People who know me think I hate Americans and their country, and because it amuses them I often play along to it. This is an attempt to explain that they’re wrong, but it’s more complex than that.
The problem with America is, it's not just any country. I can tell you many bad things about many countries. Almost anyone can say bad things about America however, because it's more than a country. It’s THE superpower that truly dominates the world. Economies and societies anywhere on the globe can shine or fall at the wish of the American leadership.
The US has supposedly acted badly at times, in the past - I wasn't there, so don't take my word for it, read books and publications about it (like "Addicted to War", Joel Andreas, or “All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror”, Stephen Kinzer). Today, some Americans feel their country has again misbehaved with Iraq.
So they write about how they think certain things must be changed, how the US must "support a war not with Islam, but within [between moderates and extremists] and when they say this, I can picture them with this look on their face- this look that says "man, I sound so super-pro-liberal-modern-open-minded, don't I?"
Well the truth is, that's not good enough. In fact, I think this ‘spirit’ is even worse than supporting the removal of Saddam. I find that as much as one can criticize the war on Iraq, the critics often sound as paternalistic as pro-colonial men sounded when they talked about "the white man's burden" of civilizing the ‘barbarians’ of the world.
Iraq under Saddam was not a free country, and all sorts of inhumane and uncivilised practises were the standard. I think it’s a fair statement to say that something had to be done. The UN thought so too, since it imposed all sorts of sanctions and inspections regarding WMD’s (prepare to hear a lot about WMD’s again, coalition forces have found ‘one’ shell of nerve agent). Most of Britain –and the world- felt that under a UN mandate, the removal of Saddam was justified and honourable. But of course, this wasn’t going to happen. Iraq had many pending debts and investments with major players like France and Russia, and the war would have –and has- compromised their profitable relation with Iraq.
The history behind Iraq’s demise is very intricate, and I honestly don’t think I’m qualified to judge it. But it is my belief that it goes back a very long way, and not in Iraq, but in Iran. Persia, long ago, was ruled by petty rulers of puppet regimes, who led lavish and downright outrageous lifestyles that could only be funded through the sales of Iranian resources to foreign powers. In those days, the powers were Russia, and Britain. This was happening while most of the Iranian population was poor, uneducated, and hopeless. But many could see that clearly, what was happening was as wrong and blatant as colonisation.
Various leaders led to others, until the only truly democratically elected leader of Iran –ever!- rose to power. Mr. Mossadegh was the Satan of Russia and Britain. And so, her Majesty’s agents organised a plot to remove him, and as it failed, Britain was no longer welcome. Mossadegh nationalised all Iranian oil resources, including those sold to the Brits by previous kings –shahs – because, he righteously claimed, these concessions were made under conventions, and conventions are treaties between nations, not between nations and individual rulers [who used the profits, in fact, only to repay their debts to the west]. Back in England, many felt that if England could have Iran’s oil, it’s domination would not have ended. So there was not a doubt: something had to be done!
So in 1953, Britain convinced the US that Iran was going communist. The Americans, with their ambitious and relatively new CIA, led a successful coup and killed Iran’s only democratically elected leader, a TIME’s Man of the Year, the man who defied the West. The US was very hard to convince, but in the end, they did it. A new puppet regime was set up: the Pahlavi dynasty was re-inforced (the American agents intensely manipulated the Pahlavis and doctored some documents to make their rule appear legitimate –this should strike you as very similar to recent actions by America in Iraq to legitimize their war and their government) and it must be said, although it didn’t please many people, the Shah did many good things for Iran, and in fact, Iran would probably be better off now if the 1979 revolution had never occurred.
But the revolution did occur. The Iranians revolted for mainly two things: above all, democracy and freedom, but again, for freedom from foreign forces –through a puppet regime. The American embassy was taken over and like it or not, compromising documents were found, clearly revealing America’s -and it’s embassy’s- role in Iran: a manipulative and dominating role. It is said that most of the documents were undergoing intense destruction as the masses began their assault on the embassy. So the west lost its rule over Iran.
But the US saw this only as a setback, and its good friend Saddam Hussein, a young military dictator, was the man for the job. Were the west willing to fund and supply his war, he was ready to use his army against the fragile and new Islamic republic of Iran. In fact, the also-young Donald Rumsfeld, personally met with Saddam, on a number of occasions. Relations were more than cordial. The West supplied Iraq with the best there was: long range weapons, bio-chemical weapons, and a modern air force to compensate for the three-times-bigger Iranian army.
And so for nearly a decade, a war in which nearly a million lives were lost, was fuelled – by the west, for the west – against Iran. The war only ended in a cease fire. Nothing was won.
Saddam and his massive army thus turned their cannons towards a much weaker enemy –Kuweit- and again, like it or not, when Saddam told US diplomats in Baghdad about his plans to invade the small neighbour, the-then US Ambassador (April Glaspie) said “we have no opinion on your border dispute with Kuwait”. She added that her superior, “James Baker has instructed our official spokesman to emphasize this instruction”. This is evidence that the US may have tried to fool Iraq into a war with Kuwait. There are many reasons for the US to do such a thing, but the most obvious one is that Iraq now had its army in the top 10 if not 5 largest of all armies. Saddam became a liability. The Coalition pushed him all the way back to Baghdad, and stopped there, short of a UN mandate for his head (that’s the official reason –really, we know the UN has never stopped the US from acting as it likes).
Perhaps this is where the UN failed the world. It was around that time that Bush Sr. had supported an uprising against the dictator. It could have been Iraq’s revolution, and after all, it would have been more legitimate and honourable than this war’s removal of Saddam, or the interim government.
It is clear that the 2003 war could have had many positive and worthy effects: removal of Saddam, democracy, prosperity, and peace, for example. But in my opinion, what’s even clearer is America’s desire to have vast control and influence over Iraq’s politics, economy and oil resources –this is most obvious with the Administration’s choice of government, its skewed distribution of contracts and its selection of reconstruction partners. And the low philosophy behind that is “we did the hard work, we should get the reward”. Would anyone else have done it differently?
My point is thus, that unfortunately, one cannot blame the US for everything. One can also blame Britain, France, Russia, and the UN. But when a nation like the USA, symbol of freedom, behaves like any other shallow, greedy and bully nation, I feel we are entitled to have reservations towards it. If tomorrow we find out Mugabe has torture chambers, we won’t be too astonished: the man is a representative of evil-on-earth itself, we expect nothing less of him. But when America’s abuses, greed or torture chambers appear to us, we can only find that incompatible with what it represents. Because at the end of the day, America represents something great, and perhaps, our problem is that we fail to accept anything less.
