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The
Michigan Socialist | News | World
No more excuses!
By BEN BURGIS
The Michigan
Socialist
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| Spc. Jose Martinez received third-degree burns on
his face, head, arms and legs after being trapped for 20
minutes in a burning ammunition truck in
Iraq. |
ONE-BY-ONE, the lies that justified the
invasion and occupation of Iraq have come crumbling down.
No "weapons of mass destruction." No
Iraq/al-Qaeda link. No throngs of grateful Iraqis throwing
flowers at the conquering American troops. No freedom and no
democracy.
Nothing, zip, nada.
In his State of the Union address, Bush
claimed that Iraq had tried to buy uranium "from Africa."
(Does he really believe that the earth's second largest
continent is a single nation?)
Now, it is a matter of public record that the
official investigation into that particular rumor had already
been done and come back with a resounding negative
before the State of the Union speech.
The best that the regime's hard-core
apologists could come up with was to claim that it wasn't a
very important lie because it was such a small part of the
speech, "just 16 words."
Throughout the lead-up to the war, we were
assured that Iraq was a clear threat to the safety of
Americans because it possessed "weapons of mass destruction."
Since that point, the facts on the ground have left Bush and
his loyal hacks with an interesting problem.
Why on earth did the Iraqis build WMDs,
continue to produce them after the first Gulf War, go to the
absurd efforts that Bush and Powell claim that they went to in
order to hide them from the UN inspectors for 12 years, and
then not actually use them when the U.S. invaded?
Please explain in 16 words or less.
Of course, chemical weapons have been found in
Iraq. In fact, they were used during the fighting between
Iraqi and American troops.
Shortly after the invasion was over, U.S.
military spokesmen admitted to pestering reporters that the
U.S. had used Mark 77 Firebombs in Iraq, which are basically
napalm.
The military doesn't use napalm itself any
more, because all of the bad publicity caused by television
images of burning Vietnamese villages and screaming little
girls.
Mark 77 Firebombs use a different chemical
compound (benzene instead of kerosene as the starter fluid),
but the effect is identical. Given the importance of the
chemical warfare issue in the build-up to the invasion, it's
amazing that Rumsfeld and Cheney haven't been shouting the
news from the rooftops.
OF COURSE, anything goes in a "war on terror,"
because this is a "War against Absolute Evil."
Period.
Right-wing talk radio hosts still rail at any
listener who dares to criticize the sordid little adventure in
Iraq by reminding them that "something called 9/11 happened.
We we're attacked!"
The problem is that not the slightest shred of
evidence was ever presented to any one that Saddam Hussein (a
secular autocrat with a history of heavy-handed suppression of
Islamic fundamentalism) and Osama bin Laden (an Islamic "Holy
Warrior" who has never made a secret of his desire to
overthrow Hussein in favor of a Taliban-type regime) were
anything but the deadly enemies that every one who knew
anything about the region always took them to be.
At this point even the Liar-in-Chief has been
forced to admit that Iraq had nothing, absolutely nothing, to
do with the September 11 outrages. Still, his more shameless
apologists have kept up the pretense that "Iraq is a front in
the war on terror" by simply altering the meaning of words.
Any and all armed resistance to the empire is
now "terrorism," and so naturally Iraqis involved in guerilla
warfare against the invading and occupying army are
"terrorists."
By this definition, the partisans that fought
the Nazis in World War II are terrorists; the National
Liberation Front ("Viet Cong") that defeated the United States
in Vietnam was a terrorist organization; etc.
Our Glorious Leader can solemnly say that he
will never give in to terrorism, and the desire to spill more
American and Iraqi blood to stop Iraq's oil reserves from
falling into the hands of Iraqis takes on the contours of a
noble crusade.
Of course, the slightly more sophisticated
school of apologists for the rape of Iraq never attached much
importance to the phantom al-Qaeda link or to the WMD issue.
New York Times columnist Thomas L.
Friedman, perhaps that newspaper's loudest supporter of the
war during the build-up, advises the administration in his
columns (with no apparent sense of shame) to stop talking so
much about the "fake reasons for going to war" and do more to
build confidence in the "real" reasons.
The "real" reason, of course, was to free the
Iraqi people from the despotic rule of Saddam Hussein and
build a model democracy.
Of course, this is nonsense. After the first
Gulf War, there was a popular uprising against Hussein. Not
only did the U.S. government not support it, it aided and
abetted the Ba'athist dictatorship's counter-insurgency
efforts, allowing helicopter gunships into the no-fly zones to
suppress it.
Apparently, the war-planners decided that a
strong-man who sometimes disobeyed American orders was a
lesser evil to the "instability" and lost profits that could
come from a democratic uprising.
WASHINGTON HAS hardly warmed to the value of
freedom and democracy in third world nations whose natural
resources and strategic value it covets since then, and
everything that has happened in Iraq since March has confirmed
that.
Local elections have been cancelled around the
country because the wrong people might win. American troops
have frequently fired into demonstrations against the
occupation.
A Governing Council has been hand picked by
the colonial administrators, and no one seriously believes
that it has the slightest popular legitimacy or that it would
survive a day without American protection.
Independent journalists have been harassed or
even shot.
Die-hard supporters of the occupation may
pretend that these are just birthing pains of democracy. We
are told that some day, when the Iraqis are ready, they will
be allowed to elect their own leaders and determine their own
destiny. This is utter nonsense.
Brent Scowcroft let the cat out of the bag on
this question in the New York Times around the time
that the invasion was launched.
Far from being a democratic socialist or
militant antiwar protestor, Scowcroft was the current
"president's" father's National Security Adviser during the
first Gulf War, and a spokesperson of the mainstream consensus
of American foreign policy.
Scowcroft posed the question of what happens
"if you hold the first election in Iraq and the radicals win.
