In reality there were no more than 10,000 workers from the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, brought directly from job sites to mill around while Republican politicians and union bureaucrats delivered speeches in support of the war. American flags were passed out, but there were few supportive signs or placards. Chants consisted simply of “USA, USA.” At best the demonstrators were responding to the leaflets distributed to them by the organizers asking them to “show support for our men and women serving in the armed forces.”

The choice of site was sinister, deliberately promoting the lie that the invasion of Iraq was somehow justified by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. From the bellicose rhetoric spewed from the speakers’ platform, no one would have known that none of the alleged attackers were Iraqis. Nor would they know that the Bush administration had been forced to acknowledge this fact prior to the invasion. This was an exploitation of the deaths of 3,000 people in order to whip up support for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, and ten times that number of injured, most with permanent injuries.

No one of course spoke about the 200,000 veterans of Bush Senior’s war against Iraq still suffering the aftereffects of exposure to American toxic weapons, chemicals and depleted uranium.

“The war started here on Sept. 11, 2001,” New York Governor Pataki told the crowd, adding that Saddam Hussein’s statues should be melted down and turned into girders for new construction on the site.

Patrick Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association bellowed: “An injury to one is injury to all. We are sending a message to the world. You attack one of us, you attack all of us. And we attack back.”

This was his justification for the massacre of women and children in a virtually defenseless country, whose numbers are not going to be counted by the Pentagon for spurious “legal” reasons.

An entire generation of young Iraqi young men has been exterminated by million-dollar uranium-headed missiles, cluster bombs and “mothers of all bombs” over the past 13 years. Not since the European rape of Africa or the Indian wars in America has there been such an unequal conflict.

With a population more than 10 times as large as Iraq’s and a military budget that is 3,000 times greater, Washington and London are now distributing purple hearts and Victoria crosses for getting a starved and impoverished people to kneel and beg.

And the score has not been “evened,” at least not yet. Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iran must also meet the same fate and a million more “uncivilized Arabs” have to be sacrificed at the altar of “ground zero” before the idols of America, Israel and Britain can be propitiated.