by Mike Wolff
Daily Lobo Columnist
Imperial war has always been waged on a pretext.
The Aztecs conquered neighboring tribes because they needed an abundance of humans to sacrifice in honor of their gods. The Spaniards conquered Latin America to bring Christianity and civilization to the savages. The first Muslims conquered the Middle East to civilize and spread the word of Allah. The Soviets wanted to save the world from evil capitalism. Today, the United States wants to spread democracy and save the world from terrorism.
Without a well-articulated debate, all of those pretexts effectively justified the cause of war. After all, the gods wanted blood, the indigenous tribes of America hadn't found The Way, the nomadic tribes of the Middle East honored the clan before Allah, capitalism did create great inequalities and today dictatorships deprive people of their right to govern themselves while terrorism threatens our security overall.
But a pretext can always be created, as long as we can reshape and define our value system. And to do this, all we need are some good speeches by those who we have been conditioned to respect, whether they be emperors, messiahs, kings or presidents. Once our values are established, we can then lay all of our cards on the table and dismiss any debate over the issue simply because we have secured our moral authority. Everything else is secondary, just details.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
So we have decided that democracy is the great good and terrorism is the great evil. Therefore we can go forth with the war machine to bring about the necessary changes. We call this our burden, for we would much rather live in a world that was naturally good, rather than be forced to make the world good, by force.
Today in Iraq, however, the pretext and the real reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein can be clearly separated and analyzed. The pretext is, first of all, that Saddam is up there on the evil scale with Hitler and Osama bin Laden. He hasn't cooperated with U.N. resolutions for weapons inspections, and therefore we have reason to believe that he trying to build up his weapons of mass destruction collection.
He has used them before on his own people and on Iran, and even though this was made possible and implicitly approved by the United States, we can assume that he is crazy enough to do it again.
Furthermore, Saddam has supported terrorists in the past and even though there has come forth no evidence of a supporting al Qaeda, we can assume that he hates the United States more than his old enemy Osama, which would therefore make Osama a friend.
It can be deduced, then, and in the simplest of terms, that Saddam is trying to destroy us.
Lastly, Saddam is a ruthless dictator, and being that we care so much about people's right to freely elect their leaders, it behooves us to overthrow him, for the sake of the people.
All of this pretext can be seriously debated, although it is not. The weapons inspections also acted as a front for U.S. espionage. Nearly all of the facilities visited by the inspectors, for example, were bombed after the Saddam expelled them. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity was both given and taken away by the United States, during the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War, respectively. Experts agree that it will take Saddam several years to create a nuclear warhead with a carrying device. If he did acquire such capacity, he would also know that using such a weapon would signify his swift and immediate destruction by a worldwide coalition force. Concerning democracy, let's just say that the United States still believes in good kings and bad kings.
As humans, we have a splendid gift for molding our value systems to fit the pretexts that justify our imperial wars. Whether it be cutting the beating hearts out of the chests of captured soldiers to worship our gods, or stamping out evil and promoting democracy, we focus entirely on the pretext, while the real motives are obscured by our moral clarity.
That said, long live Huitzilopochtli! Long live Democracy! Long live the lies!
Questions and comments can be sent to Mike Wolff at mudrat@unm.edu