Do let them take over? Surely not."
This pretty much sums it up.
It takes only a very little knowledge about
the Middle East and Washington's goals there to guess what it
takes to be considered a "radical" in the eyes of people like
Scowcroft.
Surely any politician who was opposed to the
privatization of Iraq's oil reserves (11 percent of the
world's supply) would be considered a "radical," particularly
as the Bush gang have said over in over again in speeches on
Iraq that the goal of regime change is "democracy and a
free market economy."
As the U.S. continues to fight what we are
told is a front of the "war on Terror" in Iraq, it pretty well
goes without saying that any Iraqi who wanted to ask U.S.
troops to leave -- or even opposed setting up permanent
American military bases on Iraqi soil -- would be considered
one of "the radicals."
And it surely goes without saying that any one
who had reservations about immediately diplomatically
recognizing Sharon's Israel -- even as the land-grabbing on
the West Bank and the dirty war against its Palestinian
inhabitants continue -- would be considered one of "the
radicals."
Even the most die-hard Republican would have
to admit that, most likely, the majority of Iraqis have the
"wrong" view on all three subjects.
That is to say, they think they should be able
to drive around their own country without having to stop at
checkpoints and (for fear of their lives) convince foreign
soldiers that they aren't terrorists ... and they think that
their elected representatives should be able to ask said
foreign soldiers to leave.
They don't think their country's natural
resources should be sold off to foreign robber barons. And
they certainly join the rest of the Arab world in sympathizing
with the Palestinians' plight.
SO, TO SUM UP, Iraq's new colonial masters
will not let any Iraqi government take power that sides with
the overwhelming majority of the people of Iraq on basic
questions of foreign and domestic policy. Some democracy.
The fact is that you in the real world you
can't kill tens of thousands of Iraqis directly -- and over 1
million from sanctions -- and expect them to welcome you with
open arms.
Revenge for friends and family members torn
apart by cluster bombs or blown away at roadside checkpoints,
resentment of degrading house-to-house searches, a sense of
humiliation at being ordered around on the streets of your own
country by heavily armed 18-year olds who don't speak the
language and probably won't be disciplined if they kill you
for "looking suspicious", and general resentment against
colonial rule have all combined to provide a powerful
motivation for armed resistance.
Probably there is not as of yet any central
coordinating body, but a great many spontaneously formed
cells, perhaps loosely cooperating with one another when they
become aware of each other -- more or less the model of much
of the resistance to the Nazis in occupied Europe in WWII.
Writing in the UK Guardian on November
3, writer Tariq Ali says, "According to Iraqi opposition
sources, there are more than 40 different resistance
organisations. They consist of Ba'athists, dissident
communists, disgusted by the treachery of the 'official' Iraqi
Communist Party in backing the occupation, nationalists,
groups of Iraqi soldiers and officers disbanded by the
occupation, and sunni and shia religious groups."
To these must be added people like "the
fisherman" interviewed by the Associated Press, who was not an
ex-soldier (although his resistance cell did procure weapons
from sympathetic ex-military source) and was not motivated by
any of these ideologies, but was simply reacting in anger to
the humiliating experience of occupation.
What is overwhelming clear is that attempts to
"pacify" the country and stamp out resistance while the
colonial occupation is still in place are doomed in advance.
Occupations look much the same in Iraq and Palestine today as
in Algeria or Vietnam a few decades ago.
Already there have been incidents of where
farmers have had their groves of fruit trees bulldozed by the
occupying forces as "collective punishment" for failing to
inform on the resistance.
This is not an isolated incident, but a
typical example of the arrogance and brutality of the
occupation. In turn, this sort of heavy handed repression
fuels anger.
Already, there are 30-35 attacks a day. The
U.S. (and the British, and their other junior partners) are so
heavily armed that the proportion of American deaths in these
attacks is comparatively slight, but the death toll of Iraqi
resistance fighters and civilians who happen to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time is staggering.
Journalists are not allowed into the
hospitals, but the UK Independent's Robert Fisk
estimates that the weekly death toll on the Iraqi side is in
the hundreds.
THE AMERICAN death toll is not that high, but
any price is too high for this.
Several hundred Americans -- mostly
working-class kids suckered into the military by economic
incentives and by lies about its real purpose -- have already
come back in body bags for the sake of oil revenues and
Halliburton reconstruction projects.
The cronyism and corruption of the occupation
is such that while money flows freely into the coffers of
corporations with such contracts, the troops are often left
without adequate water or protective gear in 100-degree
heat.
Many soldiers and their families have begun to
see through the lies that under-girded the invasion and
occupation, and to realize that the Iraqis see them as
conquerors, not as liberators.
Hundreds of military families, getting angry
letters and e-mails from children and siblings whose lives are
being thrown away in Iraq, have gotten involved in the
anti-war movement. They are in the advance guard of the
increasing number of ordinary Americans wondering how much
blood and treasure will be wasted in Iraq, as the death toll
mounts and as basic social services are cut across the
nation.
Antiwar sentiment in the Black and Chicano
communities -- which, as superoppressed castes within the
American working class, are disproportionately represented in
the military -- has never been higher.
Commanders in Iraq have had to crack down on
their troops making bitterly antiwar comments in the media. As
the death toll mounts, and as the lies drop away until there
are no excuses left, antiwar comments are liable to turn into
out-and-out resistance à la Vietnam.
It is very hard indeed to put a stop to these
comments, because the soldiers are simply expressing a reality
staring them in the face.
Private Jason Ring, stationed in Falluja,
Iraq, put it point blank to a reporter from the San
Francisco Chronicle. "The people here don't want us to be
here. And guess what? We don't want to be here either. So why
are we still here?"
That's a damn good question.
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