| June
21, 2006
"Just Tell Me One Thing,
Are You Glad that Saddam Hussein is Out of Power?" And I Say,
"No."
Why Bush's Iraq is
Worse Than Saddam's
By WILLIAM
BLUM
National
Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR's
Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite cleric,
a man who was described in the NPR report as "a moderate"
and as a person trying to lead his Shiite followers into practicing
peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and
forced into exile. Jenkins asked him: "What would you think
if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?" The cleric replied
that he'd "rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way
it is now."
When
one considers what the people of Iraq have experienced as a result
of the American bombings, invasion, regime change, and occupation
since 2003, should this attitude be surprising, even from such an
individual? I was moved to compile a list of the many kinds of misfortune
which have fallen upon the heads of the Iraqi people as a result
of the American liberation of their homeland. It's depressing reading,
and you may not want to read it all, but I think it's important
to have it summarized in one place.
Loss of a functioning educational system. A 2005 UN study revealed
that 84% of the higher education establishments have been "destroyed,
damaged and robbed".
The
intellectual stock has been further depleted as many thousands of
academics and other professionals have fled abroad or have been
mysteriously kidnapped or assassinated in Iraq; hundreds of thousands,
perhaps a million, other Iraqis, most of them from the vital, educated
middle class, have left for Jordan, Syria or Egypt, many after receiving
death threats.
"Now
I am isolated," said a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided
to leave. "I have no government. I have no protection from
the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and
throw me in the trash."[1]
Loss
of a functioning health care system. And loss of the public's health.
Deadly infections including typhoid and tuberculosis are rampaging
through the country. Iraq's network of hospitals and health centers,
once admired throughout the Middle East, has been severely damaged
by the war and looting.
The UN's World Food Program reported that 400,000 Iraqi children
were suffering from "dangerous deficiencies of protein".
Deaths from malnutrition and preventable diseases, particularly
amongst children, already a problem because of the 12 years of US-imposed
sanctions, have increased as poverty and disorder have made access
to a proper diet and medicines ever more difficult.
Thousands
of Iraqis have lost an arm or a leg, frequently from unexploded
US cluster bombs, which became land mines; cluster bombs are a class
of weapons denounced by human rights groups as a cruelly random
scourge on civilians, particularly children.
Depleted
uranium particles, from exploded US ordnance, float in the Iraqi
air, to be breathed into human bodies and to radiate forever, and
infect the water, the soil, the blood, the genes, producing malformed
babies. During the few weeks of war in spring 2003, A10 "tankbuster"
planes, which use munitions containing depleted uranium, fired 300,000
rounds.
And
the use of napalm as well. And white phosphorous.
The
American military has attacked hospitals to prevent them from giving
out casualty figures of US attacks that contradicted official US
figures, which the hospitals had been in the habit of doing.
Numerous
homes have been broken into by US forces, the men taken away, the
women humiliated, the children traumatized; on many occasions, the
family has said that the American soldiers helped themselves to
some of the family's money. Iraq has had to submit to a degrading
national strip search.
Destruction
and looting of the country's ancient heritage, perhaps the world's
greatest archive of the human past, left unprotected by the US military,
busy protecting oil facilities.
A
nearly lawless society: Iraq's legal system, outside of the political
sphere, was once one of the most impressive and secular in the Middle
East; it is now a shambles; religious law more and more prevails.
Women's
rights previously enjoyed are now in great and growing danger under
harsh Islamic law, to one extent or another in various areas. There
is today a Shiite religious ruling class in Iraq, which tolerates
physical attacks on women for showing a bare arm or for picnicking
with a male friend.
Men
can be harassed for wearing shorts in public, as can children playing
outside in shorts.
Sex
trafficking, virtually nonexistent previously, has become a serious
issue.
Jews,
Christians, and other non-Muslims have lost much of the security
they had enjoyed in Saddam's secular society; many have emigrated.
A
gulag of prisons run by the US and the new Iraqi government feature
a wide variety of torture and abuse -- physical, psychological,
emotional; painful, degrading, humiliating; leading to mental breakdown,
death, suicide; a human-rights disaster area.
Over
50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned by US forces since the invasion,
but only a very tiny portion of them have been convicted of any
crime.
US
authorities have recruited members of Saddam Hussein's feared security
service to expand intelligence- gathering and root out the resistance.
Unemployment
is estimated to be around fifty percent.
Massive
layoffs of hundreds of thousands of Baathist government workers
and soldiers by the American occupation authority set the process
in motion early on. Later, many, desperate for work, took positions
tainted by a connection to the occupation, placing themselves in
grave danger of being kidnapped or murdered.
The
cost of living has skyrocketed. Income levels have plummeted.
The
Kurds of Northern Iraq evict Arabs from their homes. Arabs evict
Kurds in other parts of the country.
Many
people were evicted from their homes because they were Baathist.
US troops took part in some of the evictions.
They
have also demolished homes in fits of rage over the killing of one
of their buddies.
When
US troops don't find who they're looking for, they take who's there;
wives have been held until the husband turns himself in, a practice
which Hollywood films stamped in the American mind as being a particular
evil of the Nazis; it's also collective punishment of civilians
and is forbidden under the Geneva Convention.
Continual
bombing assaults on neighborhoods has left an uncountable number
of destroyed homes, workplaces, mosques, bridges, roads, and everything
else that goes into the making of modern civilized life.
Hafitha,
Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi ... names that will live in infamy for
the wanton destruction, murder, and assaults upon human beings and
human rights carried out in those places by US forces.
The
supply of safe drinking water, effective sewage disposal, and reliable
electricity have all generally been below pre-invasion levels, producing
constant hardship for the public, in temperatures reaching 115 degrees.
To add to the misery, people wait all day in the heat to purchase
gasoline, due in part to oil production, the country's chief source
of revenue, being less than half its previous level.
