Brainwashing

southernsunshine77 left a few notes on my entry about this unstoppable war that looks like happening sometime in the next month. She lives near Washington DC and her husband was in the Pentagon when it was attacked on 11 September 2001. He is now being sent to the Middle East as part of the US invasion force. I wrote in my entry of my anger at US military craft landing in Shannon Airport in Co. Clare, since Ireland as a neutral country should not be dragged into aiding a foreign power wage war in a conflict of which Ireland has no part. I believe Ireland is being forced to allow US forces refuel here by the American government threatening a withdrawal of investment here, which would be devastating.

Now southernsunshine77 is obviously going through a lot of emotions right now. She’s vulnerable, and like many Americans she seems to trust her government without much questioning. She apologised for the “inconvenience” of “my husband’s plane landing in your country for a few hours and getting some fuel is an inconvenience to you”. This position is, to say the least, misguided and possibly ignorant. She later went on to speak about the “plane that dared to land in your country”, which to me doesn’t show much understanding for what’s being disputed here. No matter what happens on the world stage, if Ireland is directly involved in events then it is neutral. That is the constitutional position and what’s happening in Shannon is a blatant affront to our neutrality. It has NOTHING to do with convenience; I think American planes could hang on and land in their own bases in the UK. It has NOTHING to do with “daring” to land here. Ireland is neutral and no foreign military craft, unless invited, should touch Irish soil nor enter Irish airspace.

America has a problem with the idea of neutrality. Americans all too often see things in black and white. George W Bush said “you’re either with us or against us” as he declared his “war on terrorism”. This very notion immediately does away with the whole possibility of neutrality, where a nation is neither with nor against another nation’s policies. America tramples over such an un-American concept, and that’s a shame. Because Europe has an ability to see things in grey, too. Europe can fully condemn, as we did, the events of September 11. European police forces and intelligence agencies have been extremely successful in pursuing, apprehending and jailing Al Qaeda terrorists without resorting to bombing foreign countries or conveniently throwing the Geneva Convention out the window of a plane to Guantanamo Bay. Most of Europe has a history of long, bloody wars and almost every European nation has been attacked by terrorists within recent memory. And yet during the 1990’s, the United Kingdom didn’t attack Iraq because the Irish Republican Army were English cities. No, the UK pursued and caught those responsible and through legislation, security and prudence managed to drag the IRA screaming and kicking to a peace accord. Americans don’t see such a thing as possible; more than likely a peace accord with Al Qaeda is impossible. But by hunting down the specific people responsible for attacking the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US will succeed in an infinitely more just way. And the evidence of this was on out television screens this week; Osama Bin Laden’s third-in-command, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was captured this week. Catching Osama Bin Laden, the man who actually runs the organisation that killed over 3000 Americans in one day, is not entirely out of sight.

But reading what southernsunshine77 had to say was worrying. It sounded like brainwashing. George W Bush has convinced a huge swathe of his people that a war in Iraq has something to do with September 11. He’s taking all that emotion, the loss and fear endured by countless numbers of Americans, and focusing it on an irrelevant two-bit dictator who’s a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein is more like former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet; an evil man who terrorized his people, was propped up and armed by the US. Saddam Hussein was supported by Ronald Reagan’s administration, which included a George Bush Senior as Vice President. This same administration once sent a certain Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad as an envoy.

America used Iraq in the same way it used Chile; a dictator is better than a communist, even though in Chile’s case a socialist government had been democratically-elected. This policy was also used when the US helped Islamic rebels fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Rebels led by one “Usama Bin Ladin”. With the end of the cold war, America no longer cared about keeping back communism. The flow of arms and training to Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan ceased. Pinochet became embarrassing but in 1990, he stood down. Saddam Hussein is the only one remaining, and he would be ignored too just like Pinochet.

Only Pinochet didn’t have any oil.

j