The
Logic of War Crimes in a Criminal War By: Mara Verheyden-Hilliard
and Brian Becker June 2, 2006
When U.S. marines carried out the
savage and systematic execution of Iraqi families and small children
in Haditha last November, it was initially reported as a “battle”
with “insurgent casualties.” A photo of a kneeling Iraqi civilian
moments before he was murdered was taken by a Marine using his cell
phone camera. Other pictures of the corpses of small children,
families lying in pools of blood in their homes, students gunned down
in a taxi are all part of the documentary evidence.
The massacre in Haditha took place one year after a much larger
massacre of civilians in Fallujah. Four to six thousand civilians are
estimated to have been killed in Fallujah in November 2004, according
to credible independent sources reporting from the ground. The truth
of Iraq is that there were other massacres almost every week in
between the events that have made Haditha and Fallujah famous cities:
famous in the way no city wants to become well known throughout the
world. The attack on the people of Iraq and ensuing occupation by the
United States government has caused the deaths of well over 100,000
Iraqi people (the British medical journal, The Lancet, reported
an excess of 100,000 dead eighteen months ago).
“Ethics Training” to
Prevent Massacres
Now that the butchery in Haditha is making headlines in the United
States, high ranking officials in the Pentagon as well as the
President are promising an investigation. They have even announced
“ethics training” for combat troops. The implication is that
something unusual happened when unarmed civilians, including terrified
small children and their mothers who were trying to shield them, were
riddled with bullets by U.S. soldiers. Were they rogue soldiers
lawlessly breaking ranks from an otherwise pristine mission aimed at
liberating Iraqis? That is pure fiction. Those who criticize the
management of the war are talking complete nonsense when they say that
the actions of these Marines will make it “harder to carry out the
mission in Iraq.”
The Haditha massacre will not make the Iraqis think differently about
the United States or Bush. It will only confirm their view, an outlook
shaped by the cruel, cold-hard reality of the past years.
A Routine Phenomenon
Just this week, on May 31, US soldiers in Iraq “killed two Iraqi
women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at
a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of
Baghdad." The AP reports that Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was
being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when
the shooting occurred Tuesday. Jassim, the mother of two
children, and her 57-year-old cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassan, were
killed by the U.S. forces, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed
and witnesses. Her husband was waiting for her at the maternity unit
of the hospital when Jassim, pregnant with their child, and her cousin
were murdered.
Yesterday, the BBC disclosed new video evidence that U.S. forces
massacred another group of Iraqi civilians in the town of Ishaqi in
March. The story, carried by Knight-Ridder in March, and denied by the
U.S. government thereafter, stated that U.S. troops had rounded-up
villagers into a single room of a house and then “executed 11
people, including a 75-year-old woman and a 6-month-old infant.” BBC
reported June 1 that of the eleven people murdered by U.S. troops,
five were children. The soldiers then, “burned three vehicles,
killed the villagers’ animals and blew up the house.”
In Afghanistan this week, large masses of people took to the streets
throwing rocks at U.S. military vehicles following another incident in
which U.S. military personnel raced through Kabul and then rammed passenger
vehicles killing at least three people. A top Afghan police officer
reported that U.S. soldiers then opened fire indiscriminately directly
into the crowd killing at least four more people.
Rejecting the Disney Version of
U.S. Foreign Policy
The perception of the U.S. in the Arab world is based on actual
information and knowledge of the Iraq war and the war in
Afghanistan. The U.S. financing and support for the ongoing war waged
by the Israeli military against the Palestinian people also
contributes to the understanding of the U.S. role among the people of
the Middle East. This perception is 100 percent different than the
fantasy promoted in the United States. In the United States, facts are
not allowed to stand in the way of the official legend.
All the mainstream media, the politicians and even some in the
“peace movement” in the United States uphold the Disney version of
U.S. imperialism: a fundamentally benign force, motivated by
democratic values and a vision of freedom, that is suffering an
unexplained outburst of criminality based on stress caused by poor
management of the war. Haditha, and Fallujah before it, or Abu Ghraib,
are registered as deviant behavior by out of control people.
Conveniently they are all rank and file enlisted men and women. No
Generals, Secretary of Defense or President need worry.
That every exposed crime is widely accepted to be “deviant” or
aberrational in the United States is only a testament to the power of
political indoctrination by the media and the government whose
economic resources for “opinion-molding” are greater than that of
any previous empire in human history.
The Perception of U.S. Imperialism from The Middle East
“The deaths in Haditha, a volatile town in western Iraq, have barely
caused a stir in Iraq and much of the Arab world — where American
troops are reviled as brutal invaders who regularly commit such
acts,” writes AP reporter Hamza Hendawi, in a story filed on May 30,
2006.
The next day a dispatch from AP reporter Kim Gamel, reports the same
sentiment, "People in Samarra are very angry with the Americans
not only because of Haditha case but because the Americans kill people
randomly especially recently," Khalid Nisaif Jassim said.
