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The end of October has been a very embarrassing time for the
U.S. war makers both in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first place, a
new flood of internal documents from the U.S. occupation forces in
Iraq disclosed by Wikileaks confirms the atrocities committed by the
U.S. military that have earned the enduring hatred of most of the
Iraqi people and the Muslim world.
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The New York Times reported Oct. 23: “But it [the Wikileaks
archive] does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with
those compiled by several sources, including Iraq BodyCount, an
organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method
the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing
inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000
dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once,
and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures.”
However, an AP dispatch updated on Oct. 24 reported: “Iraq
BodyCount, a private British-based group that has tracked the number of
Iraqi civilians killed since the war began, said it had analyzed the
information and found 15,000 previously unreported deaths, which would
raise its total from as many as 107,369 civilians to more than 122,000
civilians.”
The New York Times commented: “The documents also reveal
many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed
civilians—at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such
killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American
presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in
Afghanistan.”
The documents released by Wikileaks represent a new stage in
counting the toll of the Iraq war and occupation. The U.S. authorities
have been forced progressively to take account of the civilian
casualties, but the latest posting is still thousands short of the
totals compiled by both Wikileaks and the Iraqi Ministry of Human
Rights, which uses death certificates to compile its list.
“This month,” The Times stated, “the Associated Press
reported that the Pentagon in July had quietly posted its fullest tally
of the death toll of Iraqi civilians and security forces ever, numbers
that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information
Act. It was not clear why the total—76,939 Iraqi civilians and members
of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008—was
significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count.
The Times noted that the reports on which archive totals were compiled
were only as good as the soldiers calling them in: “One of the most
infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at
least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western
city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated
that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same
false version of the episode that was given to the news media.”
This accounting of the civilian death toll, of course, does not
include the civilians, many of them children, who died as a result of
the degradation of essential services, such as water, electricity,
sewage, and hospitals. Adding those factors would multiply the toll
enormously.
The New York Times tried to minimize U.S. responsibility
for this carnage by claiming that Iraqi fighters were responsible for
most of the deaths. But this disregards the well documented reaction of
Iraqis who blame the killings on the chaos created by the U.S. attack
and the insensitive actions of the U.S. occupation forces and the
mercenary military contractors associated with them. The evident fact
is that it was the U.S. assault that created al-Qaeda in Iraq, where it
had not existed before. And it was al-Qaeda that inflicted slaughter on
Iraqi civilians in its attempt to provoke a civil war between Sunnis
and Shiites, with the aim of mobilizing Muslim hatred of the “infidel”
occupiers and the Shiites who welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein.
The ruthless and provocative actions of al-Qaeda eventually
aroused a backlash among local Sunni leaders that the U.S. forces were
able to tap. They promoted the organization of local militias, the
Awakening Groups, to fight al-Qaeda. It was these militias that largely
marginalized the insurgency and allowed the U.S. to reduce its troop
levels and claim victory.
Ironically, in the same week that a more complete picture has
emerged about the carnage associated with the U.S. invasion and
occupation, a report came out of a trend in the Awakening Groups to
return to insurgency.
The New York Times reported Oct. 10: “Although there are
no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the
well-disciplined fighters—many of whom have gained extensive knowledge
about the American military—appear to have rejoined Al Quaeda in
Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening
fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of
them, covertly aid the insurgency.”
The article continued: “Awakening leaders and security
officials say that since the spring, as many as several thousand
Awakening fighters have quit, been fired, stopped showing up for duty,
or ceased picking up paychecks.
“During the past four months, the atmosphere has become
particularly charged as the Awakening members find themselves squeezed
between Iraqi security forces, who have arrested hundreds of current
and former members accused of acts of recent terrorism, and Al Qaeda’s
brutal recruitment techniques.”
Even top U.S. military and civilian authorities acknowledged
that the evidence of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib did
immense political harm to the U.S. in the Muslim world. But the new
Wikileaks archive demonstrates that such abuses were not an exception,
as the U.S. authorities claimed, but a general pattern that continued
at least until last year.
The New York Times reported Oct. 23: “The archive contains
extensive, often rambling accounts of American abuse from Iraqi prisoners,
but few were substantiated [how could they be?]. The most serious came
during arrests, which were often violent when people resisted. In those
cases, investigations were opened. In a case reminiscent of Abu Ghraib,
in which guards photographed themselves with Iraqis whom they had posed
in humiliating positions, a soldier was censured for writing a mocking
slur with a marker on the forehead of a crying detainee.
“The United States took steps to improve its detention system
after the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison erupted in 2004, tightening
rules governing the treatment of prisoners and separating the hardened
radicals of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from other prisoners.
“But the documents show that Americans did sometimes use the
threat of abuse by Iraqi authorities to get information out of
prisoners. One report said an American threatened to send a detainee to
the notorious Wolf Brigade, a particularly violent Iraqi police unit,
if he did not supply information.”
The U.S. press reports stress that most of the abuse was
carried out by Iraqi security forces, and thus the responsibility of
the U.S. was only that they tolerated it. Actually the above case
suggests a sort of “hard cop, soft cop” collaboration, rather than
simply tolerance: “The six years of reports include references to the
deaths of at least six prisoners in Iraqi custody, most of them in
recent years. Beatings, burnings and lashings surfaced in hundreds of
reports, giving the impression that such treatment was not an
exception. In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi Army officers of
cutting off a detainee’s fingers and burning him with acid. Two other
cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees.
“And while some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans,
most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the
equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers told their officers and
asked the Iraqis to investigate.”
Of course, the Iraqis were trained by the U.S. military. And
the U.S. has a record of creating ruthless local forces to defend its
interests, such as Somoza’s National Guard in Nicaragua, or Trujillo’s
security forces in the Dominican Republic.
Media plays up ties to Iran
Curiously enough, on The New York Times front page, top
billing did not go to the atrocities that the U.S. was directly or
indirectly responsible for but to revelations about support for Shiite
insurgents from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But the incidents of
Iranian aid to insurgents seemed generally pretty minor, except for
helping them with shaped explosive charges that could penetrate U.S.
armored vehicles.
Why this should be such a big story is hard to understand. What
is surprising is that in general the Iranian government, which suffers
U.S. support for insurgents on its territory and is threatened with a
major military assault by the U.S., has been so tolerant of U.S.
occupation of countries with which it shares long common borders. Iran
has the capacity to give the U.S. really big problems in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but it has not.
Moreover, since Iran is being threatened militarily by the
U.S., it would hardly be surprising if it wanted to probe the
possibilities for fighting the U.S. in a neighboring country where the
majority shares its religion and culture. The Shiite organization
closest to the Iranian leadership, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq has been one of the main allies of the United
States.
The Shiite faction headed by Muqtada al-Sadr is hostile to the
occupation and led a major insurrection against it. Al-Sadr has his
friends in Iran, but his group has been quiet, and apparently fading
since it opted for participation in the Iraqi government.
On the other hand, the former Iraqi premier, Maliki, is
courting al-Sadr’s support in order to form another government. He has
just been on a political visit to Iran. That arouses U.S. nightmares of
seeing Iraq fall into the arms of its Shiite neighbor. Such fears have
been expressed for years. And there is a basis for them. At some point,
some sort of rapprochement between Iran and Shiite-ruled Iraq seems
inevitable, and it is the supreme irony that the biggest military
adventure of the United States since the Vietnam war threatens in the
end to strengthen its major enemy in the Middle East.
Fear of the reaction of the Shiites in Iraq is probably already
a major factor discouraging the U.S. from an assault on Iran. But the
play the big press has given to the reports of Iranian support for
Shiite insurgents in Iraq threatens to be an encouragement for U.S.
leaders edging toward a military confrontation with Iran.
The British Guardian published an analysis of the
U.S.-Iranian hostility Oct. 21 under headline: “Dread juggernaut of
conflict with Iran is drawing closer.” This comes at roughly the same time
as increasing hostility to the U.S. in Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan is
beginning to threaten the U.S. supply lines for its war in Afghanistan.
A more reasonable conclusion from the reports of Iranian
activity in Iraq in the Wikileaks archive is that the U.S. wars
threaten to expand and that if they do, it would be beyond the capacity
of the U.S. to control the entire region.
At the same time as exposing the human cost of the U.S. war in
Iraq, the Wikileaks exposures revealed the basic ineffectiveness of the
new privatized U.S. forces (including private security forces built up
by huge corporations, which have now reached numbers comparable with
the regular U.S. military.) The growth of these “murder for hire”
outfits is an important factor in allowing the U.S. to make war without
resorting to a re-imposition of the draft.
An article in the Oct. 23 New York Times analyzed the
information in the Wikileaks archive relating to the performance of the
mercenary outfits: “The documents sketch, in vivid detail, a critical
change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war,
with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private
contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle,
gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed
insurgents.”
The article continued: “The archive, which describes many
episodes never made public in such detail, shows the multitude of
shortcomings with this new system: how a failure to coordinate among
contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to
enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered
civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often
outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and,
often, trigger-happy.
“Contractors often shot with little discrimination—and few if
any consequences—at unarmed Iraqi civilians, Iraqi security forces,
American troops and even other contractors, stirring public outrage and
undermining much of what the coalition forces were sent to accomplish
“But despite this evidence, the authors of the article, James
Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren, conclude: “Even now—with many contractors
discredited for unjustified shootings and a lack of accountability
amply described in the documents—the military cannot do without them.
There are more contractors over all than actual members of the military
serving in the worsening war in Afghanistan.” Moreover, the effective
legal impunity of these hired killers has just been reconfirmed by the
dropping of cases against operatives of the now renamed mercenary
outfit, Blackwater. U.S. attorneys found that they could not
effectively prosecute them because of immunity deals made in the field.
Thus, the Wikileaks disclosures not only discredit the
leadership and policy of the U.S. war but also the structure of its
military machine. So, it is not surprising that the presiding genius of
Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has become the object of one of the most
massive international persecutions since the Stalinist regime’s
persecution of Trotsky.
The U.S. government is pressuring all countries where he might
find refuge to deny him a safe harbor. He is being subjected to a
campaign of personal vilification with the connivance of the Swedish
police. The big press is playing up examples of Wikileaks employees
that have turned against him. They may be sincere, but under such
pressures, renegades are to be expected.
Whatever weaknesses Assange may have or whatever mistakes he
may have committed, he has made an immense, inestimable contribution by
exposing a massive machine of murder, corruption, and demoralization.
All those who defend the values of civilization must come to his
defense.
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