The War on Iraq: Imperialism or "Just War"

In any discussion about “just wars”, the basic premise must be the human dimension of wars. No war can be described as a just war when it involves the daily killing of civilians, the daily psychological terrorizing of entire populations of civilian cities, or when it forces people to leave their homes and become refugees, or if it destroys the civilian infrastructure and disrupts the provision of daily necessities to the common people. Given the nature of weapons possessed by militaries around the world, the concept of a traditional “just war” has become completely outdated. Since the use of those weapons in all cases involves the killing of unarmed, non-combatant civilians, no war can be described as a just war.
Given the nature of modern warfare, we must differentiate between the concept of war and that of self-defense. Self-defense, would, as the term implies, mean a limited engagement between combatants where one is the aggressor and the other the defender. Self-defense can be justified, overcoming aggression can be justified but no “shock and awe” pre-emptive bombings of civilian towns can ever be justified as “self defense”. Shocking the civilian population of entire cities is nothing new in war campaigns that the major powers have carried out in the last century. General McArthur’s military secretary and chief of psychological operations during the 2nd World War, Bonner Fellers, stated in an internal memorandum dated June 17th 1945,
“The civilian bombings of Japanese cities was one of the most RUTHLESS and BARBARIC killing of non-combatants in all history.”-
He was referring to the bombing other than the use of the Atomic Bomb-, which surpassed the ruthlessness of any conventional weaponry, and which was used not once but twice.
"And when it is said to them, 'Do not cause destruction and disorder on earth', they say, 'What! 'We are only making peace'. Indeed they are the cause of destruction and disorder but they comprehend not."
(Koran 2:11-12)

"Surely the extermination of Jews in gas chambers is not comparable to the slow death inflicted in Iraqi children by deprivation. But from another angle the latter is even more despicable. The genocide against Jews was perpetrated in the greatest secret and without the blessing of the "civilized world". The crimes against Iraqi civilians are committed in full daylight, with the blessing of the ruling "civilized nations" and with the tacit support of the educated classes in these nations. Those who keep silent and are legally able to speak up, are morally accomplices to this crime."
Elias Davidsson, Musician and a Palestinian Jew, 16/4/1999
Modern weaponry that is specifically designed to destroy everything across a wide perimeter, like the MOAB bomb, reveals a predetermination of “mass destruction” on the part of those who design such weapons. Most of the weapons of mass destruction are designed in the United States. Similarly, any move of taking combat to non-aggressors or to civilian areas in my opinion makes any war an unjust war. What we see in the popular culture is confusion between the concept of just wars and that of just causes. We can very well have a “just cause” but using war as a means to attain it, is not justified. To attain a “just cause”, just means must be used.
In any wars that are planned at the present time, the people leading us into war are certain of civilian causalities- they are certain before the event that civilians are going to get killed in large numbers- yet they proceed to carry on with the same war plans- this amounts to premeditated mass murder. There is no morality and no justice in such war planning. The people who do such planning are war criminals, they are not war heroes:
In the wars of the 18th, l9th and early 20th centuries, only about half the victims were civilians while in the closing decades of this century the proportion of civilian victims has been rising steadily: In World War II it was two thirds, and by the end of the 1980s it was almost 90 per cent. PEACE PLEDGE UNION, LONDON N7OBT ENGLAND
Even though the ends are uncertain in almost all wars, the means have been well calculated and assume civilian casualties and the destruction of the “life lines” of a civilian society. In World War 2 and in all the wars that the major powers have fought ever since, civilian areas have been deliberately targeted. The ones who suffer and the ones who do the fighting are the common folk, the masses, but the ones who initiate hostilities or provoke hostilities or decide upon using weapons of mass destruction are always the “well-protected” elite.
It is dishonest to talk about a “volunteer army” when it is disproportionately made up of people from the lower socio-economic classes and racial minorities- people who are forced to volunteer because the institutional arrangement of society offers few if any alternatives to them. And this is the other reason why no war of the elites can ever be justified, when the masses have to do the fighting and suffer casualties on their behalf.
"Media reports said that among the US soldiers who went to the front, most were poor whites, blacks and other minorities...And black people, 12 percent of total population, stand for 21 percent in army...An officer responsible for recent recruitment in Los Angeles admitted that there were mainly three kinds of people who came to sign up. First were those wishing to solve their identities. Most of them were green card holders of Chinese and Spanish origins who hoped to get permanent residence through military service. Second, high school students longing for free university after quitting from the army. Third, poor people, especially those facing unemployment who wished to pull through economic difficulties in the army and secure government's care for their families." ENGLISH PEOPLE'S DAILY
Irving Horowitz writes in his 1964 book, “The War Game”:
" A framework that holds the individual in little or no regard, or considers the person only as fodder for the requirements of the State, must hold the preservation of life as incidental..."
