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<h1><big><big>Top 9 Reasons To Stop Bombing Iraq</big></big></h1>
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<div class="cat-date-line"><big><big><span class="cat-date-line2"><a
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all posts in Educate!" rel="category tag">Educate!</a></span>
<span class="cat-date-line3"> <a
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<span class="cat-date-line4">By David Swanson, <a
href="http://warisacrime.org/content/top-9-reasons-stop-bombing-iraq"
target="_blank">www.warisacrime.org</a><br>
August 14th, 2014</span><br>
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<p><big><big><strong>1. It’s not a rescue mission.</strong> The
U.S. personnel could be evacuated without the 500-pound
bombs. The persecuted minorities could be supplied, moved,
or their enemy dissuaded, or all three, without the
500-pound bombs or the hundreds of “advisors” (trained and
armed to kill, and never instructed in how to give advice —
Have you ever tried taking urgent advice from 430 people?).
The boy who cried rescue mission should not be allowed to
get away with it after the documented deception in Libya
where a fictional threat to civilians was used to launch an
all-out aggressive attack that has left that nation in
ruins. Not to mention the false claims about Syrian
chemical weapons and the false claim that missiles were the
only option left for Syria — the latter claims being exposed
when the former weren’t believed, the missiles didn’t
launch, and less violent but perfectly obvious alternative
courses of action were recognized. If the U.S. government
were driven by a desire to rescue the innocent, why would it
be arming Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain? The U.S.
government destroyed the nation of Iraq between 2003 and
2011, with results including the near elimination of various
minority groups. If preventing genocide were a dominant
U.S. interest, it could have halted its participation in and
aggravation of that war at any time, a war in which 97% of
the dead were on one side, just as in Gaza this month — the
distinction between war and genocide being one of
perspective, not proportions. Or, of course, the U.S. could
have left well alone. Ever since President Carter declared
that the U.S. would kill for Iraqi oil, each of his
successors has believed that course of action justified, and
each has made matters significantly worse.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>2. It’s going to make things worse, again.</strong>
This bombing will aggravate the Sunni-Shia divide, increase
support for ISIS, and create a lasting legacy of hostility
and violence. President Obama says there is no military
solution, only reconciliation. But bombs don’t reconcile.
They harden hearts and breed murderers. Numerous top U.S.
officials admit that much of what the U.S. military does
generates more enemies than it kills. When you continue
down a path that is counterproductive on its own terms, the
honesty of those terms has to be doubted. If this war is
not for peace, is it perhaps — like every other war we’ve
seen the U.S. wage in the area — for resources, profits,
domination, and sadism? The leader of ISIS learned his
hatred in a U.S. prison in Iraq. U.S. media report that
fact as if it is just part of the standard portrait of a new
Enemy #1, but the irony is not mere coincidence. Violence
is created. It doesn’t arise out of irrational and
inscrutable foreignness. It is planted by those great
gardeners in the sky: planes, drones, and helicopters. A
bombing campaign justified as protecting people actually
endangers them, and those around them, and many others,
including those of us living in the imperial Homeland.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>3. Bombs kill.</strong> Big bombs kill a lot
of people. Massive bombing campaigns slaughter huge numbers
of people, including those fighting in the hell the U.S.
helped to create, and including those not fighting — men,
women, children, grandparents, infants. Defenders of the
bombing know this, but ignore it, and make no effort to
calculate whether more people are supposedly being saved
than are being killed. This indifference exposes the
humanitarian pretensions of the operation. If some humans
are of no value to you, humanitarianism is not what’s
driving your decisions. The U.S. war on Iraq ’03-’11 killed
a half million to a million-and-a-half Iraqis and 4,000
Americans. A war that puts fewer Americans on the ground
and uses more planes and drones is thought of as involving
less death only if our concern is narrowly limited to U.S.
deaths. From the vantage point of the ground, an air war is
the deadliest form of war there is.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>4. There are other options.</strong> The
choice between bombing and doing nothing is as false now as
it was in September. If you can drop food on some people,
why can’t you drop food on everyone? It would cost a tiny
fraction of dropping bombs on them. It would confuse the
hell out of them, too — like Robin Williams’ version of God
high on pot and inventing the platypus. Of course, I now
sound crazy because I’m talking about people who’ve been
demonized (and personified in a killer straight out of a
U.S. prison). It’s not as if these are human beings with
whom you can lament the death of Robin Williams. They’re
not like you and me. Etc. Yadda. Yadda. But in fact ISIS
fighters were sharing their appreciation of Williams on
Twitter on Tuesday. The United States could talk about
other matters with ISIS as well, including a ceasefire,
including a unilateral commitment to cease arming the Iraqi
government even while trying to organize its ouster,
including an offer to provide real humanitarian aid with no
nasty strings attached, but with encouragement of civil
liberties and democratic decision making. It’s amazing how
long minority ethnic groups in Iraq survived and thrived
prior to the U.S. bringing democracy, and prior to the U.S.
existing. The U.S. could do some good but must first do no
harm.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>5. There are now enough weapons already there
to practically justify one of Colin Powell’s slides
retroactively. </strong>The U.S. accounts for 79% of
foreign weapons transfers to Western Asia (the Middle
East). The war on Libya had identical U.S. weapons on both
sides. ISIS almost certainly has weapons supplied by the
U.S. in Syria, and certainly has weapons taken from Iraq.
So, what is the U.S. doing? It’s rushing more weapons to
Iraq as fast as possible. Americans like to think of the
Middle East as backward and violent, but the tools of the
violence trade are manufactured in the United States. Yes,
the United States does still manufacture something, it’s
just not something that serves any useful purpose or about
which most of us can manage to feel very proud. Weapons
making also wastes money rather than creating it, because
unaccountable profits are the single biggest product
manufactured.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>6. This is going to cost a fortune.</strong>
Bombing Iraq is depicted as a measure of great restraint and
forbearance. Meanwhile building schools and hospitals and
green energy infrastructure in Iraq would be viewed as
madness if anyone dared propose it. But the latter would
cost a lot less money — a consideration that is usually a
top priority in U.S. politics whenever killing large numbers
of people is not involved. The world spend $2 trillion and
the U.S. $1 trillion (half the total) on war and war
preparations every year. Three percent of U.S. military
spending could end starvation on earth. The wonders that
could be done with a fraction of military money are almost
unimaginable and include actual defense against the actual
danger of climate change.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>7. Bombs are environmental disasters.</strong>
If someone photographs a big oil fire, some will give a
thought to the environmental damage. But a bombing campaign
is, rather than an environmental accident, an intentional
environmental catastrophe. The poisoned ground and water,
and the disease epidemics, will reach the United States
primarily through moral regret, depression, and suicide.</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>8. There go our civil liberties.</strong>
Discussions of torture, imprisonment, assassination,
surveillance, and denial of fair trials are severely damaged
by wartime postures. After all, war is for “freedom,” and
who wouldn’t be willing to surrender all of their freedoms
for that?</big></big></p>
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<p><big><big><strong>9. War is illegal.</strong> It doesn’t
matter if the illegitimate government that you’re trying to
dump invited you to bomb its country. How can anyone take
that seriously, while the U.S. installed that government and
has armed it for years, as it has attacked its people? War
is illegal under the Kellogg Briand Pact and the United
Nations Charter, and pretending otherwise endangers the
world. Domestically, under U.S. law, the president cannot
launch a war. While the Senate has been silent, the U.S.
House voted two weeks ago to ban any new presidential war on
Iraq. Offering Congress a slap in the face, Obama waited
for it to go on break, and then attacked Iraq.</big></big></p>
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