[Peace-discuss] If the United States leaves Iraq things will really get bad

[Morton K. Brussel]

Another article by the estimable, clear thinking, William Blum:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=12764
by William Blum
May 07, 2007
Anti-Empire Report

This appears to be the last remaining, barely-breathing argument of  
that vanishing species who still support the god-awful war. The  
argument implies a deeply-felt concern about the welfare and safety  
of the Iraqi people. What else could it mean? That the US military  
can't leave because it's needed to protect the oil bonanza awaiting  
American oil companies as soon as the Iraqi parliament approves the  
new written-in-Washington oil law? No, the Bush administration loves  
the people of Iraq. How much more destruction, killing and torturing  
do you need to be convinced of that? We can't leave because of the  
violence. We can't leave until we have assured that peace returns to  
our dear comrades in Iraq.

To better understand this argument, it helps to keep in mind the  
following about the daily horror that is life in Iraq:
      It did not exist before the US occupation.

      The insurgency violence began as, and remains, a reaction to  
the occupation; like almost all insurgencies in occupied countries --  
from the American Revolution to the Vietcong -- it's a fight directed  
toward getting foreign forces to leave.

      The next phase was the violence of Iraqis against other Iraqis  
who worked for or sought employment with anything associated with the  
occupation regime.

      Then came retaliatory attacks for these attacks.

      Followed by retaliatory attacks for the retaliatory attacks.

      Jihadists from many countries have flocked to Iraq because they  
see the war against the American Satan occupiers as a holy war.

      Before the occupation, many Sunnis and Shiites married each  
other; since the occupation they have been caught up in a spiral of  
hating and killing each other.

      And for these acts there of course has to be retaliation.

      The occupation's abolishment of most jobs in the military and  
in Saddam Hussein's government, and the chaos that is Iraqi society  
under the occupation, have left many destitute; kidnapings for ransom  
and other acts of criminal violence have become popular ways to make  
a living, or at least survive.

      US-trained, financed, and armed Iraqi forces have killed large  
numbers of people designated as "terrorists" by someone official, or  
perhaps someone unofficial, or by someone unknown, or by chance.

      The US military itself has been a main perpetrator of violence,  
killing individually and en masse, killing any number, any day, for  
any reason, anyone, any place, often in mindless retaliation against  
anyone nearby for an insurgent attack.

      The US military and its coalition allies have also been the  
main target of violent attacks. A Department of Defense report of  
November 2006 stated: "Coalition forces remained the target of the  
majority of attacks (68%)."[1]

      And here is James Baker, establishment eminence, co-chair of  
the Iraq Study Group, on CNN with
Anderson Cooper:
    Cooper: And is it possible that getting the U.S. troops out will  
actually lessen that violence, that it will at least take away the  
motivation of nationalist insurgents?
    Baker: Many people have argued that to us. Many people in Iraq  
made that case.
    Cooper: Do you buy it?
    Baker: Yes, I think there is some validity to it, absolutely.  
Then we are no longer seen to be the occupiers.[2]

In spite of all of the above we are told that the presence of the  
United States military has been and will continue to be a buffer  
against violence. Iraqis themselves do not believe this. A poll  
published in September found that Iraqis believe, by a margin of 78  
to 21 percent, that the US military presence is "provoking more  
conflict that it is preventing".[3]

Remember that we were warned a thousand times of a communist  
bloodbath in Vietnam if American forces left. The American forces  
left. There was never any kind of bloodbath.

If the United States leaves -- meaning all its troops and bases -- it  
will remove the very foundation, origin, and inspiration of most of  
the hate and violence. Iraqis will have a chance to reclaim their  
land and their life. They have a right to be given that opportunity.  
Let America's deadly "love" embrace of the Iraqi people come to an  
end. Let the healing begin.


Some people love guns. But why should the rest of us be targets?
The massacre at Virginia Tech is the kind of tragedy that invariably  
produces an abundance of sociological and psychological speculation,  
comparisons to the violence of American foreign policy, and many  
other clichés, platitudes, and truisms; a lot of ground I prefer not  
to walk over again.   Except this one thing, as knee-reflex as it is:  
We should ban all guns. It should be illegal to possess any  
functioning firearm; those who already possess them should be obliged  
to turn them in for a payment. No halfway measures here. We went  
beyond halfway measures many massacres ago.

