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. UN Bombing: Terrorism or National Liberation? by Kurt Nimmo 08/21/03: (Dissident Voice) Is it a surprise unknown
persons have bombed the United Nations building in Baghdad? No, the
bombing was inevitable, considering the United Nation's role in the
occupation of Iraq. It is surprising, however, that the bombers were
able to so easily drive a cement truck filled with explosives into the
lobby of the hotel converted into an office building. Considering
the UN imposed various resolutions on Iraq after Bush the Elder's invasion (specifically, resolutions 661 and 687) – which eventually
resulted in 600,000 children under the age of five dying of entirely
preventable diarrhea, pneumonia, and respiratory and
malnutrition-related diseases -- is it any wonder more than a few Iraqis
are motivated to kill UN employees? Moreover,
the UN building in Baghdad also housed the World Bank. Back in May, the
World Bank sent "a senior Bank official" along with Sergio
Vieira de Mello (who died in the bombing), UN Special Representative in
Iraq, "to assess reconstruction and development needs on the
ground," according to the World Bank's website. The IMF and the
World Bank "stand ready to play their normal role in Iraq's
re-development at the appropriate time," the said the IMF and World
Bank in a press statementafter their Spring Meetings, held April 12-13
in Washington, D.C. So,
what is the "normal role" played by the World Bank and IMF? Imposing
poverty, that's what. "Structural
adjustment programs are a set of economic policies required by the World
Bank and the IMF as a condition of loans these institutions make to
developing countries," explains CorpWatch. "These programs
often include austerity measures such as high interest rates and reduced
access to credit, which result in slower economic growth as well as
increased poverty and unemployment. Other adjustment policies include
cuts in government spending on health care and education, increases in
the cost of food, health care and other basic necessities, mandates to
open markets to foreign trade and investment, and privatization of
state-run enterprises... structural adjustment has exacerbated poverty
in most countries where it has been applied, contributing to the
suffering of millions and causing widespread environmental degradation.
And since the 1980s, adjustment has helped create a net outflow of
wealth from the developing world, which has paid out five times as much
capital to the industrialized countries of the North as it has
received." In
other words, the IMF and World Bank are rackets designed by immoral
bankers and loan sharks to rape the Third World. The
United Nations is essentially a handmaiden of the IMF, World Bank, and
the United States. So, from the point of view of many Iraqis, the
lightly protected UN complex in Baghdad was an appropriate target, as
were the main northern oil export pipeline into Turkey and warehouses
scattered around Baghdad. Undoubtedly, the idea is to make Iraq so
dangerous, violent, and unprofitable that the parasites on Wall Street
and in Washington will think twice about implementing and supporting an
occupation engineered to steal its oil and "privatize" its
ravaged economy. The
murder of a Kellogg, Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Cheney's
Halliburton) employee north of Tikrit on August 5 served as a warning of
things to come for these corporate looters and profiteers. Increasingly,
Iraqis involved in the resistance are targeting "civilians,"
who are in fact working for military contractors and organized theft
operations such as the World Bank. The Kellog, Brown, and Root employee
killed by an anti-tank mine was working on something call Material
Command Logcap III. According to a CNBC business snapshot, Logcap III's
purpose is to "deliver Combat Support and Combat Service Support
(CS/CSS)" to the US Army. In other words, this anonymous employee
was providing support to the occupation forces and was undoubtedly
regarded as a legitimate military target by Iraqi guerilla forces. No
doubt these same guerilla forces, if they are indeed responsible for the
United Nations compound bombing, also considered Sergio Vieira de Mello
a legitimate military target. Not only US soldiers are targets in Iraq,
but so are the corporate enablers of the occupation. Once
again, the corporate media has shifted into speculative overdrive: is it
possible this was the handiwork of al-Qaeda? "There was no
immediate claim of responsibility for the attack," reports the Bush
Ministry of Propaganda (read: Fox News). "But its careful
orchestration and very public, Western-world target immediately evoked
past strikes by Usama bin Laden's terrorist network." It's
as if the entire history of "terrorism" -- the title given to
all national liberation movements directed against US hegemony – has
disappeared since 9/11. Predictably, Fox trots out the same old shopworn
"experts" to pin the blame on al-Qaeda. According to one such
expert, Dia'a Rashwan, an expert on radical Islam at Egypt's Al-Ahram
Center for Political and Strategic Studies, the UN bombing fits
"the ideology of Al Qaeda... They consider the U.N. one of the
international actors who helped the Americans to occupy Palestine and,
later, Iraq." Of
course, the US does not "occupy" Palestine, Israel does,
admittedly with much assistance -- both financial and military -- from
the United States. It's true al-Qaeda's "ideology" (or,
rather, the pronouncements of its apparent titular head, bin Laden) is
directed against US imperialism, but this ideology is not significantly
different from that of other national liberation movements over the last
fifty years, especially those in the Middle East. Fox and its experts
assume we suffer from both amnesia and stupidity. In fact,
unfortunately, many of us do. At
the time of the bombing, Dubya was on a golf course in Waco, Texas.
