Happy Birthday Death! First Anniversary of Iraq War

John Ross's BLINDMAN'S BUFF incorporates and expands on his
weekly report from Mexico, MEXICO BARBARO, focusing in on global
hotspots from Bolivia to Baghdad. Copyright 2004 by John Ross.
Please do not reproduce before end of period in head.

Happy Birthday Death! On Both Sides of the Border, Marches Rev Up
to Mark First Anniversary of Iraq War

Period: Mar. 6-12, 2004, #9
MEXICO CITY (Feb. 25)--It was Feb. 15 and this reporter was
hunting for a demonstration to cover. A year ago to the date, an
estimated 12 million citizens of the world had marched against
George Bush's impending invasion of Iraq, Guinness Book of
Records numbers for coordinated international antiwar protest.
Commemorations had been pledged.

On that day last year, I had arrived in Baghdad, a member of
a delegation of self-declared "Human Shields" prepared to
interpose our bodies between Bush's bombs and the Iraqi peoples.
All along the road from Turkey through the Syrian desert and
finally into Iraq, well-wishers had lined the way, pressing in
around our buses so tightly that you could feel their blood
pumping. It was a moment of great hope in a terrible time, one
that would be dashed to smithereens by Bush's Mar. 20 invasion
and his malignant display of "shock and awe."

On Feb. 15, 2004, instead of seething mobs hurling rocks at
the US embassy here as had transpired the previous year, only two
demonstrators and an activist reporter manned and womaned the
barricades in front of Washington's windowless, bunker-like
outpost on a deserted Reforma boulevard. The silence was
deafening.

As the first birthday of the ill-named "liberation" of Iraq
approaches, the dynamic is distinct. Some 15,000 to 25,000 Iraqis
are dead, and the country is wrecked and on the brink of civil
war. Tens of thousands have been imprisoned under sub-human
conditions by the US occupation. The invasion, which was supposed
to eliminate Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction, found no WMDs and exposed George Bush as a worthy
successor to such purveyors of the Big Lie as Goering and
Goebbels. Although the White House now touts Iraq as "the
epicenter of world terrorism," if Al Qa'ida has taken root in
that beleaguered republic, it is only because George "Bring them
on" Bush brought it there.

In the days before the bombs began to fall and we were
forced to abandon Baghdad, Mr. Karash, the director of the Al
Daura oil refinery, which we were shielding, invited us into his
office for tea. "We know the Americans are coming, and we are
ready for them," he told us affably. "They will come into our
cities, and we will fight them block by block, if only with
sticks and daggers, just as our grandfathers resisted the British
and forced them to leave."

One year later, more than 600 US and coalition forces are
officially listed as battlefield dead (at least one Pentagon
official suggests that figure should be doubled), and over 2,000
have been wounded and "medically evacuated" from Iraq. Twenty-two
GIs have committed suicide "over there." Paul Wolfowitz, as much
an architect of this war as McNamara was in Vietnam, had to flee
his Baghdad hotel in his underwear, and General Abizaid, the
highest-ranking brass in the region, narrowly missed being blown
away by a sniper in Falujah just the other day. There is no light
at the end of the tunnel, just more fog of war.

George Bush himself may well be the ultimate casualty of the
Iraqi disaster. Flying high on terror octane ever since 9/11
until he ordained the invasion, the US president could very well
lose his job next November. "Iraq will be Bush's tomb," the
national daily La Jornada editorialized here a few mornings ago.

Relations between Washington and Mexico City soured
precipitously on the eve of the war last February and March. In
one of the few moments of truth in his three-year reign, Mexican
president Vicente Fox earned Bush's enmity by doing the right
thing and instructing his representative on the United Nations
Security Council, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, to vote down the US-
Great Britain-sponsored aggression against Iraq. Knowing that it
would fail to carry, the White House eventually withdrew its war
resolution and unilaterally marched into Iraq with the Brits and
the Spanish tagging along at the US's side puppy dog-style.
Communication between Bush and Fox got very frosty very fast.

As the vote that would never be taken approached, British
intelligence was asked by its US counterparts to provide
"technical" assistance in "observing" the delegations of Security
Council members that had not yet announced their intentions,
according to testimony offered in a London courtroom by Katherine
Gun, a British operative, who leaked the information to the press
and was subsequently drummed out of the corps. Both Aguilar
Zinser and Juan Manuel Valdez, head of Chile's Security Council
delegation, confirm that their office telephones were bugged, a
grievous violation of United Nations protocols.

In an interview with the British-based Observer this
February, Aguilar Zinser reveals how a last-ditch peace effort by
six uncommitted Security Council members on the eve of the
aggression was eavesdropped on. When the group met with US UN
ambassador John Negroponte the next morning, the plan was already
on his desk. The espionage "wrecked the last chance for peace,"
Zinser laments.

Notwithstanding, when Zinser asked Mexico's neophyte
Secretary of Foreign Relations Luis Ernesto Derbez, who had just
replaced the mercurial Jorge Castaneda as foreign minister, to
send him a team of security agents to sweep the Mexican UN
offices for eavesdropping devices, he was told to forget about
it. Derbez apparently wanted no new problems with the gringos to
contaminate his administration of Mexico's foreign policy.

Zinser himself was fired after telling a Mexico City
university audience that the US continues to treat Mexico as if
it were its "backyard." Zinser's removal had been repeatedly
called for by US Secretary of State Colin Powell, and his firing
was taken as a clear signal that Fox was once again snuggling up
to Bush.

Indeed, a letter timidly inquiring about the spy caper was
not tendered to either Washington or London until this past
December, nine months after the bugging occurred. In response,
both the US and the UK said they would not respond because "we
never respond to questions about intelligence matters."

Meanwhile, Bush and Fox cuddled at the so-called "Summit of
the Americas" in Monterrey in mid-January, where the US
president, in a flagrant bit of re-electoral grandstanding,
offered a "guest worker" program for Mexicans toiling in his
country in a thinly veiled ploy to both bring Fox back into the
fold and make a dent in the US Latino vote in anticipation of
November elections. Now, as polls suggest that sure-shot
Democratic Party candidate John Kerry can beat Bush this fall,
Fox, whose six-year term overlaps the US presidency, may well
have entrusted his marbles to the wrong player.

But the Mexican president is one thing and the people ("El
Pueblo") quite another. Although El Pueblo may not be marching en
masse on the US embassy, bitterness at Bush's war is palpable, no
more so than in Guadalajara this February when the United States
sub-23 Olympic soccer team faced off against the Mexican
selection for a final spot in the upcoming Athens games, and
60,000 throats began to rumble "Osama! Osama!" in unison as the
US took the field. The cruel, mocking salutation was only the tip
of the iceberg.

As reported by the Guadalajara papers, the day before the
contest (which the US ineptly kicked away 4 to 0), the North
American team had finished off a practice session by collectively
urinating on the stadium grass, a gesture Jornada commentator
Jose Blanco characterized as "symbolic of what the gringos have
been doing to Mexico for 200 years." "Osama es el bueno [Osama is
the good guy]," warbles troubadour Andres Carrasco in a homemade
corrido (popular ballad), "because he killed many gringos."

The exaltation of the name of US Public Enemy Numero Uno by
Guadalajara football fans so infuriated anti-Mexican
congressperson Tom Tancredo (Rep. Colorado), head of the House
Immigration Reform subcommittee, and apparently a bad loser, that
he demanded an immediate apology from Mexico's outgoing
ambassador to Washington, Juan Jose Bremer, a petition that was
greeted with universal disdain on this side of the border.
"Insults don't kill, but wars do," pointed out Mexican football
star Melvin Brown, taking a jab at the Bush genocide in Iraq.

As Mar. 20 international demonstrations against the war draw
near, one quandary for the Mexican antiwar movement is how to get
the fans out of the soccer stadiums and into the streets.

There is little question that the antiwar movement which
swelled to mammoth Feb. 15 size before the massacre in Iraq began
is much reduced as the first birthday of death heaves into sight.
Demoralization, resignation, frustration, paralyzing fury, the
steady grind of a war which is fast disappearing into the back
pages, and even support for "our boys" have all thinned out the
peace army. As death marches on in Iraq, there are fewer and
fewer marchers in the street on both sides of the border.

Projected international demonstrations to end the
occupations of both Iraq and Palestine set to coincide this Mar.
20 with the first anniversary of the invasion will be a short-
term memory test for the antiwar movement, and expectations must
be tempered by crude reality. The first wave of protests Feb. 15
drew little international interest save in Spain, where 150,000
marched, mostly in the capital under the rubric "One Year Later--
Madrid Against the War." Still, these hopeful numbers pale in
comparison to Feb. 15, 2003, when 1.5 million Spanish activists
took the street--this is to say that after a year in which more
than a dozen compatriots lost their lives in Iraq, and pint-sized
rightist premier Jose Maria Aznar embraced George Bush like they
were about to wed at San Francisco City Hall, only 10% of those
who marched last year renewed their vows in 2004.

In the US, where a million participants were estimated at
Feb. 15, 2003, protests in New York and San Francisco, 50,000 to
100,000 totals would be deemed a smashing success this year.

The diminishment of the antiwar movement north of the border
has been synchronistically attuned to the jostling of candidates
for the Democratic Party presidential nomination--perhaps the
late Dean crusade, which purported to be against the war, was
most efficient in co-opting activists and getting them out of the
street. It is almost as if the US peace movement is incapable of
multi-tasking--i.e., marching and voting at the same time.

Now once again wedged firmly into the Democratic Party's
pockets when never before has the need to build a third party
been more pertinent (or less realistic in the frenzy to beat
Bush), antiwar activists will almost certainly turn Mar. 20 into
a John Kerry bandwagon.

As the November election looms up north, Kerry, a decorated
war hero who turned against the Vietnam war and now tries to hide
his opposition to that hideous episode in Yanqui imperialism,
engages in a pissing contest over who is a better soldier with
George Bush, a self-styled "war" president who indeed dodged that
war when his number came up. It seems only fitting that as the
deaths mount up on all sides in Iraq, the US will soon celebrate
a war election.

[John Ross was one of the first draft resisters to the Vietnam
war to be imprisoned by the Yanqui government. His memoir of
those bad old days, Murdered By Capitalism, 150 Years of Life and
Death on the American Left, will be published by Nation Books
this spring.]