TWENTY years ago this month imperialistic America started the War in Iraq. After failing to obtain authorization for war from the UN Security Council, #43 resorted to a PR move by declaring the (illegal) impending invasion a “Coalition of the Willing.” Twas just black information, i.e., lies. In this case of specious multilateralism, only Great Britain committed a significant number of troops. The Aussies were second with about 2,000. It really was the “Coalition of the Coerced.” Remember Colin Powell’s display of yellowcake uranium? Or was that the Veep? We got fed lies by a myriad of #43 people, and the media echo chamber regurgitated the lies about aluminum tubes, babies without incubators, the presence of biological and chemical weapons, and there were more.
We were warned by Scott Ritter, Hans Blix, Sarah Anderson, Stephen Zunes, and others, if you sought the truth yourself. Regarding the latter two, both were guests in March 2003 of my favorite radio show, This is Hell, which was and still is hosted by Chuck Mertz. Ms. Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies was the lead author of this piece: https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2003/03/COERCED2.pdf I became acquainted with University of San Francisco Professor Stephen Zunes, a Quaker, many years ago after he skillfully debated an overmatched UIC professor on the campus of North Park University, my alma mater.
To peacefully and solemnly commemorate the death and destruction deployed by Satan’s Emissary on Earth, last weekend I attended “Surviving the Long Wars” at the Chicago Cultural Center. Veterans of the War on Iraq spoke as did Hassan. He was a child, living in Iraq, when he heard and saw the violence that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and more than 4,500 US service members. The multimedia “memorial activation” centered on miserable entanglements marked by the legacies of the two longest wars in US history: The American Indian Wars and the Global War on Terror.
An art exhibit complemented the array of speakers. Chris Pappan (Osage/Lakota) contributed collages, Melissa Doud (Ojibwe) adorned an Army uniform with 365 bullet casings, and Mariam Ghani and Chitra Gandesh compiled a massive collection of archival, legal, and FOIA-responsive documents related to detentions, disappearances, renditions, and the tortured in their “Index of the Disappeared.”