Last year in England and Wales (population 54 million), where there  
are tough restrictions on gun ownership, there were 50 shooting  
deaths. In Washington, DC (population half a million), there were 137  
fatal shootings.[4]

Nearly twice as many people commit suicide in the 15 US states with  
the highest rates of gun ownership than in the six states with the  
lowest rates of gun ownership, although the population of the two  
groups is about the same. Guns are used in only five percent of  
suicide attempts, but more than 90 percent of those attempts are  
fatal, whereas drugs account for nearly 75 percent of suicide  
attempts, but the fatality rate in those attempts is less than 3  
percent.[5]

Those who question the correlation between ease of gun ownership and  
death by gunfire should try to imagine what the Virginia Tech killer  
would have done if he hadn't been able to purchase guns as easily as  
he had. What would he have used? A club? A knife? He would have been  
jumped and disarmed after attacking his first victim in the classroom.

The only exception to the gun ban should be for law enforcement. That  
doesn't include the military. If the American military did not have  
any weapons this sad old world would be a much safer and nicer place,  
for American soldiers as well as their victims. So let's perform an  
act of euthanasia and pull the plug on the military's life-support  
machine. Let's convert the Pentagon into affordable housing. We won't  
have to worry about anti-American terrorists because our un-armed  
forces would not be going all over the world and creating them by the  
thousands with bombings, invasions, overthrows of governments,  
occupations, support of repressive regimes, and similar charming  
activities, all of which require vast amounts of firearms and bombs.  
Yes, the bombs would become history as well.

Oh, one more thing. Before the gun ban goes into effect, a posse  
should be formed to go and shoot up the National Rifle Association's  
headquarters. The NRA loves to cite the Second Amendment to the  
Constitution: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the  
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear  
Arms, shall not be infringed." What militias, in the 21st century,  
are the NRA gun-lovers thinking of? And what state? I'd guess that  
most NRA members are fervent libertarians who hold a lot of paranoia  
and no love for any state. It's time for another constitutional  
amendment to abolish the Second Amendment, like the Thirteenth and  
Fourteenth Amendments changed the Constitution to abolish slavery.[6]

Because of Virginia Tech's location and the fact that several of the  
victims came from the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where I  
live, the Washington Post gave book-length coverage to the event. I  
found myself choking up, at times with tears, repeatedly, each day as  
I read the stories of the stolen young lives. Two days after the  
massacre, the Supreme Court issued a ruling making certain abortions  
illegal. This led to statements from celebrating anti-abortion  
activists about how the life of "unborn children" would be saved, and  
how the fetus is fully a human being deserving of as much care and  
respect and legal protection as any other human being. But does  
anyone know cases of parents grieving over an aborted fetus the way  
the media has shown parents and friends grieving over the slain  
Virginia Tech students? Of course not. If for no other reason than  
the parents choose to have an abortion. Does anyone know of a case of  
the parents of an aborted fetus tearfully remembering the fetus's  
first words, or high school graduation or wedding or the camping trip  
they all took together? Or the fetus's smile or the way it laughed?  
Of course not. Because -- to those who support abortion on demand --  
the fetus is not a human being in a sufficiently meaningful physical,  
social, intellectual, and emotional sense. But the anti-abortion  
activists -- often for reasons of sexual prudery, anti-feminism,  
religion (the Supreme Court ruling derived from the five Catholic  
members of the court), or other personal or political hangups --  
throw a halo around the fetus, treat the needs and desires of the  
parents as nothingness, and damn all those who differ with them as  
child murderers. Unfortunately, with many of these activists, their  
perfect love for human beings doesn't extend to the human beings of  
Iraq or Afghanistan.


