ANTI-WAR FORCES ON ALERT
Bush seeks pretext for unpopular war
By Deirdre Griswold
Signs of disarray in the U.S. capitalist system and its
political leadership are piling up, even as the Bush
administration continues with its adventurous course toward a
new onslaught against Iraq.
Another huge company--Conseco--filed for bankruptcy on Dec.
17. This insurance and financial giant is the third-largest
corporation ever to seek Chapter 11 reorganization. A good part
of the debt it handles is mobile-home mortgages. The company's
failure is a sure sign that many poorer workers are unable to
pay their bills.
The forcing out of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and
Bush's chief economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, has not restored
the "confidence" of Wall Street in the economy or the stock
market.
Unemployment has jumped to 6 percent.
States are cutting social programs to the bone as declining
tax revenues--the rich are virtually exempt now--tip their
budgets into the red. This means many more layoffs to come.
The racist roots of the political system in the U.S. are
showing once again in the Trent Lott scandal.
Around the world, the U.S. is seen as a rogue state on
everything from the environment to threats of endless war.
And what is the Bush administration doing about all
this?
The cabal in the White House has a single focus: It is
moving inexorably toward launching its long-planned war against
Iraq. Everything is being subordinated to that.
Creating a pretext for war
As this is written, the National Security Council has just
met. The media expect Bush to announce that Iraq has not
adequately answered questions about its weapons--despite the
12,000 pages of documentation it submitted to the UN and its
agreement to allow UN inspectors access to all its
facilities.
This is the strategy that Washington has been honing for
months now. Agree to having the UN send inspectors to Iraq, but
then preempt them with a unilateral judgment that the Iraqis
have "fooled" the inspectors and concealed "weapons of mass
destruction" and/or the capacity to produce them.
Bush's real goal is a war to conquer and occupy Iraq as a
key step in gaining unchallenged domination over the oil-rich
Middle East. He has found it difficult, however, to line up
support in the world or among the people of the U.S. for
"regime change." So the excuse has turned to "disarming"
Iraq--a country whose capacity for self-defense has been
flattened ever since the Gulf War.
It should not be ruled out that the hawks in Washington may
engineer something even more dramatic in the way of a pretext
to justify their buildup to war.
When it will start cannot be predicted, but tens of
thousands of military personnel, a huge amount of planes,
ships, weapons and other war materiel continue to be rushed to
the Gulf area. It is known that the military consider the
weather in January the most favorable for an attack.
The U.S. and Britain, which once held colonial sway over
much of the Middle East, including Iraq, have just organized a
conference of Iraqi puppets in London. This motley bunch is to
form the core of a "free" Iraqi government--in other words, a
fig leaf for U.S. military occupation once the Pentagon has
blasted its way into Baghdad.
Mass opposition keeps growing
Meanwhile, the opposition to this war among the people in
the United States and around the world continues to grow. A
huge national demonstration will rally and march in Washington
on Jan. 18, called by the ANSWER coalition, which organized the
largest U.S. protests to date on Oct. 26. Local actions are
taking place almost every day.
Tens of millions of people are questioning why this
government is hell-bent on a war that will cost hundreds of
billions of dollars when it claims there is no money to stem
the rising tide of suffering at home.
From the point of view of weaponry, the war hawks are
Goliath. No one in the world has anything like their awesome
firepower. But they are a small band of outlaws in the eyes of
95 percent of the world's people.
The strategy of the Bush cabal is to keep the mass
opposition off balance by seeming to cooperate with the United
Nations in a multilateral approach to the "problem" of Iraq,
while at the same time feverishly preparing for a war of
aggression. They hope that as the inspections drag out, the
perception that this process will avoid war will restrain the
mass anti-war movement.
Addressing this, the ANSWER coalition put out a statement on
Dec. 17 that concluded, "It is urgent that the anti-war
movement not be lulled into a false sense of optimism because
Iraq and the UN are cooperating. Various governments are
reporting that they are hopeful that the inspections process
can help avoid war. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan went out of
his way to say that war is not inevitable.
"However, the extent to which the world is voicing cautious
optimism about a peaceful solution is also the extent to which
the Bush foreign policy team is racing to dash all hope for
such an outcome. There is now an almost perfect inverted ratio
between the worldwide clamor for restraint and peace and the
Bush administration's eagerness to publicly announce that war
is certain.
"There is really only one restraint that can block the war.
It lies within the people themselves. Neither Congress nor the
Security Council will stop Bush's dangerous war drive. The
optimism of the anti-war forces must be premised on reality. If
we can mobilize the millions--in the U.S. and around the
world--and ignite a firestorm of activism, then the political
climate can be changed, and changed dynamically."
In the stodgy halls of Congress, the political climate seems
frozen in a bourgeois time warp. But on the streets, momentum
is gathering for bigger and better struggles.
Reprinted from the Dec. 26, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
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