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| 9/6/06 |
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Published: June 9, 2006 context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/06/09/120.html The last few weeks have seen disastrous news breaking over President George W. Bush’s administration like another Hurricane Katrina. This time, though, it’s not winds and surging seas but waves of innocent blood overtopping the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates to turn the White House crimson. Report after report of horrific atrocities — long held back by a levee of lies, fear, obfuscation and the natural confusion of war — has broken through, flooding the imperial capital with the reeking, corpse-filled backwash of the vast criminal folly committed by its grubby little Caesar. So great is the stench of moral corruption that even America’s corporate media, for so long a simpering handmaiden to the ruling thugs, have been forced to take notice, just as they did, all too briefly, during the Bushist abandonment of New Orleans. New sites of shame have entered the American lexicon: Haditha, Ishaqi, Hamandiya, Samarra — places where horrors large and small, confirmed and alleged, comprehensible and unfathomable, have marked this beginning of the fourth year of occupation. Indeed, as the tormented land flails in agony — racked by civil war, unbounded corruption, religious repression, infrastructure collapse, the violent subjugation of women and all the other evils introduced by Bush’s war of aggression — U.S. forces seem to be gripped by an increasing frenzy of their own. In just the last three months, a string of incidents has seen Iraqi civilians gunned down by U.S. soldiers in outbursts of fury and panic, as Scotland’s Sunday Herald reports. The innocent victims include unarmed women (one of them a pregnant woman trying to reach a hospital), infants, children, the elderly and the mentally handicapped. There will be more such killings brought to light as Iraqis, incensed by the Haditha massacre and emboldened by the new government’s apparent willingness to confront their colonial overseers, come forth with new allegations. As long as the occupation goes on, the discipline of U.S. forces will continue to fray under the literally dehumanizing conditions that Bush’s war has established in Iraq. For example, the Marines in the Haditha massacre, many on their second or third combat tour, had already descended into a “feral state,” the Sunday Herald reports: abandoning regulation billets and living, unwashed and isolated, in “primitive huts bearing skull-and-crossbones signs.” A wife of one of the Haditha soldiers told Newsweek that the degraded unit was rife with “drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it.” As the BBC reported — back in March, to resounding silence on American shores —Haditha “was not an isolated incident,” according to several U.S. veterans of the war. Specialist Michael Blake said it was common practice to “shoot up the landscape or anything that moved” after an explosion. Sniper Jody Casey said he was told to carry a shovel with him at all times, so he could drop it next to any civilian his unit mowed down and then claim the victim was planting a bomb. “[Bombs] go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you,” he said. None of this surprising. As we noted last week, polls show that U.S. forces in Iraq have been inculcated with the false and hate-fomenting idea that their real mission is payback for Sept. 11. With revenge as their prism for viewing the Iraqi people and facing an ever-more violent and multi-sided resistance, atrocities — deliberate, spontaneous or accidental — are guaranteed. Even in the most justified conflicts, war spawns monstrosities, drawing out the beast that lurks in the muddy sediment of our brains; how much greater, then, is the guilt of those who knowingly instigate unjustified wars? How much greater is the guilt of elitist cowards who send troops — deceived, undersupplied, undertrained, overworked — into the death-dealing chaos of urban warfare, in a land whose people can see they are not being liberated but plundered, murdered, tortured, terrorized and driven back into a primitive, indeed, a feral state of existence? Of course, individual soldiers retain their moral agency and the responsibility for their actions even in wartime. (Although it’s true that refusing immoral orders poses risks; several coalition veterans have already been jailed by the Bush regime and the British government for resisting any further complicity with their leaders’ war crime in Iraq.) The triggermen of atrocity should face justice — and no doubt some of the low-hanging fruit will be plucked for heavily hyped trials to demonstrate American “accountability.” But “everybody knows the dice are loaded,” as Leonard Cohen sings. “Everybody knows that the captain lied.” Everybody knows there will be no accountability for those who authored this desecration: Bush and his dithering outrider, Tony Blair, two murderous mountebanks dripping with self-anointed piety. Bush will retire with his millions to putter about on his fake ranch, while Blair, robed in ermine, will ascend to the House of Lords — and no doubt to a plum post with the Carlyle Group or some other fine purveyor of backroom grease. So it will be with the other perpetrators, like Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz: nothing but riches, honors, security and respect, until death drags them howling to the pit where they’ve sent so many countless thousands. So yes, the Bush administration has been swamped with bad news, further exposing the dark heart of its malevolent enterprise. But everybody knows that nothing will change, just as nothing changed after Katrina. The Iraqi dead mean nothing to them. Their own soldiers mean nothing. No outrage, no scandal, no devastation will divert them from their drive for loot and dominion. Annotations A Catalogue of Alleged US Atrocities Probing a Bloodbath Northern Ireland and Iraq US Troops Accused of New Murders in Iraq The “Incident” at Haditha Return to Ishaqi: The Pentagon’s Shaky Self-Exoneration Marine’s wife paints portrait of US troops out of control in Haditha Iraqi civilian deaths shrouded in secrecy Iraq Calls for UN Probe into US Killings Baghdad has bloodiest month as 1,400 targeted killings add to toll US confronts brutal culture among its finest sons In Brazen Roundup, 56 Vanish From Baghdad Why read Clausewitz when Shock and Awe can make a clean sweep of things? Attacks on Iraq Oil Industry Aid Vast Smuggling Scheme U.S. troops kill pregnant woman in Iraq No Escaping Iraqi Violence Was the Media, Like the Military, Slow to Probe Haditha Killings? US test fire kills three Iraqis The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq Shameless in the Senate Iraqis Accuse Marines in April Killing Of Civilian Investigations Lead to More Scrutiny of Civilian Deaths Haditha: Selective Moral Outrage In Haditha Killings, Details Came Slowly Army Manual to Skip Geneva Detainee Rule As sectarian violence continues, so does displacement New Evidence of Cover-Ups in Alleged Atrocities? Goobers on Parade: Fake Christians and Sham Southerners Iraqis shot ‘for wearing shorts’ | |
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