What Liberation? Tell That To Iraqi Mothers Of Dead

Apr 16, 2003

AS the coalition of the willing rolls through Iraq, guns blazing from Abrams battle tanks and big bombs falling from the sky, the Bush administration is now spinning this war as a liberation struggle.

Letter from Toronto By Opiyo Oloya
AS the coalition of the willing rolls through Iraq, guns blazing from Abrams battle tanks and big bombs falling from the sky, the Bush administration is now spinning this war as a liberation struggle. Last week, to drive home this new-found theme, in front of a handful of people, most of them journalists, the American Marines pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein al-Takriti. This, we are told, was the reason that the war was fought — to liberate the oppressed people of Iraq from a mad dictator. There is very little or no mention of the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be primed and ready to annihilate the world. Perhaps to divert attention from this very fact, there is now rumbling from Washington and London that Syria may be the next suspect for harbouring weapons of mass destruction. Stay tuned.
The liberation theme belatedly embraced by Washington is a sad commentary on how low the Bush administration will go to justify this dirty war that should have never happened. To them, the clearest evidence that the Iraqis wanted to be liberated was the small crowd seen dancing in the streets of Baghdad last week. But what about the millions of Iraqis who inhabit this city, the ones who did not show their faces on television, do they feel the same way about this war? The point here is that just because a leader is unpopular, and Saddam was very unpopular, does not mean that the inhabitants are happy to have their city bombed into rubble by a foreign occupying force. If anything, America has a very poor track record of “liberating” people around the world. No one can forget that the removal of popular President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 in whose place the US installed the bloody dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who brought in untold suffering to that country for decades. In 1953, Iranians were supposedly liberated when the CIA orchestrated a coup against the populist Prime Minister Mohammed Mosadegh and replaced him with the unpopular handpicked Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The Shah was chased out of Iran in 1979 by the uprising that brought in the Ayatollah Khomeini.
And the relevant question then was: Who is next on the list to be liberated — the citizens of Saudi Arabia who have never known any real democracy? Or perhaps the citizens of Kuwait or Egypt or Jordan? They too would dance in the streets were the current leaders driven out of power. But, don’t hold your breath because what is supposed to be good for Iraqis is not good for Egyptians, or Saudis or Kuwaitis.
No, this war was about the resources of Iraq, namely oil. The evidence became clear when American Marines moved with lightening speed to protect oil fields in the first few hours of the war. In Baghdad, the coalition forces stood idly by while most government offices, hospitals and the national museum were looted bare. However, they mounted a fierce guard over the offices of the Iraqi Ministry of Oil. Now, try to tell the Iraqi mother whose child needs a double amputation to survive that this war is about liberation.
The question is: what freedom do you have when you have to beg for food the next day? How free are you when your children have been maimed, wounded and killed by thousands of bombs? Where is freedom when you are out of work and civil unrest is rife in the country?
These are the hard sobering questions that will grip Iraq in the weeks to come as they wake up to the fact that this freedom is as illusory as the desert mirage. There will be a slow but definite acknowledgement that life in Iraq will never be the same again for generations to come. Far worse, Iraqis will also come to realise that their so-called liberators have forgotten about them just as they forgot Afghanistan, now a desolately “sick man” of the Near East. And while oil revenue will flow to headquarters in New York, ordinary Iraqis will be left to beg, and perhaps die in dire poverty. The “liberators” will have declared victory and marched off to other conquests, perhaps in Syria or Iran. However, with time, the Iraqi people themselves will be the first to say categorically that the Americans delivered them from one dictator and shackled them with others — hunger, poverty and misery. By that time, George Bush will have won his second term and secured his name in history as conqueror of dictators.
Ends

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