[News] What Do We Owe Iraq?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

March 20, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/ross03202008.html

Death, Destruction and Reparations


What Do We Owe Iraq?

By JOHN ROSS

Lurching down Valencia Street in San Francisco last week, I all but 
stumbled over a homeless young man squatting against the wall of the 
now moribund New College. Begging his pardon, I could not help but 
note that he was leafing through a dog-eared volume scavenged from a 
nearby free book box serendipitously entitled "What We Owe Iraq." 
Indeed, my inattentiveness to the young man's pedal extremities was 
the by-product of my contemplation of just that subject.

What do we owe Iraq for over a million dead and ten times that number 
wounded or otherwise devastated in five years of Bush's unrelenting 
bloodletting?

For 5,000,000 people who have been uprooted and displaced from their 
homes, half of them forced to flee their homeland, 65% of them women 
and children, 80% of the children less than 12 years of age?

What do we owe Iraq for having perverted governance into an 
aggregation of death squads? For corrupting public officials and 
leveling essential services, leaving the nation in the dark most 
days, contaminating the water supply, destroying the agricultural 
sector in the birthplace of agriculture, and aiding and abetting the 
looting of the cradle of civilization?

What do we owe this country "where the first letter was written, the 
first law put, the first university built, the first money issued, 
and the first poetry written?" asks Eman Kammas, a fearless Iraqi 
journalist now forced into exile.

The $3,000,000.000.000 USD Joseph Stiglitz calculates this illegal 
war will cost U.S. taxpayers will not compensate Iraq in per capita 
reparations. The quotient of Iraqi blood shed in this genocidal 
exercise cannot nearly be repaid by all the hemoglobin extracted from 
the 4000 dead Americans who gave up their lives in this pointless 
fracaso. The blood they spilled is only a drop in this bottomless bucket.

What do we owe Iraq? The damage can never be quantified. "The debt is 
too great to comprehend," considers my colleague Sasha Crow, founder 
of the Collateral Repair Project whose NGO seeks to repair some of 
the damage done.

The book the homeless comrade on Valencia Street (was he a vet?) was 
perusing consists of a series of essays by one Noah Feldman, a New 
York University law professor and once senior constitutional adviser 
on "the ethics of nation building" to L. Paul Bremer's Coalition 
Provisional Authority. On its now tattered pages, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560255781/counterpunchmaga>
[]
Feldman grapples with framing "the interests of the people being 
governed (read conquered) and our own interest in exercising power 
over them." The problem, as Bremer's lawyer saw it, was how to build 
"responsible, capital-driven nations whose own citizens will not seek 
to destroy us" (sic.) Or. in other words, how to save Iraq by 
breaking it, an ethical quandary that 40 years ago perplexed the 
architects of the U.S. genocide in Vietnam.

Feldman's moral compass only tackles the "nation-building" part and 
evades completely the legality of invading and breaking a sovereign 
nation. The constitution Feldman helped to write indeed handed Iraq 
over to the assassins and their U.S. sponsors. What we owe Iraq is to 
string Professor Feldman up from the nearest lamppost in Washington Square.

What Bush's America thinks it owes Iraq was strikingly encapsulated 
in a recent New York Times dispatch that told of the "exceptional 
luck" of an Iraqi toddler. When Marines raided two year-old Amenah 
al-Bayati's home in Anbar province to detain her father on suspicion 
of supporting the insurgency, they noted that her feet were turning 
blue, a sign of congestive heart failure. Captain Kevin Jarrard 
prevailed over the objections of Homeland Security to have the child 
flown to Tennessee for corrective surgery. "The kid couldn't help who 
her daddy was," Captain Jarrard told the New York Times, adding that 
he now was friends with the imprisoned man. Amenah's homecoming when 
she returned to Haditha was described by the Times as "a public 
relations coup" for the Marines.

In April 2005, a U.S. Marine unit killed 24 civilians in Haditha in 
cold blood, five of them children. The killers have since been absolved.

