THE TYRANNY OF ANGLO-AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

BY NASSIR M. AL-AJMI 

February 16, 2003

Although I cannot speak for the Iraqi people, I can safely say that very few people outside Iraq would shed tears for a regime change in Baghdad.   This article, however, is not about Iraq, Palestine or North Korea, but rather directed to those who have claimed and praised themselves as champions of democracy and guardians of democratic principles and noble human values.   The belligerent behaviours and flagrant actions of the United States and the United Kingdom are in sharp contrast to the principles they claim to hold dearly.   The Anglo-American bloated posture and unilateral rush to judgement on major and complex international issues have raised many probing questions and met with strong international admonition.

It is, therefore, not surprising that many nations and societies around the globe have come to the conclusion that the so-called guardians of democratic principles and noble human values no longer recognize the universality of these principles, nor do they feel morally bound by the wisdom and the sense of righteousness these democratic principles represent.   Fueled by their arrogance and lack of wisdom, it is obvious that the Anglo-American leaders are more eager to unleash their superior power of mass destruction than to adhere to reason, World opinion, international law or to their own democratic principles.

The displays of American/British blunders and disdainful behaviours were presented to the World in the United Nations Security Council and in an O.J. Simpson court style.   The Anglo-American dossiers on Iraq turned out to be useless documents, filled with old information, half truths, deceptions, fabricated lies and plagiarisms.   In their efforts to justify their adventurous blunders, the guardians of democratic principles and noble human values have sunk to the level of butchery and terrorism.   They have soiled and disgraced the principles of democracy in the same manner terrorists have stained and dishonored their histories, cultures and faiths.

I wonder what the great trio of ancient Greeks, (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle), who laid the philosophical bedrock of Western culture and democratic principles, would say about today’s guardians of democratic principles and values?

Let’s face it, Iraq has never been a threat to the national security of the United States, and in its present state, Iraq is no more of a threat to the USA than the State of Delaware!    So why is Washington losing its marbles and fit to be tied?   If I were a betting man, I would bet nine on a scale of 10 that President Bush and Rumsfeld would rather invade and occupy Iraq than have Iraq disarm peacefully.   Does Washington want to show it can win a war against Saddam?   How pathetic!  No-one doubts that America will win the war against Iraq.   No doubt Washington has hidden agendas for Iraq, the Gulf and the Middle East, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq is the trump card.   Disarming Iraq is simply a pretext to obtain the hidden agendas.

Washington heightened war preparations  -  leave no doubt of its plans and intentions  -  but the frightening aspect has been the American lack of concern for the potential massive loss of innocent human life.   Mr. Rumsfeld calls it “unfortunate collateral damage”.   A gruesome description of what will happen if madness prevails is graphically portrayed in the following article published recently in the “Mirror.co.uk” under the title “Pilger:  Blair is a Coward”:

William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the camage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression “blood on his hands” to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass killing of ordinary people.    In my experience “on his hands” applies especially to those modern political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.   There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms his “authority”.  In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against humanity.  The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered no threat to one’s homeland.   Then there was the murder of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the “highest authority”.

 

Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of “endless war” and “full spectrum dominance” are a matter of record.  The entire world knows their names:  Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal.  Bush’s State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them:   “I must have war”.   He then had it.   To call Blair a mere “poodle” is to allow him distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share responsibility.  He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known since the 1930s.  The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism:  from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American “interests”, such as a voracious appetite for the world’s resources, like oil.

 

“That was my favourite coup,” said the CIA man responsible.    When you next hear Blair and Bush talking about a “smoking gun” in Iraq, ask why the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq’s weapons declaration, saying they contained “sensitive information” which needed “a little editing”.   Sensitive indeed.   The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions.  In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies.   He has never explained why.

 

As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected to people’s lives.   The most vivid images I carry make that connection.   They are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.

 

Let me give you a couple of examples.  Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the attack on Iraq.  In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.  They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the “long box” pattern, the military term for carpet bombing.  Everything inside a “box” was presumed destroyed.  When I reached a village within the “box”, the street had been replaced by a crater.  I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast.   The children’s skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead.  A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder.  I vomited.

 

Some years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent Orange.  It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.   This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliché-mongers would now call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam.  Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are stillborn.   Many have leukemia.   You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of great crime, even to be pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.   That is the true face of war.   Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq is attacked?  I doubt it.

 

I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I traveled in Iraq two years ago.  A pediatrician showed me hospital wards of children similarly deformed:  a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf War in 1991.   She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on grey little faces.  Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes.   More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British.  Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes cancer.  In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable.

