Bush bombs Baghdad
Wall Street loves it; world protests
By Deirdre
Griswold
On Feb. 16, using long-range, precision-guided missiles,
24 U.S. and British jets bombed Iraq's capital city of
Baghdad. The planes kept a safe distance, letting their
deadly weapons find the targets from miles away. Having
wreaked their destruction without even having to view the
scene of the crime, the pilots flew back to their bases and
ate dinner.
The planes that drop the bombs don't come roaring out of
the sky anymore. There is no advance warning--no rumble of
jet engines, no whistle or whine as deadly missiles seek
their targets. No time to seek shelter.
Suddenly, amid the normal sounds of a normal day, come the
deafening explosions. They are followed by screams, air raid
alarms and the shrill sirens of ambulances rushing the
wounded to hospitals.
If anything qualifies as a war crime, shouldn't it be such
cowardly attacks on a civilian population?
Pentagon calls it 'routine self defense'
The Pentagon couldn't even come up with an excuse for the
bombing raid, which left two people dead and 20 severely
wounded. So they called it "a routine mission of self
defense." Their twisted logic goes this way: Because the U.S.
and Britain have unilaterally declared two-thirds of Iraq to
be a "no-fly zone," meaning that only they can fly there, and
because the Iraqis respond to their constant over-flights
with anti-aircraft fire, these two imperialist powers have
the right to bomb the largest city in the country.
Within hours protests against this crass and brutal
display of "might makes right" began around the world.
Washington and London were condemned by demonstrators and
governments alike. Palestinians marched in Gaza in solidarity
with Iraq. In Baghdad thousands carried banners reading,
"Aggression will not scare us and sanctions will not harm
us."
Protests erupted in Egypt, Lebanon, and other Arab
countries, but also in Europe, Asia and across the United
States.
The public in the U.S. and other imperialist countries are
fed a steady diet of scare propaganda associating Iraq with
"weapons of mass destruction" and "international terrorism."
This supposedly objective reporting turns reality upside
down. It is the Pentagon that threatens the world with its
awesome destructive power.
Even Scott Ritter, the main weapons inspector sent into
Iraq by the United Nations after the Gulf War, had to quit
his job in 1997 to go public with the information that
Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. Ritter also
confirmed that many of the weapons inspectors were really
spies for the U.S., passing on information that could be used
in future air strikes--which is why the Iraqi government
finally banned them.
While a few newspapers reported briefly on Ritter's
revelations, the propaganda blitz against Iraq has continued
as before.
Politics, economics or both?
What forces are pushing the Bush foreign policy team to
enrage the world's peoples while making even Washington's
allies have to distance themselves at the very beginning of
this new administration?
Some may see in this a confirmation of Bush's conservative
politics and a determination to show that he will be as
aggressive as his father's administration. All that is true,
but the many years of U.S. war against Iraq cannot be
explained solely on the basis of internal U.S. politics.
After all, the supposedly liberal Clinton administration has
maintained sanctions on Iraq that have cost an estimated 1.5
million lives, largely children under five. The military
encirclement and daily over-flights have been embraced by
Democrats as much as Republicans.
And what about the Labor Party government in Britain led
by Tony Blair? It is as hawkish on Iraq as the Bush
administration, even though its domestic social program
purports to be more popular.
What both governments have in common is their intimate
relation with the giant corporations and banks that depend on
super-profits from Middle East oil. When the reins of
political power pass from Democrat to Republican, or even
from Conservative to Labor in Britain, there is no break in
the continuity of capitalist class rule. The form, the image,
the rhetoric may change, but the essence of the state remains
the same. U.S. and British jets bomb Iraq to tell the whole
oil-rich region that no one should dare challenge the status
quo. And that status quo rests on the extraction of
tremendous wealth by the global imperialist corporations and
banks.
Clinton pretended that his pounding of Iraq was based on
moral grounds, that he was doing it for the Iraqi people, to
"help" them get rid of the big bad Saddam Hussein. Bush, on
the other hand, has disavowed a so-called "nation-building"
role for the U.S. military since even many conservatives are
weary and disillusioned with countless interventions that
only increase hatred of the U.S. abroad. So Bush doesn't even
try to hide his connection to the oil corporations, arguing
instead that what's good for Big Oil is in the "vital
interests" of this country.
It's like the Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carroll's
poem. Both ate all the oysters they could get their hands on.
But one pretended to cry for his victims--so that he could
hide his gluttony behind a handkerchief.
Of course, defining the class character of the U.S.
government as a tool of monopoly capitalism only explains the
general outlines of Washington's foreign policy. It does not
address the particulars of why an attack now, at this time,
instead of next month or next year.
Often critics of this or that act of brazen imperialist
bullying will argue that it was done at the wrong time, in
the wrong place. Some of the pundits now appearing on
television are of this stripe. Frightened by the burning
anger against the U.S. erupting all over the world, they
argue that the tactics of the politicians and generals are
clumsy and will boomerang.
Few, if any, help educate the public by putting a
spotlight on the real problem. They dare not say that those
who make policy are merely doing the bidding of the
super-rich ruling class.
Why don't they remind everyone that the owners of the
banks and corporations bought the politicians with hundreds
of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, lobbying
perks and slush funds? Why don't they point out that this
class owns the generals and admirals, too, by guaranteeing
them lucrative positions in the corporate world when they
retire from their 20 years of "service" beating up on the
resource-rich countries of the Third World?
Bombs fall, war stocks go up
The timing of this event reflects not only Bush's
political needs but the bigger needs of the corporate ruling
class. The connection between militarism and the profit
system has never been clearer.
According to Michel Chossudovsky, a professor of economics
at the University of Ottawa who closely follows trends on
Wall Street, the only high-tech stocks that are not being
battered these days are those that are directly connected to
military production.
He describes in an article posted on emperors-clothes.com
how the bombing of Iraq buoyed a shaky stock market that had
been heading into a "near meltdown."
At one point on Feb. 16, stocks had dropped by 5 percent.
But then came the announcement that Baghdad had been bombed
and the market recovered. The London Sunday Mail sighed in
relief that "the American market didn't collapse. It didn't
plummet. Indeed, the fall was less than 1 percent. This was a
routine day--unless you happened to live in Baghdad."
Chossudovsky explained that all week investors had feared
a crash. But "In the last hours of trading on the 16th,
defense stocks spiraled; oil and energy stocks boomed
following news that Iraq's oil industry might be impaired.
The value of Exxon, Chevron and Texaco stocks shot up. Harken
Energy Corporation--in which George W. Bush served as company
director and corporate consultant before entering
politics--gained 5.4 percent by the end of trading. Harken
Energy happens to be a key player in Colombian oil (with a
multi-billion dollar U.S. military aid package under 'Plan
Colombia' on hand to protect its investments). Harken Energy
CEO Mikel Faulkner is a former business associate of George
W."
The bombing also "reassured" investors that Bush intends
to go ahead with a broad strategy of reinventing the U.S.
military machine, spending hundreds of billions on new
technologies like the so-called "missile defense shield" that
haven't even been developed yet.
The idea is to make U.S. troops invulnerable behind
high-tech weapons systems so that imperialism can dominate an
increasingly resistant world without having to fear a revolt
from within, as happened during the Vietnam War. But empires
have a way of crumbling, no matter how powerful their
militaries, when the ambitions of the rulers clash with the
needs of the people.
Right now, workers in the U.S. are being laid off and
trampled by the same corporations that order the deaths of
Iraqi children so coldly. Depriving them of social services
like welfare, social security, Medicare and good public
schools in order to beef up the military and cut taxes for
the rich is going to bring the global class war home.
Nevertheless, the military-industrial-banking complex
can't help being true to its nature. The corporations are
already lined up for the juicy contracts that a bigger
Pentagon budget will bring. Says Chossudovsky, "The new buzz
phrase on Wall Street is that--despite the slowdown of the
U.S. economy--defense stocks constitute 'a safe-haven shelter
from the dot-com implosion.' " Boeing, General Dynamics,
Lockheed Martin, Northrop- Grumman and Raytheon--the "Big
Five" defense contractors--are growing fatter as civilian
companies sink into bankruptcy.
The Bush team is attempting to hold off the capitalist
economic crisis already underway through a form of military
Keynesianism. After campaigning loudly about getting
government out of the economy, these lackeys for big business
want to use state intervention to stimulate growth and avoid
the inevitable downturn. But instead of financing a program
of civilian construction like that in the 1930s, they want
the government to step in and reorganize the flagging
high-tech sector under military guidance.
None of this will work. It is only setting the stage for a
much bigger battle over which class will control and shape
society. Will it continue to be the elite propertied group
whose insatiable hunger for profits drives them to greater
exploitation, oppression and war? Or will the vast majority,
the workers, who now must struggle every day just to keep
their heads above water, find a way to break free of the
political control of the big business parties and assert
their own class interests?
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS
:: SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page