A conservative's idea of a random act of kindness is cutting the  
capital gains tax
Michael Scheuer is a former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama  
bin Laden unit. He's also the author of "Through Our Enemies' Eyes:  
Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America", and  
"Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror". In last  
month's edition of this report, in my section on Washington's war on  
terrorism, quoting from the Sydney Morning Herald I wrote that when  
Scheuer was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from  
custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people."  
This sentiment is in keeping with the point I was making, that a  
significant portion of "terrorists" held in US custody are no such  
thing.

But then the editor of DissidentVoice.org, which reprints my report  
each month, received a letter from Mr. Scheuer, saying in part:  
"Regarding the quote attributed to me in Mr. Blum's column. I do not  
recall ever making such a statement, and if I did make it, I spoke  
mistakenly. I have no reason to believe that any one in the  
Guantanamo Bay facility does not deserve to be there. I have objected  
to the facility only because it forces the United States to be  
subject to the pacifist whinings of human rights advocates and EC  
[presumably European Community] officials."

I replied to Scheuer, asking him if his remark -- "I have no reason  
to believe that any one in the Guantanamo Bay facility does not  
deserve to be there" -- referred only to "the present prisoners,  
those held as of the time of your alleged remark in February 2006, or  
any and all of the prisoners who've been held there the past 5 years?  
If the last, that would be quite a remarkable statement to make given  
all that we know about the very faulty criteria employed in deciding  
who to send to Guantanamo, a portion of which I discuss in my  
article. Even if you're referring to the first or second time period,  
your statement would still be most surprising. How could you possibly  
know that? Or even hazard a guess? As I mention, even the prison  
commanders didn't believe that."

Scheuer has not yet replied. I had also wondered about his use of the  
term "pacifist whinings". Then, in a review of former CIA Director  
George Tenet's new book, Scheuer takes his former boss to task as  
well as Bill Clinton for not attacking Afghanistan enough in the late  
1990s to kill Osama bin Laden and his followers, accusing the former  
president of "cowardly pacifism". Scheuer writes: "I did not -- and  
do not -- care about collateral casualties in such situations, as  
most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's  
men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. 'You can't kill  
everyone,' he would say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in  
the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States.  
Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today  
had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the  
Clinton team."[7]

It should be noted that in 1993 Clinton ordered the firing of  
missiles into Iraq, killing and injuring many, as retaliation for  
Iraqi involvement in a plot to assassinate former president George  
H.W. Bush who was due to visit Kuwait. (Both the plot and the Iraqi  
involvement in it should be filed away under "alleged".)  In 1998 the  
president ordered the firing of several missiles into Afghanistan and  
Sudan in an attempt to take out suspected terrorists and their  
facilities, instead hitting "collateral casualties". And the  
following year, Clinton, wearing a NATO mask, dropped bombs on the  
people of Yugoslavia for 78 consecutive days.
      But by Michael Scheuer's standards, Bill Clinton was a pacifist.

If it's difficult for you pacifists -- of the whining, cowardly, or  
any other variety -- to appreciate or understand the mind or heart or  
soul of a Michael Scheuer, if you think he's out of touch with  
reality, amoral, and scary, take a look at a recent get-together  
between George W. and a group of neo-conservatives. Compared to these  
guys, Scheuer should quickly seek out the nearest Friends Meeting  
House. And the rest of us should seek out another country. Or planet.

Salon.org reported on the February 28 luncheon between Bush and the  
leading lights of American neo-conservatism. You have to read the  
whole thing, but here's a snippet: "The most critical priority [of  
the neo-cons] is to convince the President to continue to ignore the  
will of the American people and to maintain full-fledged loyalty to  
the neoconservative agenda, no matter how unpopular it becomes. To do  
this, they have convinced the President that he has tapped into a  
much higher authority than the American people -- namely, God- 
mandated, objective morality -- and as long as he adheres to that  
(which is achieved by continuing his militaristic policies in the  
Middle East, whereby he is fighting Evil and defending Good), God and  
history will vindicate him. ... Finally, the neoconservatives left  
Bush with the overarching instruction -- namely, the only thing that  
he should concern himself with, the only thing that really matters,  
is Iran."[8]

Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world  
that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to  
plunder and control but to educate and liberate? And that it had God  
on its side?

Will America's immune system be able to rid itself of its raw-meat  
conservatives?


