The Mysteries of History (March 19 Edition)
Nevada Gambling; Iraq War
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, 1905
1931 — Nevada Legalizes Gambling
top image generated using Bing Image Creator; bottom image public domain image from wikimedia commons
In an effort to jumpstart their economy during the Great Depression, Nevada legalized gambling on this date in 1931. Gambling brought organized crime. Whether there was a direct connection or not, later in the year they also legalized divorce, and made both getting “hitched” and “unhitched” easy.
Questions: Have you ever been to Las Vegas? Why do some people call it “Lost Wages”? Was there a Las Vegas before Nevada was a State? Did you know that Mark Twain’s older brother Orion was Secretary of Nevada Territory when the brothers lived there in the 1860s? How far is it from Las Vegas to Los Angeles?
2003 — Iraq War Begins
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this date in 2003, the United States, along with its longtime partner in War, Britain, invaded Iraq, falsely claiming it harbored weapons of mass destruction. This was either the result of bad intelligence (untrue information) or bad intelligence (poor thinking ability: starting a war to settle a grudge).
Iraq’s corrupt and bloviating (not to mention homicidal maniac, being the killer of many of his own citizens) leader Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) went into hiding (literally in a hole in the ground, and a small one at that), and his government was overthrown in a matter of weeks.
Hussein was hanged for crimes against humanity in late 2006; no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. The United States declared the Iraq War officially over almost a decade after it began.
Questions: How many Americans have been killed in Iraq in connection with the war? How many Iraqis have been killed during the war? How many of these were civilians (not members of the military or the political regime)? How do Iraqis now view Saddam Hussein? Are any of his family members still living in Iraq? If so, what is their situation?
The following is what I wrote about the Iraq War (all of Chapter 2003, “Riding the Tiger”) in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 2: 1914-2006:
“The fact is that once we go into Iraq, and liberate Iraq, two things will happen immediately: the Iraqi people will start dancing in the street, and week after week, month after month, inspectors from around the world will find vats of biological weapons, tremendous progress on nuclear weapons. And every week, if not more, people will say, ‘God, that was a close call. Thank God we stopped that production.’”—Kenneth Adelman, member of U.S. Defense Policy Board
“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”—Traditional parental admonition
“Professed patriotism may be made the cover for a multitude of sins.”—Robert C. Winthrop
“Some of you will die, but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make.”—John Lithgow as Lord Farquaad in the movie “Shrek”
“It is a difficult question. But, yes, we think the price is worth it.”—then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in a 1996 interview on CBS’ 60 Minutes, in response to Lesley Stahl’s question: “More than 500,000 Iraqi children are already dead as a direct result of the UN sanctions. Do you think the price is worth paying?”
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”—Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley in the movie “Dr. Strangelove”
“If what America represents to the world is a leadership in a commonwealth of equals, then our friends are legion; [but] if what we represent is empire, then it is our enemies who will be legion.”—Al Gore
“Men have become the tools of their tools.”—Henry David Thoreau
“Where a ruler is paying attention to false speech, all those waiting on him will be wicked.”—Proverbs 29:12
“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”—George Orwell
As on 9/11/2001, a monstrous and inexcusable atrocity was perpetrated this year. As happened two years prior, most of those victimized were civilians, trying to get on with the business of day-to-day living. An advance force of carpet bombs was to be followed by an “army” of carpetbaggers. Things haven’t turned out quite that way. The classic problem of “riding the tiger” is the result—once you’re on its back, how do you get off without being chewed to shreds and mauled into oblivion? Despite “cooked” intelligence on an Iraq-al Qaeda and Hussein/bin Laden connection (whereas in actuality bin Laden had once asked his native Saudi Arabia to wage a war on Hussein’s Iraq)—and in fact despite intelligence dia metrically opposed to the phony conclusions drawn, quartered, dolled up, and paraded before the American people and the world, Bush and his cronies pushed forward with their pre-ordained war against the Iraqi leader who, according to Bush, “tried to kill his daddy.” Even that “intelligence” (that Hussein was behind an assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush) is now considered suspect. The stage had been set the previous year, when The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (296–133) to give President George W. Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq, whether the U.N. gave its blessing to such or not. The Senate then joined the House in an even greater show of solidarity (77–23) in favor of the use of America’s military against Iraq. In April of this year, FBI director Robert Mueller said concerning Iraq’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks: “We ran down literally hundreds of thou sands of leads [and found nothing].
