(This article was originally written in 2002)
While the Bush administration insists it has not yet decided on a U.S. invasion of Iraq, the president and his closest advisors are clearly leaning in that direction. Next month, George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also a hawk on Iraq, will meet at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, reportedly to draw up plans for a military assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime.
In the run-up to the next phase in George W. Bush’s "war on terrorism", we should be on the lookout for efforts to find a casus belli, a triggering cause for war against Iraq. The underlying reason the administration wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein is to alter the balance of power in the Middle East by installing a pro-Washington regime in Baghdad. A tamed Iraq could serve as a future base for the U.S. military, which would provide valuable reinsurance right next door to Saudi Arabia. The critical oil producer in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has been the source of much of the funding for terrorists and is also the country that spawned most of the September 11 hijackers as well as Osama bin Laden himself. The Saudi regime has been rethinking whether it wants U.S. forces to retain their bases in the Kingdom.
For obvious reasons, the U.S. cannot own up to such geo-political motives for invading Iraq. Instead the Bush administration, in the absence of any evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks, has developed the case that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and its friends because it is developing weapons of mass destruction. A preemptive strike, it has been argued, would excise this tumour from the international body politic.
The problem with this as the only stated reason for assaulting Saddam is that it is rather antiseptic. Intelligent people have always doubted that Saddam (a wicked though not a stupid man) would be reckless enough to invite nuclear annihilation in retaliation for his use of weapons of mass destruction.
Throughout their history, Americans have shown that they prefer more emotionally compelling reasons for attacking other countries, reasons that often turn out in retrospect to have been based on fabrications.
A decade ago, as the first Bush administration mobilized to push Iraq out of Kuwait, which had been occupied by Saddam’s forces, the American public was fed a rancid morsel to whip it into a state of fury. A Kuwaiti teenager testified before a U.S. Congressional committee that she watched in horror as Iraqi troops tore respirators from premature babies in a Kuwaiti hospital, allowing them to die. After this, President George Bush spoke of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor."
The only problem was that the whole story was false. No respirators had been torn from babies. The Kuwaiti teenager who had testified using only her first name, Nayirah, was actually the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. The U.S. advertising Agency, Hill and Knowlton, had set up her appearance before the committee.
A comparable emotional trigger was used to win Americans over to a vast escalation of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War. On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that he had ordered U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam in retaliation against an attack on a pair of U.S. ships by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin. As in the case of the mythical premature babies, there was no North Vietnamese attack. Two days earlier, the U.S. destroyer Maddox, which had been involved in aggressive intelligence gathering maneuvers in the Gulf, in coordination with attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese airforce, had had a run in with North Vietnamese gunboats. Then came Johnson’s claim two days later of the unprovoked North Vietnamese attack.
Today no one believes Johnson’s account of events. James Stockdale, a Navy pilot and squadron commander who was later a POW in North Vietnam, reported that when he flew overhead on the night of the incident, he had "the best seat in the house." "Our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets," he recalled. "There were no PT boats there….There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."
A year later, having got the escalation he wanted, Lyndon Johnson himself, commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."
Apparently perennial believers in the truthfulness of their government and mass media, Americans were similarly enflamed by a famous incident at the end of the 19th century when a U.S. warship was blown up in Havana harbour. In 1898, Cuba was one of the last bastions of Spain’s empire in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S., which had been eyeing Cuba for decades, sent the battleship Maine to Havana to keep watch on whether the Cuban drive for independence could result in war with Spain.
On February 15, 1898, a giant explosion tore the Maine apart, killing 266 of the 350 men on board. The American press, with William Randolph Hearst’s chain in the lead, was quick to blame Spain for having blown up the ship with a mine or a torpedo. ‘Remember the Maine’ was the slogan as the U.S. Congress voted $50 million for national defence and President William McKinley led the U.S. into war against Spain.
While the fate of the Maine is still debated, in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy undertook an investigation of the cause of the explosion. His team of experts concluded that the blast was self-inflicted, probably the cause being a fire in a coal bunker.
In 1846, U.S. President James Polk was intent on wresting California and New Mexico from Mexico, if necessary by force. He got his casus belli when he sent a U.S. military force into southern Texas (still regarded by Mexico at the time as a renegade Mexican state). Mexican shelling of a Texas border fort followed skirmishes between U.S. and Mexican forces. President Polk told the American people that the Mexicans had thereby invaded U.S. territory. He got his war and with it two-fifths of Mexico, including California and New Mexico.
Today, the game is afoot again. The U.S. administration appears to be bent on finding a cause to ignite American feeling in favour of an invasion of Iraq. In recent days, the story of Navy Lt. Commander Michael Scott Speicher has been getting a lot of air time on U.S. television. Speicher’s F-18 was shot down over Iraq on January 17, 1991, the first night of the Persian Gulf War. Now the claim is being actively revived that Speicher is alive and has been held prisoner in Saddam’s Iraq for the past decade. While the evidence that the pilot is alive is sketchy, a few days ago President George W. Bush expressed disgust at Saddam Hussein "who would be so cold and heartless as to hold an American flier for all this period of time without notification to his family."
The missing aviator may or may not be a part of the casus belli this time. Perhaps a new and even more riveting story will be told. Stay tuned and skeptical. The first casualty of justifications for war is truth.
