Bob Herbert's OIL AND BLOOD
By Bill Henderson
10 August, 2005
Countercurrents.orgFinally the true story of war in Iraq has been told in major media in the US, in the NY Times. In Bob Herbert's Oil and Blood column there's the motive, premeditation, deceit and then aggression in a crime, an illegal war, we are all witness to.
Mr. Herbert as an American exaggerates the importance of US military casualties versus an unmentioned nearly 200,000 dead Iraqis and untold injured and traumatized. He doesn't accent that it is America as aggressor and occupier that legitimizes horrible insurgency.
Unfortunately for the rest of humanity Mr. Herbert doesn't document how much more dangerous life is for everybody because of the signal the US sent to nuclear powers Russia and China with aggression in Iraq and the corrosion done to international law and institutions by illegal war.
But he tells the true story of Iraq to Americans, at least to Times readers. Finally, the true story is told in a way that will be hard for any American to deny.
And then?
So far very little. It is as if Americans knew all along that Bush lied and that Iraq was cynical aggression for oil and for American geostrategic positioning versus emerging China.
Instead Americans are buried in their continuing preoccupation with terrorism, today focused upon arrests of the second London bombing group.
Bob Herbert also wrote a column last week tying the renewed terrorism to American and Brit actions in Iraq - a very reasonable connection to informed observers globally, but Mr. Herbert has as a result been called a traitor and an accessory to terrorism by the ignorant hard right.
And so the spiral of hate and injury continues. Now with the Bush Admin openly understood - even now at last in the US - as incompetent criminals. The open injustice of Iraq inflaming anti-American sentiment globally, especially within the Islamic world. More terrorist attacks in all probability adding to Western fear and legitimizing an increased militarization of government and foreign relations. The spectre of a final world war maybe just a rash Israeli attack on Iran away, down the resource war path Bush has chosen for all of us.
How unChristian. How unAmerican. How unjust and stupid.
How monumentally tragic that in our global Bottleneck predicament, with billions of innocents in peril, with predicted severe resource depletion a building tsunami - peak oil, but soon water and food, the City on the Hill shows itself to be Gomorrah, as small, self-interested and petty as any imperial power before in history.
Not a Republic; not a hopeful future to strive for; not the leader of the free world, but a failed society ripe for self-destruction.
