-->THE IRAQ WAR - PART I
by Bill Bonner

"We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable
acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call
it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East,'" said yesterday's
winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

"But as we all know, we have not been welcomed with the predicted flowers.
What we have unleashed is a ferocious and unremitting resistance, mayhem
and chaos."

Invading Iraq was a"bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism,
demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept for International Law. An
arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross
manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. And act intended to
consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East
masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having failed to
justify themselves) - as liberation."

Harold Pinter is a playwright. That he should fail to see the geopolitical
importance of the war is hardly surprising.

But Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former U.S. national security advisor, ought
not to miss it. Quoting Arnold Toynbee, he accuses the Bush administration
of"suicidal statecraft...the ultimate cause of imperial collapse."

What neither man seems to realize is that 'suicidal statecraft' is just
what the situation calls for.

The great Anglo-Saxon empire has reached its 'sell by' date. Its imperial
advantage - its lead in the Industrial Revolution - has disappeared. It
now counts on the savings of foreigners to keep going. But while its
homeland bound citizens groan under the burden of debt, its military and
political leaders still talk tough. 'You got terrorists with a grudge
against the United States?' asked the Commander-in-Chief. Well"bring 'em
on." He might as well have put a gun to his head. Now, with the curiosity
of a reporter watching a hanging, we wait to see if he pulls the trigger.

Iraq is full of potential terrorists with grudges. Had the Anglo-Americans
bothered to look before they leaped they would have seen a country that is
a mix of tribes, clans, families, and religious groups - all of whom
loathe each other and all of whom take it as an inherited obligation to
avenge any wrong done to any of their own group by any member of any other
group back to five generations.

But there is one thing these people despise more than each other - a
foreign invader.

Patrick Cockburn, writing in the Independent, reminds us of the insights
of a British civil servant, Arnold Wilson. Mr. Wilson wrote this in 1919,
two years after the British took Baghdad from the Turks:

"Wilson...warned that the creation of a new state out of Iraq was a recipe
for disaster. He said it was impossible to weld together Shia, Sunni and
Kurd, three groups of people who detested each other. Wilson told the
British government that the new state could only be 'the antithesis of
democratic government.' This was because the Shia majority rejected
domination by the Sunni minority, but n 'no form of government has yet
been envisaged which does not involve Sunni domination.'. The Kurds in the
north, whom it was intended to include in Iraq, 'will never accept Arab
rule.'"

All of this was correct. But what they would accept even less was rule by
the British. The whole country soon rose up against British forces; there
were more than more than 10,000 dead before it was over.

This was the world into which the Bush administration bumbled. Every great
empire - from the Assyrians to the Mongols to the British had taken
Baghdad. America had to do it too.

"Nobody likes armed missionaries," said Robespierre when the French tried
to export their democracy, at the point of a gun, throughout Europe. That
too was an insight missed by the Bush team, but that is why the Bush bunch
are so perfectly suited to the present circumstance. They seem to have no
knowledge or apparent interest in history; they get to relive every bit of
it as if for the very first time.

There is hardly an error chronicled in any history of imperial wars that
American forces have not committed. They went into Iraq on bad
information. Where were the WMD? Where were the rose petals upon which
they expected to tread? Where were the happy new democrats, ready to shop
at Wal-Mart for backyard barbecues and granite countertops?

Then, of course, they went in preaching democracy and freedom - about
which the Iraqis were as indifferent as Americans themselves. What Iraqis
really wanted at first was just a chance to steal something; later they
would welcome a chance to kill someone. The desert tribes are looters.
They climb gleefully through the ruins of a tank or a hotel, looking for
something that might be useful.

But their new rulers are little better. Soldiers have a license to kill. A
video aired on American TV showed a U.S. soldier gunning down a helpless
prisoner."This one is still alive." Sounds of gunfire."Now he's dead." A
poll taken days later signaled just how far the public had gone in its
descent into imperial madness - most people said they thought the killing
was justified.

This attitude goes down badly in a place with 100,000 Iraqi
casualties...and where revenge is such a serious matter. Pretty soon, talk
of 'insurgents' and 'foreign fighters' was beside the point. The average
Iraqi now jumped for joy when an American soldier went down...and rushed
to give the man a kick before his compatriots came to his rescue.

More to come...

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning