- It has become clear, very quickly, that Iraq is not a
liberated country, but an occupied country. We became familiar with the
term "occupied country" during World War II. We talked of German-occupied
France, German-occupied Europe. And after the war we spoke of Soviet-occupied
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Europe. It was the Nazis, the Soviets,
who occupied other countries.
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- Now we are the occupiers. True, we liberated Iraq from
Saddam Hussein, but not from us. Just as in 1898 we liberated Cuba from
Spain, but not from us. Spanish tyranny was overthrown, but the United
States established a military base in Cuba, as we are doing in Iraq. U.S.
corporations moved in to Cuba, just as Bechtel and Halliburton and the
oil corporations are moving into Iraq. The United States was deciding what
kind of constitution Cuba would have, just as our government is now forming
a constitution for Iraq. Not a liberation, an occupation.
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- And it is an ugly occupation. On August 7, The New York
Times reported that U.S. General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad was worried
about Iraqi reaction to the occupation. Iraqi leaders who were pro-American
were giving him a message, as he put it: "When you take a father in
front of his family and put a bag over his head and put him on the ground
you have had a significant adverse effect on his dignity and respect in
the eyes of his family." (That's very perceptive.)
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- CBS News reported on July 19 that Amnesty International
is looking into a number of cases of suspected torture in Iraq by American
authorities. One such case involves Khraisan al-Aballi, CBS said. "When
American soldiers raided the al-Aballi house, they came in shooting. .
. . They shot and wounded his brother Dureid." U.S. soldiers took
Khraisan, his 80-year-old father, and his brother away. "Khraisan
says his interrogators stripped him naked and kept him awake for more than
a week, either standing or on his knees, bound hand and foot, with a bag
over his head," CBS reported. Khraisan told CBS he informed his captors,
"I don't know what you want. I don't know what you want. I have nothing."
At one point, "I asked them to kill me," Khraisan said. After
eight days, they let him and his father go. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator
of Iraq, responded, "We are, in fact, carrying out our international
obligations."
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- On June 17, two reporters for the Knight Ridder chain
wrote about the Falluja area: "In dozens of interviews during the
past five days, most residents across the area said there was no Ba'athist
or Sunni conspiracy against U.S. soldiers, there were only people ready
to fight because their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves
had been humiliated by home searches and road stops." One woman said,
after her husband was taken from their home because of empty wooden crates,
which they had bought for firewood, that the United States is guilty of
terrorism. "If I find any American soldiers, I will cut their heads
off," she said. According to the reporters, "Residents in At
Agilia--a village north of Baghdad--said two of their farmers and five
others from another village were killed when U.S. soldiers shot them while
they were watering their fields of sunflowers, tomatoes, and cucumbers."
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- Soldiers who are set down in a country where they were
told they would be welcomed as liberators only to find they are surrounded
by a hostile population become fearful, trigger-happy, and unhappy. We've
been reading the reports of GIs angry at their being kept in Iraq. In mid-July,
an ABC News reporter in Iraq told of being pulled aside by a sergeant who
said to him: "I've got my own 'Most Wanted List.' " He was referring
to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein,
his sons, and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime. "The
aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Paul
Wolfowitz," the sergeant said.
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- Such sentiments are becoming known to the American public.
In May, a Gallup Poll reported that only 13 percent of the American public
thought the war was going badly. By July 4, the figure was 42 percent.
By late August, it was 49 percent.
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- Then there is the occupation of the United States. I
wake up in the morning, read the newspaper, and feel that we are an occupied
country, that some alien group has taken over. Those Mexican workers trying
to cross the border--dying in the attempt to evade immigration officials
(ironically, trying to cross into land taken from Mexico by the United
States in 1848)--those Mexican workers are not alien to me. Those millions
of people in this country who are not citizens and therefore, by the Patriot
Act, are subject to being pulled out of their homes and held indefinitely
by the FBI, with no constitutional rights--those people are not alien to
me. But this small group of men who have taken power in Washington, they
are alien to me.
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- I wake up thinking this country is in the grip of a President
who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who
care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom
abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth, the water,
the air. And I wonder what kind of world our children and grandchildren
will inherit. More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in
Iraq, that something is terribly wrong, that this is not what we want our
country to be.
