Ruether, Rosemary Radford, Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology, April
24, 2003.


The rapid US military occupation of Iraq, with its propagandistic claims to
have liberated the people of Iraq from an oppressive dictator, have left the
world peace movement somewhat speechless. The ability of the American media to engage in such massive cover-up of the actual purposes of the war and the gullibility of much of the American public to such claims have gone far
beyond what those in the peace movement could have imagined. Thus there is a dire need to regroup and find a new basis on which to organize against the
American military occupation of Iraq and its long-range purposes.

We need to start by acknowledging that the Iraqi people are well rid of
Saddam Hussein and so in that sense the removal of his repressive regime is
a positive by product of the war. The peace movement, of course, never
claimed that Saddam Hussein was a "nice guy," but it perhaps was
insufficiently clear about how violently repressive his regime actually was
for Iraqi people. Also the peace movement's mantra, "let the inspections
work," was insufficiently cognizant that continued inspections would have
meant endless sanctions. These sanctions would have continued to squeeze
Iraqis to death on a daily basis, given the fact that the US and Britain
were never going to accept a satisfactory end of such inspections that would
allow the sanctions to be lifted. A second positive side effect of the fall
of Saddam Hussein is thus the call to lift the sanctions.

But these positive side effects open up a number of ongoing questions which
must be the basis for organizational and communications work by the peace
movement. The US is claiming a propaganda victory as liberator from a
repressive dictator, as though the US is in principle hostile to all
repressive dictators. This is such a stunning falsification of our actual
foreign policy history as to leave many of us speechless. But this means it
is exactly the moment to speak in order to unmask this lie. One can list the
oppressive dictators who we have not only supported but installed in power
over the last century, such as the Samozas in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile
and Saddam Hussein himself.

But let us concentrate on those whom the present Bush administration is
cozying up to at present. Let's check out President Islam Karimov of
Uzbekistan, for example, with his long record of imprisoning and torturing
any opponents of his regime. We need to make a careful list of the kinds of
atrocities for which various dictators with whom we have allied and are
presently allying are responsible to expose the falacious claims that
presently dominate the airwaves. We need to make clear that the crime that
made the Bush regime determined to overthrow Saddam Hussein was not his
crimes against the humanity of Iraqis, but his shift from being a client
ruler of the U.S. to dreaming of being an independent power in the Middle
East. If he had remained a docile client of U.S. policies, Dick Cheny would
still be shaking his hand.

A second key organizing theme must be the critique of the falacious claims
that Iraq was harboring a vast arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons and was on the brink of using them against us. This was the major
pretext for the war. Since no such weapons were used in the actual war
(which would have been the time to use them if the Iraqi regime had them)
and no stores of them have been found, the Bush administration is faced with
a major embarrassment. It has vowed to find these weapons and thus prove
that they are "there," but its exaggerated claims in this regard go far
beyond any deposits that might be found. The peace movement needs to keep
this issue before the public, expose the lies on which many of the claims to
knowledge of such stores were based in the months before the war and the
inability of the US to find such stores today.

But it is not enough simply to show that Iraq did not have major weaponry,
since most of it had already been destroyed in the years between the first
and second Gulf wars. One must agree that all weapons of mass destruction
indeed must be destroyed. There must be a general movement of disarmament
that ends the stockpiling of such weapons. But the Bush administration is
not interested in general disarmament of such weapons, but only the
liquidation of those in the hands of nations that we identify as our
enemies. In other words, its campaign is to disarm the "other side" so that
"we" and our side (The US, Britain, Israel) have an absolute monopoly on
WMD. But the message that this strategy is giving to the rest of the world
is exactly the opposite. All smaller nations now feel they should acquire
such weapons in order to make it less likely that they will be invaded,
given that the US is only willing to risk invading countries that are
largely already disarmed and can be a quick "push over." The peace movement must call for the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction on all sides, those of US and Israel, as well as those of Iraq, Syria and Korea.
Let us raise the cry that has been suggested by various Middle East
countries, as well as by peace activists in Israel: make the Middle East a
nuclear, chemical and biological weapon-free zone!

Thirdly, it is time for the peace movement to turn its attention back to the
battered Palestinians, the victims of Israel's endless state terrorism. The
Bush and Blair administrations have claimed that a Palestinian state within
the 1967 borders would be on their agenda after Saddam Hussein was removed.

Yet Bush has allied himself closely with the Likud party and the policies of
Ariel Sharon, which not only have killed and injured tens of thousands of
Palestinians, but bulldozed thousands of houses, confiscated vast areas of
land and threatened new expulsions of Palestinians from their remaining
enclaves. Meanwhile the Palestinians are imprisoned by an endless curfew
that blocks any semblance of normal life where people can get to jobs,
schools and hospitals. Let us insist anew that this situation of occupation
end, and that a long promised Palestinian state that allows Palestinians
real self-government be crafted.

A fourth area of organizing must focus on critique of the intentions of the
American occupation to reshape the Middle East as the realm of US and
Israeli hegemony, militarily, politically, and economically. How are we
organizing Iraqi oil for permanent control? How are we reshaping its
politics so that a puppet regime is installed in power, and not one that
expresses any real independence of Iraqis to shape their own society? What
role does the Bush regime's favorite Arab, Ahmed Chalabi, an international
criminal wanted in Jordan for bank embezzlement and fraud, end up playing in
a new regime? How is the US going to use its present occupation of Iraq to
"pry open" "free trade" in the Middle East according to our rubrics of a US
dominated "market economy"?

Fifthly, we must continually keep an eye on the costs of American militarism
and national security policies to American democracy and social welfare. How
are the vast expenditures on foreign invasions and occupations draining
American resources for its own development of education, health and welfare?
How are methods of spying on any possible "terrorists" affecting a denial of
basic citizen and human rights in the US? We need to keep constantly before
the eyes of Americans just what they are paying for this administration's
schemes of global empire in loss of welfare and human rights. Also we need
to make clear that most of these measures of both foreign and domestic
aggression increase rather than lessen the hostility against the United
States and hence the liklihood of new incidents of terrorism. We are
crafting a much more dangerous and more impoverished world for all of us,
both in the US and in other countries.


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Al & Marjorie Stewart
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