While the Bush administration insists it has not yet decided on a U.S. invasion of Iraq, the president and his closest advisors are clearly leaning in that direction. Next month, George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, also a hawk on Iraq, will meet at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, reportedly to draw up plans for a military assault on Saddam Hussein’s regime.
In the run-up to the next phase in George W. Bush’s "war on terrorism", we should be on the lookout for efforts to find a casus belli, a triggering cause for war against Iraq. The underlying reason the administration wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein is to alter the balance of power in the Middle East by installing a pro-Washington regime in Baghdad. A tamed Iraq could serve as a future base for the U.S. military, which would provide valuable reinsurance right next door to Saudi Arabia. The critical oil producer in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has been the source of much of the funding for terrorists and is also the country that spawned most of the September 11 hijackers as well as Osama bin Laden himself. The Saudi regime has been rethinking whether it wants U.S. forces to retain their bases in the Kingdom.
For obvious reasons, the U.S. cannot own up to such geo-political motives for invading Iraq. Instead the Bush administration, in the absence of any evidence of Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks, has developed the case that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and its friends because it is developing weapons of mass destruction. A preemptive strike, it has been argued, would excise this tumour from the international body politic.
The problem with this as the only stated reason for assaulting Saddam is that it is rather antiseptic. Intelligent people have always doubted that Saddam (a wicked though not a stupid man) would be reckless enough to invite nuclear annihilation in retaliation for his use of weapons of mass destruction.
Throughout their history, Americans have shown that they prefer more emotionally compelling reasons for attacking other countries, reasons that often turn out in retrospect to have been based on fabrications.
A decade ago, as the first Bush administration mobilized to push Iraq out of Kuwait, which had been occupied by Saddam’s forces, the American public was fed a rancid morsel to whip it into a state of fury. A Kuwaiti teenager testified before a U.S. Congressional committee that she watched in horror as Iraqi troops tore respirators from premature babies in a Kuwaiti hospital, allowing them to die. After this, President George Bush spoke of "babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor."
The only problem was that the whole story was false. No respirators had been torn from babies. The Kuwaiti teenager who had testified using only her first name, Nayirah, was actually the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. The U.S. advertising Agency, Hill and Knowlton, had set up her appearance before the committee.
A comparable emotional trigger was used to win Americans over to a vast escalation of the U.S. role in the Vietnam War. On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced on national television that he had ordered U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam in retaliation against an attack on a pair of U.S. ships by North Vietnamese gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin. As in the case of the mythical premature babies, there was no North Vietnamese attack. Two days earlier, the U.S. destroyer Maddox, which had been involved in aggressive intelligence gathering maneuvers in the Gulf, in coordination with attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese airforce, had had a run in with North Vietnamese gunboats. Then came Johnson’s claim two days later of the unprovoked North Vietnamese attack.
Today no one believes Johnson’s account of events. James Stockdale, a Navy pilot and squadron commander who was later a POW in North Vietnam, reported that when he flew overhead on the night of the incident, he had "the best seat in the house." "Our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets," he recalled. "There were no PT boats there….There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."
A year later, having got the escalation he wanted, Lyndon Johnson himself, commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."
Apparently perennial believers in the truthfulness of their government and mass media, Americans were similarly enflamed by a famous incident at the end of the 19th century when a U.S. warship was blown up in Havana harbour. In 1898, Cuba was one of the last bastions of Spain’s empire in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S., which had been eyeing Cuba for decades, sent the battleship Maine to Havana to keep watch on whether the Cuban drive for independence could result in war with Spain.
On February 15, 1898, a giant explosion tore the Maine apart, killing 266 of the 350 men on board. The American press, with William Randolph Hearst’s chain in the lead, was quick to blame Spain for having blown up the ship with a mine or a torpedo. ‘Remember the Maine’ was the slogan as the U.S. Congress voted $50 million for national defence and President William McKinley led the U.S. into war against Spain.
While the fate of the Maine is still debated, in 1976, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy undertook an investigation of the cause of the explosion. His team of experts concluded that the blast was self-inflicted, probably the cause being a fire in a coal bunker.
In 1846, U.S. President James Polk was intent on wresting California and New Mexico from Mexico, if necessary by force. He got his casus belli when he sent a U.S. military force into southern Texas (still regarded by Mexico at the time as a renegade Mexican state). Mexican shelling of a Texas border fort followed skirmishes between U.S. and Mexican forces. President Polk told the American people that the Mexicans had thereby invaded U.S. territory. He got his war and with it two-fifths of Mexico, including California and New Mexico.
Today, the game is afoot again. The U.S. administration appears to be bent on finding a cause to ignite American feeling in favour of an invasion of Iraq. In recent days, the story of Navy Lt. Commander Michael Scott Speicher has been getting a lot of air time on U.S. television. Speicher’s F-18 was shot down over Iraq on January 17, 1991, the first night of the Persian Gulf War. Now the claim is being actively revived that Speicher is alive and has been held prisoner in Saddam’s Iraq for the past decade. While the evidence that the pilot is alive is sketchy, a few days ago President George W. Bush expressed disgust at Saddam Hussein "who would be so cold and heartless as to hold an American flier for all this period of time without notification to his family."
The missing aviator may or may not be a part of the casus belli this time. Perhaps a new and even more riveting story will be told. Stay tuned and skeptical. The first casualty of justifications for war is truth.
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