Why don’t US newspapers run Op-Eds like this?
From The Guardian, who state the unsurprising; that the Iraq invasion is a) about imperial power, not democracy, and b) is going rather badly. Obvious enough, yet this view is mostly absent from US mainstream media who generally cheerlead the war when not running in-depth, hard-hitting articles on how much money shoppers are spending at post-Xmas sales.
The second half of the last century was the era of successful anti-colonial struggles, culminating in the Vietnamese liberation movement. People do not like being occupied from afar by countries of different cultures and races, though the new American imperial hubris – like many before – convinced the Bush administration and our own prime minister that the coalition troops would be greeted like a liberating army, that the people of Iraq yearned for our values and our way of life.
Iraq has already demonstrated that American public opinion does not have the stomach for a prolonged occupation, that the Bush administration cannot afford the body bags, and that therefore their Iraqi appointees will have to assume, sooner rather than later, many of the frontline responsibilities. The occupation of Iraq has taught the US, not to mention the world, that overweening military power is not invincible, but on the contrary, is as vulnerable as ever when it tries to occupy another people’s country. Such was, and remains, the lesson of anti-colonial struggle.
As with all imperial endeavours, there has been much moralising about democracy, human rights and justice. It was ever so, but no more so than now. Yet these values have, as in the past, been the first casualties of imperial ambition. There are countless stories of the way in which American troops shoot first and ask questions later. The Americans don’t even bother to count the number of Iraqi dead.
When Bush and Blair insist that the Iraqis should determine Saddam’s fate, by Iraqis they mean their own quisling Iraqi regime. The Guantanamo camp is an affront to human rights worldwide. Civil rights have been rolled back in the US in the name of the fight against terror. And, of course, there are no weapons of mass destruction: truth is the first casualty of war – and imperial ambition.