"Never again?"
How did we get into an unwinnable occupation of Iraq? What parallels are there?
In
February of 2002, more than a year before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, members of Congress urged Americans to consider the rationale of the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and warned that it threatened our rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments and put our nation on the road to a permanent war economy. In
May of 2002, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei claimed they could certify Iraqi weapons compliance within one year with inspections. In
July of 2002, Scott Ritter, former chief inspector of the UN Special Commission in Iraq, reinterated that Iraq was 90% to 95% in compliance with its Security Council proscription on weapons of mass destruction capability. In
October of 2002, 23 Senators and 133 Representatives, not fooled by Bush Administration dissembling rhetoric conflating Iraq with 9/11, voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, the Iraq War Resolution.
In February of 2003, tens of millions of people protested against the expected invasion of Iraq in more than 800 cities around the world in the largest protests in all of human history. Protests occurred among others in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Syria, India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and even McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
Two million protesters gathered in London's Hyde Park alone and
three million more in Rome.
Pope John Paul II made more than
fifty public addresses in which he condemned the war in Iraq prior to its inception and he sent a special emissary, Pio Laghi, to the White House to convey his disapproval. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan proclaimed that the invasion of Iraq was “not in conformity with the UN charter…
from the charter point of view, it was illegal.”
We are now mired in the permanent war economy we were warned about. Massive budget deficits loom forever. The occupation of Iraq has already cost over $500 Billion and the lives of 4,065 brave U.S. soldiers. "Progress" in Iraq is measured by how fast the Iraqis can amend their Constitution to sanction the pirating away of their oil revenues by foreign corporations. There was no "Al Qaeda" in Iraq before the invasion and now there is. The occupation has proven a fertile ground for recruitment of future terrorists and suicide bombers. Iraq has become our "West Bank." Iraqis have less electricity and dirtier drinking water than before the invasion.
Looking for parallels?
When the Nazis came to power the most pressing issue was an unemployment rate of close to 30%. Germans felt humiliated by the reparations and loss of land imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis promised strong government, cessation of civil unrest, radical changes to economic policy, cultural renewal based on traditionalism, military rearmament in opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, and restored national pride that the Nazis claimed was lost in the Treaty of Versailles and in the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic. In this atmosphere, Hitler's government used massive budget deficits to achieve full employment through imposing a war economy.
On the night of February 27, 1933 the Reichstag building was set on fire and Dutch council communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found inside the building. He was arrested and charged with starting the blaze. The event had an immediate effect on thousands of anarchists, socialists and communists throughout the Reich, many of whom were sent to the Dachau concentration camp. The unnerved public worried that the fire had been a signal meant to initiate the communist revolution, and the Nazis found the event to be of immeasurable value in getting rid of potential insurgents. The event was quickly followed by the Reichstag Fire Decree, rescinding habeas corpus and other civil liberties. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to consolidate power and achieve passage of The Enabling Act. The act gave the government (and thus effectively the Nazi Party) legislative powers and also authorized it to deviate from the provisions of the constitution for four years. With these powers, Hitler removed the remaining opposition and turned the Weimar Republic into the "Third Reich". He then set about prosecuting unjust and illegal invasions of other countries. Nazi Germany
In January of 2001, the Defense Department-chartered U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (Hart-Rudman Commission) issued its report to the incoming administration stating that terrorism was such an imminent threat that "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers." So the Bush Administration gave $43 million to the Taliban, making the United States the world's largest supporter of the Taliban in 2001. On August 6, 2001, President George W. Bush got a Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US." He didn't read it. On the morning of September 11, 2001, three hijacked jet airplanes slammed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. and two of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Bush and the Republican Congress quickly forced through passage of the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, curtailing civil rights and ushering in illegal spying on American citizens. Secret CIA prisons, inter-country "rendition" and torture followed. In this über-nationalistic environment, the whitewashed criminals of Iran-Contra brought back into governmental power by Bush set about prosecuting an unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq, a country that posed no threat and which had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks.
What we should have learned from WWII is the threat that unchecked nationalism poses to a fearful or economically disadvantaged citizenry.
The world gains nothing by substituting "Muslims" for "Jews" when fervent nationalists use religious subterfuge to foment hatred and distrust. This should be the lesson we learn from the "Project for a New American Century" nuts running the world into the ditch in a Crusade against Islam.
The world gains nothing by ignoring the lessons in the far larger genocide of the Americas, which killed off perhaps 10 times the number of people killed in WWII. Even today, there are more native Mayan people speaking their own language and living their culture than there are Jews in the whole world. Where's their country?
But most of all, as the fathers and grandfathers of The Greatest Generation fade into history, we are the people of whom the future will ask, "How could they let that happen again?"
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