AN IMPERIAL WAR EXPANDS

[Col. Writ. 2/4/02]

Copyright '02 Mumia Abu-Jamal

    With characteristic imperial arrogance, George W. Bush's 'State of the Empire' speech was a blustering threat to several states that have yet to learn how to kneel properly to the United States -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

    By calling them the world's "Axis of Evil," the Bush regime is clearly trying to mobilize public support for some sort of militarist adventure in those regions of the world.  If they cannot be tied to the acts of 9/11/01, then they are violative of the US edict that no state, except by their leave, may acquire or construct "weapons of mass destruction."

    For many Americans still smarting from the blows of 9/11, and unsated by the aerial bombardment and humbling of the Taliban in the dusty ruins of Afghanistan, the challenges of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea may seem tempting.

    What makes Washington's charge almost laughable (if it were not so serious) is that at least two of those states were either clients or customers of the U.S., in their drive to become regional military powers. The U.S. was, and indeed remains, the world's pre-eminent arms dealer.  When the bloody, 8-year Iran-Iraq war raged on, the U.S. supplied it's then-ally (Iraq's Saddam) with what can only be termed  weapons of mass destruction, as in the poisons used by Iraq to liquidate their Kurdish minorities on their border regions.  As for the Iranian theocracy, it would not exist today were it not for the U.S./CIA intervention which overturned the Iranian parliamentary democracy of Mohammed Mossadegh of the early 1950s, and the backing of the autocratic Shah.  Were it not for this Western rape of Iranian democracy there would not now be the rule of the clerics in Iran.  The Khomeini-led Islamic revolution was, in essence, a reactive movement that strove to purge the nation of the Western and foreign influences pushed by the Pahlevi regime.  Why did the US CIA and British M1-5 oppose the Mossadegh government?  It had nothing to do with "democracy," for Mossadegh's was, if anything, too democratic for their tastes, for he backed nationalization of British oil, to provide more for the nation.  The U.S. didn't back democracy, it backed a neocolonial, repressive autocracy.

    From Iran's perspective, where does the "axis of evil" lie?  What must they think of a nation that deposed their president, installed a brutal, fascist regime, and then armed their neighboring enemy (Iraq) with conventional and chemical weapons,  which led to over half a million dead on both sides? Isn't that "mass destruction?"

    But being an empire means never having to say you're sorry; it means telling others what they must do, or else.  It means always seeking enemies.

 

Text © copyright 2002 by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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