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Special Investigation:
Have Journalists Been Deliberately Murdered in Iraq by the US
Military?
Our new
CounterPunch newsletter, just out, Christopher Reed examines
the growing body count of journalists in Iraq and documents numerous
incidents where US troops have deliberately targeted reporters.
Charles Glass offers a
stark comparison of the uprooting of Palestians in the Galilee
during the 1948 war to the lush compensation of Israelis living
on the same land who were displaced by the war on Lebanon. Remember, we are funded
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For more than a century, the U.S. has
claimed each time it invaded another sovereign nation that it
did so selflessly, shouldering the moral responsibility of "civilizing"
a backward population. This process became widely known as "the
white man's burden," after Rudyard Kipling's 1899 poem of
the same name, which described the conquered populations as "your
new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child."
Kipling's poem was written
to celebrate the 1898 U.S. invasion and occupation of the Philippines,
which killed well over a half a million civilians during the
next several years. The U.S. government crushed the Filipino
insurgency--and refused to grant independence to the Philippines
until 1946.
In Iraq, the U.S. has managed
to kill a similar number of Iraqis, but failed to crush the resistance.
The Washington establishment (minus the increasingly isolated
and delusional Bush and Cheney) has finally concluded that the
Iraq war is "unwinnable," and the imperial endgame
is beginning. Commitments to "bipartisanship" and "compromise"
are already echoing through the halls of Congress, as Democrats
and Republicans unite to avoid further humiliation and to salvage
what remains of U.S. imperialism's long-standing aims in the
Middle East.
Democrats and Republicans have
joined together to take aim at the ungrateful Iraqi population,
who apparently fail to appreciate the U.S.' selfless efforts
to impose "democracy" through military occupation.
On this point, the two parties are indistinguishable.
The Washington
"consensus"
As the Washington Post
reported, "a Nov. 15 meeting of the Senate Armed Services
Committee turned into a festival of bipartisan Iraqi-bashing":
"We should put the responsibility
for Iraq's future squarely where it belongs -- on the Iraqis,"
argued Democratic Sen. Carl M. Levin, who will chair the committee
in January. "We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves"
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.)
followed by noting: "People in South Carolina come up to
me in increasing numbers and suggest that no matter what we do
in Iraq, the Iraqis are incapable of solving their own problems
through the political process and will resort to violence, and
we need to get the hell out of there."
"We all want them to succeed,"
agreed Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) But, he added, "too often
they seem unable or unwilling to do that."
Later the same day, members
of the House Armed Services Committee took their turn. "If
the Iraqis are determined and decide to destroy themselves and
their country, I don't know how in the world we're going to stop
them," said Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.).
House Democratic leader Nancy
Pelosi has also chimed in, quoted in the Congressional Quarterly:
"We need to send a message to Iraqis that our patience is
not unlimited." Likewise, presidential wannabe Sen. Barak
Obama stated that there should be "[n]o more coddling"
of Iraqis.Presidential has-been John
Kerry told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "I believe you have to be
tougher, set a date, be clear about the transition of authority,
demand more from the Iraqis, leverage a change in their behavior
and get our troops out of harm's way."
Within a few short weeks, the
Washington "consensus" has rewritten the history of
the U.S. invasion of Iraq-as if Iraqis invited the U.S. to invade
their sovereign nation in 2003 and now have failed to live up
to their end of the bargain. The mass civilian bloodshed at the
hands of the U.S. military is apparently irrelevant in this equation.
But ongoing Iraqi violence is presented as yet more evidence
that Iraqis are "unwilling or unable" to govern themselves.
Yet, as Mark Danner writes
in the December 21 New York Review of Books, U.S. occupation
policies gave birth to the Sunni insurgency. L. Paul Bremer,
who replaced Jay Garner to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority
in May 2003, quickly moved to dismantle Iraq's military on orders
from Donald Rumsfeld. Garner recalled, "[T]he U.S. now had
at least 350,000 more enemies than it had the day before-the
50,000 Baathists [and] the 300,000 officially unemployed soldiers."
As Danner noted, "By dismissing
and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our
leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing
far too few troops to secure Saddam's enormous arms depots they
armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over
the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration
that provided the insurgency such fertile ground."
Lies, and
more lies
The war was based on a set
of lies, as the vanishing weapons of mass destruction illustrated
clearly. So too is today's talk that a "phased withdrawal"
constitutes a genuine withdrawal, prefaced by the clumsy attempt
to blame Iraqis for the state of their country.
The much hyped report of the
Iraq Study Group (ISG)--itself a product of bipartisan "consensus"
among Washington powerbrokers--has already been widely leaked
to the mass media. While the report is anticipated to call for
halving the number of U.S. forces in Iraq, that still leaves
70,000-redeploying to U.S. bases inside Iraq or just outside,
to serve as a "rapid response force." The ISG is expected
to call for combat troop withdrawals perhaps by early 2008-but
without any firm deadline. As Phylis Bennis of the Institute
for Policy Studies observed, the ISG holds "virtually the
same position as Bush's own 'when Iraqis stand up we will stand
down.'"
Indeed, as Bennis also notes,
"There is no indication in the initial set of New York
Times leaks that the ISG will recommend opening serious public
negotiations with any of the myriad of resistance forces fighting
the U.S. occupation in Iraq."
To be sure, the hot air will
be swirling on Capital Hill come January, when Biden launches
up to eight weeks of Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings
on Iraq. According to a Biden aide, the hearings are expected
to be "intensive and extensive."
But expect little of substance
to come from these hearings, without pressure from below. The
electorate expressed its opposition to the Iraq war on November
7. But electoral opposition is clearly not enough to convince
the two war parties in power that U.S. troops must leave Iraq-and
should never have invaded in the first place. U.S. occupation
has brought nothing but violence to the Iraqi people and will
do nothing to stem the bloodshed now.
Instead of blaming Iraqis for
the misery that U.S. occupation has brought them, U.S. lawmakers
should listen to them. A September opinion poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org
showed that 71 per cent of Iraqis want the U.S. out of Iraq within
a year.
The long dormant antiwar movement
must take to the streets to remind this country's ruling elite
that they ultimately must answer to the people they govern.
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