|
Autumn
Leaves and the Failed Iraq Experiment
November
18, 2003
By Manuel Valenzuela
 Autumn
leaves continue to fall inconspicuously throughout the United
States just like our cannon-fodder troops fall dead, maimed
and scarred in the Mesopotamian deserts of Iraq. Throughout
our nation, lawns surrounded by white-picket fences and small
blotches of green in concrete jungles are covered by dry and
dead brown leaves signaling the change in the seasons, as
warmth and comfort gives way to the dreaded doldrums of winter.
As each day passes, more leaves fall to the ground, leaving
bare the skeletons of wood around and above us, a stark reminder
of the hibernation of life in the natural world.
In similar ways, the loss of life and limb of our soldiers
in Iraq continues unabatedly in a far away land. Like our
leaves, soldiers continue to fall and die, their bodies devoid
of a life once so full of energy. More than 400 have died,
and the number of injured is eight times that, conveniently
hidden from Americans' view, lest we see the horrors that
our little war for oil has spawned. They might be called lucky
to have escaped the claws of explosives, flying shrapnel or
bullets whizzing by their heads were it not true that many
will have to continue living without hands, arms, legs and
feet or with severe burns, scars, brain damage and handicaps
that will forever traumatize their lives.
Of course the hidden and much more dehabilitating scars,
the psychological, emotional and mental ones will linger perpetually
in the minds of thousands who will never be able to escape
the terror of war. These demons will haunt them for the rest
of their lives. And, lest not we forget, thousands of these
brave and young men and women will carry with them back to
their homes the pulverized remnants of depleted uranium from
our bombs, creating in them diseases and sicknesses that act
like a timebomb, ready to afflict and decimate over the course
of time.
Much like Gulf War I, where anywhere from 8000 to 9000 of
its veterans have already died from mysterious illnesses including
numerous cancers, and where hundreds of babies have been born
dead or deformed in ways never seen before, today's troops
may suffer similar fates. One need only look inside Iraq,
where thousands upon thousands of civilians alive in the early
1990s have died from cancers and other diseases, and where
thousands of babies have suffered the same fate as those born
to those of our own soldiers. Knowing that tens of thousands
of tons of bombs and missiles made of depleted uranium have
been dropped on Iraq in Gulf War II, it is a good bet that
many more thousands of Iraqi civilians and American troops
will suffer the same fate. The remains of depleted uranium
are literally littered throughout Iraq, contaminating land,
air, water and humans. And we can't seem to find WMDs. I know
where these WMDs are: stockpiled in our bases, right inside
our country. Right in front of our noses, and we attack Iraq
with them. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iraq. Fertile Crescent no
more. Are we such hypocrites?
Over 7000 soldiers already injured in some way, shape or
form, but how quickly they are forgotten by an administration
that will not dare go to funerals or hospitals for fear of
awakening the presently placid storm called the American public.
Men and women of the underclass, from rural and urban homes,
their families supporting this adventure in empire building
with their hard earned wages fight for the interests of the
upper class. What a dishonor to these fallen heroes to sweep
them away into a dark closet, without mention or acknowledgement,
used as nothing more than expendable pawns in Bush's war.
The United Corporations of America is at it again, lying and
manipulating, warmongering and profiteering, once more terrorizing
the planet.
The administration bans cameras from showing dead soldiers
returning in their flag-draped coffins. It uses its powers
to hinder the media from showing armless and legless privates.
This is done for the sake of brushing clean the horrors of
war and anesthetizing a Hollywood conditioned citizenry into
believing that this is just another PG-13 movie, just another
violent video game where the good guys always win and never
suffer anything but cuts and bruises. Quite simply, it is
yet another fantasy that gets absorbed into our psyche. This
is called the art of sanitized warfare, a good news-only policy
of selling death and destruction to American citizens. It
is politics at its worst, cynically gone mad, a way to keep
Bush's poll numbers up in light of his re-election campaign,
a way to keep citizens supportive of the war and designed
to maintain the country ignorant to a reality that is the
wickedness of war.
If we cannot see the reality of war, and are only allowed
to see a fictional delusion of it then we will never empathize
with the dead or wounded, we will never see death, blood and
gore, the inextricable agony and suffering of a dying soldier
or a maimed Iraqi child crying out in terror for her mother.
In short, we will never see war, thus becoming immune to the
all-too-real, chilling and sobering effects of man killing
man with the most violent of weapons. Congratulations George,
you have succeeded in curtailing outrage and furor by conditioning
us through movies, games, media lies, charades and delusion.
