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Dead or alive, but Saddam Hussein was made by the American ultra-conservatives a hero for the majority of population of the Muslim world. Dead or alive, but George Bush was made by the same ultra-conservatives a villain for the majority of humanity, who destroyed the U.N., the international law, and is trying to distort the high moral ground of humankind. But it cannot be done because the majority of national bureaucracies are on the side of the majority of the commoners and laborers of the world. And the North Korean bureaucrats are correct, saying that there are no international law any longer, except the one that the American bureaucrats are extolling – ‘the mighty is right’.

While the bureaucrats of the deadly wounded United Nations prepares to consider North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons program tomorrow, the North Korean bureaucrats have warned they will ignore anything the U.N. bureaucrats would say on the subject, because the U.N. is dead and its decisions are "null and void" after the U.S. bureaucrats started the illegal war with the Iraqi bureaucrats.

Last October, the Washington bureaucrats said the Pyongyang bureaucrats had admitted they had a secret program to enrich uranium. The Pyongyang bureaucrats responded to the disclosure by restarting a nuclear reactor that had been shut down, renouncing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelling the IAEA inspectors, and asserting that the Washington bureaucrats did not follow through their promise to help the N. Koreans to build some power plants on the fossil fuel.

Since then, the N. Korean bureaucrats have engaged in a variety of actions, including the test firing of several missiles, to show the Washington bureaucrats that the latter would have much harder times with the former if they would behave themselves as they did toward the Iraqi bureaucrats.

Even though Mr. Obnoxious O’Riley is trying to belittle the opinion of the majority of humankind by saying that ‘everyone has its own opinion but it’s only an opinion and nothing more; but on the question of Iraqi war, the high moral ground has got nobody, except the boots’, which are tramping illegally the Iraqi soil.

Trying surreptitiously to smear such Hollywood peace-activists as Martin Shin, George Clooney, and others by saying that they dropped out of either high-school or college, but he, Mr. Obnoxious O’Riley got two diplomas of master’s degree, -- ‘and that makes him not a bad person’.

Wrong, Mr. Obnoxious, that makes you very bad person -- because those peace-activists dropped out of the established institutions, wishing not to loose their core, their soul to the Moloch of the establishment, to the Moloch of war. But you, Mr. Obnoxious sold your essence for the form, for the diplomas, particularly that one in public administration, which now are good only to put ‘em over your toilet, because they worth less than the paper, on which they were printed. How you, Mr. Obnoxious got them if you do not understand how an opinion of an individual, sharing by the majority of population, molds first the high moral ground of that majority, and then, the law of the land.

Twenty years ago, an opinion of Mr. Wolfowitz was just an opinion of a high-ranking bureaucrat; but today, it became the Bush doctrine, because it’s shared by the majority of the American apparatchiks. However, the miscalculations of those apparatchiks, of those doctrinaires are the common knowledge, particularly about the Iraqi upper class. Therefore, those doctrines cannot become our (the American majority) high moral ground, moreover, the law of the land.

Back in 1991, when the majority of Iraqis had risen in revolt against Saddam Hussein and his comrades, posters of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini appeared in southern Iraqi towns, where the majority of population is the Hamits who believes in the Shiite Islam. Nothing could have been more agitating for the WH bureaucrats of the day, since the posters signaled that the Iraqi Hamit-Shiite commoners and laborers were mere agents of the Iranian ruling Aryan-Shiite bureaucrats.

Fearful that the Iranians might to capture a large, oil-producing chunk of a disintegrating Iraq and even get the common border with Israel, the WH bureaucrats withheld even moral support for the uprising, and the Saddam gang survived to fight another day against the Bush gang. So conveniently did the posters fit in with the Washington apparatchiks’ preconceptions about ideological loyalties of the Iraqi commoners and laborers that knowledgeable Iraqis insist they were produced and displayed by Saddam's own agents to stir up paranoia in Washington, and finally, materializing their desires.

