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CounterPunch
March 21,
2003
How
Will History Judge a War the World Opposed?
The Gates of
Hell
By HANI SHUKRALLAH
As we went to print the military forces of the
US and its smaller but eminently zealous war partner, Tony Blair's
Britain, were set to launch a massive air and ground invasion
of Iraq, the one certain result of which is the utter destruction
of a once prosperous Arab nation, already devastated by two wars
and 11 years of crippling sanctions.
As the clock was ticking towards the
deadline set on Tuesday by US President George W Bush for Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave the country and
rejected by Hussein (4am Iraq time today, Thursday), tens of
thousands of coalition troops were moving into the demilitarised
zone straddling the Iraq- Kuwait border and extending 10km into
Iraqi territory.
"Troops walked into the DMZ this
morning around 11am (0800GMT)," a Kuwaiti security source
announced yesterday. "American troops are still driving
towards Umm Qasr [near the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border]." One of
the first objectives of the invasion forces, according to US
military officials, will be to overwhelm regular Iraqi army units
and take the Iraqi city of Basra, about 65km from the Kuwaiti
border and 550km southeast of Baghdad.
With 280,000 US and British troops deployed
in the Gulf -- 175,000 are in Kuwait -- US military commanders
were promising a war "unlike anything anyone has ever seen
before," according to the US naval commander in the Gulf,
Vice Admiral Timothy Keating. Speaking to reporters on board
USS Abraham Lincoln, Keating waxed poetic on the forthcoming
invasion. The coalition troops would go "about this particular
conflict... in a way that is very unpredictable and unprecedented
in history -- remarkable speed, breathtaking speed, agility,
precision and persistence."
Keating was referring to the Pentagon's
"Shock and Awe" doctrine, an aerial bombardment of
such precision and intensity, it is claimed, that it will isolate
Saddam and his leadership and stun the Iraqi army into submission.
Upward of 3,000 satellite-guided bombs and cruise missiles will
be unleashed from sea and air on targets the Pentagon deems vital
to Saddam's government.
"Shock and Awe" is the brainchild
of Harlan Ullman, veteran military strategist and co-author of
the 1996 book Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. The doctrine
recommends "nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction"
to achieve an "overwhelming level of shock and awe against
an adversary on an immediate or sufficiently timely basis to
paralyze its will to carry on."
The doctrine was inspired by the impact
of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and "the
comatose and glazed expressions of survivors of the great bombardments
of World War I and the attendant horrors and death of trench
warfare."
The levels of death and destruction the
application of this doctrine, very likely within the next 48
hours, will wreak on Iraq and its population of 20 million is
likely to prove as "unprecedented and incomprehensible"
as Keating promises.
The three-paragraph formal justification
of the war sent by the White House to Congress yesterday predicted
a quick victory but added: "Americans have to be prepared
for loss of life." For his part Keating said that "hopefully
[the war] will be quick, [though] we are prepared for it to take
however long it takes."
In Baghdad Iraqi officials were making
promises of their own. An emergency session of the Iraqi parliament
yesterday sent a letter to Saddam in which they pledged to "follow
the path of heroism and martyrdom... defending Iraq."
Iraqi Information Minister Mohamed Said
Al-Sahhaf told a press conference that the US was deceiving its
soldiers by insisting "invading Iraq will be like a picnic."
He added: "This is a very stupid lie... what they are facing
is definite death." Meanwhile dozens of Ba'ath Party members,
armed with Kalashnikovs, were deploying in clusters of fours
and fives across Baghdad, according to AP, with groups of them
manning the hundreds of sandbagged fighting positions that have
been erected around the Iraqi capital during the past two weeks.
The duration of the war and its likely
death toll remain as impossible to predict as the regional and
global ramifications of what is likely to become a lengthy US
military occupation of Iraq. The one thing that is certain is
that these will be of such momentous proportions as to change
the face not just of the region, but of the world.
Arab leaders, who in recent months have
appealed to the Bush administration to desist from actions that
threaten to drive the region into chaos, have in the last two
days accepted the inevitability of the invasion of Iraq, adopting,
as one observer put it, a strategy of minimising the potential
losses to the security and stability of their states and the
region as a whole.
In a televised address to the nation
yesterday morning, President Hosni Mubarak sounded an ominous
note. "During the past few hours," Mubarak said, "the
question of Iraq's WMD capabilities and of their divesting passed
through a crucial turning point, one that threatens grave ramifications
not just for the stability of the Middle East region and its
persistent pursuit of prosperity and development, but also in
terms of the ability of the United Nations, and particularly
the Security Council, to undertake its crucial role in managing
the international mutual security system and safeguarding international
peace and security."
Mubarak reviewed Egyptian and Arab efforts
to achieve a peaceful settlement of the Iraqi crisis, asserting
the basic principles upon which Egyptian policy on this issue
was based -- international legitimacy, protecting the sovereignty
and territorial integrity of Iraq and the indivisibility of the
peaceful resolution of the region's conflicts, foremost among
which that of the Palestinian question.
Concern with regional dangers was echoed
by Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. "When I was
saying this war was going to open the gates of hell I meant it,"
Moussa says in an exclusive interview with Al-Ahram Weekly. (see
p.5)
"The destruction and negative consequences
are not going to be just about Iraq. No. It will affect the whole
region and beyond. It will probably affect the international
system as well," Moussa added.
Among the many casualties commentators
point to the collapse of the UN system, put in place at the end
of World War II. At the UN Security Council yesterday the foreign
ministers of France, Russia and Germany condemned the American-led
war and affirmed its illegality under the UN Charter.
"We have to state clearly under
the current circumstances that the policy of military intervention
has no credibility... There is no basis in the UN Charter for
a regime change with military means," German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer told the council. Germany, he said, "emphatically
rejects the coming war".
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov
was equally emphatic. "Not one of these decisions authorises
the right to use force against Iraq outside the UN Charter. Not
one of them authorises the violent overthrow of a sovereign state,"
he said.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de
Villepin warned of the fallout of war. "To those who think
that the scourge of terrorism will be eradicated through what
is done in Iraq, we say that they run the risk of failing in
their objective," he said.
On board USS Abraham Lincoln, Admiral
Keating addressed hundreds of his men telling them: "When
it's all done... and they rewrite history, because that is what
you are going to do, your names will be written in gold on those
pages."
Before that gilding begins history will
have to be effaced, not rewritten. An illegal war waged in blatant
violation of the UN Charter and of international law; a war against
which 30 million people throughout the world have already demonstrated
before a single shot is fired on streets from Los Angeles to
Tokyo; a war to which opinion polls in virtually all the world's
nations, with the exception of the US and Israel, have produced
a definitive 'no' -- how can such a war be recorded except in
infamy?
And this, before the body count.
Hani Shukrallah
writes a weekly column for the Cairo-based al-Ahram
newspaper.
Yesterday's
Features
Ben Tripp
Blood
for Oil: the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint
Them Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic
Protest for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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