The Anti-Empire
Report
Some things you need to know before the world ends
June 21, 2006
by William
Blum
Great Moments in the History of
Imperialism
National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR's
Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite cleric, a man
who was described in the NPR report as "a moderate" and as a person trying
to lead his Shiite followers into practicing peace and reconciliation. He
had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into exile. Jenkins asked him:
"What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?" The cleric
replied that he'd "rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way it is
now."[1]
When one considers what the people of Iraq have experienced
as a result of the American bombings, invasion, regime change, and occupation
since 2003, should this attitude be surprising, even from such an individual?
I was moved to compile a list of the many kinds of misfortune which have
fallen upon the heads of the Iraqi people as a result of the American liberation
of their homeland. It's depressing reading, and you may not want to read
it all, but I think it's important to have it summarized in one place.
Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study
revealed that 84% of the higher education establishments have been "destroyed,
damaged and robbed".
The intellectual stock has been further depleted as many
thousands of academics and other professionals have fled abroad or have been
mysteriously kidnapped or assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands, perhaps
a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated middle class,
have left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving death threats.
"Now I am isolated," said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave.
"I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can
come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."[2]
Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of
the public's health. Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis
are rampaging through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health
centers, once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged
by the war and looting.
The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi
children were suffering from "dangerous deficiencies of protein". Deaths
from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly amongst children,
already a problem because of the 12 years of US-imposed sanctions, have increased
as poverty and disorder have made access to a proper diet and medicines ever
more difficult.
Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently
from unexploded US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs
are a class of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random
scourge on civilians, especially children.
Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance,
float in the Iraqi air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever,
and infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed
babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster" planes,
which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000 rounds.
And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.
The American military has assaulted hospitals to prevent
them from giving out casualty figures from US bombing attacks that contradicted
official US figures, which the hospitals had been in the habit of doing.
Numerous homes have been broken into by US forces, the
men taken away, the women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many
occasions, the family has said that the American soldiers helped themselves
to some of the family's money. Iraq has had to submit to a degrading national
strip search.
Destruction and looting of the country's ancient heritage,
perhaps the world's greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected
by the US military, busy protecting oil facilities.
A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside
of the political sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular
in the Middle East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more
prevails.
Women's rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing
danger under harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas.
There is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical
attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend.
Men can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing
outside in shorts.
Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has
become a serious issue.
Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much
of the security they had enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have
emigrated.
A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government
feature a wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psychological,
emotional; painful, degrading, humiliating; leading to mental breakdown,
death, suicide; a human-rights disaster area.
Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by US forces
since the invasion, but only a very tiny portion of them have been convicted
of any crime.
US authorities have recruited members of Saddam Hussein's
feared security service to expand intelligence gathering and root out the
resistance.
Unemployment is estimated to be around fifty percent.
Massive layoffs of hundreds of thousands of Baathist government workers and
soldiers by the American occupation authority set the process in motion early
on. Later, many, desperate for work, took positions tainted by a connection
to the occupation, placing themselves in grave danger of being kidnapped
or murdered.
The cost of living has skyrocketed. Income levels have
plummeted.
The Kurds of Northern Iraq evict Arabs from their homes.
Arabs evict Kurds in other parts of the country.
Many people were evicted from their homes because they
were Baathist. US troops took part in some of the evictions. They have also
demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one of their buddies.
When US troops don't find who they're looking for, they
take who's there; wives have been held until the husband turns himself in,
a practice which Hollywood films stamped in the American mind as being a
particular evil of the Nazis; it's also collective punishment of civilians
and is forbidden under the Geneva Convention.
Continual American bombing assaults on neighborhoods
has left an uncountable number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges,
roads, and everything else that goes into the making of modern civilized
life.
Haditha, Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi ... names that will
live in infamy for the wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human
beings and human rights carried out in those places by US forces.
At one time or another, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
have been forced to become displaced refugees because their city was made
uninhabitable by American air and ground attacks, as in Fallujah.
The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal,
and reliable electricity have all generally been below pre-invasion levels,
producing constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115
degrees. To add to the misery, people wait all day in the heat to purchase
gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country's chief source of revenue,
being less than half its previous level.
The water and sewage system and other elements of the
infrastructure had been purposely (sic) destroyed by US bombing in the first
Gulf War of 1991. By 2003, the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing
the most essential parts of it. Then came Washington's renewed bombing.
Civil war, death squads, kidnaping, car bombs, rape,
each and every day ... Iraq has become the most dangerous place on earth.
American soldiers and private security companies regularly kill people and
leave the bodies lying in the street; US-trained Iraqi military and police
forces kill even more, as does the insurgency. An entire new generation is
growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this will poison the Iraqi psyche
for many years to come.
US intelligence and military police officers often free
dangerous criminals in return for a promise to spy on insurgents.
Iraqis protesting about various issues have been shot
by US forces on several occasions.