Humanity cannot afford to have its existence treated as incidental to the desires of the elite. If human life is held incidental, and in many cases less than incidental by our militarist civilian leaders, as history has shown time and again, then all the popular war propaganda slogans of democracy, of freedom, and liberation, become quite meaningless and hypocritical. It is the most basic human right, the right to life, without which all other rights are meaningless. No one has more right to live than another and no one should be given a blanket right to determine life and death decisions for others because they claim access to more resources, resources that have offered them access to public office which is then sold to the masses as “democracy” by the establishment mass media.
In the United States, similar in principle to all other military dictatorships around the world, the economy is based on/ dominated by a Military Industrial Complex,- about which president Eisenhower warned the nation in his farewell address. The Military Industrial Complex requires heavy state involvement in the economy- contrary to free market capitalism that is often advertised. Here we have a grand contradiction. The Military Industrial Complex was promoted as necessary in a fight against communism during the cold war. Yet the whole system is based on state intervention and not free market capitalism the so-called “way of life” that was being defending.
Such contradictory propaganda is commonly used in support of wars based on economic greed and empire building. Thus we are presented with a justification to go to war to enforce UN resolutions, but when the time comes for the war to be authorized by the UN, we ignore its authority. Also contradictory is the use of preemptive terror and “shock and awe” campaigns in order to fight speculated terrorism (such and so might give weapons to terrorists) in the future. The first casualty in this war to protect "freedom"- as the so-called war on terrorism was promoted as being- was freedom itself as we saw with the passage of the Patriot Act.
Let us consider the excuse of “democracy” that is often used in provoking or promoting so called “Just wars”. It was not surprising for me to hear a (non-elected) president (Bush) saying that he "respectfully disagrees" with popular public sentiment in carrying out his "public" duties. The execution of public duties does not give any one the privilege to “respectfully disagree” with public opinion. Stating that "democracy is a beautiful thing", as the president said in the days preceding the war, while going against, in practice, the majority world and home opinion at the time, amply proves to me that the so called "democracy" that is talked about often in support of wars and promoting US foreign policy, is merely a popular propaganda slogan of politicians as they serve their minority elite interests.
Let us also look at the so-called democracy of world opinion in the United Nations: Israel has been flouting UN resolutions for the past five decades (over 60 Resolutions) including Resolution 673 that deplored Israel for not cooperating with it, and Resolution 517 that "censures" Israel for failing to obey UN resolutions. It's a joke that Israel not only flouted the UN resolutions for over five decades but also those that asked it not to flout the resolutions. Why don’t we hear about UN irrelevance in the case of Israel, a country that has attacked its neighbors, possesses weapons of mass destruction and is occupying land that is not part of its territory? Why do we veto resolutions regarding Israel, going against the majority of the members in Security Council and then condemn France when it threatens to use its veto?
Over the past 5 decades democratically elected governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia, Greece, Argentina, Bolivia were over thrown by pro-capitalist militaries assisted by the US national security state causing dreadful devastation to indigenous populations (Parenti 1995), yet we present “promoting democracy” as pretexts to initiate "greed" wars- the reality of the situation is much different and can never constitute a “just war”.

Massive State intervention in a military based economic system, as there exists in the U.S. comes either through the provision of contracts or through heavy subsidies or direct control and interference. It is often accompanied by threats and military interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is a major cause of wars. It is reckless, irresponsible and in almost all cases barbaric and inhumane. Public support to maintain such a military dominated economic system is usually obtained by scaring the masses, or as Senator Vandenberg put it, “To scare the hell out of the American people.” 46 percent of all of our taxes, in the U.S. goes into maintaining the Military Industrial complex. This fictitious "lack of security" is the number one marketing concern, of the military industrial complex, while deliberately provoking situations abroad, ensures their survival and profitability.
How would you feel if you heard in the news one morning that Russia together with the European Union and China in a joint declaration had said that America's weapons of Mass Destruction were a threat to world peace and that they would form a coalition of the willing, going against International Law to disarm the US and change its government? Would we welcome them with flowers and candy? Has the ethnocentric propaganda of the establishment mass media made us so blind that that we expect "flowers and candy" to be handed out to our troops in return for the bombs and death that our administration brings upon people? Think for a moment someone bringing the level of destruction to our entire towns and cities- the destruction US regimes have repeatedly brought upon civilian cities around the world, in over 200 direct or indirect military interventions, against countries that never attacked us first in any way- and all those adventures were marketed to the public as “Just Wars” using the same slogans of “freedom, liberation and democracy.”
