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I would like to share the following text with you, regarding the Iraqi war:
- The Speed of Dreams
- August 2004
We know, for example, that we are at war. And I'm not referring just to the real zapatista war, the one which has not totally satisfied the bloodthirstiness of some media and of some intellectuals "of the left." The ones who are so given, the first to the numbers of deaths, injured and disappeared, and the latter to translating deaths into errors "for not having done what I told them."
It is not just that. I'm also speaking about what we call the "Fourth World War" which is being waged by neoliberalism and against humanity. The one which is talking place on all fronts and everywhere, including in the mountains of the Mexican Southeast. As well as in Palestine and in Iraq, in Chechnya and in the Balkans, in Sudan and in Afghanistan, with more or less regular armies. The one which fundamentalism of both camps is carrying to all corners of the planet. The one which, taking on non-military forms, is claiming victims in Latin America, in Social Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in Oceania, in the Near East, with financial bombs that are causing entire nation states and international bodies to disappear into little pieces.
This war which, according to us (and, I insist, tendentially), is attempting to destroy/depopulate lands, to rebuild/reorder local, regional and national maps, and to create, by blood and fire, a new world cartography. This one which is leaving its signature in its path: death.
Perhaps the question "What is the speed of dreams?" should be accompanied by the question "What is the speed of nightmares?"
Just a few weeks prior to the terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004 in Spain, a Mexican political journalist-analyst (one of those to whom they give a piece of candy and then they break into ridiculous praise) was lauding Jose Maria Aznar's vision "of the State."
The analyst said that Aznar, by accompanying the United States and Great Britain in the war against Iraq, had gained promising ground for the expansion of the Spanish economy, and the only cost he had to pay was the repudiation by a "small" part of the Spanish population, "the radicals who are never lacking, even in a society as buoyant as the Spanish one," said the "analyst". He went on, noting that the only thing the Spanish had to do was to wait for a while until the reconstruction business of Iraq got underway, and then yes, they would be getting boatloads of money. In short, a dream.
It didn't take long until reality demanded the real price for Aznar's "vision of the State." That morning of March 11 the fact that Iraq is not in Iraq came true. I mean Iraq is not only in Iraq, but in the entire world. In short, the Atocha station as a synonym for nightmare.
But before the nightmare was the dream, but it was the neoliberal dream. The war against Iraq had been set in motion a good deal prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in US lands.
In order to go back to that beginning, there is nothing like a photograph...
Flat, reddish ground. It looks to be hard. Perhaps clay or something similar. A boot. Alone, without its mate. Abandoned. Without a foot to wear it. Some scattered pieces of rubble. The boot, in fact, looks like one more piece of rubble. It's all that there is in the image, and so it's the bottom of the picture which clarifies what Iraq is about. The date? September, 2004.
One can't discern whether the boot is from someone who died, if it was abandoned in flight, or if it is just a discarded boot. Nor is it known if the boot belongs to a US or British soldier, or to a resistance fighter, to an Iraqi civilian or to a civilian from another country.
Nonetheless, in spite of the lack of more information, the image presents an idea of what Bush's "postwar" Iraq is: violence, death, destruction, desolation, confusion, chaos.
All of it a neoliberal program.
If the false arguments that the war against Iraq was a war "against terrorism" have collapsed, the real reasons are now emerging, more than a year after Hussein's statue was pulled down, aided by the tanks of the US war, and a euphoric Bush erected another one to himself declaring an end to the war (Apparently the Iraqi resistance didn't listen to Bush's message: the number of US and British soldiers killed and injured has only increased since "the war ended", and now added to that are the losses of civilians from various nations.)
Neo-conservative ideology in the United States has a dream: building a neoliberal "Disneyland." In place of a "village model", a reflection of the counterinsurgency manuals of the 60s, it has to do with building a "nation model." The land of ancient Babylon was then chosen.
The dream of building an "example" of what the world should be (always according to the neoliberals) was fueled by "(...) the most prized belief of the ideological architects of the war (against Iraq): that greed is good. Not just good for them and their friends, but good for humanity and certainly good for the Iraqis. Greed creates profits, which create growth, which creates jobs, products and services and anything else which anyone could possibly need or want.
Namoi Klein: "The role of a good government, then, is to create the optimal conditions for corporations to pursue bottomless greed, so that they can, in turn, satisfy the needs of society.
"The problem is that governments, even neo-conservative governments, rarely have the opportunity to prove that their sacred theory is correct: despite their enormous ideological efforts, even George Bush's Republicans are, in their own minds, eternally sabotaged by meddling Democrats, stubborn unions and alarmist environmentalists. Iraq was going to change all this. The theory was finally going to be put into practice someplace on Earth in its most perfect and uncompromising form.
"A country of 25 million inhabitants would not be rebuilt as it had been prior to the war: it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would appear a dazzling showroom for the laissez-faire politicians, an autopia like the world had never seen." ("Baghdad Year Zero. The Pillage of Iraq After a Neo-conservative Utopia", Naomi Klein in Harper's magazine, September 2004. Translation: Julio Fernandez Baralbar).
Instead of that, Iraq is indeed an example, but an example of what is waiting for the entire world if the neoliberals win the great war, the Fourth World War: unemployment of almost 70%, industry and commerce paralyzed, an exorbitant increase in foreign debt, anti-explosion walls everywhere, the exponential growth of fundamentalism, civil war...and the exporting of terrorism to the entire planet.
I'm not going to inundate you with something that appears in the news every day: military offensives by the coalition (in a war which has "already ended"), mobilization of the Iraqi resistance, attacks, attacks on military and civilian objectives, kidnappings, executions, new offenses by the coalition, new mobilization of the Iraqi resistance, etcetera. I'm sure you can find plenty of information in the press of the entire world. The best source in Spanish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, which has among its analysts some of the most serious and best informed on the issue of Iraq.
The truth is we have already seen this video in other places...and we are continuing to see it: Chechnya, the Balkans, Palestine and Sudan are only examples of this war which destroys nations in order to try and "restructure" them into paradises...and they end up being turned into hells.
An abandoned boot on the ground in "liberated" Iraq sums up the new world order: the destruction of nations, the obliteration of any trace of humanity, reconstruction as the chaotic reordering of the ruins of a civilization.
Fragment from the essay The Speed of Dreams by Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, spokesperson of the EZLN.
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