In his book “Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm,” Dilip Hiro writes of the alleged Iraq/al Qaeda connection:
According to the longtime Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki, who possessed volumes of intelligence on Iraq and bin Laden, “Iraq does not come very high in the estimation of bin Laden. He thinks of Saddam Hussein as an apostate, an infidel or someone who is not worthy of being a fellow Muslim.” Jamal al Fadl, a key Al Qaeda defector, said there were individual Iraqis in Al Qaeda but there was no specific Iraqi group that Al Qaeda was backing. He told the US authorities that bin Laden criticized Saddam “sometimes for attacking Muslims and killing women and children, but most importantly for not believing in ‘most of Islam,’ and for setting up his own political party, the Baath.” The Baath was a secular party, and Tariq Aziz (aka Mikhail Yahunna), Iraq’s deputy prime minister and chief spokesman for the Western media, was Chaldean Catholic. For eight years Iraq fought the Islamic regime of Iran. So the idea of an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda seemed outlandish.
Hiro also brings out in his book that Israel was guilty of being in breech of more U.N. Security Council resolutions than Iraq was, so attacking them on that basis, as the U.S. sometimes claimed, rings hollow. The chief hue and cry in the lead-up to the invasion was about the sup posed existence of WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction). The U.N. weapons inspectors had been searching for such, but in vain. They wanted more time. The Bush administration, though, ran out of patience and apparently thought the inspectors weren’t looking hard enough. Whether such existed or not, the logic again (using the existence of such as a pretext for war) seemed f lawed. Hiro says of this in “Iraq”:
If possessing WMD was a sufficient cause for a country to merit an invasion by the Pentagon, then certainly Israel—possessing an arsenal of two-hundred-plus nuclear arms, produced since 1968, and vast quantities of chemical and biological warfare agents at its Nes Tziona facility south of Tel Aviv, established in 1952—should have been invaded by Washington a long time ago, especially when Israel also had missiles and aircraft to deliver its WMD.
Besides the logic, or lack thereof, Hiro, in his book published in 2002, foresaw potential disaster in a U.S. invasion of Iraq:
By invading Iraq, Washington will initiate a conflict the course of which is very hard to predict. The best scenario projected by the US hawks shows Iraqi soldiers defecting in droves and civilians welcoming the Americans as liberators. Such an eventuality is based on the information and expectations of the exiled Iraqi opposition. History shows that exiles are the last people to have a correct grasp of the cur rent situation in the country they have left. Washington faced a fiasco when it mounted its Bay of Pigs operation in Cuba, based on information provided by Cuban exiles, in January 1961. More recently in Iraqi Kurdistan, the scenario visualized by the Iraqi National Congress and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in March 1995 failed to materialize.
To imagine that a people who have suffered grievously at the hands of the United States for twelve years, and have grown deep hatred for it, would turn out in thou sands to greet American soldiers and their Iraqi cohorts as liberators seems unrealistic. The United States has been generally wrong both in gauging popular feeling in Iraq and in devising policies likely to turn Iraqis against Saddam and his regime. Leaving aside the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War, what has actually happened in Iraq is the opposite of Washington’s scenarios, often conceived in consultation with the Iraqi opposition. The United States has failed to grasp a basic element of popular psychology. When a country is attacked, its citizens rally around the leader. This is what happened after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Americans turned to President Bush Jr. for leadership and succor. His popularity ratings soared from 50 percent to 90 percent. In Iraq this is precisely what happened after the Pentagon’s bombings of Iraq—in January and June 1993, September 1996, December 1998, and February 2001. They stoked feelings not against Saddam, but the United States. Also, far from causing Saddam’s ousting or destabilization of his regime, the US policy of maintaining punishing sanctions against Iraq has ended up—albeit inadvertently—aiding him to tighten his grip over society by a most effective instrument of rationing.
In reality, the sanctions, while hurting the Iraqi people deeply, did not hurt Saddam Hussein. Not only was he, as the dictator of the country, to a great extent immune to personal privation, the sanctions allowed him to blame any and all bad conditions in Iraq on the sanctions, and simultaneously increase, rather than diminish, his control over the people. This was so because his government was administering the distribution and dissemination of necessities, doling out what little there was to those who maintained their loyalty to him and his regime.
