A
ccording
to UN estimates, over 10 million Iraqis will be killed, injured,
displaced, or traumatized by the U.S. war of aggression. It is highly
likely that U.S. military intelligence figures coincide with UN
figures. Washington has put in place a military plan involving hundreds
of war planes and a sea armada directed to dropping thousands of
tons of explosives on Iraqi cities, towns, essential infrastructure,
and defense installations. The mass media around the world report
each and every ground, air, and sea deployment in greater or lesser
specificity. U.S. public officials openly speak of the systematic
destruction, plunder, and prolonged occupation of Iraq.
Genocide—massive,
systematic destruction of a people and a nation —is planned
down to the last tactical detail. The minutely calculated costs
of troop movements, bombing, and population displacement is determined
by economists who then estimate the war’s impact on the national
budget, future oil revenues, and the length of the occupation and
its projected costs.
This
is scientific pre-meditated genocide, similar to what took place
in Nazi Germany at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 when the
high command decided on extermination of the Jews. The major difference
is that Washington’s decision on genocide precedes the war
and is widely publicized by its executioners.
The
architects of annihilation come from a plurality of ethnic, racial
and religious backgrounds: two are blacks, some are Anglo-Saxons,
several are Jews, and one is Latin American. With the exception
of Powell, all avoided military service or any combat role during
the Vietnam War. All have been previously involved in planning or
supporting previous wars of aggression or military atrocities.
During
the Vietnam War, Powell wrote a report justifying the My Lai massacre—the
U.S. Army’s slaughter of hundreds of unarmed peasants. During
the Reagan administration, Rumsfeld was a strong advocate of military
intervention and support of terrorist surrogates in Central America,
Asia, and Africa. Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle designed the
strategy for the systematic destruction of the Palestinian state
as advisors to Likud—a policy since put in place by the Sharon
regime.
What
in the past were theoretical exercises in ethnic cleansing, planning,
localized massacres, and fabricated justifications are now fused
into a systematic doctrine of international genocide.
What
matters to the genocide elite is not primarily oil or Wall Street,
but unlimited power and world domination. They see no evil on the
extreme right, only allies like Sharon. They see evil and “obstacles”
among critical NATO partners like Chirac and Shroeder. They patronize
and promote their ignoble and servile vassals in Eastern and Southern
Europe. Bush seeks the complicity of the American people in order
to proceed with his genocidal invasion of Iraq. The militarist elite
move in military formation toward the systematic destruction of
an entire nation with a high sense of impunity and blind arrogance.
But
their advisers and publicists have brought to their attention that
the people are restless. Hundreds of thousands of citizens have
taken to the streets in all the major cities and many of the small
towns throughout the U.S. The genociders at first dismissed those
reports as “the usual leftists.” But then hundreds of
thousands of others, including prominent writers, artists, former
ambassadors, and generals joined their voices to those in the street.
The genociders became shrill—they moved to deny the detonator
of active public opposition: “ban the street protests,”
“deny them all media coverage.” They fabricate more audacious
lies, give more press conferences, write more belligerent speeches,
and send Bush to read them wherever a safe audience can be guaranteed.
The genociders
are becoming more hysterical as they face “obstacles”
in NATO and the UN and growing opposition on the domestic front.
They feel that they are running against the clock, the longer the
Europeans delay the genocide, the greater the public awareness of
the horror of the undertaking and its implications, the more likely
that the opposition will grow to millions—beyond the control
of the mass media and the police. They want genocide now: they are
obsessed that all their planning, their fantasies of world power
and a Middle-East under Anglo-Israeli control, free of Arab resistance
will go to naught—that they personally will fail and go down
in history as the genociders who were defeated by their own people.
At
the cupula of power, the leaders of Europe and the U.S. argue over
the conditions and timing of war: the U.S. mobilizes the Eastern
European satellites it has inherited from the former USSR, while
the French, German, and Belgian governments count on the vast majority
of the voters opposed to war. Washington and Britain call up the
military reserves and mobilize right-wing Christian and Zionist
fundamentalists, while English, French, Italian, and Spanish trade
union confederations threaten strikes and mainstream Christian churches
join with millions of citizens locking arms across nations in civil
disobedience and protest.
The
pending war in the Middle East is not simply an imperialist colonial
conquest, though it is all of that. It is a clash between barbarism
and civilization: the outcome and consequences of which will not
be limited to the military result in Iraq. We are looking at a historic
confrontation between the advocates of genocide, who believe in
one, two, many Afghanistans and Iraqs, and the burgeoning opposition
of millions of humanity, their best writers and intellectuals, the
noble and worthy among their religious and spiritual spokespeople
and, above all, their natural leaders among the popular classes.
There
can be no compromises, there will be no end, until and when, either
the world embraces a civilization cleansed of imperialism, genocide,
and ethnic slaughter or we descend to an inferno of a world ruled
by psychopaths who see war as a means for perpetual domination.
Wherever
we live and work, we must become engaged because the empire is everywhere,
from Northern Mexico to downtown Buenos Aires, from the oil fields
of the Middle East to the banks in Jakarta. So too the people’s
movement is everywhere. In the streets of Rome, London, Paris, Madrid,
Athens, Seoul, Manila, New York, and hundreds of smaller cities
and towns, millions of workers, urban poor, peasants, retirees,
members of the middle class and students have mobilized.
The
confrontation has been joined. We are living history. I believe
we will win. Not from visionary faith, but from the conviction that
what we are fighting for represents the best of humankind.
James
Petras is the author of numerous articles and books. He teaches
sociology at SUNY Binghamton.