Throughout the world, the Green Party has consistently and vocally opposed this war with Iraq. As principled proponents of nonviolence, we oppose war as a means of resolving international conflicts. Wars, even those that achieve some positive results such as World War II (which brought about the defeat of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan), create a psychological dynamic that results in the dehumanization of "the enemy" by all parties involved, resulting in turn in a vast amount of needless death and destruction. Over 100 million people died in wars and related events during the 20th century, the majority of them civilians.
The war with Iraq will greatly increase the suffering and loss of innocent lives in a country where more than a million have already died due to war and economic sanctions. Iraqis are as human as any American, and their lives are no less valuable. Undoubtedly Iraqis would rather be rid of Saddam Hussein, but not at such great risk to their own lives. They did not ask for this war and do not want it, any more than we Americans would want a foreign nation to unleash millions of tons of high explosives on our own country. But beyond that, the U.S. government's months-long push for war is not simply a misguided effort to resolve a conflict violently, but a cynical effort to manipulate the American public into supporting a war that is in fact being waged solely to serve elite interests, not those of Iraqi or American citizens.
At the Nuremburg trials, Nazi second-in-command Hermann Goering described the Nazis' technique for fostering popular support for their aggressive policies: "Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
With the help of a compliant media, the Bush Administration has attempted exactly that, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq by claiming that Iraq possesses "weapons of mass destruction" with which it intends to attack the U.S., either directly or through al-Qaeda proxies. Both logically and factually, the claim is absurd. The secular Iraqi government and al-Qaeda (whose leader Osama bin-Laden refers to Saddam Hussein as an "infidel" and calls for his overthrow) are widely acknowleded to be bitter enemies. Not a single biological or chemical weapon has been found by weapons inspectors despite inspections far more extensive than those which took place in the 1990s, which discovered and destroyed significant quantities of such weapons.
A recently discovered transcript of an interview with the late Hussein Kamel, the former head of Iraq's weapons programs, is consistent with what many weapons experts have long believed: That Iraq's stocks of these weapons were largely, perhaps completely, destroyed during the 1990s. International Atomic Energy Association reports to the U.N. have dismissed Bush Administration claims about Iraqi efforts to revive their nuclear program as unfounded and in one case (the alleged effort to procure radioactive material from Niger) based on forged documents. Even the Bush Administration does not claim that Iraq currently has nuclear weapons. Iraq's longest-range missiles, with a range of only 100 miles, were in the process of being destroyed under the weapons inspectors' supervision when war began. Iraq's military was vastly overrated even in 1991, when U.S. forces easily crushed it, and it is considerably weaker now, with a current budget approximately 1/300th the U.S.'s. Even the very same U.S. officials who have claimed that Iraq represents a significant threat to the U.S. have also boasted that U.S. forces would be able to defeat the Iraqi military within days. Somehow, the glaring inconsistency of these juxtaposed claims is repeatedly overlooked by a U.S. mass media that can't bring itself to think critically about our government's warmongering ways.
Even if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, the fact is that it has not attacked or threatened another nation militarily since 1990 (when it was a U.S. ally), and did not use chemical or biological weapons during the Gulf War despite still possessing them at the time. Presumably, it was deterred by the prospect of massive U.S. retaliation. Why wouldn't it be similarly deterred now? And why did a regime that no one spoke of as a threat prior to the September 11th terrorist attacks suddenly become labeled public enemy #1 in their aftermath, when no evidence exists of a link with 9/11?
The other pillar of the Bush Administration's case for invading Iraq, its lack of democracy, also rings hollow. At issue is not the Iraqi regime's obvious brutality and lack of democracy, but the Bush Administration's hypocrisy. This is an Administration that came to power thanks to a Supreme Court decision which denied a recount in Florida despite obvious flaws in the electoral process; a concerted, largely successful campaign by the Florida gubernatorial Administration of Bush's brother Jeb to deny tens of thousands of overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning minority voters their voting rights; and a complacent Congress which only put up token opposition to Bush's illegitimate seizure of power.
This is an Administration which has attacked American citizens' constitutional rights continuously for the past year and a half, to say nothing of its persecution of Arab and Muslim immigrants. It overthrew the dictatorial Taliban regime in Afghanistan only to replace it with a puppet regime consisting of U.S.-loyal warlords and former oil executives, with no apparent intention of allowing free elections any time soon. Among the dozens of countries that receive U.S. military aid in the name of the "war on terrorism," 32 were identified in the State Department's human rights report as having "poor" human rights records - meaning that they have a habit of imprisoning, torturing and murdering political opponents. And we are supposed to take seriously the Bush Administration's claims that it wants to bring democracy to Iraq?
