An
Urgent Exhortation in the Face of Urgent World Crisis
by
Carl Ridd,
Professor
of Religious Studies (ret.),
and
Peace Activist
written
Sat., March 8, 2003
while
in hospital.
An urgent crisis is upon the world in Iraq.
But it is not the crisis that the U.S. says it is or that the
ignorant media repeat endlessly every day.
It is not the crisis that under the American stampede has become the one
under consideration. This substitution of a lesser, arbitrary and artificial
crisis for the real one that becomes more visible every day (but is far less
spoken about) is the crisis
the world has on its hands. The real
crisis then is over whether it is right to rush to this particular slaughter for
the unconvincing reasons offered by the Bush
Administration, while the real reason (world control via oil) remains
politely unuttered and unaddressed at official levels.
Are the world’s people and just institutions of world governance and
behaviour to be sacrificed to the impressive tyranny of a superpower in a rage
to conquer?
This potential war (read “slaughter”) in Iraq is upon us for one
reason only: the greatest superpower the world has ever seen has the political
and military power to force a putative “life-and-death” issue—“Weapons
of Mass Destruction” (WMDs)
—with this particular country at this particular time.
The crisis is artificial, contrived, and entirely due to U.S.
determination to force a “war” in order to gain control over Iraq’s oil.
The U.S. has achieved its potent new focus on Iraq’s WMDs after trying
several other, less successful, excuses—humanitarian responsibilities,
“regime change,” “leadership change,” democratization, “the axis of
evil,” and the “terrorist” connection between Iraq and the events of 9-11.
(The last of these has been surprisingly effective.
By now, 50% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime
were responsible for the September 11 bombings, though no evidence of any such
connection exists: of the 19 hijackers that day, 14 were Saudis, four were
Egyptians, and one was a Syrian).
The Bush Administration has achieved its dangerous focus by an incessant
media (propaganda) attack, by capitalizing on the sympathy that 9-11 aroused
around the world on behalf of Americans, by buying votes in the Security
Council, and, possibly, by the promise of post-“war” oil.
The marketing of the “war,” both in the U.S. and abroad (keeping in
mind that 90% of the world’s “news” is manufactured in the U.S.), has been
handled by a consortium of 25 American P.R. firms so that every day for the last
six months, Iraq has been named by a high ranking American official as the
world problem which must be addressed, always with a short term deadline
attached.
Several dates for launching a U.S. war on Iraq have been given. All are
said, by the U.S. and its few supporters, to be deadlines set by the weather.
In reality, the war the U.S. proposes, with its “Shock and Awe”
hi-tech carpet bombing of civilians and their life-means (food, water,
electricity, hospitals, transport, etc.) can be conducted in any season.
The abrupt deadlines are not, in fact, weather-related but are brutally
calculated to stop the leakage of popular support at home for a
“war” that even Americans can see is the “mother of all gambles” (Thomas
Friedman of the NY Times, in the Free
Press of March 4, 2003)—for the world community and for themselves.
The U.S. Administration knows it has only a few days to make its agenda
popular again at home: start the war, rally round the flag, inflame patriotism,
silence growing dissent at home, identify the dissenters as traitors allied with
terrorists—and get into and dominate Iraq before other alternatives (enforced
U.N. inspections, enforced co-operation by the Iraqi dictator) gain more ground.
The deadlines are phony and deliberately abrupt; they exist precisely to
limit time for careful thought, informed debate, and wise political manoeuvering.
And they underscore the real crisis that the world is currently facing.
The real crisis the world has on its hands is the fact that a single
nation now has the capacity to control the world’s agenda, naming enemies,
targets, dates, and “reasons” for a war—all as suit its own national
interest at any given moment and all backed by its staggering military
resources, its enormous financial resources, and its fierce, myopic will to do
what it chooses, regardless of the consequences for the rest of the planet’s
people.
In response to Carl Ridd’s wish that we each do something extra for peace, Rhian Brynjolson offered the following poem.
