Why
Americans Should Organize
To Stop The War
By Luciana Bohne
09 November, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Reading
Mike Ferner's book, "Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports
from Iraq" (Praeger, 2006), makes one realize how vital it is for
Americans to organize a stop-the-war/troops-out-now movement, made more
urgent by the fact that both ruling parties, Democrat and Republican,
offer Americans only one choice: support the war.
This slim volume recollects
Ferner's encounters with people in Iraq, including US troops, during
two visits. His first visit, just before the Anglo-American invasion
of Iraq in March of 2003, acquainted Ferner with the fear of living
under the threat of imminent attack and with the despair, achingly recounted
in the book, of a handful--including Ferner-- of Western peace activists
in Baghdad, principally from Christian Peace Team and Voices in the
Wilderness, who failed to stop it. Ferner's second visit, in Jauary
and February of 2004, finds Iraq caught in the churning meat grinder
fed by the predictable and legitimate resistance and the arrogant and
unlawful occupation--just two months before the US public discovers
with horror that in a place called Abu Ghraib the US
government had flushed the Geneva Conventions, the US Constitution,
and the US laws against torture down the Pentagon's, the White House's,
and the Department of Justice's collective toilet.
He concludes his book with
a series of sweeping questions, the most important of which is "what
do we owe the people of Iraq?" "Having enforced brutal sanctions,"
he writes,
"and carried out intermittent bombings for a dozen years BEFORE
invading in 2003; having reduced whole cities to rubble; having killed
over 100,000, people maimed many thousand more, and laid waste to Iraq's
environment; having lain [sic] its entire economy prostrate to international
corporations; what now?"
In the most illuminating
chapter of Ferner's book, involving an exchange of letters between Iraqi
and American students, we get the hint of an answer: begin by listening
to what Iraqis have to say. Before the invasion, US war-propaganda succeeded
in conflating the identities of twenty-four million Iraqis into a single,
uniform, monolithic identity, Saddam Hussein's, the "Butcher of
Baghdad"--the new Hitler. Because to propagandized Americans all
Iraqis became unconscious replicas of Saddam Hussein, the killing, arrest,
torture, and detention of tens of thousands of mostly innocent Iraqi
civilians could be presented and normalized by Washington as a justifiable,
necessary, and even desirable goal of the occupation. The subconscious
criminalization of a whole people ran counter to the stated noble cause
of the war, surfacing after the mythical WMDs could not be found. This
"noble cause" alleged that the US invasion was undertaken
to liberate Iraqis and to bring them freedom and democracy. Lieutenant
Colonel Nathan Sassaman, 1st Battalion, Third Infantry Division, stationed
at Forward Operation Base Paliwoda, near Baghdad, attempted to bridge
the moral gap between the "noble cause" and the brutality
of its implementation. Quoted in the New York Times, Sassaman had asserted:
"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for
projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help
them." Interviewed and challenged on this quotation by Ferner,
Sassaman "smiled grimly and said it had been a 'bad day' when he
spoke with Times reporter, Dexter Filkins." In early 2004, Sassaman
still believed that "we are here to help [Iraqis]," but he
gave no indication that he consulted them. Why should he? Within Ferner's
hearing, Sassaman called them "pathological liars," a judgment
repeated directly to Ferner by the Battalion's XO, Major Rob Gwinner.
In the chapter entitled "US and Iraqi Students Begin a Conversation,"
Ferner shows how crucial it is for Americans to begin listening to Iraqis.
The chapter involves a response by Iraqi high-school students to letters
carried by Ferner from their counterparts in a Toledo, Ohio, high school..
One notices, with a pang of professorial shame, how much more articulate,
correct, and vocabulary-confident is the Iraqi students' written English
compared to that of the English-speaking natives in the US. Furthermore,
one is struck by the Iraqi students' political understanding of the
war. "I think the US deserves a better president," declares
one Iraqi student, after writing that the American invasion "ended
a brutal dictatorial regime [but] it brought the American occupation
which the Iraqis can't stand." Another Iraqi student writes soberly,
with more journalistic acumen and integrity than some of the top-paid
reporters at the New York Times, "The war] was about the oil, that
damned liquid made a lot of people die for nothing and a lot of nations
fight for it. . . . All we want is peace on this beautiful earth."
Yet another response: ". . . Don't be sorry. it's not your fault
that we were invaded, we are living in a world where 'Power and Money'
is the vital element that is running the show. Military troops were
sent to Iraq for oil."
Compare this choral harmony
issuing from Iraqi high-school students on the motivation for the war
to its causal assessment by a "young captain from Michigan, not
long out of West Point." "Why do you think you're here?"
asks Ferner. "To get rid of Saddam Hussein; to give Iraqis their
freedom; to fight terrorism." One "bone-tired" US soldier,
however, perhaps because his brain escaped the coddling, doctrinal massage
of a superior military academy, utters a single word--"Oil."
