|
Imperial
Misadventures
By
Ghali Hassan
01/24/05
"Information
Clearing House" -- In April of 1975, the peoples of the world watched, as
the final act of US imperial misadventure played itself out on TV
screens. It was here at the US headquarter (embassy) in Saigon,
South Vietnam, where the limit of US power was on display. The
misadventure that took the lives of more than three million
innocent people and left three nations in ruins, was an atrocity
‘dedicated to the maintenance of an [unjust] imperialist
system’. Similar to its objectives in Vietnam, the US objectives
in Iraq are the conquest of Iraq’s oil resources and the
expansion of US imperial dominance. It will fail.
After the illegal invasion
of Iraq, the occupying forces set up their headquarters in the
centre of the Iraqi capital, inside the Republican Palace or
“Saddam Palace” as it is conveniently called in the West. For
Iraqis, the Republican Palace represents the symbol of Iraq
sovereignty. Iraq sovereignty is the largest C.I.A. station in the
world surrounded by thousands of US troops and a five-kilometre
radius concrete wall. It is the “Green zone”. It is a
walled-in city within a city that houses the Occupation forces and
their Iraqi quislings in Baghdad. The Iraqi people have lost not
only their sovereignty, but also a large piece of their capital.
The “Green Zone” is a no-go zone for Iraqis. From the “Green
Zone” the US administration supposedly will control the region
and its resources.
By installing its army in
“Saddam Palace”, the US hoped to emulate Saddam’s power and
bully the Iraqi people into submission, but this idea is farcical.
Saddam is an Iraqi national and Iraqis do not see Saddam as an
enemy like they see the Americans. According to several UNESCO
reports, under Saddam regime Iraqis
enjoyed one of the highest rankings in the Developing World in
terms of the Human Development Index, which measures nutrition,
health care, housing, education, and other human needs. Iraq
infrastructure was the best in the Middle East.
Yes,
Saddam is a dictator but if you stayed out of politics, you could
lead a good life, socially and economically. It should be borne in
mind that, US-backed despots rule most of the Middle East, and the
US is the major supporter of tyranny around the world. Western
progressives, who sit in their offices analysing media lies and
imposing judgements, have no idea what was Iraq like before the
US-Britain sponsored genocide, and what is Iraq like today. The
successful demonisation of the Iraqi people and Saddam in
particular, made US wars against Iraq and the destruction of the
Iraqi society politically possible.
The level of destruction
done to Iraq in the 1991 US War was three times the destruction
done in 2003 war. The level of destruction inflicted by US war
machine was incomparable in the history of wars. It was a criminal
act of aggression. Yet everything was back to normal in few
months. Iraqis were able to achieve this despite the 13 years long
genocidal sanctions that killed 2 million Iraqis, a third of them
children under the age of five. The US-Britain crimes against the
Iraqi people dwarf that of the Saddam’s regime.
The US invasion and
occupation of Iraq accelerated the destruction of Iraq and the
Iraqi society. The pretexts for this war of aggression against
Iraq were utter lies promoted by dishonest and biased mainstream
media. According to the only scientific report published in 2004
in the British medical journal, The Lancet, more than 100,000
innocent Iraqis have been killed. The majority of the victims were
killed by US bombing of civilian areas. The estimate was very
conservative because it doesn’t include the high death toll of
Fallujah. The city of 300,000 people has been completely destroyed
by US weapons of mass destruction without the slightest protest in
the West against an unprovoked atrocity. Further, more than half a
million Iraqi men, women and children are in prison. All these
atrocities, violations of human rights and the destruction of the
Iraqi society are now perpetuated by the US administration from
its headquarter, the “Green Zone”, in Baghdad.
It is here in the “Green
Zone” where the largest imperial robbery of Iraq’s economy put
to work. Paul Bremer, former US Proconsul and head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq was the designer of
this experiment of imperial conquest of Iraq’s economy. The
widespread privatisation of public assets, which included 100%
foreign ownership of Iraqi companies and 100% repatriation of
profits, places key sectors of the Iraqi economy into the hands of
American corporations.
From the “Green Zone” the US-created CPA “have
restricted investment and reconstruction efforts almost
exclusively to countries which supported the U.S. invasion,”
wrote Stephen Zunes of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at
the University of San Francesco. “American contractors and their
employees were given preference in lucrative reconstruction
efforts over Iraqi companies and Iraqi nationals. In addition,
from power stations to telecommunication, U.S. designs are
replacing Iraqi and European systems”.