The
water and sewage system and other elements of the infrastructure
had been deliberately destroyed by US bombing in the first Gulf
War of 1991. By 2003, the Iraqis had made great strides in repairing
the most essential parts of it. Then came Washington's renewed bombing.
Civil
war, death squads, kidnaping, car bombs, rape, each and every day
... Iraq has become the most dangerous place on earth. American
soldiers and private security companies regularly kill people and
leave the bodies lying in the street; US-trained Iraqi military
and police forces kill even more, as does the insurgency. An entire
new generation is growing up on violence and sectarian ethics; this
will poison the Iraqi psyche for many years to come.
US
intelligence and military police officers often free dangerous criminals
in return for a promise to spy on insurgents.
Protesters
of various kinds have been shot by US forces on several occasions.
At
various times, the US has killed, wounded and jailed reporters from
Al Jazeera television, closed the station's office, and banned it
from certain areas because occupation officials didn't like the
news the station was reporting.
Newspapers
have been closed for what they have printed.
The
Pentagon has planted paid-for news articles in the Iraqi press to
serve propaganda purposes.
But
freedom has indeed reigned -- for the great multinationals to extract
everything they can from Iraq's resources and labor without the
hindrance of public interest laws, environmental regulations or
worker protections. The orders of the day have been privatization,
deregulation, and laissez faire for Halliburton and other Western
corporations. Iraqi businesses have been almost entirely shut out
though they are not without abilities, as reflected in the infrastructure
rebuilding effort following the US bombing of 1991.
Yet,
despite the fact that it would be difficult to name a single area
of Iraqi life which has improved as a result of the American actions,
when the subject is Iraq and the person I'm having a discussion
with has no other argument left to defend US policy there, at least
at the moment, I may be asked:
"Just tell me one thing, are you glad that Saddam Hussein is
out of power?"
And
I say: "No".
And
the person says: "No?"
And
I say: "No. Tell me, if you went into surgery to correct a
knee problem and the surgeon amputated your entire leg, what would
you think if someone then asked you: Are you glad that you no longer
have a knee problem? The people of Iraq no longer have a Saddam
problem."
And
many Iraqis actually supported him.
"Moderation
in temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always
a vice." Thomas Paine
Recently,
Al Gore appeared at a bookstore in downtown Washington signing copies
of his new book on environmental concerns, when who should show
up on the line of people looking for a signed copy but Ralph Nader.
Gore stood up and said: "Nice to see you! How you doing? I'm
really so grateful to you for coming by." After more pleasantries,
Gore inscribed the book: "For my friend, Ralph Nader. With
respect, Al Gore."
Two men in line could not resist remarking to Nader that if not
for him Gore might have won the election in 2000. "Thanks to
you, we had Bush all these years," said one. "How many
are dead in Iraq because of that?"[2] What Nader replied has
not been reported.
The
idea that Ralph Nader cost the Democrats the 2000 election will
likely persist forever, so let me state for all eternity, speaking
for myself and for the millions like me: The choice facing us was
not Ralph Nader or Albert Gore. The choice facing us was Ralph Nader
or not voting at all. If Nader had not been on the ballot, we would
have stayed home. The millions who voted for Nader and the millions
more who stayed home demanded an inspiring alternative to the Republicans;
even a halfway inspiring alternative would have sufficed for most
of us. The Democrats did not, and still do not, offer any kind of
alternative, particularly on foreign policy. On foreign policy the
two major parties are completely indistinguishable.
For
all intents and purposes, the United States is a one-party state
in all but name -- the War Party. The occasional minor points of
difference which arise are Democratic artificial constructs created
for election purposes, and in these cases the Democrats often take
a position to the right of their Republican "opponents",
like calling for tougher measures in the war on terrorism or against
Iran. This is the case with the Democrats whether we're speaking
of the conservatives amongst them, or the moderates, or the liberals.
And this has long been the case. Here is an excerpt from a talk
delivered in 1965 by Carl Oglesby, President of Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington:
The
original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a
mainstream liberal.
It
was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was
intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal.
Think
of the men who now engineer that war -- those who study the maps,
give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy,
McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself.
They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They
are all liberals.[3]
Eat
the Rich. Share your recipes.
With
Bill Gates's announcement that he'll be phasing out his day-to-day
participation in Microsoft, the media has carried a lot of adulatory
stories about the Wunderkind, who became the world's youngest self-made
billionaire at age 31. I do not mean to detract from Gates's accomplishments
when I point out that for him to have become a billionaire just
six years after introducing the MS-DOS 1.0 operating system, Microsoft
had to be charging a lot more -- an awful lot more -- for its software
than it had to based on the company's costs.
There are those, enamored by the philosophy, practice, and folklore
of free enterprise and rugged individualism, who will declare: "More
power to the guy! He deserved every penny of it!"
There
are others, enamored by the vision of a more equitable society,
who question how the current distribution of property and wealth
can reasonably be said to derive from any sort of democratic process.
By the 21st century, American society should have evolved beyond
two percent with breathtaking wealth and seventy-five percent with
a daily struggle for a decent life, including the middle class.
In fact, along such lines we're regressing.
This
is almost heresy to many Americans, who are unwilling to tamper
with political and economic arrangements, though they have no qualms
about meddling with people's sex lives, women's bodies, and other
moral issues. Greed and selfishness are natural, they insist, and
have to be catered to.
But
if the system should cater to selfishness because it's natural,
why not cater to aggression which many of the same people claim
is natural?
William
Blum is the author
of Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II,
Rogue
State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
Notes
[1]
New York Times, May 19, 2006
[2]
Washington Post, June 16, 2006, p.2
[3]
November 27, 1965, copy of Oglesby's speech in my possession.
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