The Iraqi state has been demolished under the irrepressible weight of American bombs and United Nations’ silent acquiescence. What was sold as a mortal battle against weapons of mass destruction, has morphed into a fight against Saddam to liberate the Iraqi oppressed. Those who were bombed weeks ago will soon host a horde of American companies, which will earn billions to rebuild the shattered infrastructure, shattered by over 12 years of UN diplomatic and Anglo-American aggression.
“Are there weapons of mass destruction? Who cares? That was yesterday. This is today,” the corporate media seems to be suggesting. The American people seem more interested in what will be on TV tonight, than the reasons why war is waged in their name. There is a reason why Americans seem to not give a damn. First, because the bombed and blitzed were Arabs, which is the polite term we use rather than the British, “w$!g” or the American, “sand n$!$!$r.” Second, this isn’t the first time that the government used a lie to bring their citizens to a war fever. Just over a decade ago, when the U.S. wanted to whip the American people into a killing frenzy, they brought out the Kuwaiti stolen incubator story, complete with a weeping maiden, who told a chosen coterie of congressmen about the ruthless raids of Iraqi troops into Kuwaiti hospitals. The administration’s tales of horror tore into the guts of every mother and father; and before long, American troops were sending tens of thousands of Iraqis to paradise, on the highway of death, back to Baghdad.
Of course, the maiden story was a false media ploy, which garnered airtime all around the earth. The maiden, a member of the Kuwaiti ruling family, the Al Sabahs, wasn’t even in the country at the time of the Iraqi incursion. One, incidentally, that happened because the U.S., through its ambassador April Glaspie, gave personal assurances to President Saddam Hussein, that the U.S. would, “Have no opinion on your border dispute with Kuwait.” After Gulf War One, then General Colin Powell lamented at the loss of American whipping boys, “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains,” he once said.
To U.S. eyes, Saddam Hussein was deeply useful one way or another. When the Islamic Revolution sent the late Shah into retirement, the U.S. cuddled up to Hussein, and armed him to the gills to wage a vicious proxy war on the Iranians. For almost a decade, the two nations engaged in a mutual blood fest, which sputtered on until almost a million people were dead. They now need what’s under Iraqi sands much more than they needed Hussein, and they had to manufacture a reason for war that would send chills down Americans’ spines. Enter weapons of mass destruction. Like the incubator story, which pictured Iraqis throwing Kuwaiti children onto cold hospital floors to die while looting the joint of incubators, the evocation of weapons of mass destruction played on American fears kindled by the fires of 9/11. And now, after weeks of sand sifting by the armed forces, and with no iota of such weapons found, the Bush administration insists that the war was waged to liberate the Iraqis from a brutal tyrant. The very forces that supported his tyranny decades ago now insists it wants to free the people from it. What about the wars to come? Iran? Syria? What sweet lies will the U.S. propaganda machine spin for the American people? Which lies will work, again? From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
