Saddam's Evil Didn't Warrant War

By: Dennis Rahkonen

It's very evident the Bush administration fabricated sensationally ominous claims of Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction to manipulatively garner public support for an unprovoked war few would have otherwise accepted.

As the WMD fraud has come apart, it's been accompanied by a mawkish rationale shift suggesting Saddam's well-documented "evil" was - in itself - reason enough to invade.

That's utter nonsense.

If bad or even unequivocally wicked national leadership were adequate basis for some countries to aggress others, the world would be beset by a flurry of ostensibly high-minded invasions sharing the common characteristic of blatantly violating international law and global behavioral norms.

Moreover, like Bush's action, the justifications for those attacks would inevitably be greatly distorted, serving hidden agendas requiring demonizing foreigners to obfuscate real reasons behind objectively unwarranted preemptions.

Republicans are saying the discovery of mass graves in Iraq shows Bush was right in deposing Saddam.

Such graves come as no surprise. Saddam has been consistently brutal since the early 60's when he was plucked from obscurity by our own CIA to injure and kill Iraqi leaders too leftist for Washington's Cold War liking (www.villagevoice.com/issues/0316/mondo1.php).

However, from his bloody beginnings on up to his violent usefulness as our cat's paw against mutual enemy Iran, Saddam's cruel heavy handedness didn't elicit even one peep of moral indignation from those who are suddenly, opportunistically expressing ethical outrage.

3,000 bodies are said to said to be in the most prominently mentioned grave. Most, undoubtedly, are Shiite rebels who launched an armed insurrection against the Baghdad regime at the Gulf War's end in 1991.

The first Bush administration shares heavy responsibility for this slaughter because it encouraged that uprising, then reneged on supporting it.

Wisconsin Public Radio recently discussed the mass graves question, with one listener calling in to make a pair of thought-provoking points:

1. There are mass graves in our own country, at the Gettysburg and Shiloh battlefields, where Confederate soldiers who died in rebellion against our federal government were collectively buried.
   
   
2. Should a foreign-abetted insurrection break out in the United States, George Bush would not hesitate to employ a blood bath to decisively put it down.
   

Further hypocrisy clouds our condemnation of Iraq:

Our country has engaged in many covert and overt interventions in other nations' internal affairs that have resulted in horrific death tolls. For example, some 200,000 Guatemalans perished in the aftermath of the CIA's meddling in that Central American state, something for which President Clinton belatedly apologized on behalf of the entire American people.

In Indonesia, nearly half a million souls were killed in a ruthless purge of "communists" in 1965. Our intelligence agency helped dictator Suharto identify those to be liquidated, many thousands of whom were simply social-justice activists, labor leaders, even religious figures.

Throughout the Third World, over a period of several decades, the ostensibly freedom-loving and democratic United States has sponsored some of the worst, most brutally repressive thugs history has ever known.

Certainly since WWII, our own foreign policy excesses - always motivated by a multinational-corporate lust to profit from other people's cheap labor and ripped-off natural resources - have murdered innocents by a toll reaching into the millions.

The Vietnam War alone took as many as three million Southeast Asian lives. Innocents continue to die there as our unexploded landmines and cluster bombs are accidentally detonated, often by children.

We need to stop selfishly interfering in other nations' business. Iran provides a classic example of why doing so ultimately unleashes disastrous folly.

In 1953, rather than allow the conscientious reformer Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh to govern Iran and keep Iranian oil nationalized (which U.S. corporations greedily coveted), the CIA orchestrated a coup that returned Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power.

So brutally repressive was the Shah of Iran, through his infamous Savak secret police, that the Iranian people found in Islamic fundamentalism the mechanism to get out from under Yankee-sanctioned tyranny's thumb.

It was Ayatollah Khomeini's triumph over the Shah that sent radical Islamist shockwaves throughout the Muslim world, eventually giving rise to hateful anti-American extremism that now assumes a terroristic dimension.

Unless and until America adheres to a single moral standard and helps provide true sovereignty and self-determination to the Third World (including graciously accepting defeat when mass will results in things going against Wall Street's wishes), our soot-encrusted kettle can't validly call anyone else's pot black.

And we'll perpetually remain what world opinion will ever more sharply perceive as the ultimate international rogue.

Our love of America, and decency, force us to unite and use our popular will to put this country back on a correct, sustainable course.

Ending our neo-colonial occupation and getting out of Iraq is the crucial first step.