Columnist – John Sammon
I vividly recall John F. Kennedy just a month before his assassination telling Walter Cronkite something to the effect that, “what is great about this country is, that we don’t have to import our way of life onto other countries by the use of force.”
This was just moments before he said what had to be the most chilling of all ironies, that “in Vietnam, we can’t fight their war for them. We can help them, but they have to do the fighting.” In light of what eventually happened, it makes you sick.
Now comes a Newsweek Magazine cover-page headline trumpeting “Victory at Last, The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq.” The headline makes me sick.
Iraq is a war crime. A genocide. Initiated under false pretenses. A million-and-a-half Iraqis were killed in this obscenity, not to mention several-thousand Americans. Here are ten reasons why Newsweek is wrong:
1. Whatever Iraq is, right now, at this moment, is only because it’s backed up with American guns. Pull American troops out, and what have you got? A mystery. The notion that once American troops pull out the puppet regime we set up will be “Democratic,” and that once we pull out the country will remain peaceful, is presumed and wishful thinking at best, downright delusional at worst.
2. To maintain control in Iraq, we have to stay, and rule it as a colony like Puerto Rico.
3. We killed 1.5 million Iraqis, most of them innocent people including women and children, in a war that was launched to take out weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. As it became clear they didn’t exist, the government kept changing the reasons for the war, from a crusade to end violence in Iraq, to a noble exercise to establish Democracy. This ignored the reality; the war was planned long before 9-11 as a regime change to get rid of a troublesome dictator we had formerly befriended, supplied and encouraged, and to grab his oil.
4. If dishonesty and stupidity don’t mean anything to you, you won’t mind the above.
5. Iraq was a dangerous advancement in the power of the “Imperial Presidency” and a diminution in the influence of Congress and the American people. The irony is the war was led by the Republican Party, the party that in the past was renowned for its mythologizing the favoring of small government, and non-intervention in the entangling affairs of other countries. The opposite is true.
6. What the above means is that whereas America, even though it often didn’t do so in practice in the past, at least paid lip-service to the desirability of going to war only in defense. Instead, it now views war as a casual foreign policy tool. Any small, poor country whose leadership we don’t like for reasons true or false can be attacked and a million of its people killed. The American people and the Congress will go along with it whether it’s right or wrong. The appropriate justifications will always be made.
7. For example, let’s attack Cuba, a thorn-in-the-side of presidential administrations since 1960. It’s un-Democratic. Let’s kill a million Cubans in a war we start, and set up a friendly puppet regime that reinstates Mafia gambling. We can start the war by saying they were stockpiling secret weapons and then change the justification later when it’s proven otherwise.
8. Iraq proves that American Democracy is vulnerable, to a scheming, lying, crooked demagogue and his henchmen. We saw in Iraq, water-boarding torture of prisoners held without trial in secret camps in foreign countries, ignoring the Geneva Convention and illegal wire-tap spying of American citizens. It’s very possible that in the near future, with another unscrupulous president, if you’re a critic of the government, there could be a knock on your door at midnight, and you disappear.
9. Iraq was proof that in the end, Senator Joe McCarthy was the heart and soul of the real America, and that his chicanery was vindicated. It will be a country in which all you have to do to those with whom you disagree is to question their loyalty and brand them subversives. We have learned nothing from past mistakes. That comes with the corruption of unlimited power.
10. Establishing Democracy by the use of force in an attack initiated by the Democracy, is not Democracy. It’s rather a Pseudo-Demo-Fascist-Hierarchy hybrid, in which the alleged benefits of freedom are enforced at the point of a gun, not choice, the freedom of which is central to the definition of a Democracy. In other words, an oxy-moron promoted by morons.
ALL OF THIS IS A VICTORY TO NEWSWEEK!
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