TEACAPAN, SINALOA, MEXICO--The United States has gone to war with Iraq with the announcement that it is all for the good of the Iraqis, who are to be rescued from themselves.

STRAIGHTWRY COLUMN

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“I am going to teach the South Americans to elect good men.” --[end italic, tr roman] U.S. President Woodrow Wilson

TEACAPAN, SINALOA, MEXICO--The United States plans to go to war with Iraq, declaring that it is all for the good of the Iraqis who are to be rescued from themselves.

If this rhetoric seems vaguely familiar, that’s because it is vaguely familiar. It’s the American way of war.

The United States entered the conflict in Viet Nam talking about the same high purpose. For those who have forgotten the political statements of the Sixties and Seventies: we were told it was not American interests which were at stake there. American bombs and guns were being used only to uphold the principle that the good people of South Viet Nam should be free to choose their own system of government. Washington was prepared to kill a couple of hundred thousand people to make their point.

There have been other such disinterested ventures into improving other nations. One such came in 1916 when President Woodrow Wilson, that famed apostle of peace and democracy, sent the American army into Mexico to ensure that the Mexicans got the kind of government they chose. At the time, the Mexicans already had a government they had chosen, to the extent that votes mattered here, by electing General Huerta their president.

Mr. Wilson hadn’t meant exactly that kind of free choice, so he sent the army across the border to help the Mexicans understand things. If Mexico couldn’t have peace, justice and good government, he was prepared to blow up the whole place.

Originally he had championed the flambuoyant General, Francisco Villa, Napoleon of The North, but later Villa raided the American town of Columbus and became the enemy. It parallels the Americans’ attitude to Iraq, a country they first armed and treated as a friendly state and then, treating it as an enemy instead, have gone to immense trouble and expense to disarm.

This aspect of traditional American policy is treated with brevity as well as wit by author Garry Wills in his Houghton and Mifflin book [set italic] Nixon Agonistes. [end italic, tr roman] He draws the parallel of Wilson’s warmaking in Mexico and the policies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon in Southeast Asia. (At the time the book was written, the impulse to bomb Iraq into good government was unborn and unimagined. )

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Wilson had arrived at that fatal recurring moment in our country’s diplomatic benefactions, the moment it makes sense to start shooting people philanthropically, for their own good.

He was ready to do Mexicans this service as we have proved, year after discouraging year, with Vietnamese, preaching democracy with well-meant napalm, instructing (as we obliterate) children with our bombs.

We believe we can really “kill them with kindness”, moving our guns forward in a seizure of demented charity.

It is when America is in her most altruistic mood that other nations had better get behind their bunkers.

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Although unable to deal with it at his moment in time, Mr. Wills might well have found another parallel between the Wilson administration and today’s: both condoned political murders as an instrument of international policy.

President George Bush recently announced that if his killing squads can find a few selected rascals abroad, Saddam Hussein of Iraq doubtless being one of them as was Fidel Castro in the Kennedy years, they may feel free to kill them in any fashion they find handy.

This echoes Mexico’s experience in 1913 when the American ambassador in Mexico City was party to a successful plot to murder Francisco Madera, the father of the revolution, in whose memory Mexican schoolchildren parade every year.

As for Iraq, we do not know the reasons for either the first war or the impending second war. Probably it is America’s perceived need to protect oil supplies, but we are too close to events to know the facts and we are, or should be, too wise to believe what we are told. Historians will find out some day.

We can only be sure the reason is not being told us now, if it is, in fact, known. We may also be sure the Iraqi civilians who will die are not going to be truly appreciative of American altruism. The world does not always run precisely the way world leaders claim it does.

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Paul St.Pierre

Box 964

Fort Langley, B.C., Canada

VIM 2S3

Phone (current) 011 526959545256