Into the Darkness
By William
Rivers Pitt
T r u t h
o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 18 March
2003
An associate of mine, a former political
appointee, recently spoke to a Republican friend of his who serves in a senior
position in what has become the Office of Homeland Security. He reports
that this official, along with many of his colleagues across the political
spectrum within the apparatus of government, are absolutely terrified of George
W. Bush. According to this official, the consensus is that Bush has
completely lost touch with reality, and is bringing us to a place where politics
will no longer matter.
A London newspaper, the
Guardian, has quoted a source close to the administration as saying, "This has
been the worst diplomatic debacle of our lifetime." A senior White House
official is also quoted as saying, in a voice reportedly awash with sarcasm,
"There's a recognition that this has not been our finest diplomatic
hour."
There is no calculating the
understatement here. There was never any diplomacy involved here to begin
with. This has been a disaster, and it is about to get worse by orders of
magnitude.
The weapons inspectors, empowered by
UN resolution 1441 to ferret out the weapons everyone is so concerned about,
have packed their bags and fled Iraq. They have been betrayed by the Bush
administration, by Tony Blair and by Spain, as they worked to protect us from
both these weapons and from the dreadful effects of a war in the Middle
East.
The inspections were working -
weapons were being dismantled, Hussein was under control, and no mass
destruction materials were found. The fact that the hammer has come down
before these inspectors were even half done with their work means, simply, that
those pushing for war never wanted the inspections to work in the first
place.
Welcome to the
timeline.
Very soon now, perhaps within the next
72 hours, the Pentagon's "Shock and Awe" battle plan will be put into
effect. 3,000 munitions, including some 800 cruise missiles, will rain
down on Baghdad, a city inhabited by some 5 million civilians. This will
be done in the hope that the Iraqi army will surrender, thus avoiding the need
to send U.S. troops in to fight a ruinous house-to-house
battle.
The Arab news service Al Jazeera,
operating out of Qatar, will capture images of thousands and thousands of Iraqi
civilians sprawled and shattered and bloody in the Baghdad streets, in a manner
quite like the bodies we saw in New York on September 11.
The resulting explosion of rage within the
moderate and extremist Muslim world will be immediate and
ferocious.
The terrorism alert status in America
will rise to red. Troops will appear in the
streets.
Saddam Hussein will not flee, and his
forces will stand in Baghdad. American troops will be forced to fight
downtown.
The oilheads in Iraq will be
fired, and the pipeheads will be opened.
Israel
will be attacked, much to the dismay of Bush administration officials who have
pushed this war in the erroneous assumption that such action will serve to
protect that nation. Unlike the first Gulf War, this time Israel will
strike back.
American homeland security forces -
police, fire fighters and emergency rescue personnel - will watch their radios
nervously, waiting for the inevitable call. They know, better than anyone,
that this country is not ready to defend itself against an attack. Their
budgets have been gutted, the promised funding to augment their preparedness has
not come. They are not ready, but they stand and wait regardless, because
that is what they have pledged to do.
Somewhere
in America - perhaps in New York, perhaps in Washington DC, Boston,
Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Miami, Pittsburgh,
Kansas City, Detroit, San Francisco, Cleveland, Atlanta, perhaps in all of them
simultaneously - there will be an explosion. A group that cares nothing
for the well being of Saddam Hussein will take responsibility, in the name of
those thousands of Iraqi Muslims slaughtered in the initial aerial bombardment
of Baghdad.
The body bags will come out, here at
home and across the sea in Iraq, as Americans begin to die in terrible
numbers.
Martial law will be declared,
habeas corpus will be suspended, posse comitatus will be left aside, and the
strictures outlined by both Patriot Acts will come to full bloom. 227
years of constitutional law in America will draw to a
close.
An oil shock will roll across the global
community, ripping through an already precarious economic situation. Here
at home, the financial cost of this war will hurl us further into
deficit.
More explosions will echo across the
streets of America. They could be nuclear or biological or chemical in
nature, because in the effort to overthrow Hussein we have ignored completely
the fact that al Qaeda certainly possesses the capabilities to attack us with
these weapons, having needed no help whatsoever from Hussein. These
explosions could come from simple fertilizer, as well. Remember that two men
with a sniper rifle and a car held Maryland hostage for a month. It does
not take much, considering the shoddy state of affairs in the homeland security
realm.
In all likelihood, America will score a
decisive military victory. U.S. forces will invest Iraq. The
Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root will begin construction on any number of
permanent military bases. Administration officials will begin to formulate
plans for the removal of other governments in the Middle East, both friendly and
unfriendly, by any means necessary.
Civil war
will break out in Iraq as the Shia majority, the Kurdish and Sunni minorities,
go for each other's throats. American constabulary work there will become
infinitely complicated.
The United States
of America has concluded an incredible, perhaps unstoppable, race to the bottom
since January of 2001. The disputed election brought to power a mob of men
- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton - who have been planning this war
since at least 1997. The attacks of September 11, allowed in no small part
by purposeful blinders placed over the eyes of our intelligence services lest
they offend petroleum principalities like Saudi Arabia with their prickly
questions, gave these men the excuse they needed for
war.
The Bush administration's reaction to 9/11
- placing blame on "evildoers" instead of starting an honest dialogue, blocking
an independent investigation of the attack for over a year, nominating master
secret-keeper Henry Kissinger to chair that investigative panel in what was
perhaps the most disgusting insult possible to the families of the lost,
ignoring the real terrorist threats in order to focus on the politically
expedient annihilation of Iraq, instituting the most ham-fisted diplomatic push
ever seen in the history of this nation by utterly ignoring the eleven Security
Council members who said no to this war, disrupting international relations
vital to the pursuit of true terrorist threats, and all the while underfunding
the homeland defenses necessary to protect the American people - has led us to
this dismal place.
The destruction of Saddam
Hussein will do nothing, zero, zip, zilch, nada, to protect America. It
will place America and her citizens in further peril. We stand alone and
naked today. We will reap the whirlwind.
Take to the streets. Scream until your throat bleeds. Call whatever
congressional leaders you know, full in the knowledge that you will be
contacting a mob of failures, appeasers and political cowards. Make sure
you can look at yourself in the mirror as this darkness falls. Above all
else, do not succumb to despair.
You owe that
much to yourself, your children and your nation as we fade to black
William Rivers Pitt is a New
York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter)
available now from Context Books, and "The Greatest Sedition is Silence,"
available in June 2003 from Pluto Press. He teaches high school in
Boston, MA.
Scott Lowery
contributed research to this
report.
©
Copyright 2003 by TruthOut.org
Author's Note: I have prayed on a daily basis that I
would not be forced to write this article. For the sake of history, I have
listed below some of the data, warnings and analysis that I and truthout have
been delivering since this process began unfolding in the summer of 2002.