The
Fallacy of Righteous America
By Ghali Hassan
13 June, 2004
Countercurrents.org
God
is not on the side of any nation, yet we know he is on the side of justice.
Our finest moments have come when we have faithfully served the cause
of justice for our own citizen, and for the people of other land.
George W. Bush.
It
is easy to read words without knowing how corrupt language can be. Most
people know that God is on the side of justice. However,
in America justice is defined according to American standard.
The media act as a megaphone for those in power to propagate Americas
justice and Americas divine mission or
the messianic mission, as it is called in mainstream media,
to bring democracy to the Middle East and the world.
The American war
on Vietnam that killed more than 3 million Vietnamese people was portrayed
in America as a just war to defend the world
from the threat of communism. The opposite was true. Many years later
Americas elites acknowledged that the war on Vietnam was
a mistake. It was one big atrocity. The U.S. army was forced to
leave Vietnam. Americas imperialism in Vietnam has suffered a
stunning defeat at the hand of peasant and defenceless people. The result
of the war was: Vietnam is a country left shattered and its people suffering
from Americas immoral war.
For more than a
decade the U.S. is engaged in an illegal war against Iraq. In 1991,
the U.S. orchestrated the first U.S. war on Iraq, followed by more than
twelve years of genocidal sanctions and bombing, which decimated the
Iraqi society, and took the lives of more than two million Iraqis.
According to UNICEF,
the sanctions against Iraq resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children
under the age of 5 years old. In May 1996, 60 Minutes correspondent
Lesley Stahl asked Madeline Albright, US Ambassador to the UN: We
have heard that half a million children have died [as a result of sanctions].
I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know,
is the price worth it? Albright responded: I think that
is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.
UNICEF estimated that the under-5 infant mortality in Iraq in 2001 was
109,000, which has a population of 24 million, compared with about 1000
in Australia, which has a population of 20 million. Iraqi death toll
is not being reported and publicly discussed, fearing it will amount
to genocidal war crimes against those responsible for the wars (1).
To increase the
destruction and atrocities wrought by the sanctions, the U.S. and Britain
continued to bomb Iraqi infrastructure for thirteen years. Professor
Joy Gordon quotes a Pentagon official: What we were doing with
the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions
(2). Many thousands of children died as a result of contaminated water
and the inability of hospitals to function without electricity and running
water. What right does America has to destroy nations and killed so
many innocent human beings?
Former assistant
secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Dr. Paul G. Roberts, writes: Americas
brutal and barbaric 14-year old policy toward the Iraqi people has reduced
a literate and emerging country to rubble. Soccer fields are turned
to graveyards. Two decades of infrastructure accumulation is destroyed.
Hundreds of thousands of families are impacted by deaths or injuries.
A population is impoverished. Why? The former secretary asks (3).
This followed by
the second U.S. war on Iraq, which rightly condemned and called by many
law experts as the supreme crime [that] contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole. The London-based health organization
MEDACT reported last November a rough estimate of between 22,000-55,000
Iraqi dead, and also reported rising maternal mortality rates, near
doubling of acute malnutrition, and an increase in water-borne diseases
and vaccine-preventable diseases as a result of this crime (also cited
in Noam Chomsky, ZNet 09 June 2004). The war completed the destruction
of Iraq infrastructure.
Both American wars
on Iraq were unnecessary and were based on fabricated pretexts. All
along, the U.S. war machine showed little concerns for civilians and
civilian infrastructures. The people of the free world rarely
saw the full horror of shock and awe that the Iraqi children
saw. A former president of the Australian Liberal Party, Mr John Vader,
has recently called for war crimes trials of the leaders of the occupying
forces in Iraq, adducing the illegality of the war (4). Gideon Polya,
an Australian scientist calculated the death of Iraqis and concluded
that in ignoring mass human mortality in Iraq amounts to holocaust
denial (1).
All this is conducted
with total Western media compliance in service of power, and in the
name of democracy, and moral authority. This
collusion of the Western media in the epic crime in Iraq is rarely discussed.
Saddam Hussein regime is now [Americas and] the Wests moral
compass (writes John Pilger). To be fair, Saddam Hussein was never
a champion of democracy and never an advocator
of human rights. These are the virtues of the
West. Saddam was unique in his own way. He was a dictator not unlike
many who have been welcomed in the White House. He jailed and tortured
dissidents, and (at the same time) he allowed Amnesty International
and the Red Cross to do sightseeing of Abu Ghraib. Saddam proved to
be rational, and anti-war activist. Sadly, Americas atrocities
against the Iraqi people surpassed those of Saddams by many folds.
