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US atrocities in Iraq

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 8 May 2004
9 comments

In the ongoing debate on the nightmare events in Iraqi prisons which you are engaged in, some of your contributors have classified all Americans as vile psycopaths.

This is unjust, wrong and futile. Young men, stuffed to the gills with arrogance and racist propaganda (and steroids) will behave like sadists given the opportunity, whether they are Saddam’s ’security’ police or half-witted, ill-educated morons from some trailer park in Hicksville.

The real guilt lies with the neo-con clique who hi-jacked American foreign policy (Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfovitz, Bolton, et al) and in a general sense, the American people, who allowed these draft-dodging armchair warriors to send young Americans across the world with an ill-disguised Imperial agenda.

Cast your minds back a year or so. Remember Bush keeping the USA out of internationally agreed treaties to try war crimes in international courts? Remember the debate in the USA about whether torture could be justified in the war on terror? I read well-paid academics demanding to know whether or not it was justifiable to torture a prisoner who might know of an impending terrorist attack.

America went to war with this kind of thinking hanging like a fog over the military. Remember Bush: "If you’re with us, you’re against us". How do you expect the Chip Fredericks and Lynndie Englands (Abusers in the pics) to demonstrate restraint when they are given that kind of encouragement. Throw in 20,000 unaccountable security opratives pulling the strings for the CIA and the atrocities become inevitable.

Of course not all US soldiers are responsible for the prison atrocities. Many of them will return home traumatised and riddled with guilt at the work they have done and the terrible acts they have seen. I suspect that history will reveal even more terrible actions perpetrated in Afghanistan. Remember Afgthanistan, that weird place in the middle of nowhere, filled with strange people who don’t watch the superbowl or sit on the sofa watching ’Friends’. Thirty years ago, travelling around India, I met many Americans who were a credit to their country; tolerant people with a wide vision of humanity.

Go to India and you hardly see an American nowadays. A huge number of Americans do not possess a passport. Even in Europe they are becoming a rarity. I have a terrible dread that the American I met all those years ago are now sitting in Pentecostal chapels in the mid-west, jerking off to Christian fundamentalists, crazy Zionists and visions of the Rapture. For Christ’s sake, America, open your eyes and see what’s going on the world.

You are the major world power and we have to live with that, but the present administration is leading the USA into an era of darkness. You will never produce a homogenised planet, full of CNN-watching zombies, eager to feed corporate American profits. No matter how much support the USA gives to Israel, Arabs will remain Arabs. Iraq will be an independent Arab state when Donald Rumsfled is rotting in his grave.

The Palestinians will not conveniently disappear. There are intelligent civilised ways of dealing with brutal regimes. The first rule: don’t supply them with arms and don’t back them when the mood takes you. The USA has lost the war in Iraq. Now all America has left is the long, agonising retreat, littered with the corpses of dead soldiers and Iraqis. The fantasy of a subservient Iraq, run by American corporations as the largest free Gas station in the world has been exposed for what it is.

The tragedy is that the privileged elite who have hi-jacked America won’t have to smell the blood, the sand the tears and the sweat. Ordinary guys from working America will do their dirty work for them.

Forum posts

  • Will the American people wake up?
    Yes, fifty percent of them will, perhaps already have.
    The other fifty percent? They have agendas that they believe in. Armageddon is one, ’The Rapture’ is the other.
    They want this war, to them this is a prohetic event.

    pepe nero

  • Torture? No. Humiliation? yes. Softening up for interrogation - yes.

    • —Torture? No. Humiliation? yes. Softening up for interrogation - yes.

      "Your honor, I had to shove a broomstick up the homeowner’s ass. I needed to make sure that they didn’t have any relatives with weapons in the house so I could burglarize it safely and secure my way of life. Sure, it may have been humiliating for them, but necessary, and I think the prosecution exaggerates to call it sexual assault..."

  • Any conversation about abuse of the Iraqi people should inclued the U.N. "oil for food program" - don’t you think?

  • THE U.S.A. AND THEIR TAXPAYERS SHOULD BE HELD FINANCIALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR
    THE DAMAGE THEY HAVE CAUSED IN IRAC.
    EVERY STONE NEEDS TO BE REPLACED WITH THE SWEAT OF THE AMERICAN CITICENTS THE REST OF THE WORLD CAN NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH MAKING A MOCKERY OUT OF HUMANITY. LIKE GEORGE BUSH SAID: CRIMINALS NEED TO BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE !

  • Well stated! Bush can’t run for re-election as he was never elected in the first place!! His brother stole the election for him and the supreme court appointed him. I can’t believe people believe him and follow him blindly......Then again people blindly followed Hilter and ignored the truth. I fear we have the same in Bush. Stifle free speech and paint anyone that disagrees with him or his cronies as un-American. They are no better than the Taliban. One and the same.

  • If this were the 1960’s the streets of the world would be flooded with throngs of protesters. There would be civil unrest. Where are we? Are we all watching these events unfold between commercials? Are we reading, watching and hearing only to shake our heads in disgust hoping in our hearts it will all end soon? This is going to make Vietnam look like a schoolyard brawl. Rise up!

  • you know i’m sitting here as an american and am outraged myself in the events that have transpired...shocked and horrified..i beleive we as a nation in America were lied to about the whole Iraq war......but classifiing all Americans as stupid hicks is abserd...yes there are the idiots who have taken things way beyond humiliation...and trust me they will suffer a slow and painful reality whenand if convicted....nothing is worse than serving time in a military prison...they will wish they would have had a quick death...

    The only other thing I do have to add is this...imagine your countries military serving in the same war and you having contractors to take the trip there and helping to rebuild that country...then the innocent people there to rebuild are stripped naked , tied to a rope and left hanging burning off the side of a bridge...these people have put there lives on the line and aren’t even part of the military...and yet they too have suffered humiliation...i give no justice to what is the latest events it is purely wrong....they will have their justice....

    I wish the world could know that not everyone believes in or supports this war...

    911 can happen anywhere and I do believe the world should work together to stamp out terrorism..