[News] What Do We Owe Iraq?
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Mar 20 13:42:40 EDT 2008
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
Freedom Archives
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San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
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