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WAR OR PEACE?
The U.S. is looking for an excuse to fight
Adam Hochschild
Sunday, January 19, 2003
�2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
URL:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
file=/chronicle/archive/2003/01/19/IN201190.DTL
As the American armada of ships, warplanes, tanks and other equipment
pours into the region around Iraq, the only uncertainty about President
Bush's misguided and dangerous war seems to be just when it will start.
But there's something else we should watch for closely, for wars seldom
start without one.
What will be the final pretext for opening fire? Most wars need such a fig
leaf, and unpopular wars most of all. Seldom, if ever, has the United States
prepared for war with so little support. The administration itself is divided.
Major allies are balky. At home, there are peace marches but no war
marches; abroad, opinion polls almost everywhere show angry,
overwhelming opposition. All this makes President Bush, more than ever,
need a plausible excuse to start his war.
What will that be? Iraq's ties to al Qaeda? No evidence so far, and the
administration has even stopped talking about that mythical meeting in
Prague. Saddam Hussein's refusal to cooperate with the U.N. inspectors?
For the moment,
they have free run of the country, even of the hideously extravagant
palaces. Iraq's failure to account for various sinister weapon ingredients it
once had? Bush representatives are thundering away about this, but those
12,000 pages of documents and the accompanying CD-ROMs do not make
for high drama. Bush needs a Pearl Harbor, not some disputed aluminum
tubing or buried canisters.
Despite the desire for territory, riches or power that drive most wars,
regimes itching to fight almost always find an immediate pretext. When
Germany launched its long- prepared blitzkrieg against Poland in 1939, it
claimed it was avenging cross-border attacks by Polish soldiers, who seized
a German radio station and broadcast hostile statements. Newspapers
around the world carried the story. After the war, it was revealed that the
attackers were German SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms. As Hermann
Goering. commander of the Luftwaffe, said before being sentenced to
death at Nuremberg, "The people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked,
and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Indeed it does. The United States has long found its own share of war
pretexts. Eager to seize the crumbling overseas empire of Spain, President
William McKinley had no convenient excuse until, providentially, the U.S.
battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor. The Spaniards apparently had
nothing to do with this -- historians think that spontaneous combustion in
a coal bunker ignited the ship's powder magazine -- but it didn't matter.
Crowds shouted, "Remember the Maine!" as the United States took over
Spanish possessions around the world, grabbing even Hawaii, which had no
connection to Spain whatever.
In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was eager to escalate the war in Vietnam,
he pointed to attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. This
provoked a stern Senate resolution and the first big bombing raids on
North Vietnam. Only much later did it emerge that one destroyer was
sailing provocatively close to the North Vietnamese coast, and the second
of these attacks had never happened at all.
As the truth dribbled out over the years, many senators complained
bitterly of having been misled, and turned against the war. But by that
time nearly 60, 000 Americans, and a vastly larger number of Vietnamese,
were dead.
One of the aircraft carriers that launched bombing raids after the Gulf of
Tonkin incident, the U.S.S. Constellation, is now in waters off Iraq. What
will be the Gulf of Tonkin episode of this coming war? In the face of
mounting doubts about the war at home and downright hostility abroad,
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld
sorely need some provocation they can either point to or invent.
Some possibilities:
Another terrorist attack, either in the United States or overseas.
Unfortunately, al Qaeda and its supporters still seem alive and well, as
shown by the Bali bombing, the raid on the French oil tanker and other
terror attacks since Sept. 11, 2001.
If one of these happens during the crucial February-March window for
making war in the Persian Gulf region, watch for the administration to
claim that secret intelligence links this terrible outrage to Iraq. If the
attack is anywhere near as vicious or destructive as the ones on Sept. 11,
our spineless Congress will be in no mood to demand evidence. You can
expect the B-1's to be launched the next day.
American deaths in combat. There are, of course, U.S. forces already in
and over Iraq. British and U.S. planes patrol the "no fly zones" in the north
and south of the country. They are regularly fired on by Iraqi anti-aircraft
installations, which they then bomb in return. Amazingly, no American pilot
has yet been shot down. What if one is?
Furthermore, small teams of U.S. special operations troops are reported
quietly operating in Iraqi Kurdistan. What if one of these Americans is
caught up in combat, fatally? Nothing provides a better pretext for war
than brave, dead young Americans. Few will stop to ask: Why were they
there in the first place?
Finally, there's the convenient old standby excuse of border violations. U.
S. forces are in four of the countries bordering on Iraq -- Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait. Troops on both sides of the Iraqi border are
getting into position for war. It would be easy to claim that some Iraqis
crossed the border -- and the Pentagon, having learned its lesson painfully
in Afghanistan, is not going to let any unchaperoned journalist get within
dozens of miles to check.
The new Bush doctrine claiming the imperial right to wage pre-emptive war
is so shameless that the administration may well launch the bombers with
no fig leaf at all. But you can bet it will continue to look hard for any
possible pretext.
The path to this senseless war so far has been paved with exaggeration,
outright falsehoods and claims of imminent terror attacks and secret
intelligence. We need to be vigilant for more of the same. Unlike the
earlier generations stampeded into war by the Maine and Gulf of Tonkin
incidents, we'd be better off detecting such lies when they are made
instead of years later.
San Francisco writer Adam Hochschild is the author of "King Leopold's
Ghost," "Finding the Trapdoor" and other books.
�2003 San Francisco Chronicle | Feedback
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