Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Implausible war defies reason

It seems hardly conceivable that the United States is about to launch an invasion of Iraq, because, in its own mind, it has linked Iraq with terrorist threats against the U.S. The U.S. claims it destroyed 80 per cent of Iraq's military capability in the 1991 Gulf war; UN weapons inspectors subsequently unearthed and destroyed more weapons; the U.S. then launched Operation Desert Fox when, in its view, the weapons inspectors failed; and now a new round of UN weapons inspections has succeeded in still further disarming Iraq.

Iraq is a nation decimated by war. Cancer rates in the country increased by 80 per cent after the Gulf War, at least in part due to the huge amounts of depleted uranium the U.S. used in its own weapons in that war. As many as 1.6 million Iraqis have died because of the economic embargo imposed after the Gulf War. War and the embargo have sent the rest of the nation reeling into poverty. Yet the U.S. maintained a steady regime of bombing Iraq for the past 12 years.

Another war on Iraq would not only further damage the country and its people, it would create political instability in the region, if not throughout the world. It would deepen the divide between Islam and Christianity in an era when inter-religious dialogue has only begun to take place without hostility. Oil prices have already soared and world financial markets have sagged: A war would likely further exacerbate those problems and perhaps create a global economic recession.

The United States has become a rogue nation, willing even to defy the United Nations. Another war against Iraq would increase the possibility of future terrorism against the U.S. and inflame, especially the Arab world, with a hatred of the U.S.

None of this seems to matter to the current U.S. regime which vows to have its war . . . and soon. If American intelligence forces failed in preventing the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. diplomacy has failed in this case by neglecting to provide the Bush regime with an honourable way of backing down from its aggressive stance towards Iraq.

Surely, Saddam Hussein has long ago proved he is a tyrant and devious in dealing with UN weapons inspectors. Much of the world would feel safer if he was no longer in power. But the weapons inspectors have had and could still have considerable impact and Hussein has not attacked another nation since his ill-fated invasion of Kuwait in 1990. There are ways other than war to keep him on a short leash. And as Pope John Paul has said, war "is always a defeat for humanity." It must be "the very last option" even if motivated by legitimate concerns.

The chaos that could be created by another war on Iraq makes one wonder why the U.S. government even sees it as a legitimate policy option, let alone the preferred one. Is it Iraq's oil that the U.S. is after? Is Bush driven by some bizarre religious passion that sees fighting Iraq as part of a war of good against evil? Or, is the president so deeply driven by a love of freedom and democracy that he wants to impose it on Iraq (but not other tyrannies).

But even if religion or moral zeal motivates the president personally, it is hard to see the deeply secular American establishment allowing him to fight a war on religious grounds. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the establishment is very much in support of Bush's war for reasons of its own. That establishment is, of course, what an earlier Republican president (Dwight Eisenhower) called the military-industrial complex that really controls the country.

As ordinary people, we have no say in what the powerful elite of the world's only superpower decides to do. We have rather the power of prayer for peace and the power to ask our own government that it play no role in adventures that will kill many people and possibly usher in a new era of global political and economic instability.

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