Costs of War
The second Gulf War has begun. How the war will progress, how Saddam Husain will respond, and how military and political events will unfold cannot be predicted. And what after the war? The first casualty of the war has already occurred: it is the United Nations. America and Britain have fatally harmed it by stripping the world body of its international authority and by establishing a dubious principle - that if it suits a state or a group of states, the UN can be bypassed.
What matters is the unabashed pursuit of geopolitical and commercial interests. If the UN stands in the way, it should be brushed aside. By refusing to table a second resolution for fear it may not get a Security Council majority or it may be vetoed, the US and UK have seriously undermined the world body.
The world should now get ready to witness a descent into the law of jungle. All this talk about the war ushering in an era of democracy in the Middle East is poppycock. Democracy cannot be imposed from above; it has to grow from within as a result of a people's home-grown struggle.
Saddam may disappear from the scene, enabling the US to occupy Baghdad, install an interim administration there and pacify resistance elsewhere; or he may succeed in resisting at length, in Baghdad or elsewhere, forcing the US into a long fight. Or he could disappear, but others emerge to resist the US. The possibilities are endless.
If the United States is sincere in its assurance that all it wants is the destruction of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, it will have no difficulty in living up to the world's much reduced expectations.
However, only the ignorant or foolish believe in any of that anyway. America has more far-reaching goals in Iraq. It will not be content to stop at destroying Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, if indeed such an arsenal exists. Nor will it be content to depose Saddam himself and then install a civilian government in his place. Nor will it rest once the mechanisms for a democratic future in Iraq are a reality, if in fact they are really a part of the vision.
Rather, US ambitions are for nothing less than complete control of Iraq and its oil reserves, and for a redrawing of the map of the entire region according to its own -- and crucially, Israel's -- agenda. On its way toward achieving that goal, the US has amassed the most terrifying arsenal of weaponry ever dispatched from its soil into the Persian Gulf.
The weapons themselves -- awesome though they may be in their destructive power and technical sophistication -- are of course not foolproof. Just how smart are the famed "smart bombs" the US are proposing to unleash on Iraq? Previous conflicts -- in Kosovo, for instance -- revealed that a large percentage of them go horribly astray. They have even landed in the wrong country on occasion. How safe will Iraq's civilians be when all hell comes raining down on them?
The prospect of a bombardment, the extent of which can barely be imagined, is terrifying. How can such a force fail to cause significant "collateral damage" -the Pentagon's deceptive euphemism for blowing into pieces men, women and children, whose misfortune it is to have been born citizens of Iraq?
As the region braces itself for a full fledged war, two images crystallize in the mind one is of Saddam Hussein -- isolated and perhaps long out of touch with reality in the identical bunkers between which he moves, all the time contemplating his lack of a future. We must not forget, after all, that he has ultimately brought this fate upon himself and upon the Iraqi people, whom he has for so long terrorized.
The second image is of an Iraqi mother with her small children in a small house, which has had only intermittent power supplies for the 12 years of sanctions, her children robbed of an education. They are caught in a situation for which she was never even given a chance of bearing responsibility, but for which they will pay the ultimate price.
The article is an editorial from KO’s archives and was originally published on March 21, 2003