Get out

An unambiguous message for Putsch

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca
5/13/06

The Iraqi Parliament had a clear and simple message for the American forces the other day.

Get out.

Now.

Of the 275 who are members of the chamber, 144 co-sponsored a bill demanding an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. The vote will be pro forma. They have a large majority.

In a country that has basically been in a state of civil war for three years – since the Golden Mosque was blown up – it is the one thing that can bring Sunni and Shi’ite together, and now even the Kurds are beginning to realize that the Americans are no real improvement over Saddam Hussein.

The Americans, even if they had been civil and well-intentioned, would still have been occupiers, representatives of an alien culture, an alien language, and an alien god. The Americans, of course, were not civil and well-intentioned. They murdered indiscriminately, they raped, they urinated on the bodies of their victims. They laughed on camera at people they shot who were trying to crawl away, at their torture victims, and forced prisoners to pose for soft-porn shots for use on the internet. They sent men with dogs into devout Moslem households to search for weapons – yes, the same Americans who for so long preached to the world that people should have weapons in their homes to guard against invaders.

It was bad enough that America invaded Iraq for no legitimate reason. It was bad enough that they occupied Iraq for no legitimate reason. But far too many in the military behaved like absolute pigs, disgraceful, vicious sub-humans, disgracing their units, their branches, and their country.

There’s nothing courageous or manly about shooting two dozen innocent people and pissing on their bodies because someone else ambushed your unit several days earlier. Even the NAZIs didn’t do that. Yes, there was the Czech village of Ludice, and hundreds of other villages where the Nazis shot people at random because the resistance blew up one of their convoys. (America used to condemn that sort of thing). But they didn’t desecrate the dead, or make porn movies from it.

Of the dozens of lies the Putsch junta told to justify the occupation, the final one was that they wanted to bring peace, freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.

They have created a parliament that seems interested in doing just that, and their first united message is “America, get out.” A lot of people in Iraq believe that Iraq can survive the American subjugation as a united and peaceful country, but only if the Americans leave. If it can be done, the Iraqis have to do it themselves. Nobody can ever force freedom and democracy on someone else. The best you can manage is the artificial calm of a slave compound.

I’ve been reading and watching the frantic search the US military is putting on for the three survivors of the ambush. Al Qaida claims they have them, and whether they have them or not, it will help al Qaida gain some popularity in Iraq. Up until now, they had been seen as just another foreign headache with their own agenda that didn’t benefit anyone in Iraq. I don’t guess many people in Iraq give a damn if the military gets their three missing back, dead or alive.

Another big problem Americans face with the Iraqi people are the 120,000 or so private contractors in Iraq. Most of them are in logistics, and invisible to the Iraqi people. But many – perhaps 40,000 – are mercenaries, private soldiers of fortune. Jeremy Scahill of The Nation testified about this before Congress, and noted that to a typical Iraqi, there was no difference between an American working for the military, or for Blackwater. And unlike the soldiers, who have SOME accountability for when they cut loose and shoot up bunches of innocent people, the mercenaries are under no such constraints. They answer to their bosses, who in turn are careful not to say anything to anyone that could cost the company money. There are no standards, and when you look at a mercenary, resplendent in his official looking fatigues and armed to the teeth, you have no idea if he is a twenty-year army veteran supplementing his retirement while putting his expertise and discipline to use where it will do the most good, or some shambling frustrated security guard who didn’t have the brains to pass the army intelligence test or the morals to get past the LAPD’s psych eval. He’s there to make big bucks and maybe satisfy some sexual issues he’s been having.

You, the tax payer, are paying him up to 15 times as much as what an army soldier makes (some make more than the Secretary of Defense!) and you have no idea whether you have George Patton or the Zodiac Killer out there representing America. Nor will you, since private companies don’t have to account to you. Oh, in addition to his morale-busting salary meant to mask his unsuitability for the task, there’s also a 50% markup for the management and the stockholders. Just more of that private sector efficiency at work, folks.

A few weeks ago, some moron in central command had a brainstorm. Baghdad could be pacified, he decided, if they only just built a wall to divide the city! Quite aside from the fact that this idea immediately put the military in the same league as the East Germans, the Israelis, and the bozos who want a wall along the Mexican border, there was the fact that such a wall, crossing a checkerboard of Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds and Jews, would do nothing to quell the violence, but would – it was imagined – increase American control while making life that much harder for everyone else. Or perhaps the appropriate phrase would be “illusion of control”; no wall is a barrier to the truly determined.

Things aren’t much better in Afghanistan, where the opium crop has grown nearly twenty-fold since the fall of the Taliban, and Afghanis see the Canadian, American and UN forces as occupiers who randomly shoot or bomb innocent people. The Taliban now controls much of the northern part of the country. Life is worse there, and in case nobody noticed, Osama bin Laden - Putsch’s putative reason for going in – was never found.

In Pakistan, the country is disintegrating. If Musharraf, vile as he is, falls, then Moslem extremists will have his nuclear arsenal. Putin is more and more openly sabre-rattling at the United States, even as he coerces Eastern Europe into going along with him in what amounts to a resumption of the cold war. The Russians don’t like the bellicose and unreliable Putsch having bases in what they see as their hegemonous areas.

The Iraq parliament is right. It’s time to get out. Not just from Iraq, but Afghanistan and the rest of the middle east. Israel can take care of itself without American help. And America is doing no good there; not for the region, not for America.

It’s time to pull back, and consider other, less destructive strategies that might actually benefit America.