Global Eye

The Betrayers

By Chris Floyd
Published: October 29, 2004

On Sept. 14, 2001, as the Twin Towers in New York were still smoking, this column spoke of the coming response: "Blood will have blood; that's certain. But blood will not end it. For murder is fertile: It breeds more death, like a spider laden with a thousand eggs."

Almost 3,000 people died in the Sept. 11 attacks: a vast crime, a deep-dyed evil. The whole world rose up against it in condemnation and solidarity. The perpetrators claimed justification in the immense suffering their people had long endured at the hands of the West and West-backed tyrants, a death toll running into the millions. But the people of the world -- including the Muslim lands -- rejected that argument. There is no justification for shedding innocent blood, we all said, not even as "collateral damage" in a self-proclaimed "pre-emptive" war to avenge and protect your people, not even if you believe God Almighty has endorsed your cause. The terrorists' justifications were rightly thrust aside, and they were branded betrayers of our common humanity.

But the eggs laid by Osama bin Laden have hatched in George W. Bush's brain. He has perpetrated his own vast crime on the world. We now know that up to 10 times as many innocent people have been killed as a result of Bush's invasion of Iraq than died in the Sept. 11 attacks. The most conservative estimates of innocent Iraqi deaths place the figure at 15,000; credible reports from independent, anti-Hussein groups in Iraq put the civilian death toll at more than 30,000. Even today, occupation forces are killing twice as many Iraqis as the brutal insurgency spawned by Bush's war, Knight-Ridder reports.

The Sept. 11 attacks have been endlessly analyzed for their symbolic value -- a monstrous theater piece aimed at unhinging the American psyche. It is largely forgotten that they were also a military action, an attempted "decapitation raid," targeting the "command-and-control centers" of the American regime: its military headquarters, its financial hub, and its political leadership (the aborted attack on the U.S. Capitol). This is precisely the same strategy that Bush would later employ in his "pre-emptive" assault on Iraq -- while offering the same justifications for shedding innocent blood in "regrettable but necessary" military actions to avenge and protect his people.

But we know that the Iraq war had nothing to do with Sept. 11 or fighting terrorism. We know -- from the mouth of Bush himself, and from the investigations of his own appointees -- that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attack on the United States. We know that Bush's "war of choice" has turned Iraq into a terrorist's paradise, where entire nuclear plants and tons of high explosives have been carted away by sinister forces from sites left completely -- and inexplicably -- unguarded. We know that Bush's signed orders permitting widespread torture have inflamed vengeful anger at the United States all over the world.

We know too there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; they were destroyed in 1991, as Bush's own inspector confirmed last month. We know that Bush ignored the manifold doubts and caveats of pre-war WMD intelligence -- including the "crateloads of evidence" on disarmament supplied by Hussein's defecting son-in-law in 1995, as Time reports -- and instead used fabrications supplied by ideologues and con-men to weave a conscious deception about "imminent threats."

We also know this war was planned long before Sept. 11. In September 2000, a militarist faction led by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other top Bushists published their blueprint for establishing U.S. military and economic hegemony over world affairs. To further this goal, they cited the urgent strategic need for planting a U.S. "military footprint" in Iraq -- whether Hussein was still in power or not, whether he had WMD or not. All they needed was an excuse -- a "catalyzing event" like "a new Pearl Harbor," as they wrote in 2000 -- to rally the American people behind the faction's program for a gargantuan military buildup and aggressive war.

The last strand of Bush's shredded arguments for war -- the "liberation of the Iraqi people" -- can be dismissed as a cynical sham. Many of the same people now "liberating" Iraq from Hussein's tyranny fully supported Hussein while he was committing his worst crimes. Cheney and Colin Powell led the efforts of Bush's father to prevent Congress from punishing Hussein for gassing Kurdish civilians, the Los Angeles Times reports. After the Gulf War, Bush I allowed the defeated Hussein to use helicopters and heavy weapons in his horrific repression of Kurdish and Shiite rebellions, the Washington Post reports; Bush also used U.S. military forces to block the rebels from seizing weapons to defend themselves.

Almost all of the mass graves uncovered since Hussein's fall were dug with the direct connivance of the Bush family and its retainers -- the same group who have now forced the "liberated" land into the hands of a neo-Baathist thugocracy on the verge of civil war. The Iraqi people have never been anything but so much bloody mulch for the geopolitical ambitions and personal fortunes of the Bush faction.

George W. Bush has laid his thousand eggs of murder in Iraq. Each one will hatch and in its turn breed more hatred, vengeance, death and terror: an endless cycle, a self-perpetuating engine of evil fueled by human blood. Even if Bush is removed from office, the engine will grind on and on for decades. This is his legacy to the world. Whatever happens in the election, he will be joined forever with the betrayers of humanity. His name, like bin Laden's, will be cursed for generations.

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