War or peace with Iraq?
www.GlobalAware.org
Bush’s War with the entire World
The yachac blew long and steady into the conch horn. The sound
was low and mournful but somehow insistent despite the roar of traffic
and din of protest chants. Barefoot and dressed in white calf-length trousers
and cotton shirt, the Ecuadorian indigenous shaman arranged flowers, medicinal
herbs and fruits on white sheet. Dozens of people watched as he performed
a cleansing and a prayer for peace 10 metres from the entry to the seat
of power in his country, not the Ecuadorian Congress or the Presidential
Palace, but the United States Embassy.
As each person approached the wise man to throw fragrant wood chips on
the small pyre in the centre of the sheet, he intoned with them, “Yes
to peace, no to war, with this prayer I commit my heart.” No one
wanted to be left out and the line circled around and around the offering,
each person waiting their turn to participate. Across two lanes of noisy
traffic, Ecuadorian soldiers watched impassively as they guarded the property
of a foreign power. Drivers honked in support and students took up one
after another of their favourite protest chants, accompanied by compelling
drum rhythms.
After everyone had a chance to commit an offering to the fire, the yachac
expertly stifled the flames with feathers so that the pungent smoke would
continue to drift in the warm midday air performing its purifying function.
Looking up at the windows of the Embassy, like so many blank black eyes,
one wonders whether anyone took notice of the ruckus and festive hand-painted
banners weaving through the crowds below; whether they knew they were
being purified and whether they cared.
Here, thousands of miles from Washington, people are mobilizing to resist
American hegemony. Ecuadorians will never be called to fight this war
and with skyrocketing oil prices, they have even benefited as a small
oil exporting nation. Nonetheless, they like so many global citizens feel
compelled to stand together against injustice. The Bush White House may
be doing more to endanger its vision of a single superpower world than
they imagine by giving common people everywhere a rallying cry against
the growing absolutism and isolationism of Washington.
As if to prove the point, Ecuadorians moved fluidly between chants of
“Yes to Peace, No to War” and “We don’t want to
be a Colony of the United States.” Many people carried anti-war
banners, but many others came with anti-FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas,
the mini-WTO being pushed by the US) and ‘Oil=Death’ messages.
The spin-doctors and politicians may delude themselves that one thing
has nothing to with the other; that war in the Middle East has no bearing
on trade relations in the Western Hemisphere, but Ecuadorian teenagers,
indigenous farmers and average housewives know differently. It’s
all part of the new American vision of global political and economic domination.
They know they have more in common with Iraqi civilians than they do with
the people hiding behind the blank black eyes of the embassy.
An editorial in one of the main newspapers this week bemoaned the increase
in kidnappings of rich Ecuadorians and ex-pat executives. The writer argued
that this resulted from the influx of Colombians to the country. This,
he said, was Ecuador’s real war, not the situation in Iraq. The
protestors would have been able to draw the link he missed: US-sponsored
Plan Colombia driving that country’s decades-old conflict among
peasants, the government and paramilitary forces over the border and bringing
the terror tactics used by the combatants to Quito’s wealthy suburbs.
Even here, in the seedy underground of foreign kidnappers, the imprint
of post Cold War American policy is evident.
In the last four years, there has been a growing surge of anti-globalization
protests. Anti-globalization is really just a polite euphemism for Anti-Americanism
– or at least it is fast becoming so. Even 9/11 and the sympathy
for the American people it engendered has not dampened the rising tide
of awareness that no society or culture, no tract of forest, no sovereign
country stands a chance of survival if it impedes the rampage of Corporate
America across the planet. Of course, there are Canadian, Australian and
European corporations benefiting from the assault on human and environmental
rights waged by the WTO and the IMF, but their governments seem to have
realized that one must at least make a show of concern. They have supported
Kyoto and the new World Court; Europe gives double the aid that the US
does; even Canada has so far abstained from joining Bush’s Coalition
of the Willing. In small ways then, they seem more willing to concede
to the needs and concerns of world citizens.
What seems incomprehensible to anyone accustomed to analysing geopolitics
since the Second World War is the near total absence of diplomatic subterfuge
and delicacy in this current crisis. Bush moved from failing to capture
bin Laden to a ‘no choice but attack Hussein’ position in
a matter of months with no real explanation of the connection between
the two. Since then, he’s been able to provide no proof of a connection
or a good reason for war, and seems to feel little compunction to elaborate
or substantiate his position. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks
and that’s that. White House minions have all but directly threatened
members of the UN Security Council that they had better vote correctly
or risk something terrible which is never quite specified. The current
campaign is to blame France for rendering the UN irrelevant. Surely, insisting
on an unwinnable motion when you know it is unwinnable entails more responsibility
for the problem than refusing to be cowed? It’s a bit like a child
being told knives are dangerous, playing with one anyway and then blaming
the parent when it cuts itself. But that analysis assumes that the US
actually wants viable and relevant international institutions. It is becoming
clearer by the hour that they would like nothing better than to do away
with them once and for all – well at least the ones they don’t
completely control, the IMF and WTO can stay for the moment.
© Dr. Leslie Jermyn leslie@globalaware.org
Permission is required from the Author to publish this text. |
