Posted by andreas from dtm2-t7-1.mcbone.net (62.104.210.76) on Saturday, January 04, 2003 at 3:27AM :
MEDIA MONITORS
Another Humanitarian War
by Gordon Arnaut
There is nothing more sickening than attempting to justify the war on Iraq on supposedly humanitarian grounds, as in freeing the Iraqi people from the dictator Saddam Hussein. “Shouldn’t human rights be the best cause for starting a war?” asked the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8.
This is the vilest form of propaganda imaginable, not only because it is a corruption of basic human morality, but also because it is so patently false on its face. Even if it were somehow morally excusable to kill thousands of innocent people in order to free them from an alleged dictator, the fact is that human rights of the Iraqis has nothing to do with Washington’s motives for this war. There is a hidden agenda that is not being talked about, and it’s about seizing control of Iraq’s oil, and enriching the American oil industry. It is about seizing control of a part of the world that the US covets for any number of geopolitical reasons, including encircling Russia, still the only potential adversary to unfettered US global domination.
Everything that George W. Bush and the rest of the US leadership have said about Iraq is a complete lie. We now see that there are no weapons of mass destruction; some of the UN weapons inspectors have already said so to the media. Scratch the weapons of mass destruction; that red herring doesn’t even deserve mention anymore. And then we have the constant lying about the no-fly zones. Time after time the Bush administration has told us how they are merely enforcing a UN Security Council resolution. This is a complete lie. The UN Security Council has never approved any no-fly zones, or even discussed them. Former UN secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali recently confirmed this to British journalist John Pilger. But that has not stopped the US Congress from incorporating this bold-faced lie into its bill authorizing a war on Iraq, which states in part that, “the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States…by …firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.”
In other words, the Congress is peddling a lie in order to make up an excuse for attacking Iraq. In reality, those US and British planes are the ones breaking international law, by violating the airspace of a sovereign nation, an act of piracy. The Iraqis are completely within their rights to shoot in self-defense at these attackers.
And if we look at the supposed reason those no-fly zones are there in the first place, we uncover yet another massive lie. The no-fly zones were put in place to ostensibly protect the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, and the Shiite Muslims in the south. But the Americans and British regularly allow Turkish warplanes to go in and bomb Kurdish villages. The British pilots have publicly protested this, because they are always ordered to leave when the Turkish planes go in to do their dirty business. In their public statement to the British media they say they are deeply troubled by seeing the burning villages left behind after the Turkish planes depart. So much for protecting the Kurds.
And now after all this deceit, we are being told that it’s all a great and wonderful humanitarian thing that we are doing when we go in and obliterate the cities, towns and villages of Iraq. Just like it was a great and wonderful humanitarian bombing when the US obliterated Belgrade three years ago, leaving several thousand innocent civilians, including hundreds of children, dead or disfigured. Peddling such disgusting justifications for war goes beyond any norms of human decency. Even Hitler never had the gall to invoke such outlandish justifications for his aggressions. Such twisting of morality is truly despicable, yet the US media continues to shamelessly trumpet these abominations, just as they did with the aggression against Yugoslavia three years ago.
Mr. Gordon Arnaut is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker in Canada. He contributed above article to Media Monitors Network (MMN).
-- andreas
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