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To expect the United States not to attack Iraq would be to believe the impossible. It has massed and is continuing to position troops that could number as many as 150,000 in the Gulf region, prepared its military bases to support an attack, enlisted the cooperation of countries like Turkey to allow the use of the latter’s bases by U.S. troops, positioned carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf, and continues to escalate its rhetoric.

The release of the U.N. weapons inspectors report Tuesday in fact became the occasion only for more U.S. saber-rattling. Although the inspection team headed by Hans Blix did say that it had not received wholehearted cooperation from the Iraqi government in its search for the weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical and nuclear—the United States claims Iraq has, it also said it needed a few more months to complete its work under a U.N. Security Council mandate.

The head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, part of the inspection team, also categorically stated that the inspectors had not found any evidence that Iraq had nuclear weapons, and that they “should be able within the next few months to provide credible assurance that Iraq has no nuclear weapons programs.”

As if in anticipation of the report, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had said a day earlier that Saddam Hussein was “running out of time.” In response to the inspectors’ reports, Powell later said that the Bush government would provide proof of Saddam Hussein’s links to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network—links the United States had claimed before but had failed to establish. Those links are likely to be nonexistent since Saddam Hussein and bin Laden—one representing a secular state and the other demanding the creation of states based on the fundamental tenets of Islam—are said to despise each other.

Bush administration spokesmen also described the report as proof of the U.S. contention that Saddam Hussein is hiding his weapons of mass destruction in palaces, mosques and private homes, and that the refusal of Iraqi scientists to be privately interviewed by the inspection team was proof of Iraqi noncooperation.

At this writing Wednesday morning, Bush was delivering his State of the Union Address before the U.S. Congress, in which he was expected to attempt to convince U.S. citizens opposed to the war that Saddam Hussein is indeed a threat to the United States.

Bush, who has been criticized for his disastrous domestic policies that within two years have reversed the economic gains of the Clinton government, and for his obsessive focus on Iraq, was expected to present his plans to revive the flagging U.S. economy, provide jobs for the increasing number of American unemployed, as well as greater access to health care specially for senior citizens.

While “most of the State of the Union will not be about Iraq” according to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, however, the impending war with Iraq is undoubtedly the single most important issue in the minds of U.S. citizens, hundreds of thousands of whom have been demonstrating against it. They have been joined by even larger numbers of Europeans, in whose home countries there is vast opposition to war.

U.S. polls have also found that Americans are reluctant to back such a war, but apparently neither the views of U.S. citizens, much less those of the “international community,” to which Bush and company refer when convenient, matter.

That the U.S. will attack Iraq in implementation of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war has been a foregone conclusion even before the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the weapons inspections was approved two months ago, and Powell reiterated early this week that the U.S. and Britain would go it alone without a U.N. mandate if necessary.

All the major U.S. churches including Bush’s own Methodists and the Catholic Church have opposed a U.S. attack on Iraq. U.S. academics, artists, writers and even actors oppose it, as do ordinary citizens.

The common belief among them, whether at home or abroad, is that the Bush government has not proven that Iraq is a threat to the U.S. and the world, and that there is no link between the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. and Saddam Hussein.

On the other hand, researchers, journalists and academics have suggested that a war on Iraq would in the short term be in furtherance of the U.S. policy of securing access to foreign sources of oil. In the long term, however, it would primarily be to begin the process of redrawing the Middle Eastern map and of aggressive intervention in the restructuring of the societies of the region to assure sustainable energy sources first of all, but to impose a U.S. peace on it towards the consolidation of the U.S. empire.

The intention goes far beyond removing Saddam Hussein. But removing Saddam would be part of the blueprint for naked world domination by what the conservative historian Samuel Huntington has described as the only “rogue superpower.” That superpower has arrogated unto itself the right to decide the fate of entire nations in furtherance of its hypocritical claim of bringing democracy to the countries its policies over the last 50 years have devastated politically and economically.

Another U.S. historian, Gabriel Kolko, points out that United States policy has brought the world to its present state of ruin. It is a world where 300 million people go to bed hungry every night, in which the threat of a war that could incinerate the planet has never been more pronounced—and where Americans have never been as vulnerable.

“After fifty years of intervention in the affairs of dozens of nations on every continent, interventions that varied from training police and armies to supplying them with lethal equipment and advisers to teach them how to use it, after two major wars involving its own manpower for years, America’s sustained, intense and costly efforts have only culminated in greater risks to itself.”

Those efforts have also meant “more instability and violence in the world than ever,” says Kolko, and one its consequences is that the violence it has unloosed on the world has come home to roost. The violence “has finally reached [America's] own shores—and its political leaders say it will continue.”

U.S. international policies, continues Kolko, are thus a disastrous failure. “It is neither realistic nor ethical. It is a shambles of confusions and contradictions, pious, superficial morality combined with cynical adventurism, all of which has undermined, not strengthened, the safety of the American people and left the world more dangerous than ever.”

The U.S. plan to attack Iraq, Kolko suggests, is mindless, because it would not only be a continuation of the same policies that have been so disastrous; it would also evade responsibility for those very same policies having spawned the new breed of U.S. enemies in the persons of the terrorists of the 21st century.

Driven by the same self-serving and essentially mindless goals of the last 50 years, but this time brought to a higher level of idiocy by a set of breathtakingly irrational leaders who have announced their readiness not only to launch aggressive wars but also the first use of nuclear weapons, the war against Iraq will lead to a century of endless wars of intervention to clean up the mess left by, in the first place, the U.S. determination to rule the world.

The U.S., says Kolko, cannot run the world, and the events of the last 50 years show it. “It has failed in the past, and it will fail in this century, and attempting to do so will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as its own people.”

The United States, continues Kolko, “has power without wisdom,” and that is the lethal combination that has created a world of perpetual conflict, and which could eventually lead to its total destruction.

(abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 29, 2003)

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