A recent cover story in Time magazine (March, 2007, Europe and Asia) by Bobby Ghosh, “Why They Hate Each Other”, aimed at removing the Occupation as the generator of violence against the Iraqi people, and portrays the violence as “Iraqis killing Iraqis”. This media distortion obfuscates the U.S. monopoly on terrorism and allows the U.S. to use Iraq as a laboratory for terror at the expense of the Iraqi people.
Nowhere in his story does Ghosh tell the readers that the militias and the criminals were the creation of the Occupation and that the violence is the only pretext left to justify the ongoing Occupation. Why Iraqis didn’t “hate each other” before the illegal invasion of their country is totally ignored by Western media and remains a mystery to most Westerners. It is important to remember that Time was the leading propaganda organ which promoted the illegal aggression against Iraq, and continues to play a vicious role spreading Islamaphobia around the world.
To get a clearer picture of what has been done to Iraq and to Iraqi society, it is vital to connect the nearly two- decades of Anglo-American violence against the Iraqi people. Violence has been the primary tool of U.S. foreign policy and its dealing with smaller defenceless nations. Indeed, history has shown that all nations who qualified for U.S. violence were defenceless nations inhabited by coloured, or nonwhite human beings.
From 1990 to 2003, Iraq was under a 13-years genocidal sanctions regime enforced by the U.S. and Britain. The sanctions were the new weapons of mass killing the West used against innocent civilians. The sanctions were in fact a silent genocide that was deliberately used to target the most vulnerable of Iraqi society. More than 1.6 million Iraqis have died; a third of the victims were infants. In addition, the sanctions were accompanied by weekly acts of terrorism by U.S. and British forces disguised as air raids to “enforce the no-fly zones”. The pretext for this long and silent genocide was (the non-existent of) Weapons of Mass Destructions (WMDs). As the perpetrators failed to break the will of the Iraqi people to survive, they initiated a war of aggression using the same concocted pretext as justification for war.
According to Robert H. Jackson, the Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial,
“Any resort to war—any kind of war—is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal”. (Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, 2nd Day, 21 November, 1945, pp. 145-146).
Before the U.S-Britain illegal aggression, Iraqis were living in relative safety. Iraq posed no threat to any other nation. The primary objectives of the war were the imperialist domination of the region by the U.S. and support for Israel’s terror and Zionist policy in Palestine.
A short history is in order. At the outset of the Occupation, Paul Bremer, the U.S. Proconsul during the early phase of the Occupation, issued an order dissolving the Iraqi State and disbanding the Iraqi Army and Police in order to create lawlessness and chaos. Bremer then hand-picked expatriate collaborators – most of them involved in crimes and acts of terrorism against the State of Iraq – and beguiled others to form the ‘Iraqi Governing Council’ (IGC). The IGC was based on ethnic and religious affiliations, and most of its members had lived outside Iraq for decades. Bremer’s aim was to divide Iraqis according to religion and ethnicity, which made the Iraqi people shiver in their sleep. The IGC continues to function today under the name of the “Iraqi Government” without any real power, reminiscent of the Nazis-imposed Vichy regime in France.
Furthermore, the U.S.-drafted Iraqi “Constitution” is designed specifically to divide the country on ethnic-religious lines. The so-called “federation” is euphemism for the geographical divisions of Iraq. The “Constitution” has relegated women’s rights to the Stone Age and denies them equality. Before the Occupation, Iraq had one of the most progressive Constitutions in the Muslim World.
In addition, the U.S. launched a campaign of terror and assassinations – as the U.S. did in every country it invaded or which backed its military junta. It all started with the “Debaathification”; a euphemism for a murderous campaign orchestrated by the occupying forces. U.S. Special Forces in collaboration with the Israeli Mossad agents trained the pro-invasion militias (the Kurdish Peshmerga, the SCIRI Badr Brigades and other U.S.-trained militias) and began a reign of terror targeting anyone with anti-Occupation tendency. Hence, the U.S. Occupation – enforced by more than 200,000 U.S. troops and other foreign mercenaries – is the roots of the violence and destruction in Iraq today.
The aim is to terrorise the population and force them into ethnic or sectarian enclaves, suppress the anti-Occupation voices and deprive the Iraqi Resistance of protection (by the population) and resources. The campaign is based in part on the U.S. previous terror campaigns in El Salvador in the 1980s and in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and on Israel’s targeted assassinations of Palestinian unarmed men, women and children. Thousands of innocent Iraqi professionals were murdered in cold blood, including scientists, prominent politicians, Iraqi intellectuals, military officers and doctors. Even religious leaders and women opposing the Occupation are not immune from U.S. terror. Remember, all of this is known to Western mainstream media, journalists, pundits and NGOs; however, they continue to propagate the myths of “sectarian violence” and “civil war”. (See, Notes).
As resistance against the Occupation continues to grow, the U.S. resorts to refocusing the violence on Iraqis in order to deflect responsibility and justify the ongoing Occupation. The U.S. and Britain – supported by a racist and violent media – are instigating insurrection (Futna) amongst Iraqis pushing one community against the other. Expatriate collaborators and U.S. agents are infiltrating the Resistance groups and anti-Occupation forces in order to provoke intra-communal strife using the civilian population as fodder for terrorism. At the same time they continue a reign of terror against the population. The goal is to use the violence as a pretext to continue the Occupation and at the same time mislead the public that there is no Resistance against the Occupation. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. There is a massive Iraqi national Resistance movement.
Since the invasion, the aggressors have been responsible for the death of approximately a million innocent Iraqi civilians – whose names will never be published by Time magazine – and the destruction of the Iraqi society and nation.
