War: A matter of weeks / Changing face of America

There it is, George W. Bush has cocked the trigger. And it’s just a matter of weeks before war descends on Iraq and sends the whole world into unprecedented uproar. That was the grim message we got when the US president, in tones culled from the thunder of Mars, delivered his State-of-the-Union address before Congress Tuesday. There were 77 rounds of applause. America is going to war, make no mistake about that. And America will win because it has the strength of a raging tempest against a vagabond wind.

But that is not the point.

The point is this: Can the war be confined to Iraq? Will the war not spill to the Middle East where Israel and Palestine are at biblical daggers drawn? Will the war be swift and surgical as America wants? Or will it be like Hiroshima and Nagasaki where hundreds of thousands – the bulk of them children and mothers – are burned to a charcoal crisp? Has George W. Bush really made his point? That this is a war for the sole purpose of disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction destined for America? Or does this war also have the unstated objective of taking over Iraq’s oil resources, the second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia?

Will the war not ignite the world of Islam into the kind of anti-American rage that will increase, not flag down the always looming threat of international terror? Is it a just war as America claims, in the wake of the thousands that died in the horror of Twin Towers and the Pentagon? And therefore, "pre-emptive war" is absolutely necessary to destroy Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction before the enemy uses them to strike at the US heartland? Is this really the war of America? Or is it much more the war of a single individual, namely George W. Bush? Isn’t Bush a man possessed, monomaniacal, who wants to vindicate his father because the latter as US president in 1991 simply threatened the throat of Saddam Hussein but did not slit it wide open? And Saddam threatened to kill the older Bush?

Will the war not slice a big wound in the underbelly of the world’s economy? Is it not a pipedream when America says it will rebuild Iraq after the war, give its people freedom and install democracy? When America has not done so in Afghanistan which its armed forces virtually pounded on the ground in the futile search for Osama bin Laden? And Afghanistan remains in tatters? Then the question: Why go after Saddam Hussein and Iraq when they had nothing to do with 9/11, the day Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hoisted America’s bloodied pride atop the flagpole of terrorism?

No such questions were asked when the world went to universal war twice in the 20th century.

Those two world wars were defined in terms of good and bad, virtue and evil, freedom and liberty against fascism and totalitarianism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt against Adolf Hitler did not have to be explained. Winston Churchill against Benito Mussolini didn’t need an explanatory sketch. The Third Reich was a beastly political abomination that murdered six million Jews in gas chambers, as against FDR’s New Deal that sought to elevate human dignity to two chickens and a car per family during the Great Depression when America’s economy emptied its intestines.

What can stop the war from erupting?

Nothing, it seems. Not the United Nations. President Bush made that clear before Congress when he said "the course of this nation does not depend on the decision of others". He was referring particularly to France and Germany. President Francois Mitterand went back to Charles de Gaulle’s politique de la chaise vide (politics of the empty chair) when France stood up America on weighty matters involving the post-World War II Atlantic Alliance. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder simply echoed the German people’s distaste for war after being badly clobbered in two world wars. Russia and China were not going along either. Only Britain, Italy and Australia hopped aboard. And even in Britain, the citizenry started to growl at Tony Blair and called him America’s "poodle".

Oh yes, there could be one thing, and only this thing, that can prevent America from going to war.

This is mainstream America suddenly exploding in massive street demonstrations soonest against the war. By the hundreds of thousands. Maybe by the millions. Already the streets in quite a number of US cities are alive. But these are merely creeks, rivulets. What I am referring to is the unpopularity of America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflagration. Students burned their draft cards. Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted in the name of Allah. The "protest armies" marched by day and by night. Americans of high prestige and consequence joined in. All the way to the White House, the youths screamed their outrage (Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!). Eventually, President Richard Nixon and his incendiary secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, sued for peace.

But that is not likely to happen today.

The USSR and China backstopped the Vietcong. The Vietcong’s guerrilla generals were the best in the world. Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, interviewed just recently by Max Soliven, STAR publisher, psychologically disarmed the US armed forces, when he waged the Tet offensive in 1968 that knocked almost at the very gates of the US embassy in Saigon – and took the world’s breath away. That cannot, will not happen in Iraq. This war is a war predestined from the very beginning to knock Saddam Hussein and his Republican Army flat as a pancake. And destroy his weapons.

It’s the consequences and repercussions we are afraid of. The war, once it starts, can have a domino political effect. Broadcast media will zoom in, bring the war to almost every living room all over the world. We hardly saw the dead during 9/11 when about 3,000 perished in New York. In Iraq, if the war is not prevented, the horrors of technological war will see the sprawling, tumbling litter of tens of thousands dead – children maimed and dismembered, mothers snuffed out with lifeless babies in their arms, men of every age sprawled in varying positions of gruesome death. There will be no such thing as close-in bayonet battles, set pieces of classic open-air combat.

Many deaths will come electronically from ground, air and sea. The mechanics of war have come to such a pass that missiles, bombs, smart and non-smart, will be set loose in a massive hurricane. Those who deal death will not see those they kill, unless infantry soldiers close in on an objective and concealed enemy soldiers return fire. The caves and mountain labyrinths of Tora Bora in Afghanistan bear witness to that. And yet for all their sophisticated sleuthing, spy satellites, night googles, equipment that could hear enemy breathing distances away, spot them from pilotless Predators, they couldn’t locate and catch Osama bin Laden.

So in lieu of Osama, Hussein will have to go?

There is the widespread contention America’s victory over Iraq, again if there should be war, will be a Pyrrhic victory. Briefly, a victory where the winner loses a lot and the loser does not lose much. The legend and myth of America was that it was and remains a model for the world. It was a jewel of a spin-off from the Old World. Here real democracy took root. Here Abraham Lincoln was able to majestically intone "Four score and seven years ago, a new nation was born in this continent, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Here, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia tolled freedom for a nation that fought heroically for human rights. Here, the Federalist Papers crafted the democratic jewels of the world’s biggest immigrant nation. And also here, the Statue of Liberty lifted its lamp beside the Golden Door.

Are we seeing a different America today?

Maybe we are. Pax Americana has spread far and wide. Its economy is the wonder of the world, lifting productivity to heights never imagined, like the magic of cyberspace and Internet. The bulk of those who win the Nobel Prize in science, economy, physics and medicine are Americans. Its military is equally the wonder of the world, almost fully mechanized, its missiles travelling hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to hit an outthrust cigar on target. There is nothing like Las Vegas, nothing like Disneyland, nothing like Rockefeller Center, nothing like its oversize supermarkets and shopping malls swollen with everything money can buy.

In the course of pursuing untold wealth and power, America however has lost something. Overly proud of themselves, the present leaders of America have come to believe their institutions are models for the whole of humanity. And the world only can achieve peace, harmony and progress if it is transformed in the image of America. Other cultures, other civilizations, thousands of years older than the United States, must now march to the American drum, to the American banner. And so America is now perceived as a bully, an overgrown brat, a burly policeman dictating international traffic, now talking loudly and carrying a big stick.

And so Iraq. And so America will not be denied.