#### Iraq today is an amalgam of Saddam loyalists, a few
foreign fighters and a growing number of ordinary civilians
joining what Bush calls "terrorists" but that in reality are
nationalists and insurgents fighting a resistance against
our "Iraqipation." To Iraqis and to the rest of
the world, they would be called "freedom fighters," much like
the ones clandestinely trained, supplied and supported by
the United States in their resistance against the Soviets
in 1980’s Afghanistan. They are mujahadeen; resistance fighters
we at one time thought so highly enough of that we romanticized
them in movies, books and in Beltway conversation. Among those
freedom fighters, it must be remembered, was included one
Osama bin Laden. From CIA-trained freedom fighter to evildoer
terrorist, all thanks to our government and all thanks to
our jihad-inciting Middle East policies. Today we are the
new version of the Soviets, a new breed of Crusaders invading
Arab land.
What the Bush administration cannot seem to grasp is that
our Iraqipation is reviled in the country and throughout the
Arab world. Perhaps the first obvious hint of this is the
fact that Iraqis did not welcome us with arms extended as
liberators, showering us with perfumed flowers and manna from
heaven as the neocons, in their delusion of grandeur expected,
but rather as an extension and indeed a mechanism of all those
conquering entities that had come before, most notably the
Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the English of the last century.
Ordinary Iraqis are not stupid, ignorant fools like those
in the administration who concocted this failed experiment
with "diraqcracy" seem to think. They smartly noticed
that as American troops stormed Iraq, out of the dozens of
Ministry buildings in Baghdad only the Ministry of Oil was
protected by soldiers during the famous looting that took
place during the first weeks of the war. Also, only the vast
oil fields scattered throughout the country were secured while
all that was sacred in the vast history of the Fertile Crescent
was left to looting, pillage and destruction.
Iraq's citizens also remember Saddam as an American puppet
in the 70s and 80s, shaking hands with none other than Donald
Rumsfeld himself in a friendly exchange of ideas and products,
oil for WMDs. These were the same WMDs Bush can't seem to
find twenty years later and whose use our government gave
the thumbs up to in Iraq's war against Iran. Iraqis no doubt
still recollect America's willingness to abandon and sacrifice
the Iraqi insurrection against Saddam in the immediate aftermath
of Gulf War I, even after we wholeheartedly supported and
encouraged it. That failed attempt at toppling Saddam led
to the mass graves of 200,000 to 300,000 cadavers that today
the Bush administration points to as reason for invading and
occupying Iraq.
Of course we shouldn't forget the decade of harsh collective
punishment and economic genocide called UN sanctions, meticulously
blessed, endorsed, supported and safeguarded by our government,
that led to an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children deaths and
to the deaths of countless tens of thousands more adults whose
only crime was to be Iraqi. The Iraqis, it can be assured,
have not forgotten. To many of them, Saddam was no doubt a
murdering tyrant but we are much worse; they see us
as the evildoers, the real "terrorists" interested not in
the Iraqi people but only in their oil. To many in the Arab
world, we are the "Evil Empire," and we need to learn that
many of our actions give credence to this belief.
Presently, the occupation, with its harsh treatments, unevenhandedness
and cultural insensitivities of Iraqis is creating more enemies
than friends. The flowers our leaders blissfully and naively
expected upon our triumphant entry as liberators have turned
into clenched fists, RPGs and AK-47s, where only dead and
wounded soldiers land at our feet. We have imported into the
desert dunes cookie-cutter factories of resentment, hatred,
animosity and revenge. Every innocent dead Iraqi at the hands
of our soldiers, every home destroyed, crop razed, or humiliating
act perpetrated against the populace is spawning a web of
resistance that is growing and getting stronger, uniting against
the occupiers who are building permanent bases for strategic
interests, sucking Iraq's precious natural resource out of
the desert sands and making rich American corporations at
the expense of every Iraqi man, woman and child. The battle
for securing the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is over,
and "our side" has been soundly defeated, all thanks to the
Bush administration's incompetence and yearning for profiteering.
Let's not live in our little escapist Hollywood world any
more folks. What we are seeing is the inevitable movement
common to all occupations throughout history, namely the urge
to resist an invading alien force intent on conquering man
and land. It is the drive for freedom all native peoples yearn
for when they are confronted by a more powerful nation and
army. Like many before, the Iraqi people are now dominated
by a force alien to their beliefs, culture, religion and interests.
They feel like prisoners in their own land, subject to American
rule, and, already having experienced occupation and colonization
by foreign powers, do not like being subjugated and having
their collective destinies decided by Washington and its collaborator
puppets.
In the natural progression of an occupation, the resistance
continues to grow as more and more people become aware of
what is being done to them and their land. The resistance
knows it cannot defeat the monstrously powerful American army
head on, but it can chip away at it little by little until
its will and that of its people dwindles, until pressure is
so intense on the leadership that it cracks. Like a growing
storm, the Iraqi resistance, well armed, knowing the terrain,
the people, its culture and language, and, more aware of what
the lessons of history teach than its adversary, is becoming
more powerful, more dangerous and more committed than ever.
