LIGHTING THE FUSE
Freeing the Iraqi People to Death

by Peter Matthiessen

Photos by Doug Beasley Courtesy of Beasley Photography, St.
Paul
http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/Patriotism/index_Matthiessen.html

The country today is very much concerned about the young
Americans in the military whose lives will be endangered in
an attack upon Iraq. But in the event of that attack, who in
the White House will take responsibility for the
never-mentioned yet inevitable slaughter of Iraqi civilians
whose sole offense was getting in the way of a regime
change?

In our name, a half million human beings are being
threatened with death in the next few weeks -- dreadful
deaths not unlike those of the victims of 9/11, except that
far greater numbers will be burned and crushed and
suffocated, and the horror will be painfully intensified by
the shrieking of maimed and dying children. Nobody in this
closed government, and almost nobody in the compliant
mainstream media, is dealing squarely and honestly with this
subject.

One can only pray that strategic bluster is at work when a
Bush Team official boasts on television of planned "shock
and awe" armadas of bombs and rockets --nearly eight hundred
in the first two days -- that will effectively remove any
impulse to resist, especially in those who have been killed.

Bluster or not, such words can only terrify the essentially
defenseless people who wait in expectant horror for the
American Armageddon. And if that boast has any truth in it,
the mortality in Baghdad will be many times more terrible
than Bush War I's grim slaughter of hapless fugitives along
the Basra Road in 1991, when at least one fighter pilot and
a tank commander refused to participate further in a
massacre that no longer had a point. In the military, taking
such a stand requires unusual bravery, and these young men
should have been decorated as true heroes whose moral code
spared our country further shame.

But assuming the worst, that the massive military build-up,
the leaked war maps and invasion plans, the many other signs
that war is imminent, are not mere bluff tactics; assuming
that the threat of U.S. force fails to remove Saddam
Hussein, and that our military is commanded to proceed with
the obliteration of what at this moment seems to be an
undefended city; who, then, in this government (and its
cautious opposition), who in the Congress and among the
growing numbers of Americans anxious to support their
president after 9/11, yet harried by the dread of a
long-term ruination of the economy and diminished prospects
for the nation's future; who, in short, besides the protest
marchers (invariably twice as numerous as the captive media
will acknowledge) will accept moral responsibility for the
senseless annihilation of so many human beings?

Should a "holocaust" (Nelson Mandela's very apt term) be
ignited by this proposed destruction, the conflagration will
be scorched onto the darkest pages of American history. Such
slaughter for so suspect a purpose can only be rewarded by
grievous shame and an even worse retribution -- terror upon
terror that will permeate everyday existence in the western
world, as it has in Israel, to a degree that Bush and his
mentors clearly have not faced as they go about their war
games.

The White House seems less interested in the peaceful
resolution to an exaggerated crisis largely of its own
construction, than in self-justifying rhetoric about freeing
the Iraqi millions from the tyrant -- an aging, weakened
tyrant not appreciably different from the many brutal and
obliging thugs (Saddam among them) whom U.S. governments
have propped up and subsidized throughout the past century.

The Bush Team promises to install an Iraqi democracy to
serve as a beacon to other oppressed peoples in the Muslim
states. Will "shock and awe" suffice the Iraqis as their
first taste of democracy? Will violent death be their first
experience of freedom?

Iraqis will be made to pay for inhabiting a land with the
earth's second-largest known reserves of oil. Despite
endless cant and propaganda to the contrary (contradicted in
open discussion, for example, of the risks France takes of
losing her lucrative oil leases for having been a wet
blanket at Bush's party), the foundation of these Gulf wars,
in the opinion of many, is oil. The "regime change" will
amount to precisely that -- a change to an obliging new
regime that can be expected to award control of those
reserves to its "friends," with corollary political benefits
far into the future.

To be sure, there are other reasons besides oil -- Saddam's
villainous character and record, his unacceptable pursuit of
massively dangerous weapons, and his nebulous association
with Al Qaeda, for a start. (And on that Al Qaeda allegation
rests the Bush Team's justification and excuse, though few
authorities have found it to be anything more than a
convenience.)

Americans, ever more inured to spin and lies, hypocrisy and
cover-up, in this corporate-enslaved administration whose
path is smoothed by a corporate-owned media, can perhaps be
forgiven for not suspecting that a diversion from domestic
politics and problems is, in the end, what this crusade is
actually about.

From now until 2004 we must look hard at everything this
administration says, especially its un-American insinuations
that anyone who dissents or has no faith in our fine fellows
is no patriot, perhaps even a traitor. But a traitor is one
who does grave harm to his country, and by far the most harm
done to our nation in recent times has been accomplished by
the fundamentalist ideological agenda of the "Enron A-team"
in the White House. From environmental pillage and the
pointed curtailing of civil rights, to huge subsidies of the
obsolete fossil fuel industry at the expense of the clean
energy the world cries for, and grotesque tax cuts for the
wealthiest among us, coupled with the most mean-spirited
cutbacks of even modest assistance to the poor, the
administration agenda has so far contained something for
everyone to deplore.

Contrary to its public relations image, this is neither a
strong administration nor a moral one. Indeed in its
arrogance, its lack of wisdom, and its self-serving ethics,
it seems to me the weakest in my lifetime. Before 9/11, less
than a year into his presidency, the president was slipping
sadly in the polls; since 9/11, swathed in smoke and fire
and the American flag, his opportunist administration has
buttressed itself by terrorist scare talk and patriotic
bullying in a clever and loathsome exploitation of a
national tragedy.

Let us not permit that tragedy to be compounded by another
slaughter of innocents in the Middle East -- or not, at
least, until it is made known to the American people just
why it is we have "no choice" about it.

Whatever one's views on the morality of an invasion whose
underlying purpose is to gain control of another country's
oil -- Saddam's invasion of Kuwait is one example, but the
successive Bush Wars may be others -- the precedent set by a
pre-emptive attack upon Iraq may one day be seen as the
single most catastrophic blunder in American history.


For over forty years, Peter Matthiessen has been engaged
with concerns that have informed and inspired two
generations of readers and writers. His writing has appeared
frequently on <OrionOnline.Org, most recently with a
reading from his book, Killing Mr. Watson. A previous essay
for the Thoughts on America series, The Volunteers, appeared
just after September 11th, 2001.

His nonfiction works include The Tree Where Man Was Born,
The Snow Leopard, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian
Country, Men's Lives, and, most recently, The Birds of
Heaven.

Matthiessen is a 1991 Laureate of the global Honor Roll of
the United Nations Environment Programme, and has been
awarded the 2002 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime
Achievement. He lives in New York.