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- More and more every day, the lies are being exposed.
And then there is the largest lie: that everything the United States does
is to be pardoned because we are engaged in a "war on terrorism."
This ignores the fact that war is itself terrorism, that the barging into
people's homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture,
that is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give
us more security but less security.
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- You get some sense of what this government means by the
"war on terrorism" when you examine what Rumsfeld said a year
ago when he was addressing the NATO ministers in Brussels. "There
are things that we know," he said. "And then there are known
unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know that we don't
know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know
we don't know. . . . That is, the absence of evidence is not evidence of
absence. . . . Simply because you do not have evidence that something exists
does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
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- Well, Rumsfeld has clarified things for us.
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- That explains why this government, not knowing exactly
where to find the criminals of September 11, will just go ahead and invade
and bomb Afghanistan, killing thousands of people, driving hundreds of
thousands from their homes, and still not know where the criminals are.
-
- That explains why the government, not really knowing
what weapons Saddam Hussein is hiding, will invade and bomb Iraq, to the
horror of most of the world, killing thousands of civilians and soldiers
and terrorizing the population.
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- That explains why the government, not knowing who are
terrorists and who are not, will put hundreds of people in confinement
at Guantanamo under such conditions that twenty have tried to commit suicide.
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- That explains why, not knowing which noncitizens are
terrorists, the Attorney General will take away the constitutional rights
of twenty million of them.
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- The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent
people in other countries, but it is also a war on the people of the United
States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth
of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the super-rich.
The lives of our young are being stolen. And the thieves are in the White
House.
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- It's interesting to me that polls taken among African
Americans have shown consistently 60 percent opposition to the war in Iraq.
Shortly after Colin Powell made his report to the United Nations on "Weapons
of Mass Destruction," I did a phone interview with an African American
radio station in Washington, D.C., a program called "GW on the Hill."
After I talked with the host there were eight call-ins. I took notes on
what the callers said:
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- John: "What Powell said was political garbage."
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- Another caller: "Powell was just playing the game.
That's what happens when people get into high office."
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- Robert: "If we go to war, innocent people will die
for no good reason."
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- Kareen: "What Powell said was hogwash. War will
not be good for this country."
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- Susan: "What is so good about being a powerful country?"
-
- Terry: "It's all about oil."
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- Another caller: "The U.S. is in search of an empire
and it will fall as the Romans did. Remember when Ali fought Foreman. He
seemed asleep but when he woke up he was ferocious. So will the people
wake up."
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- It is often said that this Administration can get away
with war because unlike Vietnam, the casualties are few. True, only a few
hundred battle casualties, unlike Vietnam. But battle casualties are not
all. When wars end, the casualties keep mounting up--sickness, trauma.
After the Vietnam War, veterans reported birth defects in their families
due to the Agent Orange spraying in Vietnam. In the first Gulf War there
were only a few hundred battle casualties, but the Veterans Administration
reported recently that in the ten years following the Gulf War, 8,000 veterans
died. About 200,000 of the 600,000 veterans of the Gulf War filed complaints
about illnesses incurred from the weapons our government used in the war.
In the current war, how many young men and women sent by Bush to liberate
Iraq will come home with related illnesses?
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- What is our job? To point all this out.
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- Human beings do not naturally support violence and terror.
They do so only when they believe their lives or country are at stake.
These were not at stake in the Iraq War. Bush lied to the American people
about Saddam and his weapons. And when people learn the truth--as happened
in the course of the Vietnam War--they will turn against the government.
We who are for peace have the support of the rest of the world. The United
States cannot indefinitely ignore the ten million people who protested
around the world on February 15. The power of government--whatever weapons
it possesses, whatever money it has at its disposal--is fragile. When it
loses its legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered.
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- We need to engage in whatever nonviolent actions appeal
to us. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social
change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together
at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.
We find ourselves today at one of those critical points.
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- - Howard Zinn, the author of "A People's History
of the United States," is a columnist for The Progressive.
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- http://www.progressive.org/oct03/zinn1003.html
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