The Collapse of Pretext
Published March 25, 2008
By Benjamin Silverman
On March 20, Operation Iraqi Freedom entered its fifth year. Its effects have caused yet unknown short and long-term harm to the world at large with special significance to the Nation of Iraq.
The Department of Defense is honored as the single largest polluter on the planet, creating more hazardous waste in Iraq alone than the top five US chemical companies combined. World opinion of the US is at its lowest point in history, according to the BBC, ¾ of the world’s population is overtly in disfavor of American foreign policy. A New York Times article from last year put the total expected cost of the war to the taxpayer at over $1.2 Trillion. 18 allied nations who were active in Iraq have since dropped out and of the current 166,000 troops active in the war only 10,500 are non-American. In fact, the second largest military presence in the war after American troops are American mercenary contractors like Blackwater.
According to official Pentagon reports, there were as of March 24, 4,000 American combat personnel killed in Iraq and another 29,320 wounded. For the actual Iraqis, the figure of deaths and wounds may never be known. But the most recent estimate from September of 2007 done by the London based Opinion Research Business put the estimated Iraqi causalities at 1,220,580 (+/- 2.5%).
But let’s bring it back for a moment and try to find some higher vantage point.
Following the cause and effect progression backwards we know that before any outcome can happen there must be an action to cause it. But what causes the action? Nothing comes from nowhere. There is a reason, a motive, a logic to give meaning and purpose to the action. It is the all-important ‘why’ of the thing. And it is the original, premeditated ‘why’ that we must here examine for it leads to all other future ‘whys.’
Before all the retroactive pretext, before the puppet pundits spoke of the “success” of the surge (or purge), kicking out Al Qaeda, and Iraq’s imminent descent into chaos with the withdraw of US forces, there were the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Do you remember five years ago? Most mass media refuses to, but it really wasn’t that long ago. Most of us were in high school or middle school or the like and we may have noticed something strange in the air.
The first official mention of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction came from President Bush’s speech to the United Nations Security Council on September 12, 2002. Immediately afterwards, with the loyal intensity of a sheep dog, politicians with aspirations to succeed joined into the consensus. Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton- a totally bipartisan effort to convince the American people of the “truth.” Iraq was a threat and needed to be squashed.
And we ate it up. But it wasn’t totally our fault, the timing was perfect. With the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we were on edge, and they used that edge. We would have invaded heaven and hell if told they were planning another terrorist attack against us.
News sources at the time offered few dissenting opinions. In fact, the universality of news sources’ getting behind their President (including the New York Times) cannot be minimized. The excepted message was singular, absolutistic, and coming at us from all sides.
What is interesting is the speed at which this WMD argument was quickly dropped. Before the war we saw Colin Powell’s photoshopped slides at the UN and the pundit arguments on our national security. But after the “boots were on the ground” and we were actually involved in the war every newspaperman had wanted, the WMD’s seemed to fade away.
If you look at a graph of the number of times the terms “Weapons of Mass Destruction” were seen in news articles you’ll see it peaked in September of 2002 and had already descended to less than half that level by August of 2003. By the spring of 2005 the number had dropped below September 11 levels. Interestingly enough, the number of times the word “Al Qaeda” is used in conjunction with “Iraq” has not once wavered since 2002, even though the supposed connection between the two has never been proven.
So what’s the truth? Aristotle once argued that there is a universal objective reality separate from all subjective opinion and perception and it should be our job to attempt to understand it.
In September of 2004, a year after George Bush first went to the UN, the multinational Iraq Survey Group released the Duelfer Report. It detailed how Saddam Hussein had ceased all nuclear and other WMD programs in 1991 due to UN sanctions. He did seem to intend to restart these programs once the sanctions were lifted but only in an offensive attack against Iran. He had zero inclination to attack the United States or any of its allies and was of no threat to this nation.
The defining motive behind the Iraq War has proven to be a lie and by extension the war in general is a lie.
Nothing happens for no reason at all. But if the reason we were given for this war is a lie, there should there be a truthful reason we were not given. But what is this reason?
In September of 2002, at the same time he went to the UN with his intention to attack Iraq, Bush released his National Security Strategy which has since come to be called the “Bush Doctrine” in remembrance of the equally infamous Monroe Doctrine. It states, “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”
The point is clear. By the authority of providence, in the post Cold War/9-11 world, the US is the singular dominant power politically as well as economically. Subsequent sections of this document go on to say that the US reserves full right to engage in preemptive war, without any need for legal permission, against any nation that may or may try to threaten this hegemony.
But what does this has to do with Iraq? The answers are several.
The most obvious is oil. With the conquering of Iraq, either directly or through one of its closets allies, the United States has some control over five of the top six oil producing countries. With the remainder, Iran, currently situated between two US territories, Iraq and Afghanistan would be considered the next logical target.
The most encompassing answer may be less obvious and may border on conspiracy theory but does have some historical barring.
During the Cold War the US engaged in an offensive/defensive strategy called “containment” against the USSR. They built up military bases in key areas around the Soviet Union in West Germany, Turkey, Greenland, Japan, Finland, and Israel in an attempt to geographically encircle the threat. It worked pretty well for the most part.
Today the USSR is gone but a new player has emerged as the key opponent to the US for the next century. China.
Everyday there are more stories of the unbeatable Chinese economy with its unbelievably huge military to back it up (100 million strong by the more recent NATO estimates). The likelihood of China’s surpassing us in all fields has become a real possible threat in direct defiance of the Bush Doctrine.
In response, the US government’s foreign policy has been reconstituted to curb this threat by bringing back the old Cold War strategy of containment. Throughout Central and Southeast Asia new military bases are springing up. Indonesia, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and, of course, Afghanistan and Iraq.
What’s more, with the addition of these military facilities and their relative location to the top oil producing countries, the US can effectively put a road block to China’s oil supply in a pinch or in general.
Domination is the name of the game. Political Science majors take note.
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