Unacceptable regimes in Iraq and the United
States
Occupied
zones
By Howard zinn
Le Monde Diplomatique
August 2005
There are killings every day in
Iraq. Occupying troops, diplomats, aid workers and media people are
killed, as are Iraqis, in far greater numbers. But President George Bush’s
war is not only against opponents in Iraq and the
Middle East:
it is a war against his fellow Americans.
IT has quickly become
clear that Iraq is not a liberated country, but an occupied country. We
became familiar with that term during the second world war. We talked of
German-occupied France,
German-occupied Europe. And after
the war we spoke of Soviet-occupied Hungary, Czechoslovakia, eastern
Europe. It was the Nazis, the Soviets, who occupied countries. The United
States liberated them from occupation.
Now we are the occupiers.
True, we liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein, but not from us. Just as in
1898 we liberated Cuba from Spain, but not from us. Spanish tyranny was
overthrown, but the US established a military base in Cuba, as we are
doing in Iraq. US corporations moved into Cuba, just as Bechtel and
Halliburton and the oil corporations are moving into Iraq. The US framed
and imposed, with support from local accomplices, the constitution that
would govern Cuba, just as it has drawn up, with help from local political
groups, a constitution for Iraq. Not a liberation. An occupation.
And it is an ugly
occupation. On 7 August 2003 the New York Times reported that
General Sanchez in Baghdad was worried about the Iraqi reaction to
occupation. Pro-US Iraqi leaders were giving him a message, as he put it:
“When you take a father in front of his family and put a bag over his head
and put him on the ground you have had a significant adverse effect on his
dignity and respect in the eyes of his family.” (That’s very perceptive.)
On 19 July 2003, shortly
before the discovery of authenticated cases of torture at Abu Ghraib
prison in Baghdad, CBS News reported: “Amnesty International is looking
into a number of cases of suspected torture in Iraq by American
authorities. One such case involves Khraisan al-Aballi. Al-Aballi’s house
was razed by American soldiers, who came in shooting and arrested him and
his 80-year-old father. They shot and wounded his brother . . . The three
men were taken away . . . Khraisan says his interrogators stripped him
naked and kept him awake for more than a week, either standing or on his
knees, bound hand and foot, with a bag over his head. Khraisan said he
told his captors, ‘I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what you want.
I have nothing.’ ‘I asked them to kill me’, says Khraisan. After eight
days, they let him and his father go . . . US officials did not respond to
repeated requests to discuss the case.”
We know that fighting
during the US offensive in November 2004 destroyed three- quarters of the
town of Falluja (population 360,000), killing hundreds of its inhabitants.
The objective of the operation was to cleanse the town of the terrorist
bands acting as part of a “Ba’athist conspiracy”.
But we should recall that
on 16 June 2003, barely six weeks after President George Bush had claimed
victory in Iraq, two reporters for the Knight-Ridder newspaper group wrote
this about the Falluja area: “In dozens of interviews during the past five
days, most residents across the area said there was no Ba’athist or Sunni
conspiracy against US soldiers, there were only people ready to fight
because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had
been humiliated by home searches and road stops . . . One woman said,
after her husband was taken from their home because of empty wooden crates
which they had bought for firewood, that the US is guilty of terrorism.”
According to the
reporters, “Residents in At Agilia, a village north of Baghdad, said two
of their farmers and five others from another village were killed when US
soldiers shot them while they were watering their fields of sunflowers,
tomatoes and cucumbers.”
Soldiers who are set down
in a country where they were told they would be welcomed as liberators and
find they are surrounded by a hostile population become fearful and
trigger-happy. On 4 March nervous, frightened GIs manning a roadblock
fired on the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, just released by
kidnappers, and an intelligence service officer, Nicola Calipari, whom
they killed.
We have all read reports
of US soldiers angry at being kept in Iraq. An ABC News reporter in Iraq
recently described how a sergeant had pulled him aside, saying: “I’ve got
my own Most Wanted List.” He was referring to the deck of cards the US
government published featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other members
of the former Iraqi regime. “The aces in my deck,” he added, “are Paul
Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz.”
Such sentiments are
becoming known to the US public, as are the feelings of many deserters who
are refusing to return to Iraq after home leave. In May 2003 a Gallup poll
reported that only 13% of the US public thought the war was going badly.
In two years the situation has radically changed. According to a poll
published by the New York Times and CBS News on 17 June, 51% now
think the US should not have invaded Iraq or become involved in the war.
Some 59% disapprove of Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq. It is
also interesting to note that polls taken among African-Americans have
consistently shown 60% opposition to the war.
