Adventures of the neoconquistadores

Last week, the Pentagon contractors at the “Institute for Defense Analyses” published a scrubbed-for-public-view version (here in PDF) of their report on the links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and international terrorism. It was based overwhelmingly on documents captured after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq that was, we can recall, justified by the Bush administration on the two main grounds that (1) the Iraqi regime had a significant arsenal of WMDs, and (2) the regime had significant ties to Al-Qaeda.
War justification #1 turned out to have no basis in fact.
Many of us had argued all along (as I did here, back in February 2003) that War justification #2 had no basis in fact, either.
Now, the Pentagon and its contractor have confirmed our judgment. The IDA report stated (p.ES-1) that: “This study found no ‘smoking gun’ (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.”
But, and this is a big “but”– it went on to add: “The Iraqi regime was involved in regional and international terrorist operations prior to OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. The predominant targets of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens, both inside and outside of Iraq.”
President Bush was fast to seize on this new formulation, and a day or so after the IDA report surfaced he made a speech claiming that the US invasion of Iraq had in fact been justified because of the “state terror” that Saddam had perpetrated against his own citizens. Thus, the concept of “state terror” was handily conscripted there to shift the conversation from Saddam’s alleged “links with al-Qaeda” to his regime’s abusive treatment of its own citizens.
Now, it is indubitably true that Saddam Hussein perpetrated numerous atrocities against his own people. Those fell under the headings of both crimes against humanity and, most likely, genocide. To call them “terrorism” is probably to stretch the definition of “terrorism” further than it should be stretched. Anyway, in international law “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” are far more useful categories.
I note that many US allies have also committed such acts against their own people– in Central America, in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.
Indeed, when Saddam was committing the worst of his acts against Iraq’s Kurdish citizens, in the 1980s, he was acting in an informal but but very real alliance with the US. (That was when Donald Rumsfeld made his visit to Iraq.) But by early 2003, Saddam’s regime had become tightly overstretched as a result of 12 years of extremely punishing US-led sanctions imposed on the people and government of Iraq; and his regime was probably the least abusive it had ever been.
But now, as the fifth anniversary of the invasion approaches, Bush presents us with this “liberationist” description of what the invasion was all about.
The first time a western government decided to use the force of arms to invade and “remake” to its own design a non-western country, and justified this act as being completely “in the true [i.e. invader-defined] interests of the invaded peoples” was when Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sent Christopher Columbus west to “remake” as much of the newly discovered “New World” of the Americas as he could reach.
From that perspective, the key development was not in 1492 when Columbus made landfall on the Caribbean island he named “Hispaniola”, thinking at the time that he had already reached Asia. It was when Ferdinand and Isabella sent him back to Hispaniola the following year, to govern it just as he pleased. (Details here.)
Columbus turned out to be a lousy administrator– perhaps because he used wanton violence against Hispaniola’s indigenous Tainos people, reducing their numbers in just a few years from “hundreds of thousands” to around 60,000.
Two decades later, further generations of (better organized) Conquistadores launched their “liberationist” projects on the mainland of Central and North-Central America. This time they were better backed up by cohorts of Dominicans and other “cultural genocidaires” whose job was to remake the peoples of Central America as Spanish-style Catholics who would always be obedient to the diktats of the (Spanish-dominated) Catholic hierarchy.
The means the Conquistadores used to bring about their “conversions”– which of course were always described as being “for the good of the natives themselves”– were the time-honored means that colonial invaders always use: brute violence, divide-and-rule, and the spreading of both weapons and distrust. Including, many of the same means the Dominicans were using back home in Spain in their Inquisition against suspected unbelievers there.
Well, at least now we can have a richer idea of what the “con” in the word “neocon” stands for. But I still feel fairly sickened whenever I hear President Bush or other gung-ho supporters of the bloody and so destructive invasion of Iraq appropriating the noble discourse of “liberation” and trying to justify the invasion on those grounds.
Perhaps I should get over just feeling sickened by this, and try harder to really understand that Bush and his supporters probably do, in all seriousness, still feel that they have done “a good thing” in Iraq. How, then, can we get into a conversation with such people and point out to them, in a way that “works”, that noble though their intentions may have been, the effects of their actions have been very far indeed from the meliorist project they might have had in mind… And that therefore, they should be much more open than they have been thus far to ideas for Iraq other than just going ahead blindly with the application of continuing amounts of military force?