William Blum: Great Moments in the History of Imperialism

2006-06-25

Richard Moore

Original source URL:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13719.htm


NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

Great Moments in the History of Imperialism

By William Blum

06/23/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- National Public Radio foreign 
correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR's Baghdad bureau, met earlier this 
month with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as 
"a moderate" and as a person trying to lead his Shiite followers into practicing
peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into 
exile. Jenkins asked him: "What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam 
Hussein?" The cleric replied that he'd "rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein 
than the way it is now."[1]

When one considers what the people of Iraq have experienced as a result of the 
American bombings, invasion, regime change, and occupation since 2003, should 
this attitude be surprising, even from such an individual? I was moved to 
compile a list of the many kinds of misfortune which have fallen upon the heads 
of the Iraqi people as a result of the American liberation of their homeland. 
It's depressing reading, and you may not want to read it all, but I think it's 
important to have it summarized in one place.

Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed that 84% of 
the higher education establishments have been "destroyed, damaged and robbed".

The intellectual stock has been further depleted as many thousands of academics 
and other professionals have fled abroad or have been mysteriously kidnapped or 
assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, other Iraqis, 
most of them from the vital, educated middle class, have left for Jordan, Syria 
or Egypt, many after receiving death threats. "Now I am isolated," said a 
middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave. "I have no government. I have no 
protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me 
and throw me in the trash."[2]

Loss of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's health. 
Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging through the 
country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health centers, once admired throughout
the Middle East, has been severely damaged by the war and looting.

The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children were suffering 
from "dangerous deficiencies of protein". Deaths from malnutrition and 
preventable diseases, particularly amongst children, already a problem because 
of the 12 years of US-imposed sanctions, have increased as poverty and disorder 
have made access to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.

Thousands of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded US 
cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class of weapons 
denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random scourge on civilians, 
particularly children.

Depleted uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi air, 
to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and infect the water, 
the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed babies. During the few weeks
of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster" planes, which use munitions containing 
depleted uranium, fired 300,000 rounds.

And the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.

The American military has attacked hospitals to prevent them from giving out 
casualty figures of US attacks that contradicted official US figures, which the 
hospitals had been in the habit of doing.

Numerous homes have been broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the women
humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the family has said 
that the American soldiers helped themselves to some of the family's money. Iraq
has had to submit to a degrading national strip search.

Destruction and looting of the country's ancient heritage, perhaps the world's 
greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected by the US military, busy 
protecting oil facilities.

A nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political sphere, 
was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle East; it is now a 
shambles; religious law more and more prevails.

Women's rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger under 
harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas. There is today a 
Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates physical attacks on women
for showing a bare arm or for picnicking with a male friend. Men can be harassed
for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing outside in shorts.

Sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious issue.

Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security they had 
enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have emigrated.

A gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature a wide 
variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psychological, emotional; painful, 
degrading, humiliating; leading to mental breakdown, death, suicide; a 
human-rights disaster area.

Over 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by US forces since the invasion, but 
only a very tiny portion of them have been convicted of any crime.

US authorities have recruited members of Saddam Hussein's feared security 
service to expand intelligence gathering and root out the resistance.

Unemployment is estimated to be around fifty percent. Massive layoffs of 
hundreds of thousands of Baathist government workers and soldiers by the 
American occupation authority set the process in motion early on. Later, many, 
desperate for work, took positions tainted by a connection to the occupation, 
placing themselves in grave danger of being kidnapped or murdered.

The cost of living has skyrocketed. Income levels have plummeted.

The Kurds of Northern Iraq evict Arabs from their homes. Arabs evict Kurds in 
other parts of the country. Many people were evicted from their homes because 
they were Baathist. US troops took part in some of the evictions. They have also
demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one of their buddies.

When US troops don't find who they're looking for, they take who's there; wives 
have been held until the husband turns himself in, a practice which Hollywood 
films stamped in the American mind as being a particular evil of the Nazis; it's
also collective punishment of civilians and is forbidden under the Geneva 
Convention. Continual bombing assaults on neighborhoods has left an uncountable 
number of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and everything 
else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.

Hafitha, Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi ... names that will live in infamy for the 
wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human beings and human rights 
carried out in those places by US forces.

The supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and reliable 
electricity have all generally been below pre-invasion levels, producing 
constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115 degrees. To add 
to the misery, people wait all day in the heat to purchase gasoline, due in part
to oil production, the country's chief source of revenue, being less than half 
its previous level.


The water and sewage system and other elements of the infrastructure had been 
purposely (sic) destroyed by US bombing in the first Gulf War of 1991. By 2003, 
the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing the most essential parts of it. 
Then came Washington's renewed bombing.

Civil war, death squads, kidnaping, car bombs, rape, each and every day ... Iraq
has become the most dangerous place on earth. American soldiers and private 
security companies regularly kill people and leave the bodies lying in the 
street; US-trained Iraqi military and police forces kill even more, as does the 
insurgency. An entire new generation is growing up on violence and sectarian 
ethics; this will poison the Iraqi psyche for many years to come.

US intelligence and military police officers often free dangerous criminals in 
return for a promise to spy on insurgents.

Protesters of various kinds have been shot by US forces on several occasions

At various times, the US has killed, wounded and jailed reporters from Al 
Jazeera television, closed the station's office, and banned it from certain 
areas because occupation officials didn't like the news the station was 
reporting. Newspapers have been closed for what they have printed. The Pentagon 
has planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to serve propaganda 
purposes.

But freedom has indeed reigned -- for the great multinationals to extract 
everything they can from Iraq's resources and labor without the hindrance of 
public interest laws, environmental regulations or worker protections. The 
orders of the day have been privatization, deregulation, and laissez faire for 
Halliburton and other Western corporations. Iraqi businesses have been almost 
entirely shut out though they are not without abilities, as reflected in the 
infrastructure rebuilding effort following the US bombing of 1991.

Yet, despite the fact that it would be difficult to name a single area of Iraqi 
life which has improved as a result of the American actions, when the subject is
Iraq and the person I'm having a discussion with has no other argument left to 
defend US policy there, at least at the moment, I may be asked:

"Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power?"

And I say: "No".

And the person says: "No?"

And I say: "No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a knee problem and 
the surgeon mistakenly amputated your entire leg, what would you think if 
someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer have a knee problem? The
people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam problem." And many Iraqis actually 
supported him.

William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions 
Since World War 2

NOTES
[1] NPR, "Day to Day", June 6, 2006
[2] New York Times, May 19, 2006

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