According to the Observer last Sunday, the US government has decided plans
to attack Iraq.
Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, like the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, was initially helped to power by the USA. The CIA backed a coup in 1963 which brought Saddam's right-wing faction of the Ba'ath party to power. In the later stages of the war between Iran and Iraq which went on from 1980 to 1988, claiming over one million lives, the USA leant towards Iraq, considering any problems that Saddam might cause to be a lesser evil than Iranian victory.
Western powers, including Britain, supplied Saddam with arms, and turned a blind eye when he massacred large numbers of Iraq's Kurdish minority.
Since Saddam tried to grab Kuwait's oilfields in 1990, however, the USA has seen him as a source of instability. It went to war to push Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991, and since then has imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. The sanctions have not visibly damaged Saddam's power, but they have plunged the Iraqi people into desperate poverty, massively increasing the rate of deaths from disease of babies and children.
Saddam Hussein's regime is one of the most vicious dictatorships in the world. Its military machine is a standing threat to other peoples in the region. The US government is not wrong about that. It is also quite possible that Saddam has given aid to Al Qaeda.
The sooner Saddam joins Hitler and Stalin in hell, the better.
But that does not justify another US-led war. We want Saddam overthrown by the people of Iraq, not by B52 bombs.
In the first place, a war on Iraq is unlikely to be as quick and easy for the USA as the Afghan war turned out to be. It would claim many more than the approximately 4,000 civilian lives taken by the US bombing in Afghanistan. It would provoke bigger backlashes.
In the second place, the US military machine has its own agenda.
Even if a US-led war produces some good result - like the defeat of the Taliban - it does it in its own way, for its own motives, as part of an overall policy of consolidating and policing a world system structured for the profit of the big banks and multinationals.