 

For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields.  It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the south.  Last November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defense Minister Adam Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by British forces operating in Iraq.  His robotic reply was:  “I am withholding details in accordance with Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information”.

 

Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by American and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are denied even vaccines for the children.  Last week the Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq “physically, emotionally and psychologically” by raining down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days.   This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.  A military strategist named Harlan Pullman told American television:  “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.  The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before”.  The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Pullman is apparently its proud inventor.   He said:  “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes”.   What will his “Hiroshima effect” actually do to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14?  The answer is to be found in a “confidential” UN document, based on World Health Organization estimates, which says that “as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries”.

 

A Bush-Blair attack will destroy “a functioning primary health care system” and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population.  There is “likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions”.  It is Washington’s utter disregard for humanity, I believe, together with Blair’s lies that have turned most people in this country against them, including people who have not protested before.  Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors to find a “smoking gun” for Iraq to be attacked.  Compare that with his reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no “wider war” against Iraq unless there was “absolute evidence” of Iraqi complicity in September 11,  and there has been no evidence.  Blair’s deceptions are too numerous to list here.  He has lied about the nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that Washington, with Britain’s support, is  withholding more than $5billion worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council.  He has lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which he told Parliament were “needed to enrich uranium”.  The International Atomic Energy Agency has denied this outright.  He has lied about an Iraqi “threat”, which he discovered only following September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a gratuitous target of his “war on terror”.  Blair’s “Iraq dossier” has been mocked by human rights groups.

 

The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an attack on Iraq.  Washington will effectively take over the Middle East, ensuring an age of terrorism other than their own.  The next American attack is likely to be Iran  -  the Israelis want this  -  and their aircraft are already in place in Turkey.  Then it may be China’s turn.  “Endless war” is Vice President Cheney’s contribution to our understanding.  Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons “if necessary”.   On March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries “can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons”.

 

Source:   http:/www.mirror.co.uk/printable_version.cfm?objectid=12581179&siteid=50143

 

This is what awaits Iraq and the entire Middle East region.  Make no mistake about it, the Hulagues of Washington are on a war roller coaster to Iraq to rain weapons of mass destruction on populated centers, wipe out Iraqi military and economic infrastructures and burn Baghdad to the ground, but hopeful of sparing the Iraqi oil fields as war spoils.  

Since there are no visible or rationally compelling reasons for Washington’s fallacious campaign against Iraq, the World is reluctant to yield to Washington’s pressures and strong desire to wage war against a United Nations member.  Annoyed by what they viewed as a negative world opinion and international reluctance and procrastination, President Bush and his close associates have begun to lose their patience with friends and foes alike, and were threatening to go it alone if the World did not submit to Washington’s demands.

Mr. Bush and his handlers have started to vent their frustrations with the World by classifying and labeling World nations as the axis of evil, the axis of weasels, old Europe and the axis of unsupportive nations, in addition to the shoddiest of them all, “you are either with us or with the terrorists”.  This inferior form of foreign policy and diplomatic approach infuriated international public opinion and demanded World submission to American will rather  than enlist international support and cooperation.

There is no nation on planet earth today that poses a threat to the United States’ national security.   There is no nation on planet earth that does not seek America’s friendship, and there are no rational or civilized human beings or nations that wish to harm Americans or destroy their democratic principles or way of life.   But there are no nations or rational human beings that will accept to be treated like Texas longhorns driven by a bunch of cowboys to the slaugher house.  America has been the World military and economic superpower, but when it comes to foreign policy and international relations, they are devoid of fair play, wisdom and intellectual thinking.  American foreign policy over the years has depended heavily on American foreign aids as handouts and American protection for totalitarian regimes and dictatorships loyal to Washington.  Democracy was only flashed as a threatening whip against those who refused to tow the American line.

American Governments have done very little, over the years, to further democratic principles because, in many cases, such democratic ideals come in conflict with American political and economic interests.  American political and economic interests always come first and last before democratic principles and sense of fairness.   Least of all is the current American administration which, in my opinion, lacks political wisdom, fair play and a constructive leadership role when exploring complicated international issues.

President Bush is marching on the road of no return, regardless of whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not, regardless of whether Iraq agrees to disarm peacefully or not, regardless of the inspection outcome and regardless of whether the United Nations Security Council agrees or not.   Mr. Bush is as predictable as Saddam is.  The question is:    why did President Bush choose to put himself, his Country and the rest of the World in this predicament?   The following points may shed some light on President Bush’s dilemma:

• President Bush is fully aware of the fact that he was elected by less than half the eligible voters, and is conscious of his home front dismal performance on all domestic issues.  Although in his third year in office, the United States’ domestic economic policies are in disarray, unemployment is high, a huge deficit is building up, corporate corruptions and bankruptcies are common place and social programs are at a stand still.  He is now convinced that his administration will not be able to fix these domestic failures in time for his second term re-election.  Mr. Bush cannot and will not bank on his home front gloomy performance.

