Our local daily newspaper ran a banner headline today declaring, “U.S. focuses on Saddam after killing infamous sons” with two subheads proclaiming “Odai, Qusai were future of regime” and “Administration hopes attacks will diminish”. Other newspapers across the United States carried similar headlines with similar messages.
We should not allow ourselves to once again be misled by the Bush/Cheney administration and the U.S. military it commands about events in Iraq. Do not count on attacks against the U.S. occupying forces diminishing because the U.S. military killed Saddam’s two sons and his 14 year old grandson.
Interestingly, instead of surrendering, a U.S. General reported on television last night that the sons of Saddam chose to fight to their deaths yesterday. Strange behavior for men who have been described as such self centered wastrels. Already today, 2 more U.S. soldiers have been killed by Iraqis in two separate attacks. Somehow, killing Saddam’s family didn’t seem to deter the Iraqi people from killing and wounding at least a few more American military personnel occupying their country.
I believe Saddam Hussein and his family are hated by many, and, maybe even most Iraqis. However, the United States is probably hated by even many more Iraqis for some very good and quite understandable reasons that are not reported in the U.S. corporate media.
The Iraqi people remember that Iraq had the highest overall standard of living in the Arabic world until we attacked them in 1991. There was universal health care and education for even the poorest Iraqi. Iraqis remember how we invaded their country and purposefully destroyed their infrastructure in 1991. They know we deliberately bombed dams and sewage facilities causing contamination of their water supply. Iraqis know we dropped depleted uranium warheads on them causing widespread cancer among their men, women and children. The everyday Iraqi people know we instigated economic sanctions against them and that we continued to drop even more depleted uranium on them as we bombed them during the several years of sanctions. The people of Iraq, who may or may not like Saddam Hussein, know that the foreign policy of the United States has caused the deaths of at least a half million Iraqi people since 1991.
Iraqi people, and honest, politically aware people all over the world, know that the United States and Britain have been obsessed with the desire to control Iraq’s gigantic oil resources ever since Saddam Hussein thumbed his nose at us in 1991. Saddam Hussein had been supported and equipped by the United States with weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, in the Iraq/Iran war in the 1980s.
Perhaps the Iraqi people will finally submit to the brute force of U.S. military power and Iraq will become a virtual U.S. colony with a McDonald’s and Starbucks on every other corner of Baghdad and Iraqi oil supplying abundant and relatively cheap fuel for all the flag-flying, freedom loving SUV owners in the United States.
However, as much as we might wish it would be, do not count on the Iraqi people stopping their armed efforts to drive out the occupying U.S. military and trying to somehow control the destiny of their own country. The corrupt and deceitful Bush/Cheney administration, whose lying and fear-mongering allowed them to send our soldiers into the deathtrap of a guerrilla war is finally beginning to unravel and is being exposed as a cabal of boldly inept, corporate crooks.
Bush and Cheney should be impeached and indicted for lying to us about Iraq’s weapons program, including the notorious Niger uranium forgery and fabrication. They should also be charged with the personal enrichment of themselves and their business and political patrons via the secret deals they made for Halliburton and Bechtel to “rebuild” Iraq. We have jails containing many poor people who were convicted of stealing much smaller amounts. If we really believe in equal justice for all, we must put those in jail who lied us into a quagmire of guerrilla war that is killing our young men and women every day while they personally reap the financial benefits. Hopefully, the pandering U.S. corporate media which was so “embedded” and complicit with the administration in the phony run-up to this tragic situation in Iraq will finally do a “mea culpa” for its shameless pandering to the war hawks in Washington.
TOM TURNIPSEED is an attorney, writer, and radio talk show host in Columbia, South Carolina. He can be reached at: tturnipseed@turnipseed.net