O
SAY CAN YOU SEE
A Perspective on the Current Crisis
by Alanna Hartzok
Presented at the Books Not Bombs/Stop Iraq War Forum organized by students at
Shippenburg University, Pennsylvania on March 5, 2003
The unjust and inequitable ownership and control of vast amounts of the land and
natural resource wealth of our planet is a root cause of the great majority of
local-to-global conflicts and wars. Our current form of democratic governance
is severely limited in its capacity to negotiate peaceful means of resolving resource
inequities and disputes, whether over oil and other minerals or over land for
housing and livelihoods.
Neither the market system as currently structured nor the force of military might
have provided a democratic means to equitably share the gifts of nature. This
fatal flaw of democracy can be most clearly seen upon review of some of the 3,000
major and 10,000 minor CIA covert operations during the past several decades.
This Third World War - the war on the people of the third war - has slaughtered
at least six million people in the third world since World War II, as determined
by former CIA chief John Stockwell and others. (1)
Taking control of Iraq has been a long-running strategic design of the oligarchy
which has come to rule the United States. An article headlined “Seizing Arab
Oil” which appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1975 outlined “how
we could solve all our economic and political problems by taking over the Arab
oil fields (and) bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them.”(2) Similar
stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers at the time. Today, there are
41 members of the Bush administration with direct links to the oil industry. Many
of them have held high office in the military-industrial complex that President
Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about many years ago when he said:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.(3)
In the words of Dr. Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies
at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars, “Controlling Iraq is about
oil as power, rather than oil as fuel. Control over the Persian Gulf translates
into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It’s having our hand on the spigot.”(4)
Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, author of Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America
Went to War in the Persian Gulf, was the CIA senior political analyst on Iraq
during the Iran/Iraq war and a professor at the US Army War College in Carlisle,
PA for 12 years (1988-2000). He made this statement during the Carlisle Peace
College Forum on Iraq on October 19, 2002:
The only way, if we are saying to go into Iraq and change the regime, for us to
change the regime is for us to stay in Iraq, and effectively take over the oil
wells and to hand them back to the same companies - Exxon/Mobil, British Petroleum,
Royal Dutch - which originally exploited the oil when the cartel ruled the Gulf.
That is imperialism. That is a classic case of imperialism. You cannot put any
other face on it. As soon as a country invades another country with the intention
of acquiring the assets of that country to exploit for its own aggrandizement,
that is imperialism. That is, I think, the only accurate way to look at what is
happening there.
The US, in an incredibly rapid space of time, is going through a tremendous transformation
in which we are ceasing to be a republic and are in the process of becoming an
empire and no one seems to be aware of this transformation, at least you are not
getting any of this from the media... The media is going through its own transition.
It is behaving in a way I have never seen it. The adminis-tration is lying and
the media is simply reporting what it is told. I see over and over again statements
made by our media that are flatout lies, like the story of Iraq gassing its own
people. (5)
The vast build-up of US military forces in preparation for a unilateral preemptive
“shock and awe” attack on Iraq is immoral and illegal. It demonstrates
a truly shocking disregard for the steps that humanity has made since WWII to
build global institutions based on law and peaceful resolution of conflicts. If
this situation was a case of domestic abuse, the Bush administration would be
guilty of making terroristic threats and issued a restraining order by the legal
authorities. If homegrown terrorists based in Los Angeles had organized a hijacking
of airliners to fly into the twin towers, would we have surrounded California
with the full force of our military in order to launch an all out attack?
The current situation has nothing to do with saving the people of Iraq from a
malevolent dictator, eliminating a source of terrorism in the world, or providing
for the security of the United States. The current situation has everything to
do with a small clique of cunning and super wealthy men with a focused group intent
to grab geopolitical control of Eurasia and Full Spectrum Dominance of the globe.
This clique of men are not the true representatives of an enlightened democracy
- rather they are truly the representatives of the military-industrial complex
and of several multi-national corporations. This moment - March 2003 - is their
carpe diem - their time to seize rule of the world in a crescendo of voracious
desire for wealth and power.
First, foremost and most immediately we must stop this maniacal and diabolical
war in the heart of Eurasia. We must first, foremost and most immediately stop
this war because we know that, in the words of Starhawk, “gorilla chest-beating
does not constitute diplomacy, having the world’s largest collection of phallic
projectile weapons does not constitute moral authority, and invasion and penetration
are not acts of liberation.”
We must support and strengthen international law and the mechanisms to enforce
it. International law is the just and civilized way for human beings to deal with
individuals who are guilty of crimes against humanity. We here in the United States
must turn our fast growing forces for peace and justice on earth towards the reinstatement
of the United States in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to stop nuclear proliferation.
