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Iraq
has just been bombed. What Michael Albert has called
an assault on tenth rate troops is commencing. Their
usefulness alone as the guarantors of a new post-Saddam
regime may save them. If not they will be incinerated
like their colleagues on the Basra Highway last time
Uncle Sam came their way. With luck they will refuse
to fight for the thug who happens to be their supreme
commander. With more luck they will refuse to swear
allegiance to the new Saddam - a thug without a moustache
- and police the new state in the interests of the
West and its profiteers.
Those
hopeful of a more benign outcome should consider Nick
Cohen's observation that Colin Powell at the State
Department wants to replace Saddam with a more compliant
dictator and is seemingly backed by Blair on this.
'Ever since Britain created Iraq in the 1920s, the
Foreign Office has wanted a kind of apartheid rule
by a monarch or dictator from the Arab Sunni minority.'
Coming
at it from a different angle Slavoj Zizek dismisses
as nonsense the wishful thinking that conceives of
a repetition of 'Japan in 1945' by democratising Iraq,
which shall then serve as a model for the entire Arab
world, heralding the end of the regime corruption
which is seemingly so endemic to the region. He poses
the following question: 'what about Saudi Arabia where
it is in the vital US interest that the country does
not turn into democracy?'
Earlier
today schoolchildren marched through Belfast to express
their opposition to the war. Good natured but determined,
their smiling demeanour is hardly being replicated
on the faces of Iraqi schoolchildren who were absent
from school today for vastly different reasons. Then
Caoimhe Butterly appeared on television to tell us
that we in Ireland should have no part of it. And
she is right. If only our political class had one
fibre of her integrity. Hard to imagine her dancing
like a prize poodle for Bomber Bill or any other American
president. Brian Feeney had elsewhere pointed out
that 'St Patrick's Day in the USA came early this
year to accommodate George Dubya's plans to begin
redesigning the Middle East'. Our political class
couldn't care less. Our ridiculous pantomime the limit
of their global view, they stampeded over each other
to make the Shamrock party and give the warmonger
a good send off. 'The luck of the Irish be with you
Georgie Boy - Love, Bertie, Brian, Mark, Gerry and
Martin - and Davy too.'
The
US have tried the quick kill approach and get rid
of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein through pre-emptive
assassination. Meanwhile, having escaped unscathed
Saddam has appeared on TV to talk the type of nonsense
we thought only our politicians talked. He urges people
to use the sword and promises that the invaders will
be repelled. Guff, the lot of it. Just as it was last
time around. Threatening that the enemies of the Iraqi
people will go to hell but forgetting to mention that
he will be well up that queue. And if the devil is
as intellectually challenged as the US president,
Saddam may find himself greeted with a 'welcome George
Hussein.'
War
on Iraq but no war on poverty or inequality; nor on
the genocidists leading the Israeli government. Hound
Saddam and play host to Kissinger. Demand to sit in
judgement of others in the Hague but refuse to join
the International Criminal Court and then contemplate
legislation permitting you to storm the Hague and
free any of your own suspected war criminals being
held there. I don't really know what this war about.
The interpretations and spin are endless. But it is
hardly about justice. And It shall be prosecuted with
a ferocity matched only by the hypocrisy that drives
it. We are, after all, reminded by John Le Carre who
knows a thing or two about matters of intrigue that
'If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torture his
citizens to his hearts content. Other leaders do it
every day.' He cited Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey,
Syria and Egypt. None of those five were bombed today.
Rahul
Mahajan has claimed that Bush's twin ultimata, to
Iraq and to the United Nations, constituted the final
and ultimate
declaration of the New World Order. 'It is a frontal
assault on the concept of democracy worldwide.' What
is the point of a United Nations or international
law if the most powerful subvert it and use it only
as a tool to legitimise their own ends?
Writing
last year Richard Falk claimed that if the 'If the
White House defiantly goes ahead with its war plans,
the United States would find itself cast in the role
of being a menace to world order, an enemy of humanity,
as well as being guilty of Crimes Against the Peace
in a Nuremberg sense.'
Ultimately,
this is what stares humanity in the face. Few would
care if every US bomb dropped only on the head of
Saddam. But this is never the way of these things.
Watching a frightened and injured Iraqi child in a
hospital bed minutes ago underscores that the plight
of Iraqi civilians will be crucial to how opposition
to this war is conducted. Those of us opposed to it
from the start should avoid the fatalism produced
by despondency. There is an imperative to now build
on what has already been achieved and work towards
limiting the effects of a war we failed to stop.
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