Apology accepted, the war rages on

This past April, in the midst of the ongoing Iraq War, a number of Duke students staged an on-campus traffic blockade to demand an end to "business as usual" while American tax dollars supported an unjust war being fought abroad. Many bystanders issued words of support, while a few were even inspired to join the human chain that blocked Duke buses from entering Chapel Drive. Others, however, were simply annoyed at being forced to walk to class in the rain. The Chronicle Editorial board denounced the event "because the war in Iraq [had] essentially ended" the previous day.

 In hindsight we can see that the war was anything but over. It was just getting started. Since Bush's proclamation on May 1st that the major fighting had ended, at least 140 American troops have died---more than in the entire period before the president's statement. Yes, the war rages on. And it remains as unjust as ever.

 Let us begin with the popular justifications for going to war: to diffuse the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and to liberate the Iraqi people from his brutal regime. To date, no WMDs have been uncovered. However, the anti-war claim was not that Iraq possessed no dangerous weapons. Instead, the assertion maintained all along was that even if Iraq did possess such weapons, their insignificant quantity combined with the interests of Iraq's power-hungry then-dictator, Saddam Hussein, would never lead him to stage an attack upon the U.S.

 Concerning the supposed "liberation" of the Iraqi people, Americans have already seen the violent reality of this failed ideal. Weekly attacks upon U.S. armed forces, their vehicles, and the Americorporate-led "rebuilding" projects---combined with numerous newspaper interviews with Iraqi citizens---have aptly demonstrated the Iraqi people's disdain for the American occupation of their land.

 Instead, the Iraqi resistance has displayed an acute understanding of their oppressors' aims and the complicity of their collaborators. The list of collaborators, judging from the recent attack on the UN compound in Baghdad that killed over 20 people, includes the United Nations, which authorized 13 years of outrageous sanctions on the people of Iraq.

 The United Nation's own reports document the deaths of well over 1 million Iraqis--more than 500,000 of them children---as a direct result of the sanctions. The attack on the compound seems to be a bitter reminder that the Iraqis will not feed from the very hand that maims them.

 Among the real motivations for the American attack in Iraq is the thinly-veiled arrangement of government hand-outs to American corporations in the form of "rebuilding projects." The American project in Iraq is taking the form of a test-lab for absolute free-trade policies and the total privatization of national resources. The "corporate invasion" of Iraq began well before the military one; before U.S. troops had even landed on Iraqi soil, USAID was requesting reconstruction bids from an exclusive list of American corporations with strong ties to the Bush administration. Obviously, one of the hottest Iraqi resources up for grabs was oil. Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, received the largest share of that market, netting a $77 million contract to distribute Iraq's oil.

 This bidding process was open exclusively to American firms strongly linked to the Bush administration. Foreign companies, non-governmental groups, and even the United Nations were prohibited from taking part, let alone the Iraqis themselves, in accordance with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's philosophy that, "Oil is too important a resource to be left in the hands of the Arabs."