Twelve years on, the minor constrains about displacing Saddam have evaporated, but the major ones regarding Iraqi State as a fragile bureaucracy, driven with religious divisions and prone to disintegration, persist. The WH bureaucrats’ version of "Iraq 101" assumes that the ideological (Islamic) loyalties of the agricultural Iraqis prevailed over their blood (ethnic) loyalties. The Iraqi State was created 80 years ago by the Brits out of three provinces of the Ottoman Empire, in which the minority of Semitic Arabs with prevailing Sunni ideology, now represented by Saddam Hussein, has always dominated the resentful majority of the Hamitic Arabs with Shiite ideology, and the ethnically distinct minorities in the north, such as the Aryan Kurds, Persians, and Assyrians, and the Mongolian Turks. Hence the Iraqi bureaucracy could quickly disintegrate if the Hamitic Shiites were given the opportunity to secede.

The WH “experts” may have little problem with an idea that the acquired habits can be changed easier than the innate ones. Nevertheless, they prefer a distorted variant of this idea, which paved their failures in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

The conscientious Iraqis tend to disagree with the WH “experts” by pointing out that more than a half of the Iraqi families have two or three members of different Muslim sects, and the mixed Sunni-Shiah or Shiite-Sunni marriages have been typical feature of the Iraqi demographics for the past century.

Indeed, Iraqi, as well as Afghani, nationalism is based on the Iraqis’ relationships by blood rather than by their ideology and it have manifested itself in 1920, when most of the population (the Semitic-Sunni townsmen and the Hamitic-Shiah countrymen alike) that had been captured by the Brits from the Turks rose in bloody revolt against the new colonial masters.

Hussein Shah-ristani, a leading Iraqi nuclear scientist, whose roots derived from the Hamitic-Shiite community and who suffered years of torture and solitary confinement for refusing to make a nuclear bomb for the Saddam gang, denounced the notion of the WH bureaucrats that the Aryan Kurds, the Semitic-Sunni Arabs, and Hamitic-Shiite Arabs cannot have a common republican bureaucracy.

Although there have been a handful of instances of inner strife, such as Kurdish and Turkish riots in Kirkuk in 1959, Shah-ristani noted that they were rare and inspired by the established bureaucracy rather than by the movements of commoners and laborers. For millennia, Mesopotamia has been a place of tolerance between different races, with their multitude of religions. “Iraq is a very old nation -- multi-ethnic and multi-religious for many millennia”. Even the campaigns of the central Iraqi bureaucrats to quench the efforts of the Aryan Kurds, wishing to have independent bureaucracy, argues Shah-ristani, never had popular endorsement.

Under the Ottoman Turks and the Brits the Semitic-Sunni Arabs went to school and became the lower upper class of political and military bureaucrats. However, the Hamitic-Shiah Arabs became the economic bureaucrats (either big businessmen or big landowners in the south), and many of them have been members in good standing of Saddam's Baath Party.

Iraqis often point to Saddam as the instigator of most of their inner tensions. The core of his regime has always been exclusively the Semitic-Sunni Arabs, whose religious affiliation is not as important as their ethnic ties (family-clan-tribe), through which Saddam has ruled from around his home base of Tikrit.

In industrial countries, the ideological affiliation is the base of network of allegiance and political power. But in such agrarian country as Iraq, these tribal networks form a basic network of allegiance and power. Hence, the Semitic-Sunni tribesmen, holding political power in Baghdad, tend to hand out jobs and patronage to fellow family members and tribesmen; and the Hamitic-Shiah tribesmen, having a chance, do the same.

Being a shrewd and proficient manipulator, Saddam has been turning so far tribal politics and rivalries to his own advantage by reinforcing his own position as the ultimate umpire of Iraqis. Thus, Basra, the main Hamitic-Shiite city of the south, has an enclave of Semitic-Sunni Arabs, who had traditionally harmonious relations with their fellow-citizens. However, during and after the 1991 uprising, Saddam had been using the Semitic Sunnis to punish the Hamitic-Shiah insurgents, thus making them fearing of neighbors, who are now the bigger evil for them than the Baghdad bureaucrats, and thus making them to be readier to fight for Saddam in any future uprising.

