The Iraq occupation and historical antecedent last centure.

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As the US Congress debates whether the cost of the US
"reconstruction" of Iraq should be placed on the taxpayers
of the US, through approval of the $87 billion which Bush
has requested, or if the the US-orchestrated sale of Iraq's
oil should be used to pay for this, as the Democrats argue,
the question of this debt looms larger in public discussion.

Julie Webb-Pullman laid much of this out in an excellent
essay demonstrating the transparent historical continuity
between the US occupation of Iraq today and that of
Cuba a hundred years ago. Read this if you haven't:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0309/S00093.htm

Here's how Noam Chomsky explained the political and the
moral significance of such debtes in an interview with the
radio host David Barsamian three years ago:

"There's a principle of international law, which was devised
by the U.S. over 100 years ago when it "liberated" Cuba,
which means conquered Cuba to prevent it from liberating
itself from Spain in 1898. At that time, when the U.S. took
over Cuba, it cancelled Cuba's debt to Spain on the quite
reasonable grounds that that debt was invalid since it had
been imposed on the people of Cuba without their consent,
by force, under a power relationship. That principle was
later recognized in international law, again under U.S.
initiative, as the principle of what's called "odious
debt." Debt is not valid if it's essentially imposed by
force. The Third World debt is odious debt. That's even
been recognized by the U.S. representative at the IMF,
Karen Lissaker, an international economist, who pointed
out a couple of years ago that if we were to apply the
principles of odious debt, most of the Third World debt
would disappear."

The Meaning of Seattle (July 2002)
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By David Barsamian
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/july00barsamian.htm



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