The changes imposed on Iraq
economy follows the design of the infamous structural adjustment
programs imposed upon poor and indebted nations by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is responsible for many
of the worst crimes and injustices on earth. The recent Iraq debt
“cancellation” charade is one of the IMF crimes. The IMF-imposed
economic regimen will make Iraq “a poor nation like any other,
with politicians determined to introduce policies rejected by the
vast majority of the population, and all the imperfect compromises
that will entail”, writes the Canadian journalist Naomi Klein in
Harper’s magazine. Iraq’s economy will be streamlined
into the club of disaster economies such as the Philippines,
Argentina, Poland and other former Soviet bloc.
After the 28 June 2004
“hand-over of sovereignty” to Iraqis, the “Green Zone”
became even much greyer. According
to a report by The Wall Street Journal on May 13, 2004:
“In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's
CPA created new commissions that effectively take away virtually
all of the powers once held by several ministries”, including
Iraq’s budget. This is not only illegal; it is also immoral. The
so-called Iraqi Interim Government (IIG) does not have the
authority to overturn Bremer’s laws. The US “embassy” is the
new power in Iraq, not the corrupt quislings who form the IIG, and
Iraqis know that behind the scene, the US is tightens the grip on Iraq's future.
The change of the CPA name
to US “embassy”, and the replacement of Paul Bremer by John
Negroponte is an indication of what the US intended to do in Iraq.
Mr. Negroponte is an experience missionary in the business of
imperial power. He was U.S. Ambassador to
Honduras from 1981-1985; a period during which the US military aid
to Honduras grew from $5 million to nearly $100 million, and more
than $200 million in economic aid, making Honduras the largest aid
recipient and C.I.A. headquarter in the region. Honduras was the
launching pad from which the Reagan administration runs its
violent "war on terror" in Central American. At the time Mr. Negroponte was in Honduras, Honduras was a military
dictatorship. Kidnapping, rape, torture and executions of
dissidents was rampant. The military top and middle ranks were U.S-trained
at the School of the Americas (SOA), the Harvard version of the
CIA, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. According to Human Rights
Watch, graduates of the SOA are responsible for the worst human
rights abuses and torture of dissidents in Latin America. In Iraq,
Mr. Negroponte is supervising the same terror campaigns and death
squads that terrorised the population of El Salvador during the
1980s.
Like Central America’s
victims, the Iraqi victims are selected carefully. According to Azzaman
newspaper, a pro-occupation Iraqi daily, “more than 310 Iraqi
scientists have been assassinated at the hands of Israeli secret
agents, [the Mossad] since the fall of Baghdad”. The campaign is
organised by assassination squads aiming at “liquidating Iraqi
scientists”. Further, many Iraqi scientists and prominent Iraqi
politicians without charges, and many have simply disappeared.
The other US-backed
assassination squads are the Badr squads or SCIRI, offshoots of
Khomeini Brigade, which killed many prominent Iraqi officials. Further,
‘there are more than 120 imams and preachers from the Muslim
Scholars Association were either assassinated or imprisoned’,
Harith Al-Dhari, head of the Muslim Scholars Association told Al-Ahram
Weekly recently. The aim is to create an atmosphere of civil
war in Iraq and provide a pretext to continue the Occupation.
The US model of El
Salvador, where thousands of innocent citizens murdered at the
hands of assassination squads, is a criminal campaign that is
totally immoral and fraud, and will be defeated by the determined
Iraqi people.
A recent report by Anthony
Cordesman, a long-time national security adviser for the Pentagon
and an insider, reveals that, “The US faces too much Iraqi anger
and resentment to try to hold on in the face of failure”. To
avoid clear defeat in Iraq the US should not “stay the
course”, he added. Furthermore, Cordesman writes, the US
imperial objectives in Iraq “are impossible and should be
abandoned”.
This new imperial form of
“spreading democracy” around the world is fraud and will fail.
It is only a matter of time before the peoples of the world will
watch the last US helicopter hastily evacuating the last US
officials from Baghdad, and end the last act of US imperial
misadventure. There is no need to repeat the Vietnam’s
catastrophe in Iraq.
A strong and dedicated
global anti-war movement, if exists, must work in solidarity with
the Iraqi Resistance to end the US occupation of Iraq. It is the
only solution to end the violence and free the Iraqi people.
Ghali
Hassan lives in Perth
Western Australia. He can be reached at e-mail: G.Hassan@exchange.curtin.edu.au
Notes:
(1)
Medact study: http://www.medact.org/
(2)
The Lancet Study: [PDF] http://pdf.thelancet.com/pdfdownload
(3)
Naomi Klein,
Harper's Magazine, September, 2004 YEAR
ZERO
(4)
Anthony Cordesman Report: http://csis.org/
Copyright © Ghali
Hassan. All rights reserved. You may republish under the following conditions: An active link to the original publication must be provided. You must not alter, edit or remove any text within the article, including this copyright notice.
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