In attempting to identify the real reasons for the Bush Administration's war fever, it is useful to remember who these folks are. The Bush campaign raised a record $190 million in direct contributions, overwhelmingly from large corporations and wealthy individuals. Top Administration officials, including Bush himself, are largely former executives from these same corporations, especially the oil industry. Unsurprisingly, the defunct Enron Corp. heads the list of campaign contributors. Overall, the oil and gas industries contributed $26.7 million to Bush and other Republican candidates in 2000, and $18 million to Republicans in 2002. They and other corporate contributors have been rewarded with an executive branch that has displayed unwavering fealty to corporate interests.
The overwhelming influence of corporate money on both major parties is central to the way our government operates. The Bush Administration epitomizes the lust for money and power that drives government policy in America.
Given these considerations, is the Bush Administration's claim that its determination to wage war in Iraq has nothing to do with Iraq's trillions of dollars worth of oil reserves even remotely plausible? We think not. The Wall Street Journal, the voice of corporate America, acknowledged as much in a March 4 editorial denouncing the Turkish Parliament's decision not to allow Turkey to be used as a staging ground for the U.S. assault on Iraq, noting that "the Turks can forget about any postwar Iraqi oil spoils."
A recent Rand Corporation report commissioned by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, recommended invading Iraq as a first step toward gaining control of oil throughout the Middle East. Negotiations with oil companies for lucrative contracts to rebuild and run Iraq's oil industry after the war have already begun. In fact, Halliburton Oil, which made handsome profits following the first Gulf War from the rebuilding of Iraq's oil industry, has already received the first contract. Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's CEO before coming to the White House.
Control over Iraq's oil is not only about enriching U.S. and British oil executives, however. It is hard to put a monetary value on the economic leverage it would provide over the rest of Europe and Japan, which have almost no oil of their own. Indiana's own Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has threatened France and Russia, saying that if they don't support the Iraq war, they'll get no share of Iraq's oil resources.
Of course, the fact that control over Iraq's oil and the giant step toward further U.S global domination it would constitute are the major reasons for the Bush Administration's war drive cannot be widely publicized. The American public would never support war with Iraq were this motivation openly acknowledged. Hence the propaganda campaign to portray Iraq as the world's chief bogeyman, which will undoubtedly shift to a new target (Iran? Korea? Venezuela?) if the intended conquest of Iraq is successful. But the real threat to peace, democracy, and justice globally is not members of the "Axis of Evil" like Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The real threat is the corporate elite that has a stranglehold on the world's economy, and its representatives in government -- in other words, people like George Bush. This elite is perfectly willing to wage war on a regular basis to secure and further its dominant role in the world.
But most Democrats represent this elite nearly as faithfully as Republicans. By overwhelming margins, Democrats have supported wars in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, huge military budget increases, attacks on our Constitutional rights such as the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, and tax cuts that mostly favor the wealthy (albeit not as much as Republican tax bills). More than half of Congressional Democrats have supported corporate-friendly "free trade" policies, and about half voted for the unconstitutional Congressional resolution authorizing Bush to declare war on Iraq. Even those who voted against the resolution have, with few exceptions, not opposed the war on principled grounds.
Staunch liberals like Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi have instead said: "Let's not go to war until we have done more weapons inspections and we have the support of more allies." In other words, it is not the possibility that hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die that troubles Congressional liberals, but rather the possibility that the U.S. will be internationally isolated. In short, it is not enough to oppose Bush, because the whole governing elite is behind the push for war with Iraq. Democrats, like Republicans, are willing to support horrific violence, and pretend that the lives of foreigners on whom it is unleashed are unimportant, if corporate interests are thereby served.
The Green Party, unlike Democrats and Republicans, adheres to nonviolence (except in self-defense) as a matter of principle. We see ourselves as the electoral arm of a vibrant and growing worldwide grassroots movement for peace, democracy, ecological wisdom, and social justice. This movement must continue to grow, for the sake of the planet and humanity, for its task is not merely to stop war with Iraq, but to shut down the profit-mad corporate machine that produces wars.
Rebecca Riall and Jeff Melton are members of the Monroe County Green Party. Jeff was the Indiana Green Party's 9th District Congressional candidate in 2002. The views expressed herein are not meant to be official position statements of our organizations.