[from the London Tribune]

 

 

Letter from Woodstock

 

Tribune, London

 

A Tale of Two Cities: Baghdad and New York

John Mason

April 7, 2003

Woodstock, New York

 

 

               

                As you read this, the sieges of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul should be over and the Anglo-American conquest of Iraq nearly be complete – with Iraqi resistance to our joint invasion crumbling after a mere 21 days.  Already “Wolfowitz of Arabia” and his Pentagon colleagues are moving rapidly to put their occupation regime in place - a mixture of retired American generals and their Iraqi front men- whilst American firms with inside connections to the Bush White House such as Bechtel and Haliburton compete to divvy up the mega billion contracts for post-war reconstruction without the UN or the French. America’s terrible swift sword has brought us a quick win on the battlefield - but like the Israeli victory in the Six Day war that left them trapped in the “seventh day” for next 40 years, I fear that the victory of “coalition forces” (an Orwellian formula if there ever was one) will mire our “coalition of two” and its American “army of one” in Iraq for decades to come.

Victory is said to have a “thousand fathers,” but this one leaves me feeling like an orphan lost at the

 Patriots’ Day parade. Like most of my Woodstock neighbours, I opposed this unnecessary and unlawful “ war of choice.” And while the prospect of the war’s early end with mercifully few British and American casualties comes as a relief, it still leaves behind a disagreeable aftertaste. I feel a combination of anger, shame and anxiety. The anger comes from the way that the Bush Administration sold us this war on the basis of fraudulent claims that relied on forged evidence – such as nationally televised claim that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger – or that were outrageous – such as the claim that Iraqi drone aircraft were a direct threat to the American homeland – or simply stupid – such as the claim that Saddam’s regime and Al Queda were strategic allies.

 I am not entirely alone in feeling tricked again by the Bush Administration. 27 % of Americans still believe the war was a “mistake,” and so far the base of the Democratic Party has refused to rally around the flag in overwhelming numbers. As of the first week of the war only 50% of democrats approved of it as opposed to 93% of Republicans and Independents. And in “cities of peace” like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, (i.e. the 151 cities on the two coasts and the northern tier where city councils voted antiwar resolutions before the war began), public opinion about the war remained radically polarized into pro and anti war camps that mirror the distribution of partisan attitudes toward the Bush presidency. This refusal is feed by the fear that our cities will be the targets of the retaliation that this conquest will provoke. The scenes of Baghdad in flames do not make us feel safer, only more anxious. New Yorkers, for one, know what burning flesh smells like.

But all the same, I’m ashamed that so many Americans willingly enlisted in Donald Rumsfeld’s strategic “bodyguard of lies”. To this very day, 42 % of us persist in believing the “urban legend” that Iraqis made up half of the commando that attacked New York on September 11^th, and a majority believe that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons - whilst 58 % of us seemingly no longer care whether we find Iraqi weapons of destruction or not. For many of us pride in our military is justification enough for war, and almost any Arab enemy will do. So when our Special forces built a monument to the World Trade Centre in the Afghan mountains, their prayer service concluded with the pledge that ”We will export death and destruction to the four corners of the earth in the defence of our great nation.”

It s no surprise then to learn that American artillery crews outside of Baghdad inscribed the barrels of their cannons with the serial numbers of the four hijacked aircraft that were crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a cornfield in Pennsylvania. Baghdad civilians are paying with their lives for the terrible attack on my old hometown, but this was an attack with which their tyrannical government had absolutely no connection. We Americans have convinced ourselves of a falsehood in order to justify an unprovoked war.  Hence I feel shame when confronted with the thousands of Iraqi dead- a shame that is only partially outweighed by the thought that Saddam’s tyranny is finally over for them.

My anxiety comes from the belief that our Mid-East wars have just begun because our rulers think of this war as only the first in a long campaign against “radical Islam.” What’s coming next was described by a British official last summer when he wrote that in Washington: “Everybody wants to go to Baghdad, but the real men want to go to Teheran.” Whoever told us “God invented war to teach Americans geography” surely must have lied, because we have learned so little from the one we’ve just concluded.