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."
(Gunderson’s
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