The recent history of Afghanistan shows that the plan of the WH bureaucrats to govern in the immediate postwar Iraq with the help of a "Group of Ten" Iraqis, each selected to represent a particular religious sect, will probably nurture the political system similar to that one of Lebanon that was organized by the French on a similar sectarian basis, and probably with the same pity fate.

On the other hand, the coming months may show that Iraqi nationhood is greater than the sum of its ethnic-religious parts; then, the Washington and London bureaucrats should remember that fear breeds hate and terror of war and love breeds friendship and tranquility of peace.

Meanwhile the American commoners and laborers, as usual, are covering the lion's share of the costs of the illegal invasion. The American businessmen and workers are already paying the price through mounting job losses, because of fear to travel and the anti-American sentiments of the consumers of the world.

Major companies in key sectors from technology to retail to media are warning that the war and associated geopolitical uncertainty have severely cut their profits. According to the statistics of the Department of Labor, about 465,000 jobs have vanished since the beginning of February, concentrated in turmoil-sensitive industries like lodging, leisure and airlines among the hardest hit. That's about 145,000 more lost positions than many economists were expecting.

In the retail sector, the corporate bureaucrats of electronics giant Circuit City said they had seen a softening in their business as coinciding with the onset of the war with Iraq, thus reflecting consumer preoccupation with geopolitical events.

In the long-depressed technology sector, he corporate bureaucrats of PeopleSoft said, “the environment for capital spending worsened in with added concerns about the war and its impact on the already weakened [by the lack of transparency and investor’s confidence] economy”.

It's hard to say but it's possible that some corporate bureaucrats are using the war as an excuse to cover their inability to function properly in the contemporary economy. However, it is evident that many corporate bureaucrats remain retarded not by their own will. They're unable to invest in new ventures until the ultimate outcome is clearer. The wartime atmosphere makes it harder for investors to commit themselves to making long-term investments; consequently, no one seems willing to move forward to new projects.

At the same time, the markets have been bouncing around as each bit of news from the battlefield seems to set off wild up-and-down swings in investor confidence. The prices of commodities like gold and oil have also been subject to dramatic fluctuations, because the illegal war (even if successful in its proclaimed mission to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein) could lead to greater problems down the road, a largely unspoken overhang.

The majority of businessmen consider that the risk of terrorism is going to be increased by this war. However, a few of them hope that the American political and corporate bureaucrats can bring democracy to Iraq by helping economies in the Middle East, thus improving chances that there will be less terrorism rather than more.

Fear and jittery of investors, executives, and customers derive from realization that the invasion of Iraq has set off a wave of anti-American sentiment around the world that might well wash on to the balance sheets of the American-based multinational corporations. Well-publicized boycotts of American consumer brands have been called for, or are underway, in the Middle East and Europe with companies including McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Yum Brands and Altria's Philip Morris tobacco unit among the prime targets. None of those companies would acknowledge a fall-off in international business as of yet, because most boycotts tend to be more ink than action in the short run and become palpable in the long run.

Although some brands have been associated with the American freedom, prosperity, individuality and diversity, the criminal war in Iraq has been broken those associations apart. The criminal war has brought out in people's minds rather a very different set of ideas that include the American imperial arrogance, paternalism and greed-greed-greed. And these ideas would rather prompt the negative answers to such questions as: is the Middle East going to be a safer place for the Americans, is the world going to be a safer place for the Americans, and is the oil supply for the Americans going to be more secure?

If a few of the American investors and consumers think that putting a U.S. flag in Baghdad is going to take away all the risk, they are going to be disappointed. If the Bush gang thinks that the victors are not going to be judged, they are going to be disappointed too... because they are already historically dead.

4/8/03

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Victor J. Serge created this page and revised it on 04/13/03