Are the American people truly safer because of the war on terror?
North Korea has exploded a nuclear device. The casualties mount ever quicker in Iraq. Why do so many people hate us? Us? Westerners? Just Americans?
There are arguments for America invading Iraq. Just not the ones that they wish to push in the press. Why not tell the truth? Well, because the American people might find it more difficult to sleep at night. Americans want to believe in the myth that the United States is somehow different from former great powers. America is more moral. America intervenes to help the rest of the world; not for their own national and strategic interests. As the last remaining superpower it is becoming increasingly difficult for U.S. administrations to keep up the façade of America as the land of liberty, the champion of the downtrodden.
Example Iraq.
The Persian Gulf is of enormous strategic importance to the United States. The loss of that flow of oil would hamper not only America’s military but its domestic economy as well. So they invaded to seize the oil, no, too simple. America invaded because Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to stability in the region and in particular to the House of Saud. The Sauds were plucked from the desert by the British because of their willingness to accommodate Western needs. The United States inherited the Saudi royal family along with a number of strategic assets when the British, unable to maintain their position as a global power, passed the torch to their former colony and close ally. The royal house is not popular on the Arabian Peninsula. Their claim to the throne is not an unchallenged one.
The Americans, as the British before them, have expended a good deal of time, energy and money to assist the Sauds in becoming the de facto leaders of the Islamic world, or at least the Arab portion of it. However, historically the peninsula was never the centre of Islam. Certainly the two holiest sites in the Islamic world are situated on the Arabian Peninsula. But that does not automatically mean that the peninsula is the centre of the Islamic or Arab world. Compare Christianity. The centre of the Christian world is not Bethlehem or Nazareth or even Jerusalem but Rome. Rome has always been the political and cultural pivot of the Christian world. Baghdad is Islam’s Rome. The Caliph of Baghdad could be seen historically as a rough equivalent to the Pope. That was the challenge that Saddam Hussein was laying down. If he were to succeed at donning that mantle for himself, America would have been directly threatened.
Saddam Hussein was a loose cannon who had shown himself capable of treachery and subterfuge. Had he undermined the Saudi position the ramifications for the Western world would have been dire; upheaval in the economies of industrialized states and inevitable weakening of Western power over time. Power rests not only on what you have but what you can produce and maintain.
So the Bush administration had valid arguments for the invasion of Iraq. Why then not use them to support the war. Do the American people want massive unemployment and economic hardships rivalling those of the Great Depression? Was George Bush not elected to watch over their quality of life, to make America better and more prosperous not less?
I do not like the war in Iraq. Tactically it was a huge blunder. The very thing the U.S. wanted to avoid they have created, instability in the Persian Gulf. Even a casual student of history and international relations could have predicted the sectarian violence that continues to escalate as I write. No easy solution presents itself and is not likely to in the near future. And expanding the war to Syria and Iran is only a prescription for greater catastrophe. George W. Bush has put himself in the same position Lyndon Johnson described speaking of Vietnam. Johnson said he felt like a man caught in a Texas hailstorm; he couldn’t run, he couldn’t hide and he couldn’t make it stop. But at least Johnson recognized his position. It is far less clear that Bush does.
I find it unfathomable that security experts at State, Defence and the Pentagon would not have warned of this very situation. I can only assume that politics overrode strategy and expert advice was ignored or even discouraged. If there is one thing that distinguishes Iraq from Vietnam it is this fact. In Vietnam all those agencies were encouraging U.S. military intervention from the beginning.
But now the problem exists. There is no use in wishing it didn’t. But it is time the American people took their share of the responsibility for the actions of their government. My advice to you all is to stop talking about democracy and start living it. That will require that you get off you fat asses and actually pay attention. Open your eyes to the world beyond your borders before it is too late. Because if you don’t September 11 will become little more than a footnote in history compared to what will come.
