The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has passed without a lot of fanfare, as will the sixth, seventh … it will eventually be a non-event or one in which various fringe elements assemble on street corners to preach to a shrinking choir. The news media is currently in de-emphasize mode, hyping up other stories and virtually ignoring the conflict. It’s a testimony to how much they are in control of the agenda. We talk about whatever they put in our face. If there ain’t pictures, there ain’t news.
Foreign policy is mostly a staid affair attended to by the graduates of our elite schools. It’s neither fun nor pretty. The business of state and the business of corporate America are one. The world is full of crises, but only certain of them make the radar screen. Rwanda passes without notice (no American corporate interests threatened), while Iraq, a relatively calm place threatening no one becomes an emergency. We’re totally tooled up by the media and driven by the corporate agenda. The trick is to make an elite undertaking seem like a popular movement.
Iraq had been on the agenda for a long while, long before the fall of the Soviet Union, but not within our grasp until that event. Prior to 1990 Saddam Hussein had played one superpower against the other with relative skill, and there was deep resentment of him in Washington for that reason. We supported him when he invaded Iran, of course, as we are not the slightest troubled by invasions when they serve our interests. But we also made him strong – we gave him the weapons that we later claimed threatened us. Without us he would have had no chemical weaponry – the only thing that ever really threatened us (and the real reason why George H.W. Bush pulled back in 1991).
When opportunity presented itself in the post-Soviet world, as it did in 1990, we attacked, and rained hell on the country and its electrical grids and sewage systems. It was no accident – we meant to do that. They were a country with a first-world infrastructure, and we destroyed it. We spent the next ten years applying a vice, squeezing them hard, sanctioning food and medicine and killing their children while withholding the the tools necessary to repair their infrastructure. We meant to do that.
In the Clinton years we looked to get rid of those weapons and clear the way for an attack. It is here that Saddam failed his people, why he may in retrospect be seen as one of the biggest fools in history. He cooperated with weapons inspectors, canned his nuclear program, destroyed his chemical-bearing rocketry, and left his country basically defenseless.
It was then that the U.S. attacked, and it is now that we celebrate the fifth anniversary of that attack. I cited an article below that highlights how, seventeen years after the 1991 attack, we have still not managed to fix those sewers and electrical grids. It’s no accident. We mean to rain hell on them, we mean to impoverish them, we mean to make them suffer, scatter their factions, install our superbases that will permanently house 100,000 troops, control their government and watch and terrorize their internal factions as closely as Castro ever did his enemies.
We mean to be in power there. It was the goal in 1989, 1991, throughout the Clinton years and well into Bush’s term. When the weapons were finally gone, when the path to invasion and occupation was finally cleared, we moved. True, things didn’t go according to plan. It’s been costly, for us anyway. But clear heads in Washington realize that it’s a price that must be paid.
Some people marked the passing of the fifth anniversary of the invasion as if it were a significant milestone. It wasn’t. It’s no big deal. Presidents will come and go, but the troops will stay. Orators and pundits will prattle on about democracy and how we toppled an evil government – grist for the mill. It was a resource grab. It’s in its infancy.
There’ll be many more anniversaries.
Piece of Mindful 