[News] No American should be allowed to forget that the US destroyed the nation of Iraq

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Anti-Empire Report

September 1st, 2010
by William Blum
http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer85.html


Things which don't go away. Things the American 
government and media don't let go of.
And neither do I.




Iraq

"They're leaving as heroes. I want them to walk 
home with pride in their hearts," declared Col. 
John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in 
Iraq. <http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer85.html#note-1>1

It's enough to bring tears to the eyes of an 
American, enough to make him choke up.

Enough to make him forget.

But no American should be allowed to forget that 
the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have 
been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The 
Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, 
with one excuse or another; then invaded, then 
occupied, overthrew the government, killed 
wantonly, tortured ... the people of that unhappy 
land have lost everything ­ their homes, their 
schools, their electricity, their clean water, 
their environment, their neighborhoods, their 
mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their 
careers, their professionals, their state-run 
enterprises, their physical health, their mental 
health, their health care, their welfare state, 
their women's rights, their religious tolerance, 
their safety, their security, their children, 
their parents, their past, their present, their 
future, their lives ... More than half the 
population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in 
prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile 
... The air, soil, water, blood and genes 
drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful 
birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in 
wait for children to pick them up ... an army of 
young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the 
American invaders; they left the country more 
militant, hardened by war, to spread across the 
Middle East, Europe and Central Asia ... a river 
of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris 
... through a country that may never be put back together again.

"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis 
that things were better before the U.S.-led 
invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter ... drum roll, please ... Stand tall 
American GI hero! And don't even think of ever 
apologizing. Iraq is forced by the United States 
to continue paying reparations for its own 
invasion of Kuwait in 1990. How much will the 
American heroes pay the people of Iraq?

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes ...
No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes."
– Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo

"What we need to discover in the social realm is 
the moral equivalent of war; something heroic 
that will speak to men as universally as war 
does, and yet will be as compatible with their 
spiritual selves as war has proved to be incompatible."
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Perhaps the groundwork for that heroism already 
exists ... February 15, 2003, a month before the 
US invasion of Iraq, probably the largest protest 
in human history, between six and ten million 
protesters took to the streets of some 800 cities 
in nearly sixty countries across the globe.

Iraq. Love it or leave it.




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