War and Plunder in the Garden of Eden

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.
And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, the Tree of Life also in the midst of the garden, and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also from the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever:
Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the Tree of Life. - Genesis

In the 18th century the English East India Company was essentially a tool of plunder for the British Empire. Its goal was to monopolize the silk, cotton, spices and opium trades by bribing tribal leaders and kings and armies all over India. If the Company couldn’t bribe the leaders, they’d destroy them with the Company army, equipped with the first ever weapon of mass destruction, gun powder. Then the Company would install a puppet government, who’d abolish local laws that kept the Company from driving local merchants out of business. The East India Company men would return home with shipments of spices and silk and stories about great battles with crazy savages, sell to rich British folks at a much higher price than the goods were stolen for, and buy up vast properties, making them powerful and influential in Parliament. They sometimes even became members of Parliament themselves. Imagine that. Meanwhile, the Indian merchants would starve to death, and the entire country would eventually become an impoverished third world nation, while Britain became Great. Some company.

In 1773 the East India Company was losing some money in tea. So the King decided the Company didn’t have to pay the same taxes that were imposed on colonial merchants in America, and as a result, the Company could export directly to the colonies at a much lower price, which drove local merchants out of business. In response, a bunch of lawbreaking trouble-maker colonists conducted a widespread boycott of the English tea. On December 16, 1773, three East India Company ships decided to pull into Boston Harbor anyway, with tea in tow. One hundred fifty colonists dressed as American Indians (the freaks) rioted by trespassing onto the ships and dumping the entire cargo of tea overboard. This event became known as the Boston Tea Party.

This made King George III angry, and he demanded that the no-good anarchists pay for all that tea they destroyed. The no-good anarchists told him to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. So King George retaliated with a bunch of other bogus, oppressive laws imposed on the colonies. Then the colonists kicked his ass out of there, along with the loyalists that bought his bullshit propaganda, and the United States of America was born in the name of freedom from corrupt corporations and imperialistic governments who think they can go around the world and do whatever the fuck they want to people in order to stay rich and fat.

*****

Kingdoms, tribes and clans of all kinds have fought for thousands of years in what is now known as Iraq. Mesopotamia was conquered time and again for its fertile land, its Garden of Eden between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates.

The East India Company got in on all that action when it began to utilize Mesopotamia in the late 18th century as an easy passage to India. They built a port in Basra, and enjoyed a great working relationship with all the people of that area.

Sike.*

Fast forward to the end of World War One. The Ottoman Empire was being divided up by the Europeans at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and Britain carved out a big, oil-rich slab for herself and named it Iraq, and there was a piece of paper called the Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant that said this was all fine and dandy.

But not everybody agreed. In 1920 the Sunni and Shiite tribes joined forces and rose up against their new rulers. Britain defeated the uprising by dropping bombs on the resistance fighters (and whoever else was in the way) in the “first systematic use of aerial bombardment in history” [1], and by another fairly new method of warfare – gassing the shit out of them [2]. Britain used weapons of mass destruction on her own people!

Then Britain pissed off the other big tribe in Iraq, the Kurds, by not giving them their own, independent country, like they promised they would in the Treaty of Serves. Not smart. By now the only people that liked Britain were upper crust Sunnis. In fact, the same percentage of Iraqis hated Britain as Americans who once thought Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks: 70 per cent! [3]

The British started to get the notion that controlling a country just for it’s oil wouldn’t go unnoticed by the natives, so in 1921 they installed a puppet king named Faisal, who had never lived in Iraq before, and for some added insurance, made a whole new country close to where the East India Company set up shop 160 years before. The people of Iraq lost access to the Persian Gulf. [4]. The country was called Kuwait – as in, Ku-wait! You can’t go there, Iraqis! So everything was cool and nobody was mad about that.

Sike.

In 1932 Britain got sick of the Iraqis always uprising against her rule and went ahead and gave Iraq it’s independence, but not before making sure the Iraq Petroleum Company (run by a consortium of companies from Britain, France and the US) could still own all the oil. Plus, they still had puppets in Kuwait. In 1936 they discovered oil in Kuwait too. [5] Eureka!

Then there was this guy named Saddam Hussein, born in 1939. What a dick, agreed everybody. Saddam’s uncle, who was once jailed after an anti-British coup, got the little bastard involved in Pan-Arabism at an early age, which was a nationalistic movement to unite Arabic tribes against British interference in the Iraq.

In Iraq in the 20th century all kinds of movements and attempted coups took place, but ultimately the Ba’ath party took power in 1968, and for a while used oil revenues to modernize Iraq, building roads and schools and all the things that lead to a peaceful society. But in 1979 Saddam came to power, and the first thing he did was to assassinate a bunch of Ba’ath party members for an alleged plot. He had a guy film it so he could show it all over the country.[link to source] What a dick, agreed everybody. So the Ba’ath party went from being providers to being Saddam-worshippers. Saddam used an important tool in any budding dictatorship: FEAR.

