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Death, Destruction and Reparations
What Do We Owe Iraq?
By John Ross
20/03/08 "Counterpunch" -- -- Lurching down Valencia Street in
San Francisco last week, I all but stumbled over a homeless
young man squatting against the wall of the now moribund New
College. Begging his pardon, I could not help but note that he
was leafing through a dog-eared volume scavenged from a nearby
free book box serendipitously entitled "What We Owe Iraq."
Indeed, my inattentiveness to the young man's pedal extremities
was the by-product of my contemplation of just that subject.
What do we owe Iraq for over a million dead and ten times that
number wounded or otherwise devastated in five years of Bush's
unrelenting bloodletting?
For 5,000,000 people who have been uprooted and displaced from
their homes, half of them forced to flee their homeland, 65% of
them women and children, 80% of the children less than 12 years
of age?
What do we owe Iraq for having perverted governance into an
aggregation of death squads? For corrupting public officials and
leveling essential services, leaving the nation in the dark most
days, contaminating the water supply, destroying the
agricultural sector in the birthplace of agriculture, and aiding
and abetting the looting of the cradle of civilization?
What do we owe this country "where the first letter was written,
the first law put, the first university built, the first money
issued, and the first poetry written?" asks Eman Kammas, a
fearless Iraqi journalist now forced into exile.
The $3,000,000.000.000 USD Joseph Stiglitz calculates this
illegal war will cost U.S. taxpayers will not compensate Iraq in
per capita reparations. The quotient of Iraqi blood shed in this
genocidal exercise cannot nearly be repaid by all the hemoglobin
extracted from the 4000 dead Americans who gave up their lives
in this pointless fracaso. The blood they spilled is only a drop
in this bottomless bucket.
What do we owe Iraq? The damage can never be quantified. "The
debt is too great to comprehend," considers my colleague Sasha
Crow, founder of the Collateral Repair Project whose NGO seeks
to repair some of the damage done.
The book the homeless comrade on Valencia Street (was he a vet?)
was perusing consists of a series of essays by one Noah Feldman,
a New York University law professor and once senior
constitutional adviser on "the ethics of nation building" to L.
Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. On its now
tattered pages, Feldman grapples with framing "the interests of
the people being governed (read conquered) and our own interest
in exercising power over them." The problem, as Bremer's lawyer
saw it, was how to build "responsible, capital-driven nations
whose own citizens will not seek to destroy us" (sic.) Or. in
other words, how to save Iraq by breaking it, an ethical
quandary that 40 years ago perplexed the architects of the U.S.
genocide in Vietnam.
Feldman's moral compass only tackles the "nation-building" part
and evades completely the legality of invading and breaking a
sovereign nation. The constitution Feldman helped to write
indeed handed Iraq over to the assassins and their U.S.
sponsors. What we owe Iraq is to string Professor Feldman up
from the nearest lamppost in Washington Square.
What Bush's America thinks it owes Iraq was strikingly
encapsulated in a recent New York Times dispatch that told of
the "exceptional luck" of an Iraqi toddler. When Marines raided
two year-old Amenah al-Bayati's home in Anbar province to detain
her father on suspicion of supporting the insurgency, they noted
that her feet were turning blue, a sign of congestive heart
failure. Captain Kevin Jarrard prevailed over the objections of
Homeland Security to have the child flown to Tennessee for
corrective surgery. "The kid couldn't help who her daddy was,"
Captain Jarrard told the New York Times, adding that he now was
friends with the imprisoned man. Amenah's homecoming when she
returned to Haditha was described by the Times as "a public
relations coup" for the Marines.
In April 2005, a U.S. Marine unit killed 24 civilians in Haditha
in cold blood, five of them children. The killers have since
been absolved.
One thing we do not owe Iraq is another "public relations coup"
but that's what appears to be up ahead as the war
de-accelerates. Youngsters maimed by the aggression that
Professor Feldman rationalizes will be flown to the U.S. by
"humanitarian" aid scams and faith-based Christian charities to
massage the collective guilt of America for having slept through
the massacre into coughing up big bucks. Celebrity telethons and
"We Are The World" clone mega-concerts will follow.