"The terrorists that struck today again showed their contempt for
the innocent," said Bush later. "They showed their fear of
progress and their hatred of peace. They're the enemies of the Iraqi
people. They're the enemies of every nation that seeks to help the Iraqi
people... The civilized world will not be intimidated and these
terrorists will not determine the future of Iraq … they are testing
our will, it will not be shaken." It's
ironic, if not criminally insane, of Bush to so disingenuously express
his concern for "innocent" Iraqis when he is responsible for
slaughtering nearly eight thousand of them (according to the Iraq Body
Count Project). Bremer
and Bush may consider the growing Iraqi resistance as consisting of
little more than "terrorists," but the fact of the matter is
Iraq did not invade the United States or Britain -- or, for that matter,
it did not attack Poland, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Denmark, the
Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Albania, countries that have sent or will
send "stabilization" forces to Iraq -- nor did Iraq ask for
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Halliburton, Bechtel
Group, Fluor Corp., Parsons Group, Stevedoring Services of America, and
other corporate leeches to elbow their way into Iraq against the will of
the Iraq people and line up to make a killing (literally) off oil,
water, roads, trains, phones, ports, drugs, and anything else they can
get their avaricious paws on. So,
who are the terrorists here -- average Iraqis fighting a war of national
liberation or the stockholders of Halliburton and Bechtel? "Entirely
absent from this ["reconstruction"] debate are the Iraqi
people, who might -- who knows? -- want to hold on to a few of their
assets," writes Naomi Klein of the Nation. "Iraq will be owed
massive reparations after the bombing stops, but without any real
democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations,
reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as
charity; privatization without representation." Mass
theft backed up the world’s most homicidal war machine. The
IMF and World Bank have done likewise for decades in Latin America. But
Iraq is not Argentina or Uruguay -- in Iraq there are hundreds of
thousands of weapons in the hands of ordinary people, many of them with
years of experience in Saddam's military. In Latin America, US-trained
thugs and death squads have made sure there is no serious opposition to
what the swindlers on Wall Street and in Washington have done and
continue to do. That’s not the case in Iraq. Bush
had his chance to hire the Ba’athists to do what they have done since
the early 60s -- terrorize and keep the Iraqi people in check -- but
thanks to the neocon aversion of anything even remotely Arab or Muslim,
that opportunity has vanished. The Bushites have “de-nazified” their
way into a completely untenable situation. "We're
still, needless to say, much closer to the beginning than the end,"
said Rumsfeld of the situation in Iraq back in March. Needless to say,
that situation is far worse now. It gets worse every day. It will be
worse next week and even worse next month. Like
Vietnam, the "beginning" will stretch out forever, consuming
an undetermined number of human lives and billions of dollars. There
will be no "light at the end of the tunnel," as General
Westmoreland would have liked to have it. In the months ahead, as the
psychopathic Bushites attempt to redouble their efforts to eliminate the
"bitter enders" and “Saddam remnants” in Iraq, support for
an immediate and unconditional end of the occupation will grow in the
United States. The Bushites know this and that’s why they devised and
rushed through the Patriot Act. Patriot II waits in the wings. In
fact, since nearly the whole of the federal government and Congress is
"Bush territory," the only political solution to the murderous
insanity currently on tap in Iraq will likely come from the people, as
it did during the Vietnam War. Civil
disobedience and direct may be required -- again. But this time around
the stakes will be much higher. In fact, considering the severity of the
mental illness afflicting the Bushites, it may be cataclysmic.
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