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Iraqis shot dead despite
white flag
MORAL ABYSS IN IRAQ May 10, 2004
The War Is Lost by
William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
We have traveled a
long, dark, strange road since the attacks of
September 11. We have all suffered, we have all known fear and
anger,
and sometimes hatred. Many of us have felt - probably more than
we
are willing to admit it - at one time or another a desire for
revenge, so deep was the wound inflicted upon us during that
wretched, unforgettable Tuesday morning in September of 2001.
But we have come now to the end of a week so awful, so terrible,
so
wrenching that the most basic moral fabric of that which we believe
is good and great - the basic moral fabric of the United States
of
America - has been torn bitterly asunder.
We are awash in photographs of Iraqi men - not terrorists, just
people - lying in heaps on cold floors with leashes around their
necks. We are awash in photographs of men chained so remorselessly
that their backs are arched in agony, men forced to masturbate
for
cameras, men forced to pretend to have sex with one another for
cameras, men forced to endure attacks from dogs, men with electrodes
attached to them as they stand, hooded, in fear of their lives.
The worst, amazingly, is yet to come. A new battery of photographs
and videotapes, as yet unreleased, awaits over the horizon of
our
abused understanding. These photos and videos, also from the
Abu
Ghraib prison, are reported to show U.S. soldiers gang raping
an
Iraqi woman, U.S. soldiers beating an Iraqi man nearly to death,
U.S.
troops posing, smirks affixed, with decomposing Iraqi bodies,
and
Iraqi troops under U.S. command raping young boys.
George W. Bush would have us believe these horrors were restricted
to a sadistic few, and would have us believe these horrors happened
only in Abu Ghraib. Yet reports are surfacing now of similar
treatment at another U.S. detention center in Iraq called Camp
Bucca. According to these reports, Iraqi prisoners in Camp Bucca
were beaten, humiliated, hogtied, and had scorpions placed on
their naked bodies.
In the eyes of the world, this is America today. It cannot be
dismissed as an anomaly because it went on and on and on in the
Abu Ghraib prison, and because now we hear of Camp Bucca. According
to the British press, there are some 30 other cases of torture
and humiliation under investigation. The Bush administration
went out of its way to cover up this disgrace, declaring secret
the Army report on these atrocities. That, pointedly, is against
the rules and against the law. You can’t call something
classified just because it is embarrassing and disgusting. It
was secret, but now it is out, and the whole world has been shown
the dark, scabrous underbelly of our definition of freedom.
The beginnings of actual political fallout began to find its
way into the White House last week. Representative John Murtha
of Pennsylvania, the House Democrats’ most vocal defense
hawk, joined Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to declare that the
conflict is "unwinnable." Murtha, a Vietnam veteran,
rocked the Democratic caucus when he said at a leader’s
luncheon Tuesday that the United States cannot win the war in
Iraq.
"Unwinnable." Well, it only took about 14 months.
Also last week, calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary
Don
Rumsfeld became strident. Pelosi accused Rumsfeld of being "in
denial
about Iraq," and said U.S. soldiers "are suffering
great casualties
and injuries, and American taxpayers are paying an enormous price"
because Rumsfeld "has done a poor job as secretary of defense."
Representative Charlie Rangel, a leading critic of the Iraq invasion,
has filed articles of impeachment against Rumsfeld.
So there’s the heat. But let us consider the broader picture
here
in the context of that one huge word: "Unwinnable."
Why did we do
this in the first place? There have been several reasons offered
over
the last 16 months for why we needed to do this thing.
It started, for real, in January 2003 when George W. Bush said
in
his State of the Union speech that Iraq was in possession of
26,000
liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons
of sarin,
mustard and VX, 30,000 munitions to deliver this stuff, and that
Iraq
was seeking uranium from Niger to build nuclear bombs.
That reason has been scratched off the list because, as has been
made painfully clear now, there are no such weapons in Iraq.
The
Niger claim, in particular, has caused massive embarrassment
for
America because it was so farcical, and has led to a federal
investigation
of this White House, because two administration officials took
revenge
upon Joseph Wilson’s wife for Wilson’s exposure of
the lie.
Next on the list was September 11, and the oft-repeated accusation
that Saddam Hussein must have been at least partially responsible.
That one collapsed as well - Bush himself had to come out and
say
Saddam had nothing to do with it.
Two reasons down, so the third must be freedom and liberty for
the
Iraqi people. Once again, however, facts interfere. America does
not
want a democratic Iraq, because a democratic Iraq would quickly
become a Shi’ite fundamentalist Iraq allied with the Shi’ite
fundamentalist nation of Iran, a strategic situation nobody with
a
brain wants to see come to pass. It has been made clear by Paul
Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, that whatever the
new
Iraqi government comes to look like, it will have no power to
make
any laws of any kind, it will have no control over the security
of
Iraq, and it will have no power over the foreign troops which
occupy
its soil. This is, perhaps, some bizarre new definition of democracy
not yet in the dictionary, but it is not democracy by any currently
accepted definition I have ever heard of.
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction
is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections
to
September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to
bring
freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped
around by defenders of this administration and supporters of
this
war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his
own
people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off
without
him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed
more
than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed
countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that
we,
like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people.
Worst of
all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing.
The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification
for the
invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers
now.
We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W.
Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never,
ever
something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with
the
world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in
a
literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because
of
the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
We saw a prime example of this during Friday’s farce of
a Senate
hearing into the Abu Ghraib disaster which starred Don Rumsfeld.
From
his bully pulpit spoke Senator Joe Lieberman, who parrots the
worst
of Bush’s war propaganda with unfailingly dreary regularity.
Responding to the issue of whether or not Bush and Rumsfeld should
apologize for Abu Ghraib, Lieberman stated that none of the
terrorists had apologized for September 11.
There it was, in a nutshell. There was the idea, oft promulgated
by
the administration, that September 11 made any barbarism, any
extreme, any horror brought forth by the United States acceptable,
and even desirable. There was the institutionalization of revenge
as
a basis for policy. Sure, Abu Ghraib was bad, Mr. Lieberman put
forth. But September 11 happened, so all bets are off.
Thus fails the "War on Terror." September 11 did not
demand of us
the lowest common denominator, did not demand of us that we become
that which we despise and denounce. September 11 demanded that
we be
better, greater, more righteous than those who brought death
to us.
September 11 demanded that we be better, and in doing so, we
would
show the world that those who attacked us are far, far less than
us.
That would have been victory, with nary a shot being fired.
Our leaders, however, took us in exactly the opposite direction.
Every reason to go to Iraq has failed to retain even a semblance
of
credibility. Every bit of propaganda Osama bin Laden served up
to the
Muslim world for why America should be attacked and destroyed
has
been given credibility by what has taken place in Iraq. Victory
in
this "War on Terror," a propaganda war from the beginning,
has been
given to the September 11 attackers by the hand of George W.
Bush,
and by the hand of those who enabled his incomprehensible blundering.
The war is lost. |
