US President George Bush needs another bloody Gulf War to win the mid-term US Congress elections in November. The serious shooting may start before or after that election, but the troops and the multi-billion dollar killing machines are already moving into place.
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld is trying to push through new laws that will give the military a freer hand by reducing congressional supervision of the Pentagon. Meanwhile, deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz has been in Ankara to pressure Turkey to support a US invasion of Iraq.
The whole world now knows that Bush, who rails against "evil", is a crook. He made millions through WorldCom-style corporate scams, nepotism, influence peddling, insider trading and milking the public purse.
US vice-president Dick Cheney has a business record that has been described in the Los Angeles Times as a "textbook case" of corporate corruption.
What else would you expect from a government that represents the privilege and power of the 1% of the US population that owns 95% of the richest country's wealth?
Bush's September 11-enhanced popularity rating in the US has begun to slip and his best hope for a recovery is a big war on Iraq. Of course, there are much bigger reasons why the US ruling class wants a new war, but the political fallout from the wave of US corporate scandals gives an immediate incentive.
Only two other governments have supported Bush's plan for a new Gulf War so far: Britain and Australia. Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer's July 12 declaration of support for another war on Iraq has been given little attention in Australia. The ALP opposition has only expressed the most timid reservations.
Clearly, it is time for the anti-war movement to take to the streets again.
The White House, the Pentagon and the CIA are working overtime to justify a massive invasion of Iraq. The argument they hope will win them support for a new bloodbath is the charge that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is threatening the world with "weapons of mass destruction".
However, Scott Ritter, a former senior United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, points out that there is no basis for the accusation. Ritter said that the UN demolished more than 90% of Iraq's weapons stockpile. "There is no justification for war based upon the facts that had been presented by both the United States and Great Britain to date", Ritter said on ABC Lateline on July 18.
Bush and Downer argue that Saddam Hussein is a cruel dictator. There is no doubt about that. Hussein's regime was one of many bloody dictatorships helped into power by the US in the 1960s and 1970s to crush popular movements in the Third World.
But it is also clear that the US has no intention of liberating Iraq from dictatorship. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by 11 years of US-sponsored economic sanctions.
Furthermore, the people that Bush and his gang want to install in Hussein's place are blood-soaked defectors from Hussein's military, who have massacred and tortured thousands of Iraqi and Kurdish people.
Some of these characters met in London recently and offered this telling advice to the US: please get rid of Saddam Hussein but don't destroy Iraq's armed forces. The reason is obvious. The new military dictators that the US hopes to place in power will continue repress the people of Iraq and Kurdistan.
From Green Left Weekly, July 24, 2002.
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