Its numbers continue to swell and its fighting spirit continues
to skyrocket. This is the reality Bush does not want you to
know, and the reason we can see his panic in the hastily-decided
new policies being implemented today.
The United States is dealing with a resistance that knew
all along it could not compete technologically, militarily
nor economically on the desert planes or in urban warfare.
Instead, it decided to play by its own rules, and today full-blown
guerilla warfare is upon our men and women, striking them
down one by one. The resistance is shadows, everyone and no-one
at the same time. It is as present as Mesopotamian sand and
as unseen as its winds. It is as deadly as desert scorpions
crawling through the night. It is under rocks, inside flora
and in numerous homes and streets, ready to attack, ready
to fight stealthily and without warning. It will soon be everywhere,
transforming itself into night and again back to day. Sadly,
our troops will continue to fall, their energy swept away
by sandstorms of explosives and bullets.
Our so-called leaders cry foul because they do not play
by our rules, because this wasn't what was supposed to happen.
But the resistance plays with what it has, and, in the span
of three months, has inflicted more death and injury upon
American forces than at any time since Vietnam. It has neutralized
the strongest and most powerful army in the world, rendering
it susceptible to attack on a daily basis, not knowing who
or what the enemy is or where it hides. Our leaders were duped.
This was the plan all along, and the neocons holding Bush's
strings fell mightily for it, delusional in their beliefs
that they knew the Arab world, and Iraq in particular. In
fact, they failed to grasp everything about this growing quagmire,
from the Iraqi way of life to the importance of revenge among
families to the real feelings towards the United States to
the difficult intricacies of tribal and Muslim culture.
Again and again bestowing the virtue of democracy throughout
the entire Arab world, they fail to grasp just how historically
different and culturally heterogeneous these peoples are to
us. Bush talks democracy but what he means is democracy only
if it benefits the United States. True democracy in the Arab
world, if allowed to prosper, would be anything but good to
Bush as fundamentalist Islam and anti-Americanism would reign
supreme, thus washing away Bush's neocon vision for the region.
This reality is exactly the reason why our government supports
dictators and inept monarchs throughout the region, if not
the world. They are our puppets, serving our interests, not
those of the native populations.
Democracy, after all, is the will of the people, not the
design of the delusional. And right now, in the Arab world,
anti-Americanism is at an all time high, thanks to Bush and
his mentally-challenged foreign policy. "Diraqcracy"
will not work, and, as such, will not be granted to the Iraqi
people because of the inherent danger to Bush if it is allowed
to prosper. Besides, before preaching democracy for the world
from his hypocritical pulpit perhaps Bush would be better
served restoring it at home first, beginning with an introspection
of himself and a careful look at his lack of honor and integrity
in blatantly usurping the will of the people and the election
of 2000.
If Bush really sought democracy and a better life for billions
of world citizens, we would have already invaded, for the
sake of freeing and liberating people, dozens of nations,
all full of leaders representing the scum of the Earth. There
are dozens of Iraqs, dozens of Saddams, but not all with black
gold or strategic locations from which to impose imperial
aspirations. Altruism is not George Jr.'s strength or motive
because if it was, then Africa, rotting for decades in war
and disease and continuing its steep fall to the bowels of
despair, would have already been anointed with Bush's magic
wand of democracy and salvation.
It is time we Americans wake up to the harsh reality that
what puppet Bush and his cronies have done has been to alienate
the world against us by arrogantly ignoring the collective
will of the planet. The world today is much more dangerous
than ever before; indeed, the United States is a much more
dangerous place today than before 9/11. Bush has not only
lost 3 million jobs here; he has created 3 million more jihadists
as well, all eyeing their holy war at the United States George
W. Bush has created. What Bush does not see is that for every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The entire globe sees how dangerous this administration is,
why can't we? It is time we begin questioning authority, stop
being fooled and manipulated by the corporate media and start
learning about this administration, Iraq, and, most importantly,
the world. We are not alone on this planet. The garbage and
lies we are fed by television is making fools of us all, and
our democracy is disappearing as a result. We are neither
informed nor curious, and the robbery of the American soul
continues unabated.
Meanwhile, October has given way to November and autumn
will soon give way to winter. The last remaining leaves will
soon fall from the barren trees as more young Americans return
in body bags and without limbs from a war based on deception
and an occupation leading to strangulation. Let's hope our
troops return home in time to see a new generation of plush,
vibrant green leaves arise from the skeletons of reawakening
trees. And let's also hope that winter's sun sets permanently
on the neocons and the liar called Bush. Next November we
can assert our own democracy and make sure of that.
|
