The Iraq war didn't start 20 years ago

 

  JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

One of the problems with commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War is that the Iraq War didn’t start 20 years ago. It had been going on for more than a decade before Shock and Awe. First there was Pappy’s Bush’s invasion, followed by Bill Clinton bombing Iraq once every three days of his 8-year term and ratcheting down a sanctions regime that squeezed the life out of more than one million Iraqis, nearly all civilians. Clinton found that there more efficient and secret ways to kill. Pretending that the Iraq War started with Bush and Cheney is politically convenient for liberals and Democrats, even though many of them voted for the Bush’s regime change war (before they voted against it, in Kerry’s words). Even Bernie Sanders supported the Iraq War when Clinton was doing the bombing and imposing starvation on children, voting three times for the overthrow of Saddam as the “independent socialist member of Congress from Vermont.

So when did the Iraq war start? When Pappy Bush assembled an invasion force in Kuwait? Or was it when new US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie met with Saddam on July 25, 1990 and laid a trap by contending: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 1960s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.”

One can go back to 1983 when Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Reagan’s special envoy in the Middle East, promised Saddam support during the internecine Iran-Iraq war, which left more than 1.3 million dead. Or did it begin 20 years earlier with the CIA’s involvement in the Ramadan Coup of 1963, which led to the overthrow and execution of General Qasim and facilitated the rise of Saddam and the Baathist regime.

Of course, after World War II the Americans inherited Britain’s role as imperial master of the Middle East. As such one might credit the RAF’s Arthur “Bomber” Harris for establishing the precedent for Shock-and-Awe 70 years earlier with his prescription in 1936 for enforcing peace in the Middle East: “Drop one 250 pound or 500 pound bomb in each village that speaks out of turn. The only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand  and sooner or later it will have to be used.”

COUNTERPUNCH