North Korea would not be acting as it is if we had not pulled out of the ABM Treaty
and put them on the Axis of Evil list. We need to sign on to the International
Criminal Court, the Kyoto Treaty to curb climate change, the Treaty to Ban Land
Mines, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on Equal
Rights for Women.
The use and enforcement of these institutions of global goverance will move us
far along the path towards the abolition of war and the elimination of weapons
of mass destruction worldwide including the elimination of weapons of mass destruction
from the homeland of the superpower called the United States of America. The strength
and good will of the other superpower - we, the citizens of the world - can bring
these goals to fruition.
We hereby pledge our patriotic duty, “our lives, fortunes and sacred honor”
NOT to a Pax Americana but to a Pax Gaia - an order of peace and justice on earth
whereby the wealth of the world will shift away from the production of weapons
of mass slaughter and towards the healing of the planet and the people. We, the
people of the world, will now build a new global order to shift the wealth of
the world out of the control of the World Trade Organization, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other private bank accounts of the less than
300 multi-billionaires who now have as much wealth as three billion people.
We need to take a giant step forward to a new form of democracy. We, the people
of the world, must now direct the wealth of the world towards the building of
local-to-global economic democracies in order to meet the needs for food, shelter,
healthcare, and education for all. This is not a pale, pallid plea for charitable
contributions to the begging bowls of the poor. This is a pronouncement upon a
criminally unjust system of global exploitation and a prescription for the curing
of the worldwide crisis of person/planet pain.
The task before us is that of building a global order based on the full honoring
of our common humanity with profound recognition and respect for the dignity of
each and every child, woman and man.
A new democratic mandate, which we might call earth rights democracy, recognizes
that the gifts of nature - the land, oil, minerals, other natural resources and
a substantial amount of the monetary value accruing to their use - rightly belong
to the people of the world as a whole. The earth is our birthright and our common
heritage. What we make from our mental and physical labor can rightfully be held
as individual property but the profit of the earth should be shared by all and
for all.
The cure for economic and war crimes against humanity is to declare once again,
yes, RIGHT NOW, a new order of the ages, novus ordo seclorum, to form a more perfect
union of people and planet fully awakened to the realization that though we are
many, we are in truth one humanity, epluribus unum, out of many one.
O say can you see (6), our common humanity, sprung from the earth our mother and
seeded from the sun, we are in truth, children of the universe, and no less than
the trees and the stars,(7) you and I have the equal right to be here now and
to claim this planet and its land and resources as our full, fair and natural
birthright.
The current crisis is now the time to pledge allegiance to the earth, and all
the life which it supports, One Planet, in our care, irreplaceable, with sustenance
and respect for all. (8)
Right now this pledge means NO WAR ON IRAQ!
Footnotes:
(1) John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976 working for then
Director of the CIA, George Bush, spent 13 years in the Agency. This information
is from his speech available on video by email to fdorrel@hotmail.com
(2) Robert Dreyfuss, “The Thirty-Year Itch” Mother Jones, March/April,
2003, p. 41. (3) “Military- Industrial Complex Speech,” Dwight D. Eisenhower,
1961 (Public Papers of the Presidents, 1035-1040) (4) Robert Dreyfuss, op.cit.,
41. (5) To order the NO WAR ON IRAQ! video which documents the complete speech
of Dr. Pelletiere and the other speakers in the Forum on Iraq call 717-264-0957.
(6) From the Desiderata (7) From The Star-Spangled Banner, a poem by Francis Scott
Key dating to the War of 1812 between the US and Great Britain. Sung with the
melody of a popular 1700 era English tune which celebrated wine, women and song,
it was declared the US National Anthem by Congress in 1931. (8) From artwork by
Janina Lamb, artist; Lamb & Lion Studio (cards, posters, prints & bumperstickers)
Box 298, Tamworth, NH 03886 USA Tel. 603-323-7539 Fax: 603-323-8842
Alanna Hartzok is Co-Director of Earth Rights Institute, a civil society organization
working for economic justice and peaceful resolution of conflicts. She is a United
Nations NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) representative for an international
organization based in London and an educator and activist with the Carlisle Peace
College. Her recently produced video - NO WAR ON IRAQ! - documents the October
19, 2002 Carlisle Peace College forum. Hartzok is the author of Democracy, Earth
Rights and the Next Economy, an E.F. Schumacher Lecture. She was the Green Party
candidate for Congress for Pennsylvania Congressional District Nine for a special
election held in 2001.