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Consequences Of War

by Charley Reese

OUR problems will begin after King George the Younger's war against Iraq is concluded. Like all wars, those who profit from it won't die or suffer in it, and those who die or suffer in it won't profit from it.

The United States will win the war. The same country, Iraq, that is presented to the American people as a mortal peril and threat to the United States -- and even the world -- is in reality a Third World country with nothing but obsolete Soviet weapons and a wrecked economy. No matter how bravely the Iraqis fight, they won't be able to win against a superpower and its fifth-rate sidekick, the United Kingdom.

And there we will be, in the ruins of Baghdad, responsible for 22 million souls divided into factions that hate each other, are hated by their neighbors and that all hate us. The king's counselors seem to have convinced him that we will simply divide the spoils among the American and British corporations and then wash our hands of the whole thing, leaving an American stooge in charge.

It won't be that easy. Putting Afghanistan back together, which we have yet to accomplish, will be seen as a cakewalk compared with restoring and maintaining order in Iraq. From which faction will we draw our stooge? The Republican Guard? The fanatic Shiites eager for close ties with Iran? The Kurds who want their own separate country -- which, if they try to produce it, will spark a war with Turkey? Far from democratizing Iraq, we will end up imposing a dictatorship. As is the case in Afghanistan, we will find it harder to get out of Iraq than it was to get in.

In the meantime, we will bear the moral shame of having launched an aggressive war against a weak opponent. We will bear the moral blame for all the dead, maimed and impoverished Iraqis who, like American soldiers, have to pay the price for their leader's folly. Our grandchildren and their children will have to live with the terrorism that this aggressive war will spawn, not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be added to the national debt.

And that's the best-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario is that before we have defeated Iraq, the war expands to include Lebanon, Syria and Israel, and that the Arab street rises up and overthrows those Arab governments that have been servile servants of America's new imperialism. One of several strategic blunders our youthful and inexperienced King George is making is failing to understand the difference between secularism and Islamic fundamentalists.

Secular governments, like Saddam's, want to survive. They would rather live with us than die with us, and therefore all our differences are negotiable, even subject to settlement with bribes. Islamist governments, however, consist of people who would rather die with us than live with us. Nothing is negotiable. No agreement or compromise is possible. The effect of the Bush war will be, in the years to come, to place more and more of the world's 1 billion Muslims under Islamist, rather than secular, leadership.

Next to King George, the single most enthusiastic and delighted person backing a war against Iraq is Osama bin Laden. He wants a war of Islam against the West, and George Bush, who is not a subtle or sophisticated thinker, is strutting straight into his trap. Rather than making the Middle East safe for oil companies and Israel, as he imagines, Bush will make the world unsafe for Americans.

To paraphrase one of his own macho sayings, he will have started something. Others will finish it.

More about the sinister Zionist Richard Perle

 

The Israeli lobby's influence: appointments of advisors to White House and Executive Branch

A disturbing Beirut report on Douglas Feith, Bush's new "Dr Goebbels"

Pentagon hawks make haste

Robert Fisk exposes President Bush and his pro-Israel lobby by name

The Guardian also unmasks Richard Perle and his gang: "When he is not too busy at the Pentagon, or too busy running Hollinger Digital -- part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in Britain -- or at board meetings of the Jerusalem Post, Mr Perle is "resident fellow" at one of the thinktanks -- the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)."

The Guardian exposes a US "Arab" news agency as a clandestine Israeli Intelligence operation | 

Time To Get The Facts Right, By David Welch (Ambassador of the United States of America