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 THE IRAQI BORROWED KETTLESlavoj Zizek 
In order to illustrate the weird logic of dreams, Freud evoked a joke about the borrowedkettle: when accused by a friend that you returned him a borrowed kettle broken, yourreply is: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) thekettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistentarguments, of course, confirms
 per negationem 
what it endeavours to deny – that I returnedyou a broken kettle… Did the same inconsistency not characterize the justification of theattack on Iraq in early 2003? (1) Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction which pose a “clear and present danger” not only to his neighbours and Israel, butalready to all democratic Western states. (2) So what to do when, in September 2003,David Kay, the CIA official in charge of the search for weapons of mass destruction inIraq, had to concede that no such weapons have so far been found (after more thanthousand US specialists spent months looking for them)? One moves to the next level:even if Saddam does not have any WMD, he was involved with Al-Qaeda in the 9/11attack, so he should be punished as part of the justified revenge for 9/11 and in order toprevent further such attacks. (3) However, again, in September 2003, even Bush had toconcede: “We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11September attacks.” So what to do after this painful concession, with regard to the factthat a recent opinion poll found that nearly 70% of Americans believed the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks? Next level: even if there is no proof of the link  with Al-Qaeda, Saddam’s regime is a ruthless dictatorial regime, a threat to its neighboursand a catastrophe to its own people, and this fact alone provides reason enough to toppleit… The problem, again, was that there were TOO MANY reasons for the attack. Which, then, was the real reason? Strangely, there effectively were three: (1) asincere ideological belief that the US are bringing to other nations democracy andprosperity; (2) the urge to brutally assert and signal the unconditional US hegemony; (3)the control of the Iraqi oil reserves. Each of the three levels has a relative autonomy of its own and should not be dismissed as a mere deceiving semblance. Recall the mostfundamental American reaction (at least) since the Vietnam war: we just try to be good,to help others, to bring peace and prosperity, and look what we get in return… The
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fundamental insight of movies like John Ford's
Searchers 
and Michael Scorcese's
Taxi Driver 
is today, with the global American ideological offensive, more relevant than ever –  we witness the resurgence of the figure of the »quiet American,« a naïve benevolent agent who sincerely wants to bring to the Vietnamese democracy and Western freedom – it isjust that his intentions totally misfire, or, as Graham Greene put it: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” The underlying presupposition is the old one: under our skin, if we scratch thesurface, we are all Americans. That is our true desire – so, all that is nededed is just togive people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints, and they will join usin our ideological dream… No wonder that, in February 2003, an Americanrepresentative used the word »capitalist revolution« to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their revolution around the entire world. No wonder they moved from»containing« the enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the U.S. which is now, as thedefunct U.S.S.R. was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. WhenBush recently said, “Freedom is not America’s gift to other nations, it is God’s gift tohumanity,” this apparent modestly nonetheless, in the best totalitarian fashion, concealsits very opposite. Recall the standard claim of a totalitarian leader how, in himself, he isnothing at all – his strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, heonly expresses their deepest strivings; the catch, of course, is that, in this case, those whooppose the leader do not only oppose him, they also oppose the deepest and nobleststrivings of the people… And does the same not hold for Bush’s claim? If freedomeffectively were to be just America’s gift to other nations, things would have been mucheasier – those opposing the US politics would be doing just that, opposing the politics of the US as a single Nation-State. However, if freedom is God’s gift to humanity (and – therein resides the hidden proviso – if the US perceives itself as the chosen instrumentfor distributing this gift to all the nations of the world), then those who oppose the USpolitics are
eo ipso
rejecting the noblest gift of God to humanity… As for the second reason, in their recent
The War Over Iraq 
, William Kristol andLawrence F. Kaplan wrote, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there./…/ We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. /…/ This is a decisive moment. /…/It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the MiddleEast and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with it: it is effectively the future of 
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the international community that is at stake now - the new rules that will regulate it, whatthe new world order will be.Re oil, as it was reported in the media in June 2003, Paul Wolfowitz not only dismissed the WMD issue as a "bureaucratic" excuse for war – he now even openly admits that oil was the true motive: "Let's look at it simply. The most importantdifference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice inIraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.« And it seems obvious that the key factor wasthe middle one: using Iraq as a pretext or exemplary case to stake the coordinates of theNew World Order, to assert the right of the US to preventive strikes and thus to elevateits status into that of the unique global policing power. The message was not addressedto the Iraqi people, but primarily to all of us witnessing the war – we were its trueideological and political targets. At this point, one should ask the naïve question: the US as a global policeman - why not? The post-ColdWar situation effectively called for some global power to fill inthe void. The problem resides elsewhere: recall the common perception of the US as anew Roman Empire.
The problem with today’s US is not that it is a new global Empire, but that it is NOT, i.e., that, while pretending to be, it continues to act as a Nation-State, ruthlessly pursuing its interests.
It is as the guideline of the recent US politics is a weird reversal of the well-known motto of the ecologists:
act globally, think locally 
. This contradiction is bestexemplified by the two-sided pressure the US was exerting on Serbia in the Summer of 2003: the US representatives simultaneously demanded of the Serbian government todeliver the suspected war criminals to the Hague court (in accordance with the logic of the global Empire which demands a trans-state global judicial institution) AND to signthe bilateral treaty with the US obliging Serbia not to deliver to any internationalinstitution (i.e., to the SAME Hague court) US citizens suspected of war crimes or othercrimes against humanity (in accordance with the Nation-State logic) – no wonder theSerb reaction is one of perplexed fury… The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1
st
, 2002 in The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC prosecution forhuman rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape, and sexual slavery.Or, as Kofi Annan put it: “There must be a recognition that we are all members of onehuman family. We have to create new institutions. This is one of them. This is anotherstep forward in humanity's slow march toward civilization.” However, while human
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