Reconstruction swindles with billions in contracts let to
Halliburton and Blackwater (to protect the reconstructors) and
the annexation of the nation's damaged oil fields by Big Oil
will drive the final neo-liberal nail into Iraq's coffin. Just
like the Feldman scenario, first we destroy 'em and then we save
'em. It's the American way.
What we owe Iraq is about to become one more corporate
boondoggle - if we let it.
In the years after the debacle in Vietnam, those who had savaged
that country and those who had stood fast against the carnage
considered this same question: what did we owe the people of
Vietnam and their damaged land for our appalling war upon them
both? Some returned to the scene of the crime to fraternize with
the enemy and calculate the damage they had done. Vets' groups
and peace activists took action to repair what collateral damage
they could. Hospitals were built and potable water systems
installed. Kids horribly burnt by our napalm were flown to
California for plastic surgery. It seems almost axiomatic that
once the U.S. has destroyed a nation, we are driven to repair
it.
Who repairs the collateral damage is crucial in this equation.
Should repair and reparations be relegated to the same
profit-driven corporate entities responsible for the damage? Or
are the people we have indiscriminately bombed best served by
grassroots response?
Military euphemisms aside, collateral damage is the willful
decimation of a civilian population designed to terrorize those
who might consider resisting the conquest of their country. One
antidote to this homicidal hypocrisy is collateral repair.
Collateral repair begins at home. Having read of the killing of
an ambulance driver by U.S. troops in the northwest city of al-Qaim
during the first days of "Operation Iron Fist" in October 2005,
Crow began collecting small donations from her Seattle neighbors
to repair a part of the damage, eventually providing the
driver's widow and four children with four walls and a roof and
a few sheep. Others joined in and a Vets for Peace group
installed a potable water system at the hospital whose ambulance
had been crunched. The first effort blossomed into the
Collateral Repair Project (www.collateralrepairproject.org)
which seeks to soften some of the unspeakable damage Bush Inc.
has inflicted upon the Iraqi people, person to person, family to
family, hand to hand. and heart to heart.
Small things are accomplished: a kids' school uniform is paid
for, a tank of propane to heat refugee hovels in winter is
purchased, dollar reading glasses for sewing women are shipped
over, soccer balls exchanged for toy guns - band-aids, yes, but
as CRP asks "what else can we do?"
The dimensions of the damage are hard to comprehend. One does
what they can and where they can do it. For the past year,
Collateral Repair has focused on the nearly 1,000,000 Iraqis who
have been driven into exile in Jordan, sometimes with only the
shirt on their back, where they are hounded by authorities much
as ICE beats up on undocumented Mexicans on the homefront.
Iraqi families who have sought sanctuary in Jordan now have
until April 17th to pay thousands of dollars in fines for
seeking refuge in that Hashemite kingdom or face deportation and
possible death back to Iraq, or flee to a third country - the
U.S. which instigated this butchery in the first place and where
Homeland Security restricts refuge to collaborators, is not an
option. However, its not all bad news - those Iraqis with
$100,000 in the bank will be allowed to remain in Jordan.
Crow understands what we have taken from Iraq is irreplaceable,
so she and her partner Mary Madsen work on the little things,
the sewing machines, the price of baking a loaf of bread, a
camcorder for Um Muna to record the ceremonies of life in her
Amman refugee community. A collection we took up at my 70th
birthday party paid for it.
What else can we do?
What we owe Iraq is our attention. It has faded as the years and
the corpse heaps have piled up, remembered once a year on the
anniversary of the invasion when those who have suffered this
damage must live it 364 more days a year for five years now and
how many more?
What do we owe Iraq? Not a new president who praises the U.S.
killing machine and pledges "orderly withdrawal" by 2013. Not
corporate solutions to the suffering of those we have treated so
callously until now.
What we owe Iraq is to change the way America does business in
the world and the only way to do that is to radically change
this gangrenous system and root out the source of all this
damage. What we owe Iraq is really nothing short of a
revolution.
John Ross is back in Mexico and will now turn his attention to
this beautifully chaotic republic for a while. If you have
further information, write
johnross@igc.org
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