“America Supports You“, a nationwide program for supporting U.S. troops started by the Department of Defense, is a good place to find examples of U.S. citizens, friends and family of U.S. soldiers and not, expressing their genuine support for the U.S. troops abroad, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. In my own home town, countless magnetic bumper stickers in the shape of ribbons read “Supporting the Troops”, “Pray for our Troops”, etc. And I have no problem with this at all…I have one of these on my own vehicle, and I do both support and even almost pray (I am not really religious…) for the troops.

However, I think where we should take issue is with the equation of supporting our troops and supporting the war they are a part of, a war that has been revealed in excruciatingly tragic detail[1] as being based on distortion and self-deception on the part of our national leaders (whether, and to what extent, it was based on “lies” is not known). In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said that “We won’t take forces and go around the world and try to take other people’s oil…That’s not how democracies work”. He also stated once that the notion that oil was the real reason behind the Bush administration’s drive against Saddam Hussein was “nonsense,” saying, “It has nothing to do with oil, literally nothing to do with oil.” But while almost all government officials, policy elites, and media pundits have denied the influence of oil in U.S. foreign policy and especially the war in Iraq, no serious historian or analyst does so. A recent book of analysis by Michael Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum, reveals the relationship in depth, and provides definitive arguments showing the vacuity of the statements of Rumsfeld and others. Even members of the government sometimes admit the obvious truth, however. Speaking in Singapore in the summer of 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, when asked why a nuclear power like North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where no WMDs had been found, he said “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil” Also, our own president has recently cited oil as a reason to stay in Iraq. In fact our country has a long history of “blood for oil” campaigns, as has been revealed in numerous works [2]. In the 1980s, our government was supporting Saddam Hussein during his war against Iran and some of his worst atrocities, precisely because it would be better for our “national interest[3]”. One million people died in that war, and Iraq won partly because of the infamous Reagan “tilt” towards Iraq, which included $5 billion in credits, equipment and technology, and intelligence [4]. It wasn’t until 1991, when Saddam turned on us, that we were against him, and this was primarily because he was a threat to our access to Iraq’s oil[5]. Prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion, a leading Arab analyst had this to say about American intentions:

“On all the major issues concerning the oil market, from raising prices to equitable levels and improving the conditions for production quotas to the nationalisation of oil supplies, Iraq had always been among the hawks in OPEC. As a matter of historical record, therefore, Iraq has always presented an obstacle to the US’s oil-market strategy. This explains why the US administration’s behaviour towards that country is so implacably vindictive, and why, in the process of occupying Iraq to drive oil prices down to the cheapest possible levels, it wants to drive a lesson home to all nations opposed to the US and use the fate of Iraq as an example to intimidate all developing nations [6].”

It is not certain whether everything said here is true, but this reflects the view of much of the world on the vicious “blood-for-oil” campaigns of the United States, by far the world’s leading user (and nearly-shameless contributor to global warming [7]), and is very similar to the conclusion reached by nearly every scholar of the Gulf War and the Iraq War so far. The only people not admitting this, and in fact publicly denying it, are the perpetrators of these crimes, their media lapdogs, and the intentionally misinformed public.

The American public, especially in the poorest and least-educated parts, provides the biggest source of our soldiers, many of whom join after high school to make money for college and/or find a career (this is often referred to as “the poverty draft”), thinking that they will serve their country. None, or very few of them, know anything about the connection of the wars they are sent to fight and Middle East oil, or other aspects of international politics and U.S. foreign policy. These decisions are made at the very top, and not often publicly announced. Instead, like much of the American public prior to the war, and even to a greater extent, they are miseducated and and ill-formed of the motivations for past and future U.S. wars and military actions. They grow up seeing military propaganda on television and even at school, where every soldier is a hero saving lives and protecting the American way.

I support the troops, and so does everyone I know who is against the war (meaning we don’t want them to die fighting for an unjust cause). They, like so many of us, were misled by our leaders. We hold little to nothing against them for the part they may be playing or have played in the death of approximately 655,000 Iraqis [8] and the further destablization and exploitation of that country. Many of them are helping people in Iraq, and others just don’t know what they are doing as they have been misinformed by their superiors. An increasing number have even deserted or have come back and opposed the war, as have their families and friends [9]. During the post-WWII Nuremberg trials, it was recognized that primarily the leaders, and not the individual soldiers, were most responsible and should be punished for their crimes [10]. The primary responsibility for these hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of our invasion of Iraq, almost 3,000 of which are of our own soldiers, lies with the architects of this disgusting and immoral war. The blood of Iraqi men, women, and children is on their hands. Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. Powell. Rice. The leaders of the military-political-industrial complex. The war profiteers. The PR managers and propagandists. It is they who misled us, and the troops, and it is they who we must oppose and hold accountable for their manipulations and unspeakable crimes against Iraq and against our own country, which include (in addition to the lives of American soldiers, Iraq civilians, etc.) fueling of hatred of out country abroad and increasing the threat of terrorist attacks. Every broken family in Iraq and the United States is broken mainly because of their decisions. Every father-less child is father-less mainly because of their irrational policies. As citizens of the richest and most powerful country on Earth, we of course owe it to ourselves, our children, and the rest of the world to understand our situation and not be taken in by the deceptions of our leaders. It is also, I believe, our responsibility to hold them accountable for what they have done.

The real way to support the troops is to bring them home, now; to keep more of them from killing and dying for the pernicious untruths of the nihilistic and anti-democratic wealthy and powerful classes.

- Peter Broady

Peter Broady is a regular guy out of Wasilla, AK who reads and writes in his free time.  He can be contacted here, at his website, or by email at pbroady@gmail.com.

[1] For an ongoing collection of articles on the ‘History and Context’ of the Iraq War see ZNet Iraq Watch, for good sources (but weak analysis) see Bob Woodward’s recent trilogy, Bush at War, for analysis see Behind the Invasion of Iraq by The Research Unit for Political Economy of the Monthly Review, or Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal; for more sources see here. 

[2] From John Tirman: “Sonia Shah, Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories, 2007), is well written and intelligent.  In addition to Yergin and Klare, scholarly works abound, though they have sometimes mistaken the “problem of oil” as its plentitude and control rather than scarcity.  On the connection to war, see Michael Stoff’s Oil, War and American Security: The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941-1947 (Yale, 1982); or, on oil and U.S. foreign policy, see Thicker than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (Oxford, 2006),by Rachel Bronson.  A Century Of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press, 2004)by F. William Engdahl; and the classic, The Control of Oil (Vintage 1982) by John Malcolm Blair, are worthwhile.For more general works on the Middle East, see The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003) by the redoubtable Dilip Hiro; and the provocative Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Knopf, 2005); and the delightfully entertaining history of the early 20th century, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Owl, 2001)
by David Fromkin.”

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

[6] Ahmed El-Sayed El-Naggar, Al-Ahram

[7] Eugene Linden, The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations; Tim Flannery, The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth; and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe

[8] See studies in the leading medical journal, The Lancet

[9] See Veterans Against the Iraq War http://www.vaiw.org/, so far there have been over 5500 deserters from the Iraq war  http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/06/60II/main659336.shtml

[10] On the Nuremberg Trials and the ideas behind them, see Wikipedia’s page (includes beginner references); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials