Plague Years Begin

One fine day in the fall of 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. To him it did not seem like a big deal- he said Kuwait was really a part of Iraq. While many scoffed at such a claim he did have a point. While Mesopotamia has an ancient history, the modern country  of Iraq  was cobbled together as a British mandate after the first world war.  And they more or less arbitrarily separated Kuwait, apparently for administrative and oil production  purposes. The U.N. and many countries, including the Soviets and the U.S., chose to regard Saddam’s action as an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state, and so Iraq must withdraw or else. After a few months of dithering and arguing about what should be done, old G.W. Bush kind of took over the scene, giving orders, talking tough, giving ultimatums. It did begin to look like he was going to go to war. And after Saddam failed to meet his ultimatum for withdrawal, he unleashed the dogs of war on January 19th. Little did anyone suspect they would never get back in the kennel. That was the beginning of the Plague Years.

I remember those few months very well because hardly anyone I knew was buying old Bush’s story. At work- I was then working in a big social services agency- somebody felt a need for us to organize a mutual support group- as if we already sensed the magnitude of what was about to hit.
 Then a coalition of local peace groups organized a big rally and march. It was the biggest I ever saw. The Boston Common was so crowded you could hardly move, and when the march started, the way we were all packed together as we nudged slowly to the street. Once there we marched in a dense mass that filled the streets. We encountered no resistance.  People were looking out office windows to wave and thumbs up. We felt, then, almost as if we could really stop it. We clearly knew it must be stopped before it started, and it seemed as if the whole world was with us. Even having been there and participating I cannot quite relive that “we can win!” feeling we had.
   It didn’t last long. At the rally we forged a plan: If the bombing started, the next morning we would stop whatever we were doing and rally at Government Center.  So of course the attack did begin in January, and I went down to join my thousands and thousands of  antiwar mates. When they did not show up- we might have gathered as many as two hundred at our peak- it was pretty clear our cause was already lost. I never did find out what happened, where the marchers had all gone. All I had left was a motley band of die hard peaceniks. I stayed around all day anyway because I met a young lady in a wheel chair who’d come down all the way from New Hampshire, and it made me feel useful to push her around and do things for her. Old Bush had assembled some writers to compose glory of war prose, and they handed him a name for what he did. They called it Operation Dessert Storm.

    Even  if you accept the claim that Saddam really did have to be forcibly removed from Kuwait, there is still no way to excuse what the U.S. did to Iraq. Not then and not anytime since. It would have been a relatively easy matter for the world’s  only super power  to push Iraq out of Kuwait. But they wanted to show what superpower super bombing looks like. So they bombed like crazy  to no easily apparent purpose, targeting civilian infrastructure and knocking out most Iraqi power plants, dams, pumping stations, and sewage treatment plants. So basically they wrecked the country and killed thousands of civilians. None of this destructive mayhem had any connection to getting Iraq out of Kuwaiat. It was designed by he U.S. defense department to make life miserable for Iraqi civilians, none of whom had ever invaded anybody. Even the Iraq armed forces became victims of a U.S. atrocity two days after the cease fire, as they were fleeing home as fast as they could go. The U.S. pursued them from the air raining death on hopelessly defeated troops as they fled. Strangely this was one of the most filmed part of the war, so everyone saw what we did. The heroic airmen thought it was funny. They called it a “turkey shoot”. Very few other people who watched the film could find anything funny about it. It was cruel and nasty in a way we did not know the U.S. could act in public, for all the world to see. We had to start wondering what had happened to us. Little did we know our country had just opened  the imperial conquest of the Middle East.
 

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