TomDispatch.com has a new report by Dahr Jamail, the famous independent journalist who covered the Iraq war, and in particular the bloody Battle of Fallujah, outside the confines of the US military’s “embedding process” and outside the safety of the Green Zone from 2003 until 2005. In this report, Jamail provides us with the responses of real Iraqis to the propaganda of the Bush administration and the Pentagon that the surge has been a success. Here are a few excepts:
On October 6, 2004, George W. Bush proclaimed: “Iraq is no diversion; it is the place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror — and we must not waver.”
Iraqis, of course, continue to witness firsthand this “decisive stand against chaos and terror.” In our world, however, they are largely mute witnesses. Americans may argue among themselves about just how much “success” or “progress” there really is in post-surge Iraq, but it is almost invariably an argument in which Iraqis are but stick figures — or dead bodies. Of late, I have been asking Iraqis I know by email what they make of the American version (or versions) of the unseemly reality that is their country, that they live and suffer with. What does it mean to become a “secondary issue” for your occupier?
In response, Professor S. Abdul Majeed Hassan, an Iraqi university faculty member wrote me the following:
“The year of 2007 was the bloodiest among the occupation years, and no matter how successful the situation looks to Mr. Bush, reality is totally different. What kind of normal life are he and the media referring to where four and a half million highly educated Iraqis are still dislocated or still being forcefully driven out of their homes for being anti-occupation? How can the people live a normal life in a cage of concrete walls [she is referring to concrete walls being erected by the Americans around entire Baghdad neighborhoods], guarded by their kidnappers, killers, and occupation forces? What kind of normal life can you live where tens of your relatives and your beloved ones are either missing or in jail and you don’t even know if they are still alive or, after being tortured, have been thrown unidentified in the dumpsters?
“What kind of normal life can you live when you have to bid farewell to your family each time you go out to buy bread because you don’t know if you are going to see them again? What is a normal life to Mr. Bush? If we’re lucky, we get a few hours of electricity a day, barely enough drinking water, no health care, no jobs to feed our kids…
“Little teenage girls are given away in marriage because their families can’t protect them from militias and troops during raids. Women cannot move unescorted anymore. What kind of educations are our children getting at universities where 60% of the prominent faculty members have been driven out of their jobs — killed or forced to leave the country by government militias? Is it normal that areas [on the outskirts of Baghdad] like Saidiya and Arab Jubour are bombed because the occupation forces are afraid to enter the areas for fear of the resistance? It is always easier to control ghost cities. It becomes very peaceful without the people.”
There’s much much more. Please go read the entire article. Its the most definitive rebuttal to the Bush and Republican spin that we are “winning in Iraq” and need to stay there for as long as it takes to secure that victory. The truth is, we have destroyed Iraq, its society, its culture, its infrastructure and its people. And we have done it for one reason: Iraq’s oil. Jamail quotes two persons who ought to know confessing to this well known, if rarely acknowledged, fact:
Last October, speaking of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation at Stanford University, where he is now a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institute, former CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid told the audience, “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” General Abizaid’s comment came roughly a month after former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
The reality is that under the guise of fighting a “War on Terror” we have become a rogue nation, looting the wealth of the Iraqis, but also looting the reserves of our own nation’s resources for the benefit of war profiteers and Big Oil. And for reasons I can only speculate about, the major media outlets in this country have largely ignored Iraq and limited their reporting about the war and occupation of that country to the “happy talk” that flows out of the mouths of Pentagon spokespersons and White House officials. This deliberate act to ignore the “greatest strategic mistake” in the history of our country would be unfathomable in a nation that truly had a free press. But of course, what we have a corporate controlled media industry, an industry that increasingly has been consolidated into the hands of a few large media conglomerates to the detriment of our democracy. The only truly free media left is online.
So, please, take the time to read Dahr Jamail’s report in full and then email it to your friends and your representatives in Congress. Don’t let the corporate media hide the truth about Iraq from those who get all their news from TV or radio. And tell them not to allow the lies of George W. Bush regarding our “success in Iraq,” lies certain to be repeated many times tonight in his last State of the Union Adress, to go unchallenged.
