(Revised 3/24/05, wee hours, to put a fine tip to various points.)
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Bragging about Butchery. U.S. media were uncharacteristically exulting in militarism yesterday, bragging about slaughtering Iraqi insurgents who "ambushed" a military convoy. The U.S. never "ambushes" anyone, of course. We 'attack' or 'defend' but never "amBush", because that would be dishonorable, and we are nothing if not honorable. We kill for good reasons. The "enemy" kills for bad reasons. But people still end up dead, don't they?
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Mohatma Ghandi said, "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
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The next day, "our side" bragged again about successful butchery. The Iraqi armed forces (we are told, as tho that is to be believed), with U.S. air 'support', killed over 80 insurgents at a supposed training camp not far from Baghdad. The 'fact' that this attack was instituted by the Iraqi government — which, curiously, does not yet exist, the many parties not having yet agreed to a President or Prime Minister, much less having held so much as a single legislative session — is supposed to reassure us that the death being visited upon Iraqis by Lake Tharthar was both necessary and just. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't.
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I thought back today to a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie from 1988 called April Morning, about "the shot heard round the world", the armed clash between American and British forces on April 19, 1775 in Lexington, Massachusetts, that marked the beginning of the American Revolution. It showed honorable American defenders of their rights standing on a lawn beside a church, muskets in hand, facing a British force equally unprotected. Somebody — no one knows who, on which side — fired a shot, and then all hell broke loose. Americans simply standing still were gunned down by the invaders, and the adult hero, played by Tommy Lee Jones, was killed by our enemies, the British.
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The Americans ran for cover, then immediately fell into guerrilla mode, following the column of invaders from the sides and rear, and shooting them dead at every opportunity, while seeking cover behind trees and a roadside wall. The British sent out attacking troops to hunt down the snipers in the woods, and the film's young hero, played by Chad Lowe, is almost found and killed. But he escapes, the Americans continue to harry the invaders, and the British return to Boston much reduced in number and chastened by their first taste of American lead.
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I can't help but think of the military convoys the U.S. sends thru Iraq as that column of British invaders, and the Iraqi insurgents as the brave Americans shooting at them to drive them out of their country.
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We have become the British. The Iraqis are the Americans, fighting for their homes against a foreign invader. It is utterly apt that the Bush Administration's prime ally is the British, because the British-descended American ruling class is British in its mindset: we are the source of enlightenment for the world — White Man's Burden — and if we have to create an Empire of Democracy by killing everyone who stands in our way, we will indeed drag the world into the 21st Century even if we have to kill millions and destroy entire countries.
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The British Empire lost only one major war in its entire history of brutality against the people and rape of the resources of a quarter of the planet. That was their war against Us. But now we are Them, so perhaps They won after all.
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We, who started as enemies of imperialism, have become the most arrogant and vicious empire on Earth, and not even for our own sake, because our empire in Iraq is costing us a fortune, way over $200 billion and counting, at the rate of billions more a month, all for Israel, not our own country, nor even a Christian country. We are (wrongly) called "crusaders" by Islamists, and the crimes our Government commits in our name blacken the reputation of Christianity and make the situation of the co-religionists of the great majority of Americans more difficult across the Moslem world. We are endangering Christians across the Mideast, not just Americans traveling abroad, or even just going to work in the United States (as in the (former) World Trade Center). We, Americans and Christians more generally, are more endangered today because of the war against Iraq and Islam than we have ever been — and all because of Israel. Has there ever been a smaller group that caused more trouble for the entire planet than the Jews of Israel and their Zionist supporters in world Jewry? I can't think of a one, and I know something about history.
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There are only 18 million Jews on the entire planet Earth, yet they have caused more trouble than 1.3 billion Chinese, a billion Indians, a billion and a half Catholics, 400 million Latin Americans, or any other number of any other group you can name.
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For some reason, which I do not understand, the British and the British-descended American ruling class seem to identify tightly with the Jews, seeing themselves as The Chosen People of God, entitled to Lord it over the rest of humanity.
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In regard to Iraq, our British-surnamed and British-minded ruling class put forward first one excuse — "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (remember that? it seems a long time since we've heard anything about that) — and then, when the first was shown to be a huge and shameless lie, another: 'making the world safe for democracy'. Where have we heard that load of crap before?
