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The
New Crusade
By
Robin
Eastman Abaya
Posted by Bulatlat.com
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History
has its grotesque parallels. President William McKinley, so the story goes, fell
to his knees and in answer to his prayers was commissioned (by god) to invade
the Philippines and "Christianize and civilize our little brown
brothers". That was in 1898. Leaving aside the fact that the Filipinos were
largely Christian and civilized with a Spanish colonial civil structure,
factories, ports and universities, the Philippines also had a revolutionary
national government established in the course of their national liberation
struggle against Colonial Spain and which the U.S. refused to recognize.
Twelve years later and after the deaths of perhaps 1 million Filipinos, the US
declared the insurrection over. Serving under officers who had made genocidal
war on native Americans in the West, some US soldiers wrote anguished letters
home about the massacres of whole villages and the horrible concentration camps
they had established. These revelations were published widely in the U.S. press
and led to the expansion of the Anti-Imperialist League whose most famous
president was the great American writer, Mark Twain, and whose membership once
numbered in the tens of thousands. Twelve years of slaughter and starvation, the
'gooks'', the 'slants', the 'goo-goos' were finally pacified. Their crippled
president, their poets, painters, and national heroes of the resistance were
killed or exiled to prison islands like Guam. The Filipinos, whose land was
turned into a 'howling wilderness', were still largely Christian but they were
never again as civilized and free.
Back home while the censorship of war increased and the anti-imperialists were
branded "traitors", the American sugar barons and shipping magnates
carved up the booty.
The failed businessman-turned dynastic politician, George W. Bush, once a
dreadful abusive alcoholic who traded the bottle for the Bible, saw the
destruction of Iraq in even starker literal Old Testament terms. Evoking the
tragedy of September 11, 2001 which had nothing to do with Iraq he concentrated
the wealth and military power of the United States to go after the "evil
doers" and to "bring violence and death to the four corners of the
world". The conquest took a fraction of the time McKinley and his
successors needed to pacify the Philippines - but then George was immensely
helped by the slick diplomats of the United Nations which instituted 12 years of
brutal starvation sanctions and the effective disarmament program which rendered
Iraq, once the most advanced and sophisticated nation in the Arab world,
impoverished and defenseless. McKinley did not have fragmentation bombs or maps
provided by UN inspectors detailing every facet of Iraq's national defense and
infrastructure.
The pacification of and colonization of the Philippines was not a "cake
walk" as Paul Wolfowitz claimed Iraq would be. American newspapers were not
uncritical or "embedded" in 1898 as they are today.
The anti-imperialists were branded traitors then as now. It helps to provide
some historical and ideological context in the business of empire building:
Hermann Goring, Hitler's mouthpiece, once mused on the ease in leading the
German nation into wars of foreign conquest, "First you tell the people
that they are going to be invaded, then denounce the peacemakers as traitors for
leaving the country vulnerable to attack." This was the tactic used in the
buildup to the invasion of Iraq.
The destruction of Iraq had been carefully planned in phases. Phase 1 was the
12-year period of brutal economic sanctions, disarming and almost daily bombing
by US and British forces over the "No Fly Zone". Phase 2 was the
invasion by massive aerial bombardment and the destruction of the central
government - the once sovereign Iraqi Republic. Phase 3 is right on schedule.
Phase 3 is the ongoing destruction of the Iraqi nation, the obliteration of its
national culture, history and institutions - its system of universal secular
public education, state funded modern health care, laws protecting national
industries and resources, water and sanitation, communication systems,
subsidized agriculture, public universities and research institutes, law and
medical schools, schools of agriculture and engineering, theaters, museums and
hospitals. American planes even bombed the Iraqi census bureau and Ministry of
Health, to destroy the records. Gangs of Iraqi criminal elements have sprung up,
organized by shadowy warlords claiming to operate under the protection of
occupation forces or their intelligence services. They are salting the soil of
the Iraqi nation to destroy the last vestiges of hope for the Iraqi people. This
is because a united, secular, strong Iraqi republic can have no future in the
Pax Americana, nor in the Greater US-Israel Co-Prosperity Sphere that is to
administer the region.
It is painful but useful to listen to George W. Bush's speeches or to read them
with care. On March 27, 2003, Bush told a wildly cheering mass of young soldiers
at the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida that the "post-war model for
Iraq would be the newly liberated Afghanistan". Afghanistan is not a
country in any conventional sense. It is a wild place of brutal regional
warlords with no functioning state, no educational system, no health system and
no laws. It is a place where smuggling and the growing and refining of opium are
the primary sources of income for most of the people. It had been turned into a
place of profound barbarism. It is a cruel joke to play on the sophisticated
people of Iraq.
Iraq is to be reduced to the ungovernable through looting and a policy of
national-historical erasure (to use the Israeli term) and pillage of its
resources. It will be split into 3 ethnically defined and probably ethnically
cleansed US protectorates following this grotesque period of "creative
destruction" - a favorite concept of the neo-conservatives. Its
nationalized oil wealth, which once funded the republic's transformation into a
modern secular state, will be expropriated by the Texas-based victors whose
agents will no doubt shed fat crocodile tears for Iraq's looted and burned
institutions, its once elegant culture and famous museums. Perhaps to show their
regard for the glory that was once Iraq/Baghdad/Babylon/Mesopotamia, the victors
and their colonial lackeys will adorn their mansions and corporate offices with
loot that includes the finest treasures of the Islamic world and the priceless
antiquities that were once revered as our collective world heritage.
What no Mongol invader could accomplish. What no violent power drunk Crusader
was able to achieve. These poisoned, barren ruins of Iraq are a tribute to the
destructive genius of George W. Bush.
Epilogue on July 4 2004 - The heroic Iraqi resistance is the only force
preventing the completion of Phase 3 of US Empire building in Iraq. Their
on-going sacrifice has prevented the planned imperialist invasions of Syria and
Iran and, in Latin America, Venezuela and Cuba. On this most chauvinistic
occasion in the empire center - this is a reason to celebrate. Posted by
Bulatlat.com
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