The case for a war against Iraq?
“Iraq isn’t a rogue state; it’s a captive nation, the world’s first prison state, kept under a level of microscopic control and surveillance that would have made Jeremy Bentham tremble with envy.
All the recent chatter in the media about a forthcoming war on Iraq conveniently ignores the fact that the US and Britain have been waging war against Saddam since 1990-although its been a decidedly one-sided affair, too one-sided to mention apparently. Since the accords that brought an end to the Gulf War Round One, Iraq has been remorselessly bombed about once every three days. Its feeble air defense system is shattered and its radars jammed; its air force is grounded, the runways cratered; its primitive Navy is destroyed. The nation’s northern and southern territories are occupied by hostile forces, armed, funded and overseen by the CIA.
Every bit of new construction in the country is scrutinized for any possible military function by satellite cameras capable of zooming down to a square meter. Truck and tank convoys are zealously monitored. Troop locations are pinpointed with a lethal certainty. Bunkers are mapped, the coordinates programmed into the targeting software for bunker-busting bombs.
This once wealthy and secular nation is bankrupt, its financial reserves crippled by the sadistic sanctions that have blocked not only the export of Iraqi oil but also the import of medical and food supplies, leading to the deaths of millions of Iraqi civilians. Clinton’s dreadful Secretary of State Madeleine Albright boasted that this horrific toll was “worth it” in order to keep Saddam penned in.
Now along comes mini-Bush to proclaim to the world that this emaciated nation, shackled in the political equivalent of an isolation tank inside a maximum security prison for these past 12 years, is the greatest threat to world peace on the planet.”
In his discussion of the new book War Plan Iraq: Ten Reasons Against War on Iraq by Milan Rai, Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch talks about Rai’s apparently on target deconstruction of the case for war against Iraq. Even if you never intend to read the book, the review itself is a very interesting read.
Read the whole article here.
