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In the American film Mars Attacks, the U.S. President asks an adviser, a professor played by Pierce Brosnan, if the Martians’ intentions are hostile. The professor replies that the Martians are technologically advanced. A technologically advanced society can’t be barbaric.

The professor ends up eating his words. Mars attacks Earth with all the technological capability at its disposal, massacres hundreds of thousands of people all over the planet and turns much of it into rubble. The only thing that saves the world is the 1940s song Indian Love Call, which has the singular effect of turning Martian brains into green mush.

But, yes, a technologically advanced society can indeed be barbaric—in fact, it can very well use its technological capacity, not for life and creation, but for death and destruction. This much the United States has been demonstrating for the last 100 years. It is currently demonstrating it in Iraq.

Like all conquering armies, the United States came to the Philippines at the turn of the century to civilize the natives, albeit with a Krag (the rifle then used by U.S. forces), and to bring democracy to a benighted people who, despite their successful revolt against the Spaniards and their key leaders’ contact with the writings of the French Revolution, were in its mind surely unaware of the Rights of Man.

Like Bush today in Iraq (who may not be saying it but is certainly thinking it), William McKinley dragged an unsuspecting God into the bloody blundering business, telling the world that God had told him to take the Philippines, Christianize Filipinos and educate them in the arts of democracy. It didn’t matter that the Filipinos were already mostly Christian (though Bush and company are making that less and less something to be proud of), and that some of them at least had taken the huge democratic step of defeating the Spanish colonizers in a war of independence.

Fifty years, two world wars and numerous interventions all over the planet later, the United States brought half a million troops to Vietnam to protect “democracy” from the Vietnamese, a.k.a. the Viet Cong.

To defend democracy (synonymous with the regimes of Ngo Dinh Diem and of a succession of despots willing to allow US multinationals to loot Vietnamese resources), the US defoliated tens of thousands of acres of forests with chemical agents like Agent Orange, turned rice fields into dust, mined much of the southern part of the country and rained bombs on the independent northern part of it. Along the way the exporter and defender of democracy killed a million Vietnamese, give or take a few.

In both these Asian cases, the question was who was the barbarian and who was the defender of civilization—civilization as exemplified by, among others, those rights every conquering army disdains: the right of a people to live in peace and to chart their own destiny.

It’s also called democracy in some places, though not in U.S. ruling circles, one of whose key members, Henry Kissinger (he’s still around in Washington, and still making his pitch for the inherent superiority of U.S. interests) once said that the U.S. had to save people like the people of Chile from themselves. The latter had made the insufferable mistake of electing Salvador Allende president via democratic elections. That mistake the U.S. proceeded to correct by assassinating Allende and installing the mass murderer Augusto Pinochet in his place.

Who’s the barbarian and who’s the defender of civilization? As U.S. B-52 bombers rained bombs on the northern part of Vietnam in the 1970s, the wonder of it was that in the tunnels the Vietnamese had dug, life went on even as the ground shook and entire communities with their temples and schoolhouses, their paddy fields and their animals, were destroyed.

Children were taught their alphabet, the adults read books, attended meetings, cooked in communal kitchens, took turns manning antiaircraft guns on the surface, and shared lives together in the tenacious belief that they were defending their country and their right to make of it what they please without the benefit of US omniscience.

Today U.S. forces are within 100 kilometers of Baghdad and are knocking at its gates. But they worry that the quick victory their chief military tactician, the draft evader George W. Bush, wanted and expected has not been forthcoming. Instead they anticipate a war lasting several months into the summer.

This means that the rain of bombs and cruise missiles on Baghdad will turn into a storm. Stalled by Iraqi resistance and fearful of taking casualties, US forces have stepped up the air attacks which they had earlier claimed were using “smart” bombs to avoid civilian casualties.

No lie could be more hideous. No one can rain 3,000 bombs within 48 hours on a city of 5 million (a million of them children below five years old) without killing noncombatants, especially when some of those bombs, “smart” as they are, have ended up far from their targets—in other countries like Turkey and Iran, in fact.

The lie that the US is concerned over, and is not causing, civilian casualties, is thus bound to unravel as the weeks and the pounding of Iraq drag on. Thousands will die among the civilian population, hundreds of thousands—probably millions—more will be displaced, as the US use of unprecedented firepower results in a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions. Water and food supplies will run out, the injured will lie unattended in darkened hospitals and under the rubble as essential services break down and electrical power is targeted next.

Only former chief U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter seriously thinks the U.S. will be beaten by a combination of mass resistance, vulnerable supply lines and bad weather—the bane of every conquering army from Attila the Hun’s to Napoleon’s to Hitler’s. These problems notwithstanding, it is almost certain that the US will succeed in occupying all of Iraq and draining it of its resources. It will be at considerable cost, however, mostly in terms of Iraqi lives.

No matter. What’s a few lives when world domination is at stake? What matters is that Iraq will fall to the US attack, and US ruling circles are sure of it.

The American Enterprise Institute, for one, is not waiting for the surrender of Baghdad. Last week its leading members, among them the most influential advisers of George W. Bush, held a “victory celebration” in which the discussions went beyond Iraq—into what to do with Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria.

These countries are next on the list of countries for attack by US power if Bush’s advisers, most of them from the Institute, will have their way. Make no mistake about it: the Institute’s influence is considerable enough for what it is thinking to be government policy.

The International Herald Tribune’s William Pfaff notes that The New York Times has quoted a Bush administration official as saying that Iraq “is just the beginning. I would not rule out the same sequence of events [i.e., war] for Iran and North Korea. . . .”

And for Syria, Libya and whoever else the U.S. government wants. This enthusiasm for war can only be curbed if Iraq were to succeed in repelling the invasion force, or at least in keeping it tied down for months in a costly and protracted war. The stakes are enormous. Although they include Iraqi deaths and the future of Iraq, they even more urgently include what the world will be like in the 21st century.

Iraq is thus the key to either a century of war, or a century of uneasy peace. The attack on Iraq has never been, and is not about Saddam Hussein. Rather, it is about the fate of other countries and peoples as well as the rest of the planet, which Bush’s advisers would destroy so Halliburton and other US companies can rebuild it.

Iraq could thus be where the line has been drawn, representing those hopes in the hearts of millions of men and women all over the world for better societies in a peaceful world free from barbarism disguised as civilization—or from where that barbarism will further inflict its arrogance and brutality on the entire human race. Iraq was the cradle of civilization; it could also be, courtesy of the USA, its grave.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, April 1, 2003)