WHY DOES WASHINGTON HATE SADDAM?
By Loise Neville
For 300 years, England followed a policy throughout the British Empire of
controlling small countries by keeping them weak lest they become strong
enough to establish independence. A helpless nation is a subservient nation
that will readily come to terms and sell its labor and its products at a
low price to its powerful technological neighbors. The technique of containment
is so successful that our own State Department adopts it to control small
agricultural or oil furnishing nations for the benefit of corporations that
need cheap products to feed our industries.
Part of the recent U.S. policy of containment is to demonize Saddam Hussein,
telling us that he is a vicious dictator who abuses his people. Yet everything
in the U.S. Army's own 1990 publication IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY directly contradicts
that view.
IRAQ:A COUNTRY Study (Area Handbook Series), Helen Chapin Metz, ed., published
by U.S. Army Chief of Staff, is a textbook used for Georgetown University
where our foreign service personnel are trained. State Department personnel
and others who will be sent to Iraq by our government need accurate information
about the country they will work in. Strangely enough, this book tells them
that Saddam Hussein created an ideal country that liberated women and offered
them high level government and industry jobs; provided social services to
his people that no other Middle Eastern country -- and, in fact, few world
countries -- have ever offered citizens; established universal free schooling
up to the highest education levels; supported families of soldiers killed
in war; granted free hospitalization to everyone; and gave subsidies to
farmers.
In addition, the textbook says Saddam Hussein brought electricity to everyone
in Iraq, including those in far outlying areas, built roads, established
agriculture on a large scale, promoted mining and other industries to remove
total reliance on oil, provided both Arab and Western style banking systems
to give the people a choice between these interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing
accounts, created a fair, western style legal system, and abolished the
old Mosaic law courts except for personal injury, small court claims. In
sum, according to the U.S. Army textbook, Saddam Hussein made his people
the most prosperous in the Middle East across all levels of society.
Washington tells us that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the other Middle
Eastern nations.
IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY states that Iraq's atomic plant was used to furnish
electricity, not only to its own country but to five other Middle Eastern
oil nations, and Hussein was building a pipeline across the desert to bring
water to arid Saudi Arabia to enable them to establish agriculture for their
people and supplement the expensive saline plants they used to convert gulf
water to usable, salt-free water.
WASHINGTON TELLS us that Iraq has always been hostile to Kuwait because
Kuwait was created by the British from land that was originally part of
Iraq and Saddam needed the seaport Kuwait occupied.
IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY tells us that Kuwait had already offered its seaport
to Iraq, and it was using Iraq's fleet of oil tankers to transport its own
oil abroad, as were many other oil countries. This gave them an indigenous
industry, independent of outside European and American tankers which demanded
higher fees. Thus Kuwait and Iraq were in the oil tanker business together,
Iraq furnishing the tankers, Kuwait furnishing the port.
Washington tells us that Saddam Hussein, without consulting any other nation,
cruelly invaded Kuwait because Kuwait was illegally slant-drilling across
the border, removing Iraq's underground oil.
IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY tells us that the war with Iran, a heavily militarized
powerful client state of the U.S. under the dictatorship of the Shah, left
Iraq bankrupt. Faced with rebuilding its infrastructure destroyed in the
war, Iraq needed money. No country would loan it money except the U.S. Borrowing
money from the U.S. made Iraq its client state. A client State could take
no action without the permission of the more powerful nation.
In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to our State Department about Kuwait's
illegal removal of Iraqi underground oil by slant drilling across the border
into Iraq. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed the money that
this oil would supply to pay its bills. Saddam considered a war with Kuwait
but needed Washington's permission. April Glaspie, our Ambassador to Iraq,
implied such permission by telling Saddam that we were not concerned about
disputes between Middle Eastern nations and would not interfere. Believing
this to be the green light he wanted, Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait.
We all know what happened next. U.S. and Britain, major members of the UN
Security Council of five, stirred a reluctant Security Council into declaring
war on Iraq, which President George Bush declared was "for the New
World Order."
What was that war really about? IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY states that Iraq was
the leading country in forming an Arab Alliance similar to the European
Economic Commission, an alliance of European countries. All oil nations
would share and work together and plan their own army that would include
no Europeans.
This is when alarm bells went off. The oil that makes our plastics and runs
our machines is in the hands of European and American nations through leases.
Independent oil states working in concert could make their own terms and
control OPEC. The last thing the Western world wants is an alliance of oil
states -- especially if they have their own army. Their control of oil would
result in a huge financial crunch to big business.
But there was something even worse about Saddam's Iraq. IRAQ: A COUNTRY
STUDY exposes Iraq as a socialist state. Socialism seriously competes with
capitalism by nationalizing industry and selling its products cheaply. The
"New World Order" is a capitalist economic order run by capitalist
methods, capitalist finance and carried out by capitalist corporations.
In such a world there is no place for socialism.
That is what George Bush meant when he said that the war with Iraq was "for
the New World Order." That is why a U.S. sting operation fooled Hussein
into attacking Kuwait. That is why George Bush said he would "bomb
Iraq into the stone age." That is why Washington hates Saddam Hussein.
That is why other Arab nations could be convinced to join the war against
Iraq in 1990. None of them wanted their people to demand the modernization
and privileges Iraq gave to its people.
But Saddam Hussein may have committed yet another unforgivable "crime."
At the time, it was reported that he refused to sign the GATT treaty, and
at the last minute just before the military attacks on Iraq began, Hussein
was told by a member of our State Department that if he signed the GATT
there would be no war. He refused to sign.
Why did Saddam Hussein refuse to sign the GATT treaty that almost every
other nation in the world had signed? Because the GATT (General Agreement
of Trade And Tariffs) would automatically remove all social programs in
Iraq, remove sovereignty from the nation, demand 50% of all products from
the earth for the use of international corporations on whatever terms they
chose, dictate what products Iraq could buy or sell, dictate the wages of
workers, demand that all seeds planted by farmers be bought from international
corporations, claim corporate ownership of indigenous plants and trees,
and replace the laws of Iraq with laws and regulations made by the World
Trade Organization, a central authority that in private meetings sets irrevocable
rules for all things that relate to business or finance.
GATT is complex, but in essence amounts to putting all political and financial
power into corporate hands. It endangers, even destroys, the ability of
national leaders or the populace of a nation to control its own destiny.
The fact that Washington still demonizes Saddam Hussein and wants his removal
suggests to me that Hussein still refuses to sign the GATT. What other reason
could there be for such unaccountable cruelty?
The long cruel blockade has killed many in Iraq since the military war.
It is reported to have caused the deaths by starvation and disease of a
million people and is said to account for the deaths of 500 children a week.
What happens next is up to the Arab States and the nations of the western
world. By the time this goes to press, some of those questions will be answered.
Spring 1998-- N.C.Xpress
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