The Bush administration wants war

If it achieved nothing else, the offer of the Iraqi government to accept without conditions the return of United Nations weapons inspectors has exposed the most essential truth of contemporary international politics: the Bush administration wants war. Its hysterical claims of “weapons of mass destruction” have never been anything else but a means of manufacturing a public justification for war. The Bush administration has responded angrily to the diplomatic note of the Iraqi foreign minister—demanding that it be ignored by the UN—because it knows that Saddam Hussein’s concession deprives the United States of the fig leaf of a pseudo-legal pretext for invading Iraq, destroying its government, seizing its oilfields and reducing the country to what would be, in effect, semi-colonial status.

Last week’s maneuvers by the Bush administration at the United Nations were based on the assumption that Iraq would never be able to comply with the provocative and draconian resolutions that the United States intended to ram through the Security Council. Moreover, the resolutions would leave it to the United States to decide whether or not Iraq was in compliance. The Bush administration was confident that this arrangement would inevitably provide the United States, within weeks if not days, with a casus belli. It would simply declare that Iraq was in “noncompliance” and initiate hostilities.

At least for the moment, this scenario has been somewhat disrupted—though there is no reason to believe that the United Nations will not soon bend to American pressure. The Bush administration will get, in all likelihood, both the resolutions and the war it wants.

For more than a half-century every American administration has invoked the specter of Munich 1938—when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain caved in to Hitler and handed Czechoslovakia over to the Nazis—to justify its own aggressive imperialist politics. America habitually cloaks its actions in the mantle of resistance to aggression. But this latest attempt to cast Bush as a modern-day equivalent of Churchill, standing firm in the wilderness against those who would compromise with a ruthless tyrant, attains a degree of mendacity that no other administration has ever achieved. For nothing so closely recalls the methods employed by the Nazi regime in its willful fabrication of the Czech crisis and its conduct of the negotiations in Munich in September 1938 than the tactics that have been pursued by the Bush administration in relation to Iraq.