Of course, US wants Iraq’s oil

THE EDITOR: Please permit me to express an opinion concerning “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. The editorials of all the major daily newspapers seem to take a negative view of the decision by the US and UK to intervene in the politics of Iraq. Indeed, the pervasive view seems to be that control over that country’s oil reserves is the raison d’etre of their incursion.

Of course the West in interested in Iraq’s oil reserves! Shouldn’t we be as well? It is vital to their economy. What is wrong with being pro-active in a situation, in which a psychopathic megalomaniac madman unlawfully and through brutish force, and violence, has absolute power over a dis-empowered and uninformed captive population, and is the self-proclaimed renegade overseer of resources that are used with no thought to distributive justice? Should the US do as we might do: sit on a fence-pole and wait for ‘nature’ to take its course? Rubbish! You seem to want the best of two worlds: you acknowledge his inhumane and savage brutality, but wimpishly express consternation at the loss of “untold numbers of civilian lives”. Get real!

Look at the track record of this madman. Hussein joined the Ba?thists to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister, ?abd al-KarYm Qsim, and, wounded, escaped to Syria and then Egypt. When the Ba?thists were overthrown that same year, Hussein spent several years in prison in Iraq. He escaped, becoming a leader of the Ba?th party, and was instrumental in the coup that brought the party back to power in 1968. Hussein began to assert open control of the government in 1979, becoming president upon Bakr’s resignation. He then became chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and prime minister, among other positions. He used an extensive secret-police establishment to suppress any internal opposition to his rule, and he made himself the object of an extensive and perverse personality cult among the Iraqi public. His goals as president were to supplant Egypt as leader of the Arab world, and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf.

This megalomaniac launched an invasion of Iran’s oilfields in September 1980. His folly led to a useless war that dragged on until 1988. In spite of the debt incurred, and the untold lives lost, he continued to spend billions on his military. In August 1990 the Iraqi army overran neighbouring Kuwait in a surprise attack. On the same day the UN Security Council passed Resolution 660, condemning the invasion and demanding Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal. When, in his usual style, Hussein showed no sign that he was prepared to withdraw from Kuwait, US President George Bush and his allies, considering Iraq’s action a threat to Western interests, decided that the status quo ante must be re-established. US troops began arriving in Saudi Arabia on August 9. On August 28, Iraq declared that Kuwait had become the 19th province of Iraq.

The military operations not only destroyed most of the Iraqi armed forces but they also severely damaged the infrastructure of the major Iraqi cities and towns. Above all, the war brought Iraq to the verge of dismemberment into the major religious and ethnic divisions, especially the Kurds and the ShY?ites. After the coalition forces began to withdraw from Iraq, the Iraqi regime was able to suppress both the ShY?ite and Kurdish rebellions. In its action against the Kurds, however, the Iraqi forces used weapons of mass destruction killing tens of thousands of Kurds, and forcing thousands more to flee to Turkey. Many died from hunger and disease. Only with Western intervention did the Kurdish refugees feel safe in returning to their homes in northern Iraq.

As part of the cease-fire agreement with the UN, Iraq was prohibited from producing chemical and nuclear weapons. Numerous sanctions were levelled on the country pending compliance, causing severe food and medicine shortages and further weakening the economy. Hussein’s continued refusal to cooperate with UN arms inspectors led to a four-day air strike by the United States and Great Britain in late 1998. Both countries announced that they would support effects of the Iraqi opposition to unseat Hussein.

Does Saddam not kill his own people without a conscience? Can you not see that he is the instrument of his people’s tribulations? A shepherd devouring his own flock? When you defend Saddam, you defend a madman who would ‘gas’ to death 182,000 Kurdish men, women and babies! A man who forcibly evicts homeowners and stores ammunition caches in the sanctuaries of their homes: a man who sets up military outposts at schools, at hospitals and between civilian homes, often with homeowners in the line of fire. Like Gadaffi, the Syrians and other psychopathic poor-me-ones like Castro, he trains “terrorists” — today’s euphemism for sociopaths, like our local Muslimeen, men with ‘logs’ not ‘chips’ on their shoulders — to kill babies and kidnap children; he instructs women and children to kill, while like a rat, he burrows underground in order to run and hide (like the bin Ladens, the Bakrs, the Hitlers of this world), when the action gets tough.

Were we not happy that communism was nipped in the bud in Grenada? Was it not we who invited the same USA here to deal with this psychopath called Yasin Abu Bakr in 1990? Peace is the daughter of Justice! It is just that each person be accorded the dignity given to him/her as free gift, by our Creator. The central core of our human dignity resides in our freedom to choose, the assertion of our individual free will. No Cuban under Fidel, no Iraqi under Saddam, no Grenadian under Bishop, could ever do this. The assertion of, and right to be accorded the dignity given to me, justifies the ultimate sacrifice. For the very essence of ‘sacrifice’ involves the notion of an ‘exchange’: of one ideal, for another that is nobler.

Without the justice that is intrinsic to our dignity as humans, there can be no peace — either within or outside of us. There can only be “tranquillity”, enforced, as it has to be in Iraq, Cuba and even here, through the barrel of a gun! I salute the USA and the UK for their proactive and manly action, and condemn the UN, castrated, emasculated, for sitting too long on the proverbial fence-pole!

DR STEVE SMITH
Port-of-Spain