How can those intellectuals
and social libertarians in America and the West know that
Iraqis are better now that Saddam and the sanctions are removed? On
the contrary, the sanctions continue and Saddam was much lesser problem
then than invasion and occupation. From an Iraqi point of view, since
the invasion and occupation of Iraq by U.S-British armies, Iraqis are
now jailed, tortured and murdered randomly by brutal foreign invaders.
Iraqi women and girls lost their freedom to venture outside their homes,
and gave up their education for safety. Kidnapping and extortion are
daily business. Iraqis have lost the good days of Saddams free
food rations. Most Iraqis are unemployed, and they have barely enough
for surviving. The unique Iraqi health services were destroyed, and
the schools, and universities of once proud nation are converted to
American army barracks. America is joining the OPEC cartel to sell Iraqi
oil on the free market and skimming the profits. Asian workers are replacing
Iraqi workers, and Iraq is becoming a dumping ground for subsidised
and contaminated U.S. products. Saddam is gone, but the people who replaced
him were once his worst thugs. The liberators piggybacked
them to Baghdad and immediately put Saddams aftershave on. For
Iraqis, democracy is becoming a fantasy, like the weapons of mass
destruction fantasy. Iraqis are left bewildered about Western
virtues.
President George
W. Bush, believes because he has been born again, nothing
[he] dose can be challenged on moral grounds, however unethical or evil
it might appear, because all of his actions are directed by God. He
can twist the truth, oppress the poor, exalt the rich, despoil the earth,
ignore the law--and murder children--without the slightest compunction,
the briefest moment of doubt or self-reflection, because he believes,
he truly believes, that God squats in his brainpan and tells him what
to do (5). Furthermore, according to Bob Woodward, the author
of Bush at War, the president has told his advisers that he does not
worry about alienating other nations. At some point we may be
the only one left he has said. Thats OK with me. We
are America (6). Iraq already is showing the cracks in the American
empires foundation and may prove to be the prelude to its inevitable
crash landing.
George W. Bush,
writes David Moberg, was reasserting the powerful and dangerous
collective self-delusion that America is a uniquely privileged nation,
set apart from history and embodying a divine mission. This deep-rooted
sense of American exceptionalism that goes back to the Puritans underlies
the justifications for the creation of a new, benign American empire
(7). Sadly, most Americans don't have an opinion about their country
foreign policy. Worse than that, Ramsey Clark, former attorney
general said, when they do think about it, it's in terms of the
demonization of enemies and the exaltation of our capacity for violence.
According to Richard Falk, the distinguished Professor of International
Law and Practice, this Iraq war is a war of aggression and, as
such, that it amounts to a Crime against Peace of the sort for which
surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted and punished at the
Nuremberg trials conducted shortly after the Second World War(8).
In response to the
new U.S. imposed restrictions on travel to Cuba, president Fidel Castro
told George W. Bush recently: You have neither the morality nor
the right to speak of freedom, democracy and human rights. No one is
born equal in the U.S. In the black and Latino ghettos and on reservations
for the natives there is no other equality but that of being poor and
excluded(9). In a word, no nation has the right to invade and
subjugate other nations to foreign views.
According to Buddhism
philosophy, right action means to act kindly and compassionately,
to be honest, and to respect the belongings of others. The same type
of energy that fuels desire, envy, aggression, and violence can on the
other side fuel self-discipline, honesty, benevolence, and kindness.
It follows, had America behaved in self-discipline, honesty, benevolence
and kindness manner; the world, including America would be a safer place
to live for every human being.
My advice to Americans
is to take a hard look in the mirror, and ask yourselves why your country
is committing horrendous terrorist acts on the soils of other countries.
The destruction of Iraq and the horror brought forth by American war
on the Iraqi people, and Americas other countless atrocities rob
America of all moral authority and idealism.
Ghali Hassan lives
in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted on: [email protected]
[1] Gideon Polya,
Iraq death toll amounts to a holocaust, Australasian Science, June 2004,
http://www.control.com.au/bi2004/255conScience.pdf
[2] Joy Gordon, Cool War, Harpers Magazine, November 2002. http://harpers.org/CoolWar.html.
[3] Paul G. Roberts, A country Destroyed, 20 April 2004, http://lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts38.html.
[4] Mark Forbes, Iraq conflict like Vietnam, says Fraser, The Age, 09
April 2004.
[5] Chris Floyd, The Revelation of St. George: God instructed
me to strike Saddam. Counterpunch.org
/floyd06302003.html.
[6] Bob Woodward, Bush at War, Simon & Schuster, 2004.
[7] David Moberg, Imperial Barbarians, In These Times, 25 May 2004.
[8] Richard Falk, Resisting the global domination project, Vol: 20,
issue 08, April 12-25 2003.
http://flonnet.com/fl2008/stories/20030425004002300.htm
[9] Faiza Rady, Cuba sera pronto libre, Al-Ahram Weekly
No. 691, 20-26 May 2004.