[Peace-discuss] Top 9 Reasons To Stop Bombing Iraq

Fri Oct 3 08:10:11 EDT 2014

  Top 9 Reasons To Stop Bombing Iraq

1iraq
Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Foreign 
Policy <http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/foreign-policy/>, Iraq 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/iraq/>, Wars and Militarism 
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/wars-and-militarism/>
By David Swanson, www.warisacrime.org 
<http://warisacrime.org/content/top-9-reasons-stop-bombing-iraq>
August 14th, 2014
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*1. It's not a rescue mission.*  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.

*2. It's going to make things worse, again.* 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.

*3. Bombs kill.*  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.

*4. There are other options.*  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.

*5. There are now enough weapons already there to practically justify 
one of Colin Powell's slides retroactively. *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.

*6. This is going to cost a fortune.* 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.

*7. Bombs are environmental disasters.* 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.

*8. There go our civil liberties.* 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?

*9. War is illegal.*  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.

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