What?
"The Twenty Years War; Our ventures in Iraq sustain a US frontier myth" by John Tirman | August 1, 2010
TWENTY YEARS ago tomorrow, Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into Kuwait, seized the capital, occupied the country, and sent the Kuwaiti ruling family into Saudi Arabia. The United States, Britain, and other major powers responded quickly, imposed sanctions on Iraq and told Saddam to quit Kuwait. Thus began the first of three phases of what has become, in effect, our Twenty Years War, an extraordinary American venture.
Yes, what an extraordinary adventure, 'eh, Americans?
How and why has this happened?
Do I have to spell it out for you?
I-S-R-A-E-L
Two strains of conventional wisdom purport to explain.
That's newspaperspeak for bulls***.
The first focuses on Saddam, the Sunni Arab strongman who tyrannized the Iraqi public, launched a catastrophic war against Iran, attempted to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and sought to become the symbolic (and heroic) successor to the archetypal Arab nationalist, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
All with U.S. help.
In this account, Saddam provoked maelstroms of instability in the region, repeatedly threatened neighbors, and grotesquely violated human-rights norms.
We don't care when Israel does it.
For the sake of regional and possibly US security he had to be removed from Kuwait and the Kurdish provinces, militarily contained and weakened by sanctions, and, in 2003, deposed.
Related: PNAC
Clean Break
See what I mean about the BS?
Yeah, REGIME CHANGE TRANSCENDS the issue of Saddam Hussein!
The second explanation acknowledges the centrality of Saddam’s malefactions, but notes that other bullies have been untouched by US military power and thus the bad boy story is insufficient. Two other reasons for action are offered. Oil is the most apparent. The first phase of the Twenty Years War — Desert Shield and Desert Storm — pivoted on Kuwait’s enormous oil reserves and the proximity to the preeminent Saudi fields. The other factor was Israel. Saddam was openly hostile, had launched his Scud missiles into Israel during Desert Storm, and supported Hamas. Thus, a convenient marriage of rationales led to the long and arduous US intervention.
But these explanations are incomplete. The Twenty Years War is only the latest manifestation of a recurrent American tendency:
The Iraq venture is very much in this spirit.
As if it was some sort of fun outing and not a mass-murdering war crime.
While the lure of oil is obvious, Iraq also appeared as a hostile frontier of US-led globalization — alien, “backward,’’ resistant — which presented all the ingredients of what cultural theorist Richard Slotkin calls the Frontier Myth. The urge to extend “freedom’s empire,’’ the depiction of Saddam and indeed Arabs more broadly as savages, the bounty of oil, the attempts to reshape Iraq’s politics, economy and culture to our liking; all these objectives fit snugly in the long narrative of American globalism.
The taming of the Persian Gulf wilderness has been vexing. As we found in Vietnam, the savages are often uncooperative with our myth-making....
Yeah, those stoo-pid savages not buying our lies, huh?
There are costs to these ventures. Estimates range up to $3 trillion or more for the United States for the most recent war alone.
So they are all bundled together now, huh?
It MUST be a WORLD WAR even if no one is calling it that!
More important are the human costs, for the frontier is often a place of violence.
The frontier -- as if NO ONE WERE LIVING THERE ALREADY!
Give us enough time and there won't be.
In Iraq over these two decades, the tolls are sobering: between 300,000 and 500,000 Iraqis dead as a result of the sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003, and as many or more dead in the last seven years.
Then they are war crimes, aren't they?
Related:
The number of Iraqis killed by the surge alone was around 300 per day, 10,000 per month -- with 1.2 million Iraqis dead since the invasion (must be nearly TWO MILLION by now).
Related: Story Iraq: MSM Lied About Death Tolls
Memory Hole: 600,000 DEAD!
Occupation Iraq: One Million Dead Iraqis
And those that managed to survive?
Five million Iraqis were displaced. Living conditions are deplorable.
Some surge success, huh?
Such ventures are not the only ways America interacts with the rest of the world, of course.
But mostly.
There are peaceful trading relations, cooperation on many issues, observance and enforcement of international and bilateral treaties, and so on.
Yeah, except we use those as weapons of war as well.
But it is no less striking that since the end of the Second World War, the US military has been in armed conflicts and confrontations in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, in addition to smaller skirmishes, for 33 years.
Have we ever really stopped being at war?
The Twenty Years War in Iraq has perhaps more than any others sustained the Frontier Myth as an animating set of norms of America’s global role. Along the way, the actual, human consequences are glossed, overlooked, forgotten....
And whose fault is that, lying, agenda-pushing paper?
The dead of Iraq are telling us something. Are we listening?
We never do.
