- Let us have no illusions.
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- In Baghdad, once I'd gotten to know someone fairly well,
they'd often ask me point blank: "The war, Joe... when is it coming?"
And searching my eyes, it was clear that they weren't looking for comfort.
They wanted the unmitigated truth.
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- They need, of necessity, to ask these hard questions.
The 8-year war with Iran in which 200,000 died; the Gulf War, which took
possibly another 300,000 besides wrecking the entire infrastructure; 12
years of U.S.-enforced U.N. sanctions, which have cost them an additional
million lives-23 years of sustained economic and military conflict have
simply made the Iraqi people immune to illusions, in the matter of war.
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- Let us, like the Iraqis, have no illusions.
-
- I was in the states at the end of September when the
House of Representatives handed the president a gun. I was in Baghdad when
the Senate loaded it for him. History repeats itself, as the power to make
war is now invested in the person of one, fallible man. Was not the American
Revolution fought to prevent a king from making war at his subjects' expense?
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- As the "Old Europe" of Germany and France makes
waffling attempts to assert their independence from Washington realpolitik,
Eastern European nations are lining up to take their places at the table.
Washington will not lack for lackeys, because power makes money makes power
makes money, and this is the first lesson of politics. Have no illusions;
other nations will not come to our moral rescue. It may seem ridiculously
obvious to you that if the inspectors remained in Iraq for the next 75
years it would still be just plain cheaper than any other solution.
-
- You may be angry at how deeply your civil rights are
being slashed at, and recreated in the image of a neo-conservative New
World Order.
-
- Or you grasp all too well that it is U.S. arms sales
around the world that make inevitable the endless cycle of big and little
wars to come, for the next hundred years.
-
- Maybe it's equally clear to you that any future U.S.
treaty is a thing of convenience, to be abrogated when its purpose has
been served... That the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords,
bans on nuclear and conventional weapon testing, research into alternative
energy sources, all of these are only impediments to "preserving the
American way of life"...
-
- That the War on Terrorism is simply a convenient place
to focus American fears now that Communism is dead, and the Pentagon needs
a new justification for its ever-expanding budget...
-
- That this war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan to
secure right of way for the natural gas reserves of central Asia, the war
for the oil of Iraq, the not-so-coincidental turmoil in Venezuela...these
are only the opening gambits in the U.S. bid to secure the fossil fuel
resources of the entire planet, in order that we may dictate terms to the
rest of the industrialized world.
-
- Ask the shoeshine boys, the art dealers, the doctors,
the cafe operators, the hotel staff, ask anyone in Iraq why the United
States is coming there. They have no illusions. "It's the oil, we
know," they say, shrugging their shoulders as though this is a commonplace,
known to every child.
-
- In ancient Assyria, war was not dressed up in Patriotism
or the tattered gown of Democracy or a distorted Moral Righteousness fabricated
from the loving words of long dead Holy Men. War was an undisguised grab
for the wealth of another state, the losers impaled or sold into slavery.
And you had to face your "enemy".
-
- Will the government of Pakistan, a nation that possesses
nuclear weapons, be destabilized? Will the Israelis use the occasion to
push the Palestinians into Jordan? Will Turkey finally move on Iraqi Kurdistan?
Will the Shia'a majority of southern Iraq link up with Iran or simply demolish
itself in endless revolt against the American invaders? How many more Saudi
terrorists will be inspired to action? How long before the New Hiroshima,
and what unfortunate land will suffer it?
-
- Hundreds of thousands would die in such a war, but that
is academic, an historical footnote, statistics. Lives mean nothing to
this administration, yours, mine, or the Iraqis'. Have no illusions.
-
- Dare we note that, should the Iraqis put up a stiff resistance,
the American military machine will merely back up, and then, oh my fellow
citizens, then we will see a demonstration of Weapons of Mass Destruction
such as the world has not previously witnessed.
-
- Debate or forget all of the above, but be assured of
one thing: the present crisis is over nothing less than the American Soul.
-
- So why, in a world pitching giantly out of control, would
you bother to raise your tiny voice, against a din of violence, waste,
fear, greed, and "gut feelings", that seeks to drown out any
rational consideration of events? We raise our voices because we are Americans...unlike
the Iraqis, we can still raise them. We raise our voices because we have
children...and parents...and loved ones...and cherished ideals that we'd
like to hang onto, and we realize that everywhere an American bomb falls,
an Osama bin Laden seed is sown.
-
- We raise our voices because the right of assembly has
not yet been taken from us. We raise our voices because our government's
arrogant denial that all the peoples of this planet are beautiful and necessary
parts of creation, this arrogance is now attributed to the American people
as well, and soon it will be unsafe for us to travel outside of our borders.
-
- We raise our voices because the incontrovertible result
of war is more war.
-
- We raise our voices because we have galloping inequities
in our schools, in Corporate America, in our inner cities, and the 100
or 200 or 900 billion dollars we would squander on further brutalizing
our brothers and sisters in Iraq would be better spent otherwise than in
financing the theft of that nation's natural resources, to fill the pockets
of the conglomerate that is running this country.
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- * * *
-
- Writing in the early Baghdad evening, I often watched
the sun setting over the Tigris River. There, in the Cradle of Civilization,
one was, perhaps, more keenly reminded of the flickering and snuffing out
of civilizations, and by a small leap, to grasp the historical illogic
of war as a problem solving device.
-
- We raise our voices because we must. Because our hearts
tell us that the clock is ticking, not quite as loudly as it's ticking
for the Iraqis, but time is running out on the American Dream. Have no
illusions: An attack against Iraq will be one of the cataclysmic events
in American history, on a par with The Civil War and the Great Depression.
Would it not signal to the world that democratic principals and Jeffersonian
humanism have no more significance in the American ethos than they did
in Nazi Germany? And to send that message is to invite a return to international
barbarism, but on a scale we must shudder to contemplate.
-
- We raise our voices because there's a drunk at the wheel.
Approaching the wall, the catastrophe ever more imminent, we begin to see,
with growing and terrible clarity, who and what drives the American State.
There is precious little time left in which to grab the keys and avert
this self-inflicted disaster.
-
- We raise our voices in the certainty that even should
the dreaded Battle of Iraq come, it need not, must not, will not stun us
into silence.
-
- And the clock is still ticking...
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- Joe Quandt is a 52-year old actor/cab driver/activist/teacher/poet
living in the Albany, NY area. He traveled to Baghdad on the 49th Voices
in the Wilderness delegation, during the month of October, 2002. He can
be reached at: <mailto:Ytonthemoon@aol.com>Ytonthemoon@aol.com
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/quandt02172003.html
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