One thing we do not owe Iraq is another "public relations coup" but 
that's what appears to be up ahead as the war de-accelerates. 
Youngsters maimed by the aggression that Professor Feldman 
rationalizes will be flown to the U.S. by "humanitarian" aid scams 
and faith-based Christian charities to massage the collective guilt 
of America for having slept through the massacre into coughing up big 
bucks. Celebrity telethons and "We Are The World" clone mega-concerts 
will follow. Reconstruction swindles with billions in contracts let 
to Halliburton and Blackwater (to protect the reconstructors) and the 
annexation of the nation's damaged oil fields by Big Oil will drive 
the final neo-liberal nail into Iraq's coffin. Just like the Feldman 
scenario, first we destroy 'em and then we save 'em. It's the American way.

What we owe Iraq is about to become one more corporate boondoggle - 
if we let it.

In the years after the debacle in Vietnam, those who had savaged that 
country and those who had stood fast against the carnage considered 
this same question: what did we owe the people of Vietnam and their 
damaged land for our appalling war upon them both? Some returned to 
the scene of the crime to fraternize with the enemy and calculate the 
damage they had done. Vets' groups and peace activists took action to 
repair what collateral damage they could. Hospitals were built and 
potable water systems installed. Kids horribly burnt by our napalm 
were flown to California for plastic surgery. It seems almost 
axiomatic that once the U.S. has destroyed a nation, we are driven to 
repair it.

Who repairs the collateral damage is crucial in this equation. Should 
repair and reparations be relegated to the same profit-driven 
corporate entities responsible for the damage? Or are the people we 
have indiscriminately bombed best served by grassroots response?

Military euphemisms aside, collateral damage is the willful 
decimation of a civilian population designed to terrorize those who 
might consider resisting the conquest of their country. One antidote 
to this homicidal hypocrisy is collateral repair.

Collateral repair begins at home. Having read of the killing of an 
ambulance driver by U.S. troops in the northwest city of al-Qaim 
during the first days of "Operation Iron Fist" in October 2005, Crow 
began collecting small donations from her Seattle neighbors to repair 
a part of the damage, eventually providing the driver's widow and 
four children with four walls and a roof and a few sheep. Others 
joined in and a Vets for Peace group installed a potable water system 
at the hospital whose ambulance had been crunched. The first effort 
blossomed into the Collateral Repair Project 
(www.collateralrepairproject.org) which seeks to soften some of the 
unspeakable damage Bush Inc. has inflicted upon the Iraqi people, 
person to person, family to family, hand to hand. and heart to heart.

Small things are accomplished: a kids' school uniform is paid for, a 
tank of propane to heat refugee hovels in winter is purchased, dollar 
reading glasses for sewing women are shipped over, soccer balls 
exchanged for toy guns - band-aids, yes, but as CRP asks "what else can we do?"

The dimensions of the damage are hard to comprehend. One does what 
they can and where they can do it. For the past year, Collateral 
Repair has focused on the nearly 1,000,000 Iraqis who have been 
driven into exile in Jordan, sometimes with only the shirt on their 
back, where they are hounded by authorities much as ICE beats up on 
undocumented Mexicans on the homefront.

Iraqi families who have sought sanctuary in Jordan now have until 
April 17th to pay thousands of dollars in fines for seeking refuge in 
that Hashemite kingdom or face deportation and possible death back to 
Iraq, or flee to a third country - the U.S. which instigated this 
butchery in the first place and where Homeland Security restricts 
refuge to collaborators, is not an option. However, its not all bad 
news - those Iraqis with $100,000 in the bank will be allowed to 
remain in Jordan.

Crow understands what we have taken from Iraq is irreplaceable, so 
she and her partner Mary Madsen work on the little things, the sewing 
machines, the price of baking a loaf of bread, a camcorder for Um 
Muna to record the ceremonies of life in her Amman refugee community. 
A collection we took up at my 70th birthday party paid for it.

What else can we do?

What we owe Iraq is our attention. It has faded as the years and the 
corpse heaps have piled up, remembered once a year on the anniversary 
of the invasion when those who have suffered this damage must live it 
364 more days a year for five years now and how many more?

What do we owe Iraq? Not a new president who praises the U.S. killing 
machine and pledges "orderly withdrawal" by 2013. Not corporate 
solutions to the suffering of those we have treated so callously until now.

What we owe Iraq is to change the way America does business in the 
world and the only way to do that is to radically change this 
gangrenous system and root out the source of all this damage. What we 
owe Iraq is really nothing short of a revolution.

John Ross is back in Mexico and will now turn his attention to this 
beautifully chaotic republic for a while. If you have further 
information, write <mailto:johnross at igc.org>johnross at igc.org




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