Unlike the American soldiers killed by the Resistance, the names of Iraqi victims will never be published. In addition, tens of thousands of Iraqis are enduring torture, sexual abuses; rape and humiliation at the hands of U.S.-British forces in hundreds of U.S.-British run prisons throughout Iraq. The Iraqi people must be asking the question: “why they hate us” so much.
The case of the three Iraqi women (Wissam Talib, 31, Zainab Fadhli, 25, and Liqa Omar Mohammed, 26) awaiting imminent execution in a Baghdad’s prison after a fraud trial – condemned even by Amnesty international as unfair – is the most shameful and cowardly act. The UN and the European Parliament should be ashamed for remaining silent.
Before the invasion and long after the Occupation, there were no bombs exploding in Iraq killing innocent civilians on religious pilgrimages. There were no “suicide bombers”. Resistance attacks were against U.S. force and their Iraqi collaborators. It all started during the Occupation when the Iraqi people refused to surrender to the Occupation and the U.S. began the search for a pretext to continue the Occupation.
Credible sources reveal that the U.S. and British forces are behind these attacks. A case in point was that in September 2005, Iraqi Police in Basra arrested two British soldiers (the SAS) disguised as Arab “terrorists” planting bombs in civilian centres. Furthermore, most car bomb attacks on civilians were detonated by remote control, but propagated by the occupying forces and Western media as “suicide car bombs”. The aim is to demonize Muslims and present them as as killers who having no concern for human life.
Aided by a new breed of native informers, such as the Iranian Vali Reza Nasr (employed by the U.S. Defence department) which has become a household name in the West to confirm it to Westerners that the violence in Iraq is between “two factions of Muslims” and the U.S. is on benevolent “mission” with “good intentions”, Westerners have reacted to the violence in Iraq by labelling Muslims as “violent”. However, Westerners ignore that Iraqis have no history of killing other Iraqis because of ethnic or religious affiliations.
Despite all this, and in addition to the daily suffering inflicted upon them by US forces, the Iraqi people remain firmly opposed to the Occupation. An overwhelming majority of Iraqis want the U.S. to end the Occupation of their country and end the violence.
Iraqis do not identify themselves according to ethnic and religious backgrounds. A fact recently acknowledged by George Bush himself when he admitted that he was not aware of Iraq’s ethnic-religious mix. This is the West’s way of discriminating and persecuting minorities. Religious sect was never an issue in Iraq before the invasion. There is no such thing as a “Shi’ite majority” and a “Sunni minority”. Iraqi censuses never included religion and ethnicity.
Few months after the invasion “the U.S. army issued a list of 55 wanted top Iraqi officials, starting with President Saddam Hussein; half of those senior officials were Shia …The Committee of Debaathification issued a list of 100,000 senior Iraqi Ba’athists who would not be allowed to enjoy governmental posts, 66,000 of them were Shia – so how is the Ba’ath party a Sunni party?”, a prominent Iraqi politician told the Arab media on December 19, 2006. I spent many long years in Iraq, and at no time felt that I belonged to some kind of religious sect.
Thanks to a campaign of distortion generated by the media, the U.S. is succeeding brilliantly in convincing the world that the violence in Iraq is “sectarian” and that the U.S. is simply acting as a “saviour” protecting the Iraqi people. Hence, the U.S. will end the Occupation when the puppet government is able to provide security. It follows that the U.S. will decide on security and withdrawal when the U.S. sees fit. The longer the violence continues, the Occupation will continue.
In fact according to the Pentagon own assessment (Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on security in Iraq), the violence has increased dramatically “forcing as many as 9000 civilians to flee the country each month”. The report reveals that; “Although most attacks continue to be directed against coalition forces, with Iraqi civilians bearing the brunt of the violence”. It adds; “Weekly attacks in Iraq rose to more than 1000 during the period of late 2006 and average daily casualties increased to more than 140”.
On 12 March 2007 Vice President Dick Cheney, told supporters gathered at the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual policy conference (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference) that withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would endanger Israel, confirming that one of the motives of the illegal aggression against Iraq was to support Israel’s Zionist policy in the Middle East.
Furthermore, the U.S. is also succeeding in using the violence and Iraq’s current position to pass a new “Hydrocarbons Law” (drafted by the U.S. and U.S. Oil Corporations, in collaboration with the IMF) at the expense of the Iraqi people, who were kept uninformed about the theft of their resources. It gives large oil companies (mostly U.S. Oil Corporations) control over Iraqi oil and relegates Iraq to the old colonial dictatorship. The “Law” not only deprives Iraqis of their resources, it infringes on Iraq’s sovereignty. Hence, the violence is deliberate and it is serving U.S. interest well.
Finally, The Anglo-American public (including Australia) have a moral responsibility to hold their leaders directly responsible for the mass murder of innocent Iraqi civilians. Failure to do so, is tantamount to complicity.
It should be borne in mind that the U.S. is using Iran’s non-existent weapon program and the conflict in Darfur as a diversion to manipulate and keep the public in a constant state of fear
The Time magazine’s cover story demonizes Islam, it is based on distorted images of Muslims. The entire Time story is a distortion of reality, which serves to cover up the atrocities committed in Iraq, while casually blaming the victims for the mass killings of civilians instigated by the Occupation forces.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.
Notes:
1. Max Fuller, Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq; Also, Silence of the Lambs? Proof of US orchestration of Death Squads Killings in Iraq.
2. Ghali Hassan, Occupation and Sectarianism.
3. Peter Mass, The Way of the Commandos.
