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Topic: The elimination of Iraq as a nation. (Read 506 times) |
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Hermit
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The elimination of Iraq as a nation.
« on: 2010-01-31 03:13:30 » |
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Remember the illegal destruction of Iraq?
Source: Salon.com
Authors: Glenn Greenwald
Dated: 2010-01-29
British political news has been consumed for the last several weeks by a formal inquiry into the illegality and deceit behind Tony Blair's decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq. Today, Blair himself is publicly testifying before the investigative commission and is being grilled about numerous false claims he made in the run-up to the war, not only about Iraqi weapons programs (his taxi-cab-derived "45-minutes-to-launch!!" warning) and Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda, but also about secret commitments he made to join the U.S. at a time when he and Bush were still pretending that they were undecided and awaiting the outcome of the U.N. negotiations and the inspection process.
A major focus of the investigation is the illegality of the war. Some of the most embarrassing details that have emerged concern the conclusions by the British Government's own legal advisers that the invasion of Iraq would be illegal without U.N. approval. The top British legal officer had concluded that the war would be illegal, only to change his mind under substantial pressure shortly before the invasion. Several weeks ago, a formal investigation in the Netherlands -- whose government had supported the invasion -- produced the first official adjudication of the legality of the war, and found it illegal, with "no basis in international law."
As Digby notes, all of this stands in stark and shameful contrast to the U.S., which pointedly refuses to "look back" or concern itself with whether it waged an illegal (and horribly destructive) war. The British inquiry has been widely criticized for being too passive and deferential and lacking any credible threat of accountability (other than disclosure of facts). Still, one can barely even imagine George Bush and Dick Cheney being hauled before an investigative body and forced, under oath, to testify publicly about what they did as a means of determining the legality or illegality of that war. Doing that would fundamentally conflict with two leading principles in American political life: (1) our highest political leaders must never be accountable for actions they take while in power; and (2) whether something they do is "illegal" -- especially the starting of wars -- is utterly irrelevant. Instead of formally investigating whether they broke the law, we treat them like elder statesmen who deserve a life of luxury and media reverence. Tony Blair -- who had no discernible expertise or experience in banking -- himself is showered with riches for a "part-time" job by JP Morgan and by other institutions who benefited substantially from his acts in office.
All of this underscores the fact that -- despite how much public debate it has received -- we still childishly, and with moral blindness, refuse to come to terms with the true scope of our wrongdoing when it comes to the Iraq War. Several hundred thousand Iraqis -- at least -- were killed as a result of this war, with another 4 million being turned into refugees. As the Iraqi journalist and professor Ali Fadhil put it in 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion: "basically, my assessment is we have a whole nation called Iraq, now it's wiped out." Contrary to self-justifying conventional wisdom, the alleged post-surge improvement in Iraqi civil society has not remotely mitigated the destruction spawned by the invasion. As The Economist detailed in September, 2009, the U.S.-supported Maliki government is relying increasingly on Saddam-era tactics of torture, censorship, lawless sectarian militias, and brutal punishment of dissent: "Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state."
The invasion of Iraq was unquestionably one of the greatest crimes of the last several decades. Imagine what future historians will say about it -- a nakedly aggressive war launched under the falsest of pretenses, in brazen violation of every relevant precept of law, which destroyed an entire country, killed huge numbers of innocent people, and devastated the entire population. Have we even remotely treated it as what it is? We're willing to concede it was a "mistake" -- a good-natured and completely understandable lapse of judgment -- but only the shrill and unhinged among us call it a crime. As always, it's worth recalling that Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, insisted in his Closing Argument against the Nazi war criminals that "the central crime in this pattern of crimes" was not genocide or mass deportation or concentration camps; rather, "the kingpin which holds them all together, is the plot for aggressive wars." History teaches that aggressive war is the greatest and most dangerous of all crimes -- as it enables even worse acts of inhumanity -- and illegal, aggressive war is precisely what we did in Iraq, to great devastation.
I'm periodically criticized for an "angry" tone in my writing, which I always find mystifying. I genuinely don't understand why anger should be avoided or even how it could be. What other reaction is possible when one looks around and sees the government leaders who committed these grave crimes completely unburdened by any accountability and treated as respectable dignitaries, or watches the Tom Friedmans, Jeffrey Goldbergs, Fred Hiatts and other unrepentent leading media propagandists who helped enable it still feted as Serious and honest experts, or beholds the current Cabinet and Senate filled with people who supported it, or observes the Michael O'Hanlons and Les Gelbs and other Foreign Policy Community luminaries who lent trans-partisan credence to it all continue to traipse around still pompously advocating for more wars that never touch their lives?
A few months ago, I did an MSNBC segment with Dan Senor, who is currently a Fox News contributor, author of a new book hailing the greatness of Israeli innovations, a recent addition to the Council on Foreign Relations, and husband of CNN anchor Campbell Brown. But back in 2003 and 2004, he was Chief Spokesman for the "Coalition Provisional Authority" in Iraq -- the U.S. occupying force in that country. Sitting in the green room with him before the segment, I was really disgusted by the paradox that one is supposed to treat him as just some random political adversary deserving of standard civility, respect and respectability -- in other words, a Decent Person is supposed to forget that he was an official who enabled and lied about some of the most monstrous acts of the last many years and is wholly unrepentent. And, of course, he was going on MSNBC that day to opine about our current foreign policy options: direct involvement in this horrific crime is no disqualifying factor; it's not even a black mark against someone's credibility and reputation.
