The Scrivener's Diary

Archive for the ‘War and Peace’ Category

This is a rather extensive update of a piece I wrote and originally published in several places in December, 2006. It was updated in November, 2009

Most American politicians and many pundits now concede they were wrong to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq, stating that the administration lied to them about its justification. Politicians who voted to support the invasion, especially liberal politicians, say that the Bush administration lied to them about its reasons for this invasion. It is hard to believe this, especially in the case of bright, educated, and talented people like Hillary Clinton and others. The Bush administration’s phony excuses did not fool many ordinary American citizens, who did not have the same access to information as did the Clinton-style politicians and inside-the-beltway denizens.

When trying to justify launching this war, the Bush administration and its apologists gave reasons that included:

• Saddam’s supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction
• Saddam’s nose-thumbing UN weapons inspectors in the face of UN sanctions
• The undoubtedly brutal nature of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship
• The supposed desirability of creating an Arab democracy that would serve as a beacon in the Middle East, the latter a more “politically correct” and polite version of early 19th century meme of carrying “white man’s burden” and securing the “blessings of western civilization.”

But the truth is that none of these stated reasons were the real reasons for this war. These currently transparent excuses were really nothing more than a now-failed public relations ploy.

As demonstrated below, the American corporate rulers had planned this war a decade before the initiation of hostilities. This war planning had always been about control of energy resources and marketplaces, not democracy, not terrorism, not Islam.

Moreover, this war was not an aberration from American moral principles that supposedly guide its foreign policy. It was the natural outgrowth of a longstanding foreign policy, a strategy that stems back from the days of the Spanish-American war of 1898 and before.
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Legacy of Vietnam and Iraq Wars

Lately, pundits, politicians, and even President Bush have drawn parallels to the Vietnam war and the present war in Iraq. But there is another, not-talked-about parallel, and it is much more important. Read the rest of this entry »

Nuclear Arms Race and North Korea

According to this CBS news story, former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung is afraid the current UN-North Korea flap over nuclear arms will cause a military conflict. This is a real possibility. After much browbeating, arm-twisting, and probably not-so-subtle US threats of unilateral action, the UN unanimously approved a resolution to block military and luxury-item shipments in and out of North Korea, in effect making such shipments illegal.
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