Closely connected by language, historical and geographic knowledge,
and access to more comprehensive media reporting, the Arab people
consider the entire war, including its unprovoked initiation by Bush
on March 20, 2003, to be a criminal endeavor by large powers against a
small but oil-rich nation. The racist character of the war itself is
well recognized throughout the region. Having battled for a century
against colonial and semi-colonial domination, the Arab people don’t
derive their knowledge about the intentions of Britain or the United
States from FOX News or the New York Times.
In the U.S. media, Iraq is treated as a low-intensity war. When U.S.
soldiers are killed their deaths are accompanied by a small
article. The fact that well more than 100,000 Iraqis have died does
not merit blazing headlines. Iraqi suffering is minimized or
usually attributed to “terrorists.” Thus, the people of the United
States are shielded from that which the Arab people know all too well
about the criminal character of the war of aggression.
Fallujah and Hue City, Vietnam
The issue of Fallujah is a case in point. Fallujah is emblematic of
the war. It is well understood throughout the Arab world but treated
like ancient history by the U.S. media.
On the eve of the assault on Fallujah, the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition sent
out an email to anti-war activists (November 7, 2004) under the
headline: “Top U.S. Marine in Iraq Calls for Massacre in Fallujah.” It
reported that Sgt. Major Carlton W. Kent gave an emotional pep-talk to
2,500 Marines who were poised to attack the city. The marines had just
notified the people of Fallujah that any male between the age of 15-55
who dared go outside would be automatically killed. “You’re all in
the process of making history,” the Sgt. Major exhorted his
soldiers. “This is another Hue City in the making. I, have no doubt,
if we do get the word, that each and every one of you is going to do
what you have always done kick some butt.” (AP, November 7, 2004)
Evoking the events in Hue by U.S. officers, as a motivation for
today’s troops, shows the macabre criminality inherent in
imperialism’s war for conquest.
Hue was a city in South Vietnam that was a scene of horrific war
crimes by military personnel when it was captured by U.S.-led forces
in March 1968. U.S. Under-Secretary of the Air Force, Townsend Hoopes,
admitted that Hue was left a “devastated and prostrate city. Eighty
percent of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, and in the
smashed ruins lay 2,000 dead civilians …” (Noam Chomsky’s
forward to the papers of the 1967 International War Crimes in Vietnam
Tribunal.)
The Machinery of Racism
How can 100,000 people die, how can children be murdered, how can the
devastation and destruction of an entire society occur at the hands of
the U.S. government without there being a huge outpouring of
indignation and condemnation in the U.S. mass media, much less even
acknowledgment by so many in the “loyal opposition”? Because the
U.S. mainstream media is a corporate dominated propaganda machine that
is part and parcel of the imperial establishment and shares its
interests. It uses the instrument of racism, a tool that has been
fine-tuned by the forces of militarism in the United States for nearly
four centuries. The racist demonization of conquered and targeted
people has been crafted with the idea of dehumanizing the victims so
as to prevent the forging of human solidarity in opposition to the
crimes of conquest and Empire. The mass media, always willing to
exploit the emotional appeal of death and tragedy that occurs within
the United States, can ignore or define the experiences of the people
of Iraq as somehow less worthy, the death of Iraqi children as less
agonizing, their lives less valuable.
Bush Proclaims that Iraq “is only the beginning” of
Endless War
The day after the NY Times front page story revealing the graphic
details of the Haditha massacre, George W. Bush said these words about
the Iraq war to the West Point graduating class of 2006: “This is
only the beginning. The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran
that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the
promise of liberty reaches every people, in every nation.”
Reiterating his and Cheney’s theme that the U.S. is now engaged in
“endless war,” Bush told the young cadets: “The war began
on my watch, but its going to end on your watch.”
While Bush was exhorting the next generation of privileged military
officers to enthusiastically embrace his imperial crusade, the reality
is that this administration sees in every rank and file enlisted man
and woman nothing more than pawns. For the working class youth who
make up the bulk of the military, the Bush administration has only
callous disregard. Bush is willing to send these young people to kill
and be killed while it carries out vicious cut-backs in education, job
training and veterans benefits. The rich are always ready to have the
working class and poor people do their fighting and dying.
The crimes of the U.S. soldiers in Iraq are as inevitable as the
crimes committed by soldiers in imperial armies throughout history.
The conquered people refuse to accept their fate. They rise up, they
form resistance organizations. They take up arms and conspire to oust
the foreign occupiers. They are then branded as terrorists and
criminals by the Empire. To the extent that they enjoy popular support
among the indigenous population, the population itself is considered
“suspect” by the occupiers.
Civilians thus become a danger. Children and young teenagers can
become the “enemy.” The vehicles carrying expectant mothers to the
hospital can thus become a threat because they must travel quickly,
too quickly for the comfort of the occupying soldiers who are fearful
of car bombs.