At least Robert McNamara had the decency to write a deeply humble mea culpa and spend the last couple decades of his life under a cloud of deep shame and disgrace until he died. Do you think any of that will happen to any of the people responsible -- in politics, the media and our Foriegn Policy think tanks -- for the unimaginable crimes of the last decade, particularly what was done in Iraq: Shock and Awe and the Fallujah massacres and Blackwater slaughters and Abu Ghraibs and all the rest?
Of course it won't. They continue to thrive unabated even as Iraq tries to rebuild itself from the devastation they unleashed. As toothless as the British investigation appears to be, at least there's some public reckoning, compelled answers from their leaders, and an attempt to determine the precise nature of their crimes. And the Dutch have formally declared the war in which they were involved to be a crime. By contrast, we treat it all as a pointless relic of the irrelevant and distant past, all because the people who did it have banded together to decree that the worst possible crime is not what they did, but instead, would be if the rest of us examined what they did and insisted on meaningful accountability.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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MoEnzyme
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Re:The elimination of Iraq as a nation.
« Reply #1 on: 2010-01-31 15:43:44 » |
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I have heard some persuasive commentators suggest that Iraq as a nation was simply an unstable element to begin with, not much in the way of shared cultures - a "team of mavericks". Perhaps one of the few things really holding it together at all was Saddam's brutality. But isn't that true of all nations as power structures? They are necessarily born out of some original brutality. At least that seems the way most of our patriotic mythologies seem to read.
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Hermit
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Re:The elimination of Iraq as a nation.
« Reply #2 on: 2010-02-01 02:12:37 » |
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[MoEnzyme] I have heard some persuasive commentators suggest that Iraq as a nation was simply an unstable element to begin with, not much in the way of shared cultures - a "team of mavericks". Perhaps one of the few things really holding it together at all was Saddam's brutality.
[Hermit]
Before you read the following, let me note that Tu Quoque is not being used here in an attempt to defend the allegedly guilty, that would be pointless as we will never know if he really was guilty of much beyond being in the way of the US, as Saddam Hussein was murdered by the US, in my opinion to ensure that we would never know; but to invalidate the stance that the mugger turned self appointed policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner was qualified to pass any form of judgement, or to make sneering comments on their erstwhile enemy, and to note that available facts tend to contradict the claims made here by MoEnzyme.
Saddam Hussein was many things. His culture can be a brutal one, and he reflected his culture. The times in which he governed were often brutal, and brutal times often result in brutality. He was, however, so much more. For example, malnutrition, power and water supplies - along with life expectancy, were significantly better in Iraq under Saddam, despite brutal sanctions carefully planned to cause widespread disease and death in order to make Iraq ungovernable, than they ever have been under the American occupation and likely than they ever will be under a US puppet regime. Which suggests that he was at the least a relatively competent administrator - and the degree of incompetence and corruption, as well as relative death, refugee and incarceration rates - as well as brutality - imposed on Iraq by the USA, tells us that Saddam Hussein's was far more competent and far less brutal than the USA or its assorted generals or administrators.
Perhaps worth mentioning at this point, that in the 1970s, before two brutal wars, that Iraq was repeatedly taking accolades for its advanced, profitable, secular society. One with the best educated women in the Middle East. The highest level of industrialization. The best medicine. The lowest infant mortality rates.
Iraq fought Iran to a standstill despite its vastly smaller population. And Saddam Hussein was popular. When he marched into Kuwait, with America's agreement not to intervene if not exactly blessing, in order to end slant drilling into the Iraq oilfields, his men were welcomed by the Kuwaitis who rejoiced to see the end of their Royal family and delighted to see a step taken in the reunification of the political and social area that existed before British Petroleum the UK arbitrarily sliced it up.
Most "brutality" there was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, was aimed at the Kurd separatists, many of whom fought with Iran in the First Gulf War (the one that didn't involve the US). We know how the US would have dealt with that. In WW II they put Japanese Americans who had done nothing to the US into concentration camps and its Supreme Court decided that the President had that power and that the country did not need to apologize or even pay reparations. Those the US suspected of collaborating with their enemies were simply executed after the same kind of sham trials by kangaroo courts as were used on Saddam Hussein. Despite this, Iraq (and Iran) was generally far less brutal towards its Kurds than our vaunted allies the Turks, let alone than under its previous colonial rulers, one of whom, Sir Winston Churchill, whose name you might recognize, was directly responsible for the use of chemical weapons on the Kurds. Interestingly we just hanged an Iraqi General for doing that. Do you remember what Sir Winston Churchill's punishment was? What was George Bush Senior's punishment for the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure in the Second Gulf War (the one that did involve the US) or Clinton's punishment for the sanctions regime designed as a component of the same program to maximize disease and death? Or GW Bush's punishment for his illegal wars - crimes against humanity encompassing the whole? Or Obama's for bombing civilians in Pakistan on a daily basis? I suggest that the US is far more brutal than Saddam Hussein ever was. Saddam Hussein was a tribal brigand born into the wrong century and there was much that was good in him as well as much that was petty. I'm not convinced he ever was "bad" or "brutal" on the same scale as the "great" Western leaders I just mentioned.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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