The United States’ entry into World War 2 against Germany was marketed to the public as a move to defend helpless countries against an evil foe that had violated the principles of non-intervention into the affairs of other countries. Considering the track record of the U.S. at the time of entry, this appeal to “liberation and freedom” was hypocritical to the extreme. The historian Howard Zinn in his, “A People’s History of the United States: 1492 –Present” (1995), summarizes U.S. military intervention into the affairs of other countries prior to World War 2:
The U.S. had instigated a war with Mexico and taken over half that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments and right of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had opened Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats…It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years… It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the “independent” state of Panama in order to build and control the canal. It sent 5000 Marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution and kept forces there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for nineteen years… Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times. By 1924 the finances of half of the twenty Latin American states were being directed to some extent by the United States. By 1935, over half of U.S. steel and cotton exports were being sold in Latin America. Just before World War 1 ended, in 1918, an American force of seven thousand landed at Vladivostok as part of an Allied intervention in Russia and remained there until early 1920. Five thousand more troops landed at Archangel, another Russian port….(Zinn 1995:399-400)
We have a president (Bush), here in the U.S, who a little past midway between his first term had already launched two different wars of aggression on two much weaker countries, under shady pretexts, laying both of them to waste, killing thousands of people and forcibly changing regimes. He was hardly done with his second war (on Iraq) when he started threatening two other countries (Iran & Syria). His regime (during this short term) provoked North Korea to go down a dangerous path of nuclear deterrence because it fears a similar war of aggression from him, jeopardizing the peace and lives of hundreds of thousands in that region. Due to his disrespect for international law in the context of wars, he provoked, what sounded to many (journalists included) at the time, "cold war" rhetoric in its disagreements with Russia. He pulled out of the Antiballistic Missile treaty and wants to develop low-yield tactical nuclear weapons for use in the battlefield.
His regime has divided up Europe into "old" and "new", pitting one against the other. His Secretary of State threatened France with "consequences" for non-appeasement. His doctrine of "preemption" led India to almost start a nuclear confrontation with Pakistan. He stood by, giving a green light to Ariel Sharon when the latter launched a massive military reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and called him a "man of peace". And what is truly scary is that he isn't done with his assault on peace around the world yet, and his establishment mass media (paraded as the “free-press”), particularly the Fox News Channels, wonders why people oppose his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize?
With such a military establishment, an establishment that serves the economic interest of the elite, all talks of "Just Wars" are simply nonsense. Not only are the ends in such wars unclear, they are in most cases based on ulterior motives and the means used are often similar to treating the entire population of a region as guinea pigs, in a controlled experiment. This not only is inhumane, it is barbaric and racist in that it assigns grades of expendability to people of different races, religions and nationalities.
Television interview, "60 Minutes", May 12, 1996:
Lesley Stahl, speaking of US sanctions against Iraq:
"We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And -and you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."
(The above Albright quotes are taken from, William Blum's Web site, author of "Killing Hope")
"On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism". Iraq was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible". Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele's estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives." JOURNALIST JOHN PILGER, A NEW PEARL HARBOR
In any “just war theory” the concept of proportionality figures in as a major factor. The wars that have been fought in recent history have all been disproportional. Around 900 billion dollars are spent around the world on arms and armament, while people die of preventable diseases and starvation around the world. With the current increases in military spending, the United States will be spending more on its military establishment than all the other countries of the world combined-, and all this is being sold to us as being necessary to fight people who attack us with "box cutters".
There is no bravery involved in attacking a nation that has less than one percent of the firepower possessed by the United States and spends less than one half of one percent of what we spend on our military establishment. Lobbing hundreds of missiles from hundreds of miles away at civilian cities, cities whose defenses don’t stand a chance in a million to protect its civilian inhabitants does not constitute bravery by any definition. Those who believe their causes are righteous do not pick on weak targets. What is even more embarrassing for the administration is the deliberate use of forged documents as UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix recently pointed out and faulty intelligence which didn't check out about the claimed weapons that Iraq possessed that posed a threat to the USA.
If protecting us is the "real agenda" for the National Security Administration, as is claimed, why don't they do something about problems caused by environmental depletion and pollution? The military industrial complex, disproportionately contributes to environmental pollution and depletion- rather than protect us, it is ensuring our early demise, through death and disease, on a scale much grander than any terrorist act.
