In many ways the content of US President George Bush's September 7 "address to the nation" was unremarkable. Aimed at those in the US who are increasingly disturbed by the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation of their country, it featured many of the standard propaganda techniques employed by the White House in the last two years.
There was, for example, the ritual invocation of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and assurances of victory in the "war on terror". "Iraq is now the central front" in the "war on terror", stated Bush. Yet the supposed terrorist threat posed by Iraq that Bush outlined in his January 28 State of the Union speech was that Saddam Hussein's regime would provide members of al Qaeda or other terrorist organisations with weapons of mass destruction — weapons which even the White House has all but conceded don't exist!
When asked about a meeting with David Kay — the head of US "weapons inspections" in Iraq — Bush's war secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told reporters on September 8 that he hadn't had "much of a discussion on the substance of what [Kay] is turning up", adding that he is "assuming" Kay will "tell me if he got something that he thinks I need to know".
In a September 4 interview with Associated Press, John Bolton, Bush's undersecretary of state for arms control, stated that whether Hussein's regime possessed WMD "isn't really the issue"! This from a leading member of a government which assured the world before it ordered US troops to invade Iraq that it knew where Hussein had the weapons hidden!
The final report of the "Iraq Survey Group" — Washington's "weapons inspectors" — is widely expected to acknowledge that Iraq possessed no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, but claim that Iraq possessed the technical knowledge to make such weapons at some point in the future. Of course, anyone able to read chemistry, biology or nuclear physics university textbooks can possess such knowledge.
The best the Bush regime can hope for is that the commemorations of the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, proclaimed Patriot Day by Bush on September 4, will give a boost to US nationalism that will sideline the administration's virtual admission that it lied about its reasons for invading Iraq.
Most Americans just do not buy Bush's repeated claims that Washington's invasion of Iraq has made America and the world a "safer place". Two days before the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the University of Marylands' Program on International Policy Attitudes released a poll showing that 76% of Americans feel that over the last two years they have become either less safe or no safer from terrorist attacks than before. More than half indicated that Bush's "efforts to halt terrorism" had either made no difference to how safe from terrorist attacks they were, or made them less safe. Almost two-thirds thought that the Bush regime should place more emphasis on "economic and diplomatic methods", as opposed to military means, in the "fight against terrorism".
The Reuters news agency reported on September 8 that two US opinion polls showed that Bush's approval rating is continuing to fall. In one poll, just 45% of respondents Bush gave "positive marks for job performance" (down from 52% in August). The other showed an approval rating of 52% (down from 63% in May).
"There is growing concern and impatience about whether the war was worth it", one of the pollsters told Reuters.
This shift in public opinion, due mainly to uneasiness about the rising number of dead and injured US troops in Iraq but probably in part due to the collapse of the White House's WMD justification for the invasion, provides a favourable political environment to revive the anti-war campaigning in the US and internationally.
Through mobilising those opposed to the war on Iraq in large, highly visible public protests that raise the clear demand that the US and its allies get their troops out of Iraq — thus restoring to the Iraqi people the national sovereignty that the invasion has violated — the growing public disquiet about the war can be turned into an irresistible mass political movement.
Through the mass marches of the late 1960s and early 1970s demanding "Bring the troops home now!", the US and international anti-war movements helped force an end to Washington's decade-long criminal occupation of Vietnam. The same course of action can defeat the Bush gang's imperialist war in Iraq.
From Green Left Weekly, September 17, 2003.
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