War Against Whom?

Reuters reports that the "U.S. Will Not Go to War with Iraqi People":

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested on Sunday that any American invasion of Iraq would directly target Baghdad's "dictatorial, repressive" government while attempting to spare the Iraqi people.

"Obviously no one would want to harm the people of that country. We favor the people of that country."

We were told the same thing back in '91, and have killed hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of Iraqis since, via the war and the subsequent imposition of sanctions. In other words, Rumsfeld is an absolute hypocrite when he drops phrases like the above. Hardly a surprise, though.

Still, I do realize that there is an active effort within the military to avoid civilian casualties, and, looking at the situation from a certain level, it is remarkable how they have developed techniques to do so. But let's not kid ourselves: the desired "humanitarian assault" which deliberately avoids killing noncombatants is basically a PR ploy. The military utilizes this tactic because, without it, they likely wouldn't have any leverage to wage war in the first place. The general consensus is that, since Vietnam, the American public will not accept wars which kill many innocent civilians. Thus, the only way to convince the American people to consent to wars (like Afghanistan and Iraq) is to hide the effects of them, either by media omission or by completely fetishizing the military hardware and its "amazing" accuracy. The goal is to depict a war in which only the bad guys get blown up; beyond that, it is assumed, the war has few consequences for civilians.

Of course, that's never the case. In regards to the Gulf War, things get really hairy when you start to take into account issues like "collateral damage," bombing errors, the morality of bombing civilian infrastructure, as well as the deadly little secret about depleted uranium. It goes without saying that these issues were (and are) rarely raised in the media.

Basically, if we're going to wage war against "Saddam," there's nothing getting around the fact that we'll have to do so by attacking an entire nation of, mostly, innocents. Despite all the efforts to disregard the Iraqi civilians (this is the first article I have seen in the mainstream press to even mention possible civilian casualties since god knows when...), they are likely to suffer the brunt of any military action, as they did in Operation Desert Storm.

To better contextualize the war, I suggest we take into account this comment by John Pilger, who wrote in response to a few of the debates from a few months ago about whether it was prudent to attack Iraq,

These "debates" are framed in such a way that Iraq is neither a country nor a community of 22 million human beings, but one man, Saddam Hussein. A picture of the fiendish tyrant almost always dominates the page. ("Should we go to war against this man?" asked last Sunday's Observer). To appreciate the power of this, replace the picture with a photograph of stricken Iraqi infants, and the headline with: "Should we go to war against these children?" Propaganda then becomes truth. Any attack on Iraq will be executed, we can rest assured, in the American way, with saturation cluster bombing and depleted uranium, and the victims will be the young, the old, the vulnerable...

An aside: Rummy says,

"The people in that country are, in a sense, hostages to a small group of dictatorial, repressive government officials. It is not a large group..."

Hmm. That's funny. I feel the same way about the US right now...