The writer is the National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). This statement was prepared on behalf of ANSWER, the primary organizer of the March 17, 2007, March on the Pentagon, to orient anti-war organizers and activists in the weeks leading up to the demonstration. Click here to find out more about the protest: MarchOnPentagon.org.
The war in Iraq is intensifying. The challenges facing the anti-war movement are great. How can we stop the war?
It is an utter illusion to think that Congress will stop the war. Congress forfeited its “constitutional authority” to declare
The regime of George W. Bush is a symptom of a disease. The aggression against Iraq is another symptom. The people of the United States, especially young people and the soldiers and military families who are disgusted with Bush’s lies, are taking action now.
This is not a time for mealy-mouth genuflections before Congress, insisting that they “do the right thing.” It is not the time for band-aids. This movement must be massive, it must be angry, and it must blaze a new path. If there was ever a time for the creation of a truly radical movement, it is right now.
The disease that must be uprooted is the system of militarism. Bush is asking Congress for nearly $700 billion for the Pentagon next year. Congress will approve funding—as it always does.
The Pentagon has over 700 military bases in 130 countries. It carries out its own spying program against people in this country. It carries out targeted assassinations against those deemed to be “enemies of America.” At Guantanamo and elsewhere, the Pentagon operates prisons that are labeled “torture facilities” by the United Nations. The biggest media corporations are also military contractors.
The Pentagon’s 16-year-long war against Iraq
Go back in time—almost exactly six years ago. With the Bush administration in office less than a month, two dozen U.S. and British planes bombed targets throughout Iraq on Feb. 16, 2001. The explosions were loud, heard throughout Baghdad, and reported on CNN.
This big bombing attack against a country that was not remotely threatening the United States, however, did not signal a dramatic escalation by the new Bush administration in anticipation of the full-scale invasion that eventually came on March 19, 2003. Yes, it was the largest bombing attack on Iraq in two years. But the attack was not ordered by Bush or Rumsfeld. The decision to escalate and invade came the following year.
In fact, the Feb. 16, 2001, bombing of Iraq made Donald Rumsfeld angry. He was mad because nobody in the Pentagon high command even bothered to tell him that the attack was coming. He had been in office for 21 days.
“I’m the Secretary of Defense. I’m in the chain of command,” Rumsfeld angrily told the Pentagon chiefs. (Bob Woodward, “State of Denial,” Simon & Shuster, 2006, p. 22)
This episode is very revealing. It should register in the calculations of the now-growing anti-war movement leading up to the march on the Pentagon on March 17, 2007—the fourth anniversary of the start of the criminal “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq.
The Bush administration is a criminal monstrosity. But replacing it with a new group of politicians who are dependent on and deferential to the military-industrial complex can only treat the symptoms without treating the disease itself.
Bush will leave office in two years—or sooner, if he is impeached. The people of Iraq and Iran will still be facing the full force of the endless war that is being waged against them by the U.S. war machine.
The U.S. war in Iraq didn’t really start with Bush. Neither is it confined to the borders of Iraq. We are witnessing a new colonialism—and the people of the United States must stand up and organize for real peace, which means rejecting any expression of colonialism.
Between Dec. 12, 1998, and March 19, 2003, the Pentagon carried out a near-daily aerial bombing of Iraq. While the U.S. Air Force dominated the skies, it was the U.S. Navy that interdicted thousands of ships in the Persian-Arabian Gulf in order to enforce the prohibition of economic trade between Iraq and the rest of the world. Those economic sanctions killed more than 1 million Iraqi civilians during a 12-year stretch, according to U.N. estimates.
Genocidal sanctions enforced by the Pentagon
The U.S. war machine was the indispensable obstruction preventing Iraq from importing or exporting the goods necessary to sustain civilian life. Of the 8,000 Iraqis who perished each month from sanctions from the lack of food, clean water and medicine, more than 5,000 were babies.
Many Iraqi babies died from water-born diseases after the Pentagon deliberately targeted Iraq’s water treatment facilities in the 1991 war. A Pentagon classified document from January 22, 1991, made public in the September 2001 issue of The Progressive by journalist Thomas Nagy, reveals that the Pentagon was knowingly taking action that would lead to epidemic proportion death among Iraqi civilians. This targeting of water facilities, compounded by Iraq’s inability to acquire spare parts or replacement parts because of economic sanctions, was carried out with the Pentagon planners’ knowledge that the outcome would lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.”
Nagy cited a second classified Pentagon document dated a month later, Feb. 21, 1991, concluding, “Conditions are favorable for communicable disease outbreaks, particularly in major urban areas affected by coalition bombing.” The cold-blooded targeting of Iraqi civilians is blandly suggested in the title of the Pentagon document, “Disease Outbreaks in Iraq.”
The Pentagon’s spreading of disease against the Iraqi population should be called by its right name: biological warfare. The Feb. 21 classified document couldn’t be more forthright. The document lists “the most likely diseases in the next 60-90 days (descending order): diarrheal diseases (particularly children); measles, diphtheria, and pertussis (particularly children); meningitis, including meningococcal (particularly children); cholera (possible but not likely).”
During the next decade, UNICEF and the World Health Organization found all these diseases ravaging Iraqi civilians, particularly children, just as the Pentagon predicted. The plan worked.
The Pentagon was obviously not concerned about “liberating Iraqis from Saddam Hussein.” The strategy was to kill civilians and weaken the country as a whole. The country would then be completely economically dependent on the United States.
Destroying Iraq as an industrial society
Describing the Pentagon’s integrated military and economic plan to hobble Iraq, Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman wrote an article on June 23, 1991, that summarized the views of the top Pentagon military planners he had interviewed. “Many of the [bombing] targets were chosen only secondarily to contribute to the military defeat of [Iraq]. … Military planners hoped the bombing would amplify the economic and psychological impact of international sanctions on Iraqi society. … Because of these goals, damage to the civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended was sometimes neither. … They deliberately did great harm to Iraq’s ability to support itself as an industrial society.”
The Pentagon’s war has never ended. Three different presidents have been in the White House. Each has pursued the path of diminishing Iraq as an independent country. The Pentagon has used limitless violence to project so-called “American Power” to dominate the Middle East. That is why Iran, too, is in the crosshairs.
The Pentagon wants only proxy governments in this strategic region. To the extent that Iraq or Iran began to emerge as a regional power, they were targeted by the Pentagon for destruction.
The demonstration at the Pentagon on March 17 will demand that the United States get out of Iraq now. We will also be telling all the peoples of the Middle East that this is not our war, it is not our empire. The people of the United States will signal that they have had enough.
Instead of war and occupation, the peoples and countries of the Middle East must be free to determine their own destiny. The era of the old colonialism is over.
It is up to people everywhere to stop the new colonialism as well. There will be no better place than the steps of the Pentagon to make this statement resound throughout the country and the world.
