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CounterPunch
March 31,
2003
Liberating Iraqis...From
Their Homes
IOUs for Looting
By DAVID LINDORFF
As the U.S. Army's Seventh Combat Support Group,
a unit of the Third Infantry Division, moved northward in the
Arabian desert west of the Euphrates River towards the town
of Najaf on March 26, the commander, realizing his exhausted
men faced shortages of food and water, was looking for a place
of refuge. He found it in the form of two Bedouin families.
Drew Brown, reporter from Knight Ridder
News Service who was embedded with the unit, reported that Col.
John P. Gardner ordered the two families to leave their land
and turn it over to his men. He reportedly gave them "receipts"
for the tents, dogs, chickens, bowls,  pots and other possessions
they left behind--receipts that neither he nor anyone else
could tell them how they could redeem--and sent them off "befuddled"
into the desert.
If any incident illustrates the true
nature of the Anglo-U.S. invasion of Iraq, this one is it. A
modern army unit, bristling with the latest in high-tech, high-powered
weaponry, purportedly in the country to "liberate"
the natives from the tyrant who "enslaves" them, summarily
casts two defenseless groups of men, women and children out
of their homes into the barren desert, handing them worthless
IOUs for their trouble.
Obviously Col. Gardner the liberator
didn't do much studying of American history or he would have
known that the Third Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the
one that bans the billeting of troops in private households,
was a direct result of the British practice of taking over colonial
farms and households at will for the quartering of Redcoat troops.
It was this obscene imperial behavior, perhaps more than the
issue of "taxation without representation", that really
fed the fires of rebellion in the U.S. colonies. Brown doesn't
tell us what the two "nomad" families felt or said
as they were driven by Gardner and his men from their homes
and lands, but it's a fair bet they weren't awash with feelings
or gratitude at their liberation.
As this war continues to look more and
more like a quagmire, this and other actions by the army of
liberation are likely to cause problems for the liberators.
Take the U.S. attacks on Iraqi television
and on the telephone headquarters in Baghdad. Under the doctrine
of reciprocity, a country that suffers any type of attack during
a war is entitled to respond in kind, even if the initial attack
was outside the bounds of normally acceptable rules of war.
This means that should Iraq decide to respond by sending sappers
to the U.S to blow up the headquarters of CNN or Fox TV, for
example, such attacks would not be acts of terrorism, but of
war.
President Bush said he was invading Iraq
to make America safe. In fact, by going to war in Iraq, he has,
legally speaking, made the entire U.S. a potential battlefront
in this war, inviting Iraq to send its agents into the country,
or to get sleeper agents already here activated.
It's unlikely that Iraqi sappers would
be billeting themselves in American households, but should they
do so, in an effort to hide from Ashcroft's minions, or simply
to seek temporary refuge, they could always cite the precedent
of Col. Gardner, and say they were just behaving reciprocally.
Hopefully, if they force any American
families out of their homes, those Iraqi agents will be as thoughtful
about providing their unwilling hosts with receipts as was the
Seventh Combat Support Group.
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
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