by Rahul Mahajan
BAGHDAD (Iraq) -- Before the Iraq war, at a meeting of the Arab League,
Secretary General Amr Moussa famously said that a U.S. war on Iraq would
"open the gates of hell."
In Iraq, those gates are yawning wider than they ever have before -- at
least for the United States.
"Sunni and Shi'a are now one hand, together against the Americans," . . .
We're being told a convenient and self-serving story about those events. In
that story, a few barbaric "isolated extremists" from the "Saddamist
stronghold" of Falluja killed four contractors who were guarding food
convoys in an act of unprovoked lawlessness. Moqtada al-Sadr is fighting the
U.S. forces right now because, in the words of George Bush, he decided that
"rather than allow democracy to flourish, he's going to exercise force."
The truth is rather different. Falluja, although heavily Sunni Arab, was
hardly in Saddam's pocket. Its imams got into trouble for refusing to obey
his orders to praise him personally during prayers. Many inhabitants were
Salafists (Wahhabism is a subset of Salafism), a group singled out for
political persecution by Saddam.
In fact, during the war, Falluja was not a hotbed of resistance. Its turn to
resistance started on April 28, when U.S. troops opened fire on a group of
100 to 200 peaceful protesters, killing 15. They claimed they were returning
gunfire, but Human Rights Watch investigated and found that the bullet holes
in the area were inconsistent with that story -- and, furthermore, every
Iraqi witness maintained that the crowd was unarmed. Two days later, another
three protesters were killed. . . .
The most recent incident, in which four mercenaries from Blackwater
Security, a company formed by ex-Navy Seals (Blackwater people are
performing many of the same functions as soldiers in Iraq and do get
involved in combat), did not arise in a vacuum. In fact, just the week
before, U.S. Marines had mounted heavy raids on Fallujah, killing at least
seven civilians, including a cameraman. Residents spoke of this as the
reason for the attack on the Blackwater people and the gruesome spectacle
that followed. . . .
In general, there is no quicker way to get an Iraqi to laugh than to talk
about how the United States is bringing
freedom or democracy to the country.
Shaykh Sadun al-Shemary, a former member of the Iraqi army who participated
in the 1991 uprising and now a spokesman for the al-Sadr organization in
Shuala, told me, "Things are exactly the same as in Saddam's time -- maybe
worse." . . .
That is all you need to know about the occupation of Iraq.
FULL TEXT
[Rahul Mahajan is the publisher of the weblog Empire Notes. His latest book is "Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond."]
Susan Sachs, "Where Brave Constitutions Are Often Window
Dressing," The New York Times, March 9, 2004
"Blix:
Iraq better off under Saddam," Associated Press, April 4, 2004
Robert Fisk, "Iraq
on the brink of anarchy," Independent, April 6, 2004
Naomi Klein, "Bremer is
deliberately pushing Iraq's Shia south into all-out chaos," Guardian,
April 6, 2004
Karl Vick, "Muslim
Rivals Unite In Baghdad Uprising," Washington Post, April 7, 2004
Rupert Cornwell, "Kennedy
evokes the Vietnam 'quagmire' fears of Americans," Independent, April 7, 2004
"'40 dead' as US rockets hit Fallujah mosque," Associated Press, April 7, 2004
Robert Fisk, "A
PoW's exit: US airlifts Saddam out of Iraq," Independent, April 7, 2004
"Hospital Official:
Fallujah Dead Are Women, Children," NBC5.com, April 11, 2004
Rick Rogers, "Retired general assails U.S. policy on Iraq," San Diego
Union-Tribune, April 16, 2004
[What we do routinely in the imperial west, wrote Richard Falk, professor of
international relations at Princeton, is propagate "through a
self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen positive images of western values
and innocence that are threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted
violence." Thus, western state terrorism is erased, and a tenet of western
journalism is to excuse or minimize "our" culpability, however atrocious.
Our dead are counted; theirs are not. Our victims are worthy; theirs are
not.--John Pilger, "Get Out Now,
Before We Are Thrown Out," Antiwar.com, April 16, 2004]
Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Karl Vick, "Revolts in
Iraq Deepen Crisis In Occupation," Washington Post, April 18, 2004
Mona Eltahawy, "Why the
Arab world can thank Bush," International Herald Tribune, April 20, 2004
Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, "A Full Range of Technology Is
Applied to Bomb Falluja," New York Times, April 30, 2004
"Iraqis hail Falluja 'victory'," Reuters, May 1, 2004
Patrick Graham, "'We've had
a lot of experience of US weapons'," The Observer, May 2, 2004
[In burning Falluja, we saw the United States acting with the same imperial
ferocity as did the Soviets in Hungary, Afghanistan, and Chechnya. We saw
the same pattern of ruthless collective punishment in reprisal for a single
atrocity against occupation forces that may turn the entire nation against
the invader. We saw the horrifying spectacle of America, land of liberty,
using tanks to crush Iraqi resistance.--Eric Margolis, "IRAQ: BECOMING WHAT
YOU HATE," ericmargolis.com, May 4, 2004]
Justin Huggler, "One
incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?," The Independent, May 21, 2004
Robert Fisk, "Iraqi academics targeted in murder spree," The Independent, July 14,
2004
[But what I saw was infinitely more disturbing: a nation whose government
rules only its capital,--Robert Fisk, "'A
better and safer place'," The Independent, July 20, 2004]
Farnaz Fassihi, "A Journalist's Letter from
Iraq," The Wisdom Fund, September 30, 2004
Bonnie Azab Powell, "Investigative
Journalist Seymour Hersh Spills the Secrets of the Iraq Quagmire and the War on
Terror," University of California-Berkeley, October 12, 2004
"Wounded
Spanish Journalist Olga Rodriguez Describes the U.S. Attack on the Palestine
Hotel That Killed Two of Her Colleagues," Democracy Now!, March 23, 2005
[Haifa Zangana writes there is a systematic campaign to assassinate Iraqis
who speak out against the occupation. --"Iraqi
Novelist Haifa Zangana: U.S. Troops Must Withdraw Now," Democracy Now!,
March 9, 2006]
[Highly trained personnel employed with the private security firm formerly
known as Blackwater Worldwide sometimes operated side by side with CIA field
officers in Iraq and Afghanistan as the agency undertook missions to kill or
capture members of insurgent groups--R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, "Blackwater tied to clandestine CIA raids,"
Washington Post, December 11, 2009]
PHOTOS: "Pictures of Destruction and Civilian Victims of the
Anglo-American Aggression in Iraq," Robert Fisk