• He is totally absorbed by his war on terrorism and pre-occupied by his planned military blunders against Iraq.  Mr. Bush has been on cloud nine since Sept 11, acting more like a belligerent military commander, eager to wage a war than to look after the presidency.   His rush to judgement approach and hip shooting diplomacy have, however, resulted in the disarray of efforts and fractured international coalition against terrorism, enraged World public opinion, alienated traditional allies and inflamed World-wide anti American sentiment.   As a result, the War on terrorism has floundered, the costs have rocketed and the outcome has been so far modest.  Mr. Bush’s performance of the War on terrorism alone will not get him re-elected in 2004 either.

• President Bush needs a clear cut and decisive win for his re-election, and War against Iraq fits the bill.  The War against Iraq is confined, quantifiable in terms of costs, quantities and timing and, most importantly, Mr. Bush is confident of winning.  However, to the surprise and dismay of many coalition partners, Mr. Bush decided to include the war on Iraq as part of the War on terrorism, and based his decision on the flimsiest American hearsay.  To make his hearsay plausibility stick, Mr. Bush employed media sensationalism, heightened American public fear and rage by putting on monthly alerts of impending terrorist attacks, and has intimidated all nations large and small, friends and foes, who voiced opposition to his war on Iraq.

• No-one doubts that President Bush will be victorious militarily in his War on Iraq, but Mr. Bush has been blinded by his revengeful rage and by his desire to achieve specific American/Israeli hidden agendas.   By invading and occupying Iraq, Mr. Bush hopes to win re-election, firmly plant American hegemony over the Gulf region’s oil fields and reserves, reshape the Middle East geopolitical map, eliminate what Israel/Bush call “Middle East Terrorist Groups” and, finally, give Israel a huge military, economic and geopolitical advantage over its neighbours.

After September 11, President Bush emerged as a powerful and angry giant whose mental capacity and view of the World has been limited to two dimensions:  his black and white vision, his morality of right and wrong, his judgement of friends and enemies, his sense of reward and punishment and his wisdom of war and peace.  I wonder if President Bush were the President of another country other than the United States of America, how the World would put up with and tolerate such an “either or” mentality and arrogantly simplistic behaviour?

Can Mr. Bush and the American people ethically and morally cope with the tragedy and devastation they are about to unleash on Iraq and the entire Gulf region?  Major human calamities and destruction are looming over Iraq, a small country ruled by a ruthless dictator, and ruined by 12 years of sanctions.   The United States, for unsubstantiated reasons, is about to carry out an unprovoked aggression against Iraq, resulting in massive civilian casualties and material destruction.  Unfortunately, Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld view such devastation as collateral damage and preemptive occupation.

Is this arrogance and belittlement of human life commensurable with American democratic principles, values and moral standards?   Is spreading fear via monthly alerts and heightening American public opinion against the World democratic?  Is drumming up support via blackmail, threats, promises of aid and manipulation basic elements of American democracy and moral values?   Is democracy an Anglo-Saxon property?

I raise these questions not because I believe them to be inherent in real democracy, but because that is how the World views Anglo-American democracy in action outside Washington and London.  Democracy can become a dangerous weapon in the hands of tyrants  -  Hitler’s abuse of democracy is a lesson to remember.  Anglo-American democracy and moral values are now on display on the World theatrical stage as a toss up between hypocrisy and tyranny.

Last night, I watched the Security Council presentations, (the Inspection Reports), and debate of the Iraqi situation.  It was obvious that the American and British delegations were in the minority and on the defensive.   Their dossiers on Iraq were questioned and ridiculed.  Today, the entire World, including American and British, have spoken through huge peace protests and demonstrations.   Will the Anglo-American democratic leaders hear, heed and respect the will of the World, and the call of their own people?

President Bush has put himself in a closed box.   In the eyes of the World, he is in a pickle.  He has humiliated himself politically and intellectually through his own arrogance and diplomatic blunders, ridiculed his country’s international posture and mocked American image.  Unfortunately, I do not believe that Mr. Bush will back off because he has no place to go but to march forward on his familiar road of blunders.

Courtesy of and © 2003 by Nassir M. Al-Ajmi.   The writer is a former Executive Vice President of the  Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), and Former President of Saudi Railway Organization.   This article may be reprinted without further permission but with proper citation.