by Steven Wishnia
11.11.02

the Bush administration wants to invade Iraq, and none of them have anything to do with Saddam Hussein's potential military threat to United States citizens.

The first is revenge. Bush has said it himself, that Saddam tried to kill his father. The elder Bush’s failure to depose Saddam also tainted the high point of his presidency, his 90% poll ratings after the Gulf war triumph, less than two years before he ignominiously lost re-election to Bill Clinton, whom his elite clan despised as Arkansas trailer trash.

The second is oil. As of 1997, Iraq had about 10% of the world's known oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia and more than the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined. If the Bush II regime has one fundamental principle, it's the protection of oil-company profits and Americans' divine right to drive SUVs.

Click on the image to see a larger version | by Tim Kreider

The third is Bush’s domestic agenda. As long as we are at or near war, he can accuse anyone questioning anything—from tax cuts for the rich to environmental despoilation—of "supporting terrorism."Anyone opposing further restrictions on civil liberties is also guilty of "supporting terrorism."

The fourth, and perhaps most important, is a prison-rapist, barroom-bully projection of American imperial power. We are Number One in the world and must periodically prove it by stomping anyone who defies us. Saddam's murderous personality-cult dictatorship is good for propaganda value and defusing dissent—he's more capricious thug than revolutionary, more Idi Amin than Ho Chi Minh—but his crimes are not the real reason Bush II wants him out. Saddam's killing Kurds, for instance, didn't stop the Reagan-Bush I administrations from giving him military aid to slaughter Iranians.

I am not generally given to apocalyptic ideas. I was a teenage radical in the Nixon era, the time of the killings at Orangeburg and Altamont, at Kent and Jackson State, the time of the COINTELPRO secret police and the Weather Underground's nihilistic bombings. Many in the leftist and countercultural movements thought we'd be living in revolution or fascism within five years. That didn't happen, and I've been skeptical of such beliefs ever since.

But when we live under a president who took power by election fraud, who controls the world's largest collection of weapons of mass destruction, who is supported by religious fanatics, and who represents an ideology of imperial world domination through military superiority and economic exploitation, it's scary. Bush's stance toward Iraq, his eagerness to shove aside any obstacle to war, is eerily similar to Adolf Hitler's before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. (On the other hand, unlike the German Enabling Act of 1933, the Patriot Act did not eliminate all of Congress' power.)

There is virtually no evidence tying Saddam to the 9/11 attacks, and Bush's rationales for invading Iraq are so flimsy that they're even discounted by the CIA and much of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Never mind either that a U.S. invasion of the Middle East could have the effect of setting off dynamite in an oil refinery, both literally and figuratively. Never mind that the only major world leaders who wholeheartedly support Bush are Ariel Sharon and Tony Blair, whose slavish echoing of U.S. policy embarrasses many Britons.

Bush seems to be selling the war based on the notion that Osama bin Laden is a terrorist "raghead" who hates our guts; Saddam Hussein is a terrorist raghead who hates our guts; and therefore the two must be connected. Apparently, he's betting that the American people won't dig any deeper than that.

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