The biggest lie of all is never mentioned
Bill Moyers' recent documentary "Buying the War" does an excellent  
job of showing how the preeminent members of American mainstream  
journalism failed woefully in their duty to the public and their  
profession by not properly questioning the great falsehoods of the  
Bush administration in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. The media  
did not expose the fallacies of White House claims that Saddam  
Hussein possessed all manner of weapons of mass destruction, that he  
had close working ties to Osama bin Laden and/or al Qaeda, that an  
Iraqi agent had met with Mohammad Atta, the reputed leader of the  
9-11 hijackers, and other stories put forth by the Bush-Cheney gang  
to create the belief that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United  
States.

But the biggest lie of all about the war in Iraq, one that I've  
discussed before in this report, one that the mainstream media never  
pursue, one that Moyers doesn't mention in his documentary, but one  
that has been clearly implied during five years of news and  
discussions, is this: If in fact Saddam Hussein had possessed all  
those terrible weapons he would have been a threat to use them  
against the United States, even without provocation. This is so  
preposterous that I doubt that even Bush or Cheney held such a  
belief. To attack the United States, Hussein would have had to be  
imbued with nothing less than an irresistible desire for mass  
national suicide. I do not know of any evidence that he was insane.

Nor the leaders of Iran. But that counts for nought when the empire  
knows that you are a non-believer in the empire.

Moreover, having exposed the administration's stated excuses for war  
as fraudulent, the documentary inexplicably presents no discussion  
whatsoever as to what might have been the real reasons for the war,  
though the program undoubtedly left many viewers wondering just that  
-- "So why did they lie so much?   To cover up what?"   Most TV  
journalists tend to tread rather lightly in a field full of mines  
labeled "oil" or "Israel" or "defense corporations".[9]


Democracy Now!
I'm a fan of Amy Goodman and her morning radio program "Democracy  
Now". It consistently covers a wide range of issues of interest to  
the progressive community and undoubtedly recruits many new members  
to the cause. But perhaps their range is too wide to expect the  
Democracy Now! staff to have done all of their homework on all of the  
issues. Cuba is one such issue where the program tends to stumble.  
The latest example was on April 26. In the opening news report, Amy  
informed us: "In Cuba, six dissidents have been released from prison  
nearly two years after they were jailed. The Cuban government had  
drawn international condemnation after the jailings in the summer of  
2005."

That was it. CBS or NPR couldn't have followed the State Department  
script any better. There must be many thousands in American prisons  
who could be called "dissidents" for having at one time or another  
expressed serious disgust with what the US was doing in some part of  
the world and who had taken part in a protest; or done the same in  
regard to some vital economic, civil rights, or civil liberties issue  
at home. "Oh," you declare, "but they were not imprisoned because of  
their dissidence." Yes, that's true about almost all of them. But  
it's also true about almost all Cuban prisoners.

To grasp this, one must first understand the following: The United  
States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington,  
only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution,  
the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have  
inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what  
happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban  
dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political  
and financial connections to American government officials,  
particularly in Havana through the American Embassy (the United  
States Interests Section). Would the US government ignore a group of  
Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated  
meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the United  
States? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a  
great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged  
ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had  
with its dissidents' ties to the United States, evidence gathered by  
Cuban double agents.


NOTES
[1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2006/iraq- 
security-stability_nov2006.htm)

{2] CNN, December 6, 2006

[3] World Public Opinion Poll, conducted by the Program on  
International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland,
"The Iraqi Public on the US Presence and the Future of Iraq",  
September 27, 2006, p.5

[4] Washington Post, April 24, 2007, p.18

[5] Study by Harvard School of Public Health, Associated Press, April  
16, 2007

[6] The title of this section and some thoughts on the Constitution  
are taken from an excellent article on the subject of gun control by  
Jonathan Safran Foer in the Washington Post, April 22, 2007, p. B5

[7] Washington Post, April 29, 2007, p.B1

[8] Glenn Greenwald:  http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/ 
2007/03/14/roberts_luncheon/print.html),

[9] Transcript:  http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/transcript1.html


William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire




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