At other times, the US has killed, wounded and jailed reporters
from Al Jazeera television, closed the station's office, bombed the office,
and banned it from certain areas because occupation officials didn't like
the news the station was reporting. The Al Jazeera office was bombed even
though the staff had made a point of giving the US their exact GPS coordinates.
Other newspapers as well have been closed for what they have printed.The
Pentagon has planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to serve
propaganda purposes.
But freedom has indeed reigned -- for the great
multinationals to extract everything they can from Iraq's resources and labor
without the hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations
or worker protections. The orders of the day have been privatization,
deregulation, and laissez faire for Halliburton and other Western corporations.
Iraqi businesses have been almost entirely shut out though they are not without
abilities, as reflected in the infrastructure rebuilding effort following
the US bombing of 1991.
Yet, despite the fact that it would be difficult to name
a single area of Iraqi life which has improved as a result of the American
actions, when the subject is Iraq and the person I'm having a discussion
with has no other argument left to defend US policy there, at least at the
moment, I may be asked:
"Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein
is out of power?"
And I say: "No".
And the person says: "No?"
And I say: "No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to
correct a knee problem and the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg,
what would you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no
longer have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam
problem."
And many Iraqis actually supported him.
"Moderation in temper is always a virtue; moderation
in principle is always a vice." Thomas Paine
Recently, Al Gore appeared at a bookstore in downtown Washington signing
copies of his new book on environmental concerns, when who should show up
on the line of people looking for a signed copy but Ralph Nader. Gore stood
up and said: "Nice to see you! How you doing? I'm really so grateful to you
for coming by." After more pleasantries, Gore inscribed the book: "For my
friend, Ralph Nader. With respect, Al Gore."
Two men in line could not resist remarking to Nader that
if not for him Gore might have won the election in 2000. "Thanks to you,
we had Bush all these years," said one. "How many are dead in Iraq because
of that?"[3] What Nader replied has not been reported.
The idea that Ralph Nader cost the Democrats the 2000
election will likely persist forever, so let me state for all eternity, speaking
for myself and for the millions like me: The choice facing us was not Ralph
Nader or Albert Gore. The choice facing us was Ralph Nader or not voting
at all. If Nader had not been on the ballot, we would have stayed home. The
millions who voted for Nader and the millions more who stayed home demanded
an inspiring alternative to the Republicans; even a halfway inspiring alternative
would have sufficed for most of us. The Democrats did not, and still do not,
offer any kind of alternative, particularly on foreign policy. On foreign
policy the two major parties are completely indistinguishable. For all intents
and purposes, the United States is a one-party state in all but name -- the
War Party. The occasional minor points of difference which arise are Democratic
artificial constructs created for election purposes, and in these cases the
Democrats often take a position to the right of their Republican "opponents",
like calling for tougher measures in the war on terrorism or against Iran.
This is the case with the Democrats whether we're speaking of the conservatives
amongst them, or the moderates, or the liberals. And this has long been the
case. Here is an excerpt from a talk delivered in 1965 by Carl Oglesby, President
of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), at an anti-Vietnam War rally
in Washington:
The original commitment in Vietnam was made by
President Truman, a mainstream liberal.
It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate
liberal. It was intensified by the late
President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men
who now engineer that war -- those
who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons,
and tally the dead: Bundy,
McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson]
himself. They are not moral
monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all
liberals.[4]
Eat the Rich. Share your recipes.
With Bill Gates's announcement that he'll be phasing out his day-to-day
participation in Microsoft, the media has carried a lot of adulatory stories
about the Wunderkind, who became the world's youngest self-made billionaire
at age 31. I do not mean to detract from Gates's accomplishments when I point
out that for him to have become a billionaire just six years after introducing
the MS-DOS 1.0 operating system, Microsoft had to be charging a lot more
-- an awful lot more -- for its software than it had to based on the company's
costs.
There are those, enamored by the philosophy, practice,
and folklore of free enterprise and rugged individualism, who will declare:
"More power to the guy! He deserved every penny of it!"
There are others, enamored by the vision of a more equitable
society, who question how the current distribution of property and wealth
can reasonably be said to derive from any sort of democratic process. By
the 21st century, American society should have evolved beyond two percent
with breathtaking wealth and seventy-five percent with a daily struggle for
a decent life, including the middle class. In fact, along such lines we're
regressing.
This is almost heresy to many Americans, who are
unwilling to tamper with political and economic arrangements, though they
have no qualms about meddling with people's sex lives, women's bodies, and
other moral issues. Greed and selfishness are natural, they insist, and have
to be catered to.
But if the system should cater to selfishness because
it's natural, why not cater to aggression which many of the same people claim
is natural?
NOTES
[1] NPR, "Day to Day", June 6, 2006
[2] New York Times, May 19, 2006
[3] Washington Post, June 16, 2006, p.2
[4] November 27, 1965, copy of Oglesby's speech in my possession
William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
<www.killinghope.org >
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