Three thousand innocents were killed on 9/11 in the United States. Since the invasion of Iraq, thousands of civilians there have been killed—not to mention members of both the U.S. and Iraqi military and police forces, as well as subjects of other countries. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, approximately 100,000 Iraqi civilians, the majority of them women and children, have died in Iraq since the invasion this year. Most of these deaths (The Lancet estimates 80%) have been the result of air strikes by the U.S.-led “coalition” forces. Based on an AP survey of Iraq’s 124 hospitals, more than 3,420 civilians perished in the initial part of the aerial siege—approximately the same number who died in the 9/11 attacks. In just one locality, al-Nasiriyya, 169 children died, and one resident (Ali Kadhim Hashim) lost fourteen family members to the slaughter. Among these fourteen were his wife and children as well as his parents. As it had in 1991, 1993, 1996, and 1998, this year the United States bombed Iraq. Like an attempt to smash a mosquito in a preschool classroom with a sledgehammer, the American military, in attempting to “take out” certain unsavory individuals, bombed and shelled the areas they were purported to be occupying. In many cases, though, the bombs and shells killed Iraqi citizens with no connection to the military or its government. Among these casualties were many children. Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, warned regarding how America went about its goal of regime change in Iraq: “If we are to achieve our strategic objective in Iraq, a military campaign very likely would have to be fol lowed by a large-scale, long-term, military occupation.” As of the time of writing, the U.S. occupation of Iraq, three years old, continues, and with no end in sight. Allegedly undertaken to fight terrorism, this tactical blunder, just like the invasion of Afghanistan, seems to have played right into Bush’s archenemy Osama bin Laden’s hands. Professor Gerges Fawaz wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Bin Laden must be laughing in his grave or cave…The U.S. has alienated those in the Islamic world who were its best hope.” Al Qaeda was overjoyed at this turn of events because now U.S. troops were spread out across Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula—close at hand, and easy to target. In “Imperial Hubris,” the author writes:
There is nothing bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The U.S. invasion of Iraq is Osama bin Laden’s gift from America, one he has long and ardently desired, but never realistically expected. Think of it: Iraq is the second holiest land in Islam; a place where Islam had been long suppressed by Saddam; where the Sunni minority long dominated and brutalized the Shia majority; where order was kept only by the Baathist barbarity that prevented a long overdue civil war; and where, in the wake of Saddam’s fall, the regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia would intervene, at least clandestinely, to stop the creation of, respectively, a Sunni or Shia successor state. In short, Iraq with out Saddam would obviously become what political scientists call a “failed state,” a place bedeviled by its neighbors and—as is Afghanistan—a land where al Qaeda or al Qaeda-like organizations would thrive. Surely, thought bin Laden, the Ameri cans would not want to create this kind of situation. It would be, if you will, like deliberately shooting yourself in the foot…In the end, something much like Christ mas had come for bin Laden, and the gift he received from Washington will haunt, hurt, and hound Americans for years to come.
With the risk already clear to many (even including many who had the administration’s ear), and the reasons for attacking Iraq dubious, the question may come up: Why? Why invade Iraq? What is the potential upside which proved so irresistible to President Bush and his advisers? Again quoting from “Iraq” by Hiro:
If the risks are high, so are the rewards, argue the hawks. Ousting Saddam and replacing him with a democratic regime in Baghdad will open Iraq’s rich oil fields to US corporations, thus releasing the United States from its dependence on petroleum from Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist kingdom that provided the bulk of the hijackers for the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, they claim, Washington will introduce democracy in Iraq, from where it is bound to spread to the rest of the region.
Is it really a true democracy that Washington wants in Baghdad, though, or do they define self-determination in this case with the conditional stipulation that the government chosen be one approved by the U.S., and that it not be an Islamic regime? There is a well-known and oft-quoted aphorism about those ignorant of history being destined to repeat it. It seems to apply even better than usual in this case, as Britain had earlier failed to harness Iraq. A key point driven home in Jon Lee Anderson’s book “The Fall of Baghdad” is that most Iraqis were glad to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but they would not stand for the United States staying on and trying to run their country after the removal of Saddam was accomplished. Most Iraqis want Americans to simply leave and allow them to run their own affairs. Anderson writes of the quag mire that America seems to have gotten itself into there:
A few historians and academics had written books about Britain’s early-twentieth century colonial experiences in Mesopotamia, but knowledge of the period was not widespread in the United States. I wondered whether Washington’s war planners had studied the history and taken some of its lessons into account. Somehow, I doubted it.
In his book, Anderson tells of a conversation he had with Mouayed al Muslih, the chief engineer for the grounded Iraqi national airline:
Muslih told me that he and most other Iraqis had been pleased by the American overthrow of Saddam and had had high expectations of what would come next. But they had been sorely disappointed. “Tomorrow, the ninth of April, is the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, but now, you know, everyone sees this as the date marking the beginning of the liberation of Iraq.” I understood that what Muslih was talking about was liberation from American occupation, in an inversion of the language used by President Bush to refer to the U.S. role in Iraq. Muslih went on: “Iraqis don’t have anything against American people or their culture, you know, but they don’t want to be humiliated by American soldiers.”