If we care about our troops why does the military use depleted uranium in its armament. Since the Gulf War, cancer rates in Iraq among common people went up by more than 700% as a direct result of using such armament. This contamination is not accidental or something new that is being done. The same was done in Vietnam, and its effects are well documented. In Vietnam, as a direct result of the 18 million gallons of Agent Orange and the 400,000 tons of Napalm that was dropped, the population developed one of the highest rates of liver cancer- a disease that was virtually unknown in the pre-war era (Parenti 1989). We scare our population by fictitious accounts of others using “dirty bombs”, yet we use them routinely in our military adventures abroad in the form of depleted uranium.
The truth behind the excuse of liberation that is now being used for the suffering Iraqi masses becomes clear when we consider that over 1.5 million Iraqi people have died as a direct result of the sanctions regime imposed by the "same" people who now want to liberate the "same" suffering people. According to the 1998 UNICEF report over 250 Iraqis, a disproportionate number of them children die as a direct result of sanctions every day, representing a 345% increase from the pre Gulf War rate. The deaths in children under five went up 16 fold (1600%) in Iraq AFTER the first Gulf War. The sanctions that these liberators kept in place because of "invisible" weapons that were never found, and the same sanctions which they now want to remove without even starting to look for those "invisible" weapons which they knew "existed", shows the shallow, inhumane nature of their " just causes". After destroying the infrastructure of urban Iraq in the name of "liberation", the so-called "liberators" showed complete indifference and disregard to the destruction of the cultural/historical heritage of Iraq and the security of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Baghdad. However, they wasted no time acting as policemen to secure the oil wells of Iraq at the very start of the conflict, even moving their war plans up because the security of the oil wells (and not the Iraqi people) were threatened.
Anyone who knows anything about basic economics will never conclude that the preventable deaths in Iraq are due to the palace building of Saddam, despicable as such conspicuous consumption might be, as our media and economically illiterate Ari Fleischer often presents them to be. Iraq’s GNP fell by 75% after the war due to sanctions. If you cut the GNP of the US by 75%, simple statistical projection can show that the rise in proportional deaths as a consequence, ceteris paribus (other things being equal), would be similar to what we see in Iraq, regardless of the real estate activity of the corporate elite. By 1994, according to the US department of Health and Human Service Statistics, the mortality rate for black children ages 10 through 14 in the USA was nearly 65 percent higher than the rate for white children in that age group, 81 percent higher for children ages five though nine, and twice as high for children ages one through four. Are these numbers a result of the real estate activity of the elite in the USA or the de-facto institutional sanctions built into our economic system, that sanction people based or race and sex?
Consider for a moment what happened on February 26th and 27th 1991 when the Iraqi soldiers were withdrawing from Kuwait in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 678. On the sixty miles of coastal highway, now famous as the "highway of death", US warplanes, completely unprovoked, after the withdrawal had already started, killed thousands of Iraqis and Palestinians civilians (who were fleeing Kuwait fearing reprisals) and withdrawing soldiers who never fired a shot. A US pilot remarked, “"It was like shooting fish in a barrel.” Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer said, “Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like this. It's pathetic.” (http://www.deoxy.org/wc/wc-death.htm). Colin Powell at the time called it a “massacre”. How can massacres be part of a “just war?”
While we talk about “liberating” the Iraqi people, the same people that the US regimes have been killing for the past 12 years through economic sanctions, and the ones mercilessly killed on the "highway of death", let us consider the suffering masses at home that need "liberation" as well:
Ø Thirty-three million people in the US-more than the entire population of the country of Iraq-including 13 million children-live in households that experience chronic hunger or the risk of hunger-
Ø Thirty Seven million here in the US, or one out of every six Americans, regularly use emotion controlling medical drugs pushed by pharmaceutical companies. · 2,000,000 non-hospitalized persons are given powerful mind-control drugs, sometimes described as "chemical straitjackets." The numbers show extreme distress and not a very happy state of affairs
Ø 2.9 million children are subjected to serious neglect and/or abuse, including physical torture and deliberate starvation here in the US.
Ø 2,000,000 to 4,000,000 women are battered every year, 5000-7000 of them die, here in the US. Domestic violence is the single largest cause of injury and second largest cause of death to women.
Ø 41,000,000 or more are without health insurance or protection from catastrophic illness for the entire year, while 71 million are without it at some point in the year.
(The above Stats were taken from, Michael Parenti, "Dirty Truths"-1996, updated)
Ø Also consider the many millions who live in the inner cities in the US. Minorities whose communities suffer from the effects of chronic crime, drugs, disease, homelessness, and unemployment, at levels in many cases worse than the levels in the Third World. The people trapped in inner cities, due to the policies of both Democratic and Republican regimes in the US, are in need of liberation as well.