<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div>...I believe we should try very hard to hear the grievances of people in
Iraq and the region, including those who have joined the Islamic State,
regarding U.S. policies and wars that have radically affected their
lives and well-being over the past three decades. It could be that many
of the Iraqis who are fighting with Islamic State forces lived through
Saddam Hussein’s oppression when he received enthusiastic support from
the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Many ma<span class="text_exposed_show">y
be survivors of the U.S. Desert Storm bombing in 1991, which destroyed
every electrical facility across Iraq. When the U.S. insisted on
imposing crushing and murderous economic sanctions on Iraq for the next
13 years, these sanctions directly contributed to the deaths of a half
million children under age five. The children who died should have been
teenagers or in their early 20s now; are some of the Islamic State
fighters the brothers or cousins of the children who were punished to
death by economic sanctions? Presumably many of these fighters lived
through the U.S.-led 2003 Shock and Awe invasion and bombing of Iraq and
the chaos the U.S. chose to create afterwards by using a war-shattered
country as some sort of free market experiment; they’ve endured the
repressive corruption of the regime the U.S. helped install in Saddam’s
place.</span></div><div class="text_exposed_show"><p> The United Nations
should take over the response to the Islamic State, and people should
continue to pressure the U.S. and its allies to leave the response not
merely to the U.N. but to its most democratic constituent body, the
General Assembly.</p><p> But facing the bloody mess that has developed
in Iraq and Syria, I think Archbishop Romero’s exhortation to the
Salvadoran soldiers pertains directly to U.S. people. Suppose these
words were slightly rewritten: I want to make a special appeal to the
people of the United States. Each of you is one of us. The peoples you
kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a person telling
you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is
obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in
the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you …I
command you to stop the repression.</p><p> The war on the Islamic State
will distract us from what the U.S. has done and is doing to create
further despair, in Iraq, and to enlist new recruits for the Islamic
State. The Islamic State is the echo of the last war the U.S. waged in
Iraq, the so-called “Shock and Awe” bombing and invasion. The
emergency is not the Islamic State but war.</p><p> We in the U.S. must
give up our notions of exceptionalism; recognize the economic and
societal misery our country caused in Iraq; recognize that we are a
perpetually war-waging, often aggressing nation; seek to make
reparations; and find dramatic, clear ways to insist that Romero’s words
be heard: Stop the killing.</p></div><div>[From <<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/20/the-emergency-is-not-the-islamic-state-but-war/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/20/the-emergency-is-not-the-islamic-state-but-war/</a>>]</div></body></html>