions yet not succumb to its habitual isolation. Between Romanesque imperialism and retreats to a cave, the U.S. has the capacity if not quite the will to act as a leading world citizen in the best sense of a benevo lent country squire. We can manifest a little real socialism (meaning society) combined with authentic communism (community) and utilize our prized capitalism (the ideology of money) to help alleviate the poverty and injustice that shadows humanity. We have the power to do as we always claim to do — we can, like our comic book superheroes, use our force for good. There are, after all, a few more responsibilities to world hegemony than national and personal glorification. As citizens of the last superpower it is our responsibility to curb its excesses of power and cupidity to prevent the global wretchedness that culminates in terrorism. The USA must realize “a decent respect to the opinion of mankind," as Thomas Jefferson said, and also understand that national interest in a democracy “is simply what citizens after proper deliberation say it is” (Joseph Nye on Jefferson) rather than the “blinkered" perspective" of the current national security advisor who thinks the U.S. should “proceed from the firm ground of national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community." For all his contradictions and intellectual fancies, Jefferson had a powerful grasp and insight into the workings of government, which he said was “only a framework in which humans may interact without killing each other." 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