Because it has faded from our general consciousness, you may not be aware, but today is the seventh anniversary of "Shock and Awe!" - the beginning of the second Gulf war. On March 20, 2003, waves of supersonic fighters and attack aircraft screamed inland from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and unleashed the latest high-tech weapons on the city of Baghdad. The explosions lit up the night sky over the Iraqi capital and began one of the biggest disasters in modern history.

Right behind those warplanes, a vast collection of tanks and light armoured vehicles backed by thousands of infantry and support units swarmed in to do the real dirty work on the ground. The invading force was labelled as a coalition, but the overwhelming majority of the invaders were American and British.

The British settled in to their assigned area around Basra on the banks of the Shatt-al-Arab, a waterway formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers which cut right across the country which is the birthplace of civilisation. The American forces drove up to Baghdad and beyond to the territory in the north where the independent-minded Kurds have long resided.

Wars and propaganda go hand in hand. Hitler and his salesman-in-chief, Joseph Goebbels, employed every modern system of communication - radio, print, billboards, films, even the school system - to bombard Germans with their twisted, evil ideas. His most elaborate effort led to the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) against Poland.

He fabricated an incident in which it appeared that the Polish army had invaded Germany, and even produced for his willing media as well as foreign correspondents a dozen bodies dressed in Polish uniforms. Only those bodies were of German criminals taken from a work camp. Then he sent in the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht to crush the Poles, whose pitiful attempts to defend themselves included old-fashioned units mounted on horseback.

That conflict lasted from 1939 to 1945. It was the costliest conflict in history - consuming some 60 million lives and enormous amounts of treasure. It completely altered the makeup of the world and set the template under which we still operate.

The major European colonial powers - notably Spain, Portugal, France and Britain which used force to conquer indigenous peoples across the world - all employed excuses, ruses, devices and fabricated circumstances to achieve their ends of domination.

The Americans, who came late to the game, quickly mastered the art of arranging the circumstances for wars it wanted to fight. The US manipulated intelligence leading up to the Mexican-American war to support the policies of President James Polk. As the 20th century approached, the Americans seized upon an explosion on one of its battleships, the USS Maine, in Havana harbour, to embroil itself in Cuba's struggle to shake off Spanish colonialism. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson employed a minor clash in the Gulf of Tonkin to unleash the full might of the US war machine on the Vietnamese people who only wanted to rid themselves of foreigners and run their own country.

But all these pale in comparison to the lengths to which George Bush the Second went to eliminate Saddam Hussein, against whom he had a personal grudge. He actually admitted this in public, telling reporters that Saddam "tried to kill muh daddy". A group of neo-conservatives who had served in various Republican administrations had some time before put together a plan for a new international order in which the US called the shots.

Nine months after Bush went into the Oval Office, a bunch of Saudi Arabian terrorists hijacked some airliners and crashed them into buildings in the US. That provided the perfect launching point for Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and their cohorts to go after Saddam. All they needed was a pretext.

They found one in the infamous WMD - Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam had established a programme to build nuclear and chemical weapons, but the first Gulf war and the years of UN sanctions which followed put a serious crimp in that effort. In the summer of 2002, Bush put together a group in the White House to develop ways to convince the American public of a need to go to war with Iraq.

They worked closely with the US intelligence agencies to develop information they could use. The agencies willingly manipulated intelligence to suit the desires of the Bush White House. The head of MI6, Britain's military intelligence agency, warned Prime Minister Tony Blair after several meetings with his CIA counterpart about the US public relations campaign relying on the misuse of intelligence. Blair, who had fallen under Bush's influence, ignored this and enthusiastically went along.

The UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling on Iraq to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors to verify that it had no WMD. UN monitors made several visits and found no evidence of such weapons.

No matter. The White House had cooked up an omelette of rotten eggs and wilted onions and served it up before the world. Bush dispatched his underlings to sell the message. We well remember how he suckered the loyal soldier, Colin Powell, into going before the United Nations to make a presentation which was full of sound and fury but very little substance. Bush himself appeared before the US Congress in his famous "axis of evil" speech which amounted to an act of terrorism against his own people because it was designed to make them afraid and follow an unwise, reckless, dangerous, totally dishonest and illegal course of action.

The results speak for themselves. The United States has poured hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the exercise, money which would have come in handy to help ease the recession. In fact, the cost of the war and the tax cuts Bush gave to his wealthy friends contributed to that recession. The war has cost the lives of more than a million Iraqi civilians and many more have been maimed. Millions of others have been driven into exile. Almost 5000 American soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands more suffer from wounds and psychological damage such as port-traumatic stress disorder.

But the war - which is more than a full year longer that World War Two -- has contributed vast profits to the companies that manufacture arms, supply services to occupation forces and build and maintain a network of military bases and an enormous new US embassy.

People have asked why Saddam never admitted that he did not have the weapons Bush insisted he had. It came to light only recently that he was not worried so much about the United States, but about his nemesis, Iran. Don't forget that he had unleashed a war against Iran which petered out after eight years without resolving anything.

History shows that from the Romans on down, the problem with having a huge military is the constant temptation to use it.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

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