Tensions with Iran were building, so in 1980 Iraq and Iran went to war. Iran had had problems with the US, namely, taking Americans hostage and killing a bunch of Americans. Also, Iran was gaining more and more power militarily, and the US knew this. Why? Because http://www.historychannel.com/speeches/archive/speech_237.html> the US government sold Iran a shitload of arms!

So the US government decided that funding and arming Saddam Hussein was a swell idea. US and European companies sold Saddam all the ingredients for some great chemical weapons, and nobody cared, and old Ron made sure Saddam got millions of dollars in aid.

To “normalize” relations with our friend Saddam, a Special Envoy was sent to Iraq, a man by the name of Donald Rumsfeld. He and Saddam shook hands and commenced normalizing. The US government liked Saddam so much, that, when Iraq attacked the USS Stark in Persian Gulf killing 37 Americans, the Reagan administration didn’t give a flying fuck! The Iraq-Iran war went on. Iraq killed a bunch of people with US arms, and Iran, the bad guys, killed a bunch of people with the same shit, and also they carried out some human wave attacks, sending thousands of children in at once toward Iraqi troops, who had to kill children or die themselves, and so the Iraqis thought it’d be easier to back up and just gas the shit out of them with chemicals supplied by American and European companies.

In 1988 a town called Halabja was overtaken by Iran with the help of some Kurds living there, who never asked to be part of Iraq in the first place, especially since Saddam Hussein, the Sunni Baathist, was in charge. So, Saddam gassed the shit out of the whole town, killing 5000 people. The US government first downplayed the reports. Then they showed the reports on TV. So the US government said Iran did it.[source]. But the fact remained: Saddam Hussein Used Weapons of Mass Destruction on His Own People.

So Uncle Sam decided never to support this evil dictator again.

Sike.

Uncle Sam continued to fund Saddam Hussein, overlooking what a dick everyone knew he was.

By 1990 Saddam felt all big and bad, like a character out of his favorite movie, The Godfather, what with the support of the world’s richest and most powerful nation. So he decided that Kuwait was really part of Iraq in the first place, and he’d go and take it back, and nobody’d mind.

George Herbert Walker Bush decided Saddam was getting too uppity, and it wouldn’t be a good idea for this dick to control the Middle East and all it’s oil with access to the Persian Gulf to boot. President Bush knew how powerful Saddam was. Why? Because President Bush helped arm the shit out of him!

Saddam was also throwing his arms up to Saudi Arabia, a dictatorial monarchy which borders Iraq to the south, in a “What’s up bitch? You gotta problem wif me takin’ Kuwait or sompin?” fashion, so George Herbert Walker Bush decided it was time to put the dick back in its pants. Another dick, Dick Cheney, met with King Fahd of the House of Saud, and the king invited the Dick to secure the long border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Dick Cheney replied, “Go fuck yourself, you oppressive dictator!”

Sike.

Cheney wisely accepted the invitation. Uncle Sam and Saudi Arabia had enjoyed business relations in the past. This would strengthen those relations and at the same time protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam.

So, armed with a cheerleading and unquestioning media, George Herbert Walker Bush launched a propaganda campaign to justify the Iraq war to the most powerful force on earth – the American People. Bush pronounced Saddam, “Sodom”, with the accent on the first syllable, and talked of Sodom’s “naked aggression” against the tiny, wet Kuwait. But Sodom would not withdraw. So Dick and Colon were thrust into action to get the job done, to knock off Sodom’s throbbing arsenal and force him to pull out.

I remember watching the beginning of the war on CNN. It was early evening in the United States of America, if I remember correctly. Bernard Shaw and a couple others were in a hotel in Baghdad when the bombing started. I was in my living room and the rest of the folks were out in the kitchen. The TV had been on the whole time. I was the only one watching. Shaw muttered something about being in hell. Little did he know it was only the first circle.

Two hours later, on prime time, Bush gave a speech, while Americans bombed the shit out of Baghdad. I have it on a CD called “Great Speeches of the 20th Century”:

“While the world waited, Sodom Hussein systematically raped, pillaged, and plundered a tiny nation, no threat to his own. He subjected the people of Kuwait to unspeakable atrocities, and among those maimed and murdered, innocent children. While the world waited, Sodom sought to add to the chemical weapons arsenal he now possesses, an infinitely more dangerous weapon of mass destruction: a nuclear weapon. And while the world waited, while the world talked peace and withdrawal, Sodom Hussein dug in and moved massive forces into Kuwait.”

NEXT WEEK: Gulf War, Economic Sanctions and Bombings under sex-crazed lefty President, Business Deals with the Great Satan, and Gulf War 2

footnotes

*I know “sike” is technically spelled “psych” but it looked better that way.
[1]The fire this time: U.S. war crimes in the Gulf, by Ramsey Clark, p. 4
[2] "Cruel Ancestry" by Said K Aburish, from Inside Iraq: the history, the people, and the modern conflicts of the world's least understood land. p.71
[3] Aburish, pp. 71-72
[4] Clark p. 13
[5] Clark pp. 12 and 13