He and the Iraqi students share the same common sense in examining the
evidence. Had Iraq been rich in turnips instead of oil, they both imply,
there would have been no war.
But there is a war, the brutality
of which, even in the first year of the occupation, Ferner uncovers
by listening to ordinary Iraqis--farmers in villages enclosed by razor
wire for "their security," according to US military rationale,
taxi drivers with engineering degrees unable to get work in their profession
in Saddam-free Iraq, translators who prefer to work for NGOs rather
than for the occupiers, collaboration being a betrayal few sentient
beings under an illegal occupation would consider less evil than fratricide.
Particularly enlightening is Ferner's report on how so many largely
blameless Iraqis came to be detained in US-run prisons so soon after
their liberation from Saddam Hussein.
Investigating the detention
of eighty-three men (among 10,000 then detained without charges all
over Iraq) and incarceration at Abu Ghraib, Ferner reveals the murky
underside of the "noble cause," two months before it beaches,
belly up, on the innocent shores of the homeland's public consciousness
with the pictures of the Abu Ghraib horrors. "On December 16, 2003,"
Mohammed Al-Tai, citrus grower, reports to the visiting Christian Peace
Team delegation, which includes Ferner, "at 2 A.M., on a rainy
night, all the houses of Abu Siffa, about two dozen, were surrounded
by U.S. troops in tanks and humvees. They surrounded the fields of the
farmers by tanks and they destroyed the fences of the fields."
In Ferner's own summary of Al-Tai's narrative, "soldiers from the
Army's 4th Infantry Division rounded up two attorneys, fifteen schoolteachers,
men in their eighties, a blind man, police officers, young teens, and
an elderly man so frail he had to be carried by the soldiers. . . .
In all, eighty-three men
disappeared that night, virtually every male in the village." Al-Tai
further reported to the
CPT delegation, documenting detainees' stories that "they also
stole from Imad, the attorney, 4.5 million dinars ($10, 370)" and
from other detainees the additional total of approximately $6,375 to
$6,400.
When Ferner interviewed Lieutenant
Colonel Sassaman, he asked why the army detained the men of Abu Siffa
three days after arresting Kais Hattam, a resident of Abu Siffa, wanted
for links to the resistance. Sassaman replied that "the amount
of weapons and explosives [found in the village] implicated Abu Siffa
as a center of resistance." Six weeks after the raid, seventy-nine
men were still held in Abu Ghraib, guilty by association with the resistance.
This is the logic of an occupier who violates international law. The
Nazis had it, too, in occupied Europe during WW II. The Geneva Conventions
of 1949 called it "collective punishment" and forbade it.
Ferner's book is a work
of vital importance, especially at a time when liberal and conservative
officialdom and the media punditry are attempting to shift the blame
for the failure of the US occupation onto the Iraqis themselves. It
bears remembering that the US invasion of Iraq was the "supreme
international crime," having violated international law by waging
war without the approval of the United Nations' Security Council. It
follows from this "supreme crime" that the occupiers bear
all the responsibility in the catastrophe they have created in Iraq
with their reckless, naked, and unlawful aggression. Occupiers do not
have rights; they have only obligations. Reading Ferner's book--a record
not only of the suffering of the people of Iraq caused by the neo-imperialist
designs of the US economic elites and by the US army forced to serve
them but also a record of courage, humanity, and solidarity by an ordinary
American citizen unable to silence his conscience at the injustice perpetrated
by his government in his name against a blameless people-burdens the
reader with thoughts of responsibility.
"What now," Ferner
asks. "First, read this book or inform yourself in some other way;
then organize" is the suggested first response. Unless the people
of the United States rise up to oppose this war, it will not end. The
world is waiting for the sleeping American giant to shake off its slumber,
its confusion, its sense of powerlessness and mount once more the historic
resistance to yet another imperialist war as the American people of
a previous generation had done before, thereby stopping the war in Vietnam,
aided by the resistance of the people of Vietnam. This waiting for deliverance
from the disaster and the inhumanity that is the war in Iraq either
through the ballot or through some external military or economic debacle
that checks Washington's bellicose adventurism is unworthy of the power
and privilege that the American people enjoy to force their government
to change course.
"Does [the Military Commissions Act of 2006] mean that under this
law, ultimately the only thing keeping you, I [sic], or the viewer out
of Gitmo is the sanity and honesty of the president of the United States?"
Keith Olbermann
"It does. . . . What
the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes
over 200 years of American principles and values." Jonathan
Turley, George Washington University Constitutional Law Professor
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