But more ominous, perhaps,
than the occupation of Iraq
is the occupation of the US. I wake
up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied
country, that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers
trying to cross the border, dying in the attempt to evade immigration
officials (trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the US in 1848),
are not alien to me. Those 20 million people who are not citizens and
therefore, by the Patriot Act, are subject to being pulled out of their
homes and held indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional rights, are
not alien to me.
But this small group of
men who have taken power in Washington (Bush, Richard Cheney, Rumsfeld and
the rest of their clique), they are alien to me.
I wake up thinking: the US
is in the grip of a president who was first elected in November 2000,
under questionable circumstances and largely thanks to a Supreme Court
decision. He remains, since his re-election last November, a president
surrounded by thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or
here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing
about what happens to the earth, the water, the air, or what kind of world
will be inherited by our children and grandchildren.
More Americans are
beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that something is terribly
wrong, that this is not what we want our country to be. More and more
every day the lies are being exposed. And then there is the largest lie,
that everything the US does is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a
“war on terrorism”, ignoring the fact that war is itself terrorism, that
barging into people’s homes and taking away family members and subjecting
them to torture is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries
does not give us more but less security.
You get some sense of what
this government means by the war on terrorism when you examine what the
secretary of defence, Rumsfeld (a face on the sergeant’s most wanted
list), said when he was addressing Nato ministers in Brussels on the eve
of the invasion of Iraq. He was explaining the threats to the West
(imagine - we still talk of “the West” as some holy entity, as if the US,
having alienated most western countries, including France and Germany, was
not now wooing eastern countries, and trying to persuade them its sole aim
was to liberate the Iraqis, just as it liberated them from Soviet
control).
Rumsfeld, explaining the
“threats” and why they are invisible and unidentifiable said: “There are
things that we know. And then there are known unknowns. That is to say
there are things that we now know that we don’t know. But there are also
unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know . . . That
is, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence . . . Simply
because you do not have evidence that something exists does not mean that
you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.”
We are fortunate to have
Rumsfeld to clarify such points. That explains why the Bush
administration, unable to capture the perpetrators of the 11 September
attacks, went ahead and invaded Afghanistan in December 2001, killing
thousands of people and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes.
Yet it still does not know where the criminals are. It also explains why
the government, not knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein was hiding,
invaded and bombed Iraq in March 2003, disregarding the United Nations,
killing thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorising the
population. That explains why the US government, not knowing who was and
was not a terrorist, confined hundreds of people in Guantánamo under such
conditions that 18 have tried to commit suicide.
The Amnesty International
Report 2005, notes: “The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become
the gulag of our times . . . When the most powerful country in the world
thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence
to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity.”
The report highlights US
attempts to play down the importance of torture: the US is trying to
redefine torture to create loopholes in the current ban. But, the report
stresses, “torture gains ground when official condemnation of it is less
than absolute”. Despite the public indignation prompted by torture at Abu
Ghraib, neither the US government nor Congress have called for an
independent inquiry.
The “war on terrorism” is
not only a war on innocent people in other countries, but is a war on the
people of the US. A war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living.
The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over
to the super-rich. The lives of the young are being stolen.
The war in Iraq will
undoubtedly claim many more victims, not only abroad but also on US
territory. The Bush administration maintains that, unlike the Vietnam war,
this conflict is not causing many casualties (1). True enough, less than
2,000 service men and women have lost their lives in the fighting. But
when the war finally ends, the number of its indirect victims, through
disease or mental disorders, will increase steadily. After the Vietnam war
veterans reported congenital malformations in their children, caused by
Agent Orange, a highly toxic herbicide sprayed indiscriminately over the
country.
Officially there were only
a few hundred losses in the Gulf war of 1991, but the US Gulf War Veterans
Association recently reported 8,000 deaths among its numbers in the past
10 years. Some 200,000 veterans, out of 600,000 who took part, have
registered a range of complaints due to the weapons and munitions used in
combat. We have yet to see the long-term effects of depleted uranium on
those currently stationed in Iraq.
What is our job? To point
all this out. Our faith is that human beings only support violence and
terror when they have been lied to. And when they learn the truth, as
happened in the course of the Vietnam war, they will turn against the
government. We have the support of the rest of the world. The US cannot
indefinitely ignore the 10 million people who protested around the world
on 15 February 2003.
The power of government,
whatever weapons it possesses, whatever money it has at its disposal, is
fragile. When it loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days
are numbered. We need to engage in whatever actions appeal to us. There is
no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the
history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points
in history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress.
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