We need a war with Iraq.

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By Derrick Jensen, pulled from this page, but I don't know where it was first published. He's an investigative reporter and has a couple books out, but I haven't read them. Yet.

We need a war with Iraq. It would help distract Americans from the scandals surrounding the president (and more broadly from the fact that our failing economy is killing the planet) than the start of football season: Nothing compares to the patriotic thrill of watching grainy footage of Iraqi radar facilities-- or maybe houses or hospitals; the resolution's never quite good enough to tell --explode into fragments, or better, simply vaporize from the pressure of the blasts.

     We need a war with Iraq. It allows those who run the U.S. government-- both the politicians, who run the nominal government, and the CEOs, who run the de facto government-- to talk about new jobs while increasing their fortunes. It allows the top 1% of America's power elite to speak of patriotism while sacrificing lives less valuable than their own. It brings about an urgency-- a frenzy, even --that allows the rationalization of massive public expenditures without even the illusion of a greater good or benefiting the public. It allows them to further centralize political and economic power under the guise of efficiency and national security. It allows them to imprison or execute those who oppose this centralization, with no fear of repercussion. It allows them to praise themselves and others like them for giving voice to an urge to destroy. It allows them to invent, deploy, and use no end of nightmarish devices. It allows them to kill, or rather give orders so others must kill, with no fear of public censure. It allows them to pull off the mask of public nicety and more fully concentrate and exercise their power, or more precisely, their power to destroy.

     We need a war with Iraq. But let's break down that sentence. First, who is the we in this statement? I cannot speak for you, but I do not need a war with Iraq. Nor do any of my friends. (I've asked them.) The trees outside my door do not need a war with Iraq any more than the salmon living in the stream nearby. They're busy trying to survive our culture's war against the natural world. I'm pretty sure that the people of Iraq do not need a war with Iraq. They're suffering enough already at the hands of the U.S. government. Or rather they've suffered because of its policies. The United States has perfected the science of killing at a distance. No barbaric strangling or stabbing here, it's much more civilized to kill with policies, or if necessary at the push of a button, the flick of a joystick. In July, 1989, before the United States imposed sanctions on Iraq, 387 children per month under the age of five died in that country. As of July 1998, 6,495 children per month under the age of five died. That number will go up dramatically if the United States invades Iraq.

     The New York Times and other news agencies tell us that a war with Iraq could hurt the economy, since the "U.S. would have to pay most of cost and bear the brunt of any oil-price shock or other market disruptions." This is undoubtedly true and realistic, but it is also dangerously short sighted. Wars are necessary to the U.S. economy for reasons far beyond the stimulating effect of all these taxpayer subsidies going to large corporations, and even far beyond the critical utility of soaking up of excess industrial capacity by producing items that will never enter the consumer economy, in fact items specifically created in order to be destroyed. War for the United States is a question of public relations, the most expedient way for our government to demonstrate what happens when our policies are ignored or our way of life threatened. The message is clear: You will be bombed. You will be killed. If a leader of a Central American country does not want an American transnational banana corporation running his country, he will be deposed or killed, and a more reasonable leader will be installed. If a leader of a South American country does not want American transnational mining and communications corporations running his country, he will be killed-- spectacularly --and a more reasonable leader will be installed. Teddy Roosevelt said it well when he talked of carrying a big stick to beat into submission those who resist, and intimidate those who have a mind to rebel. If you are the leader of an African country, and do not want transnational aluminum corporations to dam your rivers, if you are like Arbenz, Allende, Lumumba, Mossedegh faced with U.S. sponsored death squads and the kleptocracies that these death squads support, what do you do? Perhaps you compromise just a little, and then a little more, not only to save your own skin, but to save the skins of the people you are supposed to represent.

     One problem with the use of force to support an economic and governmental system, however, is that the poor do not always give up their hope and dignity so easily. The lesson-- that they are poor and you are rich --must be constantly reinforced, lest they forget that their resources actually belong to you. And how must you remind them? The same way the rich have always reminded the poor, through the use of spectacular violence-- terrorism. This was true in the postbellum South. It was true in the turn-of-the-century Philippines, where a million Filipinos were killed to reinforce the lesson that the Philippines do not belong to them but to us (a San Francisco newspaper editorial put it well: "We do not want the Filipinos. We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately they are infested by Filipinos. There are many millions there and it is to be feared their extinction will be slow.") It was true in the Shah's Iran, Guatemala after Arbenz, Somoza's Nicaragua. And it is true today around the globe in the New World Order.

     It does not matter that Saddam Hussein is not a revolutionary, or a reformer. He defies America, and so he must die. He has something America wants, and so he must die. He is a symbol of what America fears, and so he must die.

     We need a war with Iraq. Now let's define another word in that sentence: war. Not even Bush, Rumsfeld, General Electric, nor Boeing/Rockwell/McDonnell-Douglas particularly want a real war: my understanding is that for something to be called a war the other side has to actually be able to fight back, and while those who run the big military corporations of course wouldn't complain too much about the destruction of their equipment, necessitating the purchase of replacements, I don't think Bush and company particularly want to feel the political fallout from the steady flow of homeward bound of body bags. It would be too cynical, or more accurately superficial, to say that a drop in popularity would be the only reason those in power wouldn�t want to see the bodybags. A more fundamental reason would be that our society is based on an unarticulated hierarchy. The unthinkable-- when those low in this hierarchy perpetrate violence against those at the top, or just a little higher than they are --inevitably meets with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims. Violence brought to bear on those of little importance to this hierarchy is nearly always transparent, and very often goes unnoticed, or ignored. If noticed, it is fully rationalized. War thus redefined begins to seem more like ritualized slaughter.

     In the first Gulf War, the United States military flew 110,000 aerial sorties in forty-two days, the equivalent of one every thirty seconds, dropping 88,500 tons of bombs and killing probably at least 100,000 human beings (casualty ratio: 637:1, although the number is actually higher, since most of the American dead were killed by Americans, too). Foreign dead didn't matter. When asked how many Iraqis the U.S. military had killed, Colin Powell responded, "Frankly, that's a number that doesn�t interest me very much."

"Crispy critters," that's what a U.S. soldier burying Iraqi dead called those she buried, "people whose blood had boiled and evaporated. Their uniforms burned away with their skin down to naked, blackened bones, leaving vacantly staring charcoaled skeletons brittle enough to break up into skull, torso, legs, arms, and ashes."

     Let's look more closely at the word war. Such a small word. Three letters. Even if we call it slaughter that's still only nine letters. Behind and beneath all the talk of geopolitics and Patriot missiles are dead bodies. If the United States military invades Iraq again, many more people will die. Let's say for a moment that the casualties are the same as last time, and the number is 100,000. What does that mean? If each of the individuals who are about to die has an average of thirty-years of life ahead, this would be three million years snuffed out. More than a billion days. Let's say two hundred million moments of lovemaking, three-quarters of a billion bursts of laughter, and the same number of tears. A half-billion personal epiphanies, and six billion dreams. Children, old men, young women, grandmothers, the healthy, the sick, the happy, the unhappy, parents with children, orphans, lovers, friends, brothers, sisters. More than twenty-four billion hours of life suddenly stopped. Never to happen. Three hundred thousand pounds of brains, boiled or charred in the brainpan. Two million pounds of bones, and more of muscle. All of these turned into crispy critters.

And for what?

--Derrick Jensen, Crescent City, California
August 28, 2002