A Pertinent Revelation this Week: 50 Years After the Fact
In the Korean War, U.S. soldiers gunned down hundreds and possibly
thousands of South Korean civilians as they tried to escape the
horrors of war. For five decades, the Pentagon and each successive
U.S. administration denied these facts. South Korean survivors who
tried to press their claims against the United States were labeled
traitors and North Korean spies and put into prison for many years.
After the killings of No Gun Ri in July 1950 were exposed decades
later in the U.S. media, the Pentagon even carried out an
“exhaustive” investigation and concluded that the actions were
those of inexperienced soldiers. “The deaths and injuries of
civilians, wherever they occurred, were an unfortunate tragedy
inherent to war and not a deliberate killing.... Soldiers were not
ordered to attack and kill civilian refugees in the vicinity of No Gun
Ri.” (Department of the Army Inspector General, No Gun Ri Review,
Jan. 2001)
But just this week, as the Pentagon begins its new “investigation”
into Haditha, a document has come to light that not only reveals the
truth of the massacre of Koreans but that it was an act of official
U.S. war policy. The day of the mass killings, the US Ambassador to
South Korea sent a letter to State Department official Dean Rusk about
the military decision arrived at a meeting on July 25, 1950 announcing
that Korean war refugees would be shot if they approached US lines.
The day after the decision the 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment killed
hundreds of civilians at No Gun Ri in South Korea.
The Logic of War Crimes
There was a military rationale for killing the civilians at No Gun Ri
and in scores of other sites throughout Korea during the war. The U.S.
soldiers could not tell whether the civilians were sympathetic to the
North Koreans or whether they would permit North Korean soldiers into
their midst.
The Geneva Conventions expressly prohibit the targeting of civilians
under any circumstances. But the Pentagon had a bigger political
concern than adhering to international law. The fundamental fear of
the Pentagon and the White House in Korea, as it was in Vietnam and
during the first and current war against Iraq, was that public opinion
at home would turn against the imperialist adventure and tie the hands
of the warmakers. The logic of their political calculus was that U.S.
public opinion would turn against the war directly as a result of a
large number of U.S. casualties. This thought took them to the next
murderous conclusion: if civilians pose even a remote risk to U.S.
soldiers it is better to shoot the civilians first and ask questions
later. Dead Korean or Vietnamese or Iraqi civilians will not be as
politically damaging back home as dead American soldiers.
There is one more side to the logic of
war crimes. If the civilian population is sympathetic to the
resistance fighters it is necessary to terrorize the civilians as
punishment for providing aid or shelter to a guerrilla army. This is
not a new story. The Japanese wiped out whole villages and nearly some
cities in China as a warning against aiding the communist-led
resistance during World War II. The Nazi's policy in Serbia was to
kill one hundred Serbs for every German soldier killed by the
resistance. Under the direction of John Negroponte, current Director
of US Intelligence services, the Salvadoran military carried out
large-scale massacres of peasant communities that were considered
supportive of the FMLN resistance fighters in El Salvador during the
1980’s. In Vietnam, the CIA organized the Phoenix Program, a
clandestine war that assassinated as many 50,000 south Vietnamese who
were considered to be members or sympathizers of the National
Liberation Front.
The People of the United States Must Act to Stop Imperialist
War
There is no investigation, no new training, or change in the way the
war and occupation is administered that can stop massacres like
Haditha, Fallujah and the day in and day out killings of Iraqis and
destruction of their society. The only change that can bring about the
hope of building a new future for Iraqis, one of self-determination
and eventual peace, is to end the foreign occupation of Iraq and
remove the invading army. Every day the U.S. and other troops remain
in Iraq the situation grows more dire for the Iraqi people. We must
demand that the troops be brought home now and reach out to our
friends, families, co-workers and schoolmates to make this demand a
powerful and undeniable force. The majority of people of the U.S. now
oppose the war in Iraq - but at this very moment, many in the peace
movement are urging that all focus turn towards the elections, just as
they did two years ago. This is the road to irrelevance and it must be
rejected.
The war in Vietnam was not ended
because “better politicians” were elected. No one could assert
that Richard Nixon was better than anything or anyone. What mattered
was that millions of people used every avenue to intensify the mass
struggle in the streets and in every community throughout the country.
The Vietnamese people were clearly determined to fight until their
homeland was free from foreign occupation. Ultimately, the U.S.
soldier was only fighting to return to his or her home. The congruence
of these factors and the ever-widening mass anti-war movement made the
nearly genocidal conflict unsustainable for the Pentagon brass and the
occupant of the White House. We must learn and re-learn these lessons
and apply them to today. That is the challenge and obligation of the
next period.
Mara Verheyden-Hilliard is a civil
rights attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil
Justice. Brian Becker is the National Coordinator of the A.N.S.W.E.R.
Coalition.
**Feel free to circulate
the above message widely**
A.N.S.W.E.R.
Coalition
Act Now to Stop War & End Racism http://www.answercoalition.org
info@internationalanswer.org
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