Crocodile tears & humanitarian intervention

The liberation of the Iraqi people will begin with the arrival of the U.S. military. The war, driven by the desire to spread democracy throughout the world, will be opposed by the overwhelming majority of people in the world. The invasion of Iraq will also be a war for peace in the Middle East, and will be soon followed by invasions of Syria and Iran. And, as soon as we have freed the Kurdish people of Northern Iraq, we will quickly feed them to the Turkish military assisting us with the humanitarian crises.
Every time we invade anybody, it will always be an act of liberation. Hitler was liberating the persecuted Germans in Poland; Mussolini was coming to the aid of the hungry Ethiopian people. “Humanitarian Intervention” ain’t nothing new, and most if not all the aggressive wars in modern history were only concerned with the plight of the conquered population. As Bush’s “Saddam is coming to get us” routine has stalled, the U.S. government has begun advocating the liberation of Iraq from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. While I’m glad Bush and the American military have joined the movement for Third World Liberation I am concerned he does not mean what he says he means.
Yes, the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam has been horrendous, but it has not been alone. Over the last decade it has been equalled, perhaps surpassed by the repression of the Kurdish population of our close ally Turkey. Even while we denounce Saddam for his atrocious attacks on the Kurds done with our backing in the 1980s we continue to support the terrible slaughter of the same people carried out by the Turkish military in the 1990s. Ten and a half billion dollars in military aid over the last decade to Turkey, a country where according to the 1998 State Department of Human Rights ,“extrajudicial killings, including deaths in detention from the excessive use of force, ‘mystery killings,’ and disappearances continued. Torture remained widespread.” Speaking the Kurdish language can get you thrown in prison. U.S.-supplied attack helicopters, jets, tanks and armored personnel carriers have been used to destroy over 3,000 Kurdish villages. You know that “no-fly” zone in Northern Iraq? The same Turkish airforce bases from which U.S. planes take off to patrol it send U.S. supplied jets with U.S. supplied satellite intelligence reports to target the Kurds living in Turkey. The Turkish military even invaded the no-fly zone in Iraq in order to hunt down and kill Turkish Kurds, with the full approval of the Clinton Adminstration. It has become evident they will do more of the same in Northern Iraq, most likely with our continued support, as soon as Saddam is displaced.
It isn’t just that we’ve propped up terrible dictatorships such as Saddam that concerns me (how do you think we got to be on a first-name basis with him in the first place?). It’s that the American government has proven fully capable of terrorizing a people even while simultaneously claiming to liberate them, without a whiff of hypocrisy wafting from the armpit that is our government past the thick deoderant that is our media, or a peep from the Freedom Fighters now advocating the invasion of Iraq. Whatever ex-Iraqi General we set up as new Glorious Leader will only continue the pattern of repression set by the endless list of U.S. client-states like Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Columbia, Uzbekistan, Indonesia and a little while ago, Iraq.
But anything is better than Saddam. Fine, but I don’t think war is the only alternative. I do think if we are going to oppose the invasion of Iraq we have a responsibility to articulate and fight for an alternative path to bring justice and democracy into the world. Instead of calling for multilateralism and insisting that Russia, China and France (currently repressing the people of Chechnya, Tibet and Sierra Leone, respectfully) support us in our pet imperial project, we need to expose the war as part of the same corrupt, violent aparatus that has as much impact on our communities as it does those in far-away lands. Nearly every state on the Security Council and many that aren’t are currently inflicting on people around the world the same punishment we hope to apply to the people of Iraq. Instead of demanding all nations invade Iraq multilaterally, let’s fight against the repression inflicted in all nations. That sounds grandiose, but with the huge new global peace movement it becomes increasingly plausible.
The explosion of the peace movement is not a “mainstream,” objection to unilaterlism, it is emerging because Bush’s war has come to symbolize the war on the lives of oppressed communities around the world. That’s the emotional part; people feel the reality of racism, of exploitation, of need suppressed from the mainstream has begun to erupt through the peace movement. I’m not saying we need to get ideological and start shouting at people, I’m saying the opposite. We need to bring the personal reality of injustice and suffering into the discussion. The more infused the peace movement becomes with the experiences and voices suppressed from the mainstream the stronger it will be.

—Jason Johnston