The Wormwood Express: American War Crime Rolls On
I had much to say about the recent terror bombings in Baghdad, which
were framed almost universally in the American media as the result of
the withdrawal of the steadying, beneficent hand of the U.S. military.
For example,
the New York Times spoke of "a country reeling from political and sectarian turmoil that erupted after the departure of the American military."
It
is hard to fathom the level of moral blindness -- not to mention the
wilful ignorance -- required to write such a statement. To pretend to
oneself, much less the rest of the world, that political and sectarian
strife has only now "erupted" in Iraq, out of the blue, or more likely,
due to the inherent savagery of those poor primitives we liberated --
think what a pathetic, self-deluded wretch you would have to be to hold
such an belief.
Think what it must be like to lose so much of your
humanity and to have your intellect so stunted and diminished. Yet this
is the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of the American political
and media elite. No causal connection is made between the unprovoked
invasion by U.S. forces and the "eruption" of violence and political
chaos in the conquered, broken, blood-soaked land.
So yes, there
is much to say about the continuing obscenity of the American war crime
in Iraq, and its most recent manifestation in the eviscerated bodies on
Baghdad's streets. But I think in this instance, I should put my voice
aside and let an actual Iraqi speak of the situation and its
implications and causes.
Sami Ramadani writes powerfully of the hell that has been unleashed in his hometown.
From the Guardian:
Baghdad, the city of my childhood, is
again being terrorised by cowardly attacks aimed at spilling the blood
of as many workers, students, shoppers and bystanders as possible. As I
write, the facts are becoming clearer: the hundreds of murdered and
injured men, women and children are Shia, Sunni, Christian, Arab, Kurd,
Turkuman – a cross-section of the mosaic of peoples who have inhabited
Mesopotamia for more than 1,000 years.
So, who is killing the innocent in Baghdad today, and why?
In
the rush to provide an explanation for the nihilistic violence, the
same old simplistic mantra is trotted out. Thursday's co-ordinated,
simultaneous attacks are invariably described by the media as sectarian.
Few pause to ask why a "sectarian" attack would be aimed at all sects
and ethnicities equally. Only a handful raise the possibility that these
attacks are not sectarian in motive, or a reflection of sectarian
hatred on the streets, but are instead designed to create sectarian
entrenchment and animosity, and ignite street conflict.
Similarly,
analysts are quick to conclude that both the power struggle within the
political elite, and the explosions are the result of the withdrawal of
US troops. They portray the US forces as the good Samaritan who
prematurely left the scene. Too few examine the legacy of the occupiers'
poisonous presence at the heart of Iraqi society for nearly nine years,
or ask why the US has built the biggest embassy in the world in
Baghdad, staffed by 15,000 personnel and spies.
Today's bitter
power struggle can be traced back to the measured 2003 decisions made by
Paul Bremer . Bremer, a Bush "civilian" appointed to rule Iraq,
continued the military occupation under a different guise. Faced with
massive popular opposition and armed resistance to the US-led invasion,
the US recognised in 2003 that the occupation of Iraq could not continue
without a prominent Iraqi component, so Bremer formed the Iraqi
governing council while retaining control of all levers of power.
The
mix of the 25-member council was carefully calibrated, with quotas to
reflect Iraq's sectarian and ethnic makeup. That sectarian formula was
to be mirrored in all Bremer's appointments. Far from preventing
sectarianism, it introduced it to all the political and military
institutions created by the occupation. .....
Such is the anger
at the occupation that many Iraqis think the US was behind Thursday's
attack. This belief is dismissed as conspiratorial, but it is widely
held. There is a reason for this. Apart from the horrific violence
committed directly by the occupation forces and Pentagon-contracted
mercenaries, the US also created Iraqi secret militia, and smuggled tens
of thousands of weapons and tons of explosives into Iraq through
private firms in Bosnia .... Indiscriminate killings and terrorist
attacks were a permanent feature of the US-led occupation, and to many
ordinary Iraqis, Thursday's bloodshed is just more of the same.
Similarly,
ordinary Iraqis see their current rulers, who arrived with the
occupation, as self-seeking, corrupt politicians who use religious and
ethnic differences to perpetuate sectarianism as a means of creating
power bases ...
The truth of what happened and is happening in Iraq is
well-documented. The illegal invasion based on knowing and deliberate
lies; the active fomenting of sectarian militias by the occupation
forces; the use of death squads by the occupiers and their local allies;
the widespread indiscriminate killing of Iraqi civilians by the
occupiers and the local security forces they armed, paid and trained;
the world-historical levels of looting and corruption on the part of the
occupiers' war profiteers and their local appointees -- all of this and
much more of the story of the suffering, anguish and degradation
inflicted on the Iraqis by the invaders has been plainly evident for
years. I have written about it on this site and elsewhere since the
beginning, drawing almost entirely on mainstream sources of information,
easily accessible to any ordinary citizen.
It requires no
specialist knowledge, no insider connections, no secret sources to know
and see the horrendous reality that the Americans and their accomplices
have created in Iraq.
As we noted here the other day,
all that it requires is a willful turning away from reality into the
maniacal hallucination of fear-ridden righteousness that has swallowed
the American mind: a hysterical dream-world where the giving-over to
evil bears no fruit, has no consequences, can always be absolved,
repaired, reversed.
But time's arrow flies in only one direction: the
past cannot be undone, and the poison we have served to others -- and
poured into our own veins -- will eat through the walls of the
hallucination and stain the future deep with horror.