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Ah, that's right: World War I. When we entered World War I, we didn't understand that it would later be given a roman numeral. We thought — or were told — that we were going into "the war to end war", and that this "Great War" would be the LAST war, ever! Didn't work out that way, did it? Instead, the First World War produced the Second, an even worse war!
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Now we are in an endless war, a "Permanent War" as envisioned and embraced by Radical Zionists, in which Christians kill Moslems to make the world safe for Jews. Of course, they never put it that way. That's just the way it is.
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We are told that even tho it turns out that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction, and even tho Iraq was never really a danger to us — so we never had any justification for attacking Iraq in a war of aggression rather than self-defense — it doesn't matter. We have to forget about the past (the lies) and face "the fact" that we "can't just withdraw" and let Iraqis sort things out for themselves. No, we're to believe that we are HELPING the Iraqis avoid even WORSE devastation. How can that be?
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How much worse could it GET? We destroyed their infrastructure — bridges, highways, water treatment plants, sewage treatment plants, electrical generating stations and transmission lines, schools, hospitals — and killed literally uncounted tens of thousands of them, and continue to kill more every day. Two years after the invasion, they still don't have reliable electricity nor sewage treatment. They can't rebuild an economy without electricity, and their kids have to go to schools whose playgrounds are flooded by untreated sewage! Would we want our kids to go to such schools? What ever happened to "As you would have others do to you, so too do to others"?
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Our presence is a constant irritant that puts a significant portion of the Iraqi people in a state of war not against each other but against us — a war in which they (the "True Americans", anti-imperial defenders of their home against "The New British", US) continue to die. There are 400 insurgent attacks a WEEK in Iraq, week after week after week. How is our continued occupation bringing peace? protecting ANYone? rebuilding Iraq? Iraq's main resource, oil, cannot even fuel the nation's rebuilding, because insurgents are blowing holes in pipelines and destroying other key facilities, and there's so much violence across the country that the government cannot focus on protecting the pipelines.
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It is a truism of guerrilla warfare, especially in a landscape as desolate as Iraq's (no dense forests nor high mountains filled with caves to conceal insurgents from observation and attack), that a guerrilla force cannot function without at least passive assistance from the surrounding population. The current insurgency relies upon people not turning against them, not turning them in to the government or American invaders. Isn't it thus far more likely than not that if we got the hell OUT of there, Iraqis would STOP supporting an insurgency against their own elected government and, tired of war and destruction, join together to repair the damage, make peace between communities, and work together to rebuild their own country?
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The insurgency at its strongest was never strong enuf to destroy a working Iraqi government, but the various groups in Iraq seem unable to form a working government as long as we are there. Iraqis furious at foreign invasion and continuing occupation by "Zionist infidels" must regard any Iraqi government in cahoots with the invaders as quislings to be fought to the death. But once the invaders are gone, the government isn't in cahoots with anyone but the people who elected them.
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That is a huge difference. People inclined to fight invaders will be inclined to work with their fellow citizens.
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Will there still be terrorists? Sure, some, but mostly from outside the country. A working government can do much to stop infiltration along the borders. Will there still be domestic Islamists trying to impose a benighted, repressive theocracy upon Iraq? Sure. But much of their present power arises from the resentment of invasion, occupation, and humiliation that the people of Iraq feel, people who will not turn in their brothers to alien outsiders or their puppets in Baghdad. Once the invaders are gone, support for the insurgency is likely to plummet to manageable levels.
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And once we are out of there, the Arab League and United Nations are almost certain to offer assistance to a genuinely sovereign Iraqi government, which will gratefully accept their help. Wouldn't you rather spend a few billion dollars on transporting OTHER countries' soldiers to Iraq and supporting their peacemaking mission than spend a lot more billions on maintaining our troops in harm's way? I would.
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At end, if after U.S. withdrawal, the Iraqi government cannot reestablish a working, civil society, even with the help of the Arab League and United Nations, we can always go back in — if that be the will of the American people, making the decision on facts this time, not on lies, and for the Iraqi people rather than against them.
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But how is Iraq to heal if it continues to have a knife in its back? You must pull that knife out for the body to heal. We are the knife. We must leave.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,524.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:46 AM