Bush's mad mess

[unhappycamper]

Bush's mad mess
AL-AHRAM
22 - 28 September 2005
Issue No. 761

The first crisis to rock America began with an act of anger and frustration. Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed outside Baghdad on 4 April, 2004. She travelled to Crawford, Texas, disrupting United States President George Bush's five- week vacation, to demand he explains what "noble cause" her son's death had served.

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It is also vital that anti-war voices forcefully challenge the new version of the white man's burden argument that has led significant numbers of people who opposed the invasion of Iraq to now support continued occupation in the name of "protecting" the people of Iraq from civil war or of "securing democracy". Not having found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- the first big lie of the invasion -- the United States has turned to a new big lie: George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Negroponte, and their friends are bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. But democracy has nothing to do with why the United States is in Iraq. The Bush administration invaded Iraq for reasons of power politics having to do with long-established imperial interests in the Middle East -- the same reasons they backed Saddam as he carried out the worst of his crimes against the Iraqi people, the Kurds and Iranians (crimes that were later used to justify going to war against him in 1991 and removing him from power in 2003).

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Does the US government have an obligation to the Iraq people? Absolutely. An obligation for the crimes Washington supported for years when Saddam was an ally. For arming and supporting both sides in the brutal Iran-Iraq war. For the devastation of the 1991 Gulf War. For the use of depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs, and bunker busters. For the devastating sanctions. For the invasion of 2003, and the humiliation and destruction and deaths that caused. But the only way to begin to meet this obligation is to withdraw immediately -- not six months or six years from now, but today -- and to pay reparations.

And we should demand that the soldiers who are brought back from Iraq be sent, without their guns, to rebuild the levees and homes of the people whose lives have been shattered by Hurricane Katrina.

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