Two Short Notes on Iraq/One Short Note on Iran

Two Short Notes on Iraq
One Short Note on Iran
by Alex Wolfson

The Iraq that we are told of in the media and by our governments is a fictional country with a fictional history. This is true in a many number of ways and can evidently be seen in the large number of blogs written by Iraqi citizens.1 To them the Maliki government is a government only by name. American protection forces do just the opposite of protect. Anti-terrorism measures are State terror by a different name. Foreign terrorists, Iranian influencing forces, sectarian tension, we-stand-down-as-they-stand-up, are all terms that have no meaning. The depth of our societies’ lack of understanding of the Iraqi reality is immense, but I would like to bring up just two facets of it, both that are very troubling.

In the years between 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War the Bush administration began its very effective effort to move public approval, both domestically and internationally, in line before the invasion would begin. To do this they used a variety of techniques and made common knowledge a number of falsehoods. The primary falsehood was the allegation of Saddam Hussein’s mass stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and his will to either use them himself (probably against Israel) or to pass them off to a terrorist organization who would use them directly against America, or one of its allies. The fact that there were no WMD’s is now widely known and the press has issued a belated mea culpa. However, to anyone who had been reading the newspapers, or international human rights reports over the 1990’s (a group which we would assume includes the editors of America’s leading papers and periodicals), it was clear that Saddam could not have the weapons he was accused of having, and even if he did would have no means or motivation to use them. This was known because the weapons had been destroyed, along with Iraqi civil society, throughout the nineties by bombing campaigns carried out by Presidents Bush Sr. and Clinton, and through much more effective, and deadly, American led sanctions that caused mass starvation and the death of a huge numbers of Iraqis.
The sanctions against Iraq were controversial in most of the world, but rarely spoken of at home. In 1996, Madeleine Albright (then Clinton’s Secretary of State) was interviewed by Lesley Stahl for 60 Minutes. Stahl asked Albright about the US sanctions, “We have heard that a half million children have died. That’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price is worth it?” Albright responded, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” Albright’s cold dismissal of half a million dead Iraqi children raised some eyebrows but was basically quickly forgotten. But what exactly was the price of the bombings and sanctions? In June 2001, Kate Pflaumer, a federal attorney from Western Washington wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

“Thousands of innocent children and adult civilians die every month as a direct result of the 1991 bombing of civilian infrastructure: sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants, water purification facilities. Allied bombing targets included eight multipurpose dams, repeatedly hit, which simultaneously wrecked flood control, municipal and industrial water storage, irrigation and hydroelectric power…The resulting devastation frequently has been confirmed. A physician study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1992 concluded that the Gulf War and trade sanctions caused a threefold increase in mortality among Iraqi children under 5, estimating 1991 deaths alone at approximately 50,000 children.”2

The Iraq that the US Armies invaded in 2003 was nothing like the country we were told it would be, and we should have known, because it was a country we had already destroyed.

Bush’s plan to increase the troop levels in Iraq has met with strong opposition from all sides of the political divide, and rightfully so as the troop increase will further compound the daily suffering and bloodshed in Baghdad. However, what many of the Democrats and other opponents of the President have proposed as the alternative, which they call containment, could also be known as slow genocide. Here is what Kern Pollack, a former foreign policy advisor for President Clinton, and now part of the influential Brooking Institution (a Democratic think-tank) said on Meet The Press, Sunday January 27, 2007, discussing a new report put out by the Brooking Institution:

What we outline in that report is a strategy of containment. Could we contain the civil war, the violence and the spillover effects within the borders of Iraq, prevent it from affecting other countries that we care a lot about, like Saudi Arabia, like Kuwait, like Jordan, like Turkey? And we lie—we lay out a strategy to do that, but we’re very sober about it, because we looked at a lot of the history of other civil wars like this and what we found is it is very hard to do.3

The idea that we should make sure that complete civil disorder occurs only to the countries that we don’t “care a lot about” was not questioned by Meet the Press host Tim Russert, either of the two United States Senators who were also guests on the show, or any other of the contributing commentators. What “containment” actually calls for is the policy of turning Iraq into a national prison, something that is dangerously close to already occurring as more and more border countries close off their borders to the ever-increasing number of refugees.4 The citizens of Iraq did not choose this war, they did not choose to live in constant bloodshed, that decision was made for them by the institutions of the United States government, and now both sides of the ridiculously limited two-sided government are both offering solutions that will mean that the mass slaughter of Iraqis is to continue, with no end in sight.

3) A Final Note:

The period leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a terrifying time, but one that seems to be in danger of repeating itself. Up until a few weeks ago war against Iran seemed like a nightmare, something frightening to think of but unlikely to occur. That no longer feels true. None of us can know whether the US or Israel will attack Iran in the near future, but what is clear is that the governments are quickly stepping up the rhetoric. Now Iran, not Al-Qaeda, is miraculously the main instigator of Iraqi civil conflict, although no credible evidence is given to support this. This time we must watch carefully, and speak out earlier and louder, to do what we can to make sure that another unnecessary and murderous war doesn’t begin on our watch.

Footnotes:

1. Two of the best are Healing Iraq (http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/) written by an Iraqi dentist, and Baghdad Burning (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/) by a young Iraqi woman.
2. Kate Pflaumer, “P-I is wrong on Iraqi sanctions”, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Thursday, June 21, 2001, http://www.scn.org/ccpi/ofac/PflaumerArticle21Jun01.html.
3. Meet the Press transcript, January 27, 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16785556.
4. An extended article appeared in The Washington Post on February 4, 2007 on the plight facing the almost two million Iraqi refugees. It can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/03/AR2007020301604.html.