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Keynote
Address delivered to the National Assembly antiwar conference Held July
10-12 in Pittsburgh.
On
July 4 of this year, Vice President Biden
celebrated American Independence Day in occupied Iraq, in one of the presidential
palaces of the former regime, now an integral part of the U.S.-run
“Green Zone.” Four days earlier, PM Nouri Al-Maliki’s U.S.-installed puppet government declared
a “victory” signaled by the pullout of U.S. troops from major Iraqi
cities, and the beginning of the “restoration of sovereignty.”
Nothing
could have been more hypocritical or comical.
When
the late Robert McNamara paid a visit to the independent country of Vietnam that he had previously
“sought to conquer” and failed, he said to their foreign minister, “We
wanted to give you democracy.” The reply was, “We wanted our
independence first.” Why do American policy-makers never learn from
history?
I’m
amazed by the number of Americans who are “hurt” that the Iraqis are
celebrating U.S. troop withdrawal with no
“word of thanks.” The sad truth is that there is no withdrawal and
there is nothing to thank for. For the Iraqis the list of war
reparations is not one that the U.S. can dream to even begin to
fulfill. How can you bring 1.2 million people back to life? How can you
render 2 million war widows married wives again? And how can you give
back a lost parent to 5 million Iraqi orphans?
The
celebrations of “independence” in Iraq today are a circus where
the primary clowns are the same thugs that count on U.S. presence to survive. And
how can anyone question the status of continued U.S. military presence when the
largest embassy in the world, the size of 80 football fields, lies in
one of the most beautiful locations in the heart of Baghdad?
The
current troop level dispels the myth of the “SOFA” agreement. Even
after the June 30 deadline, 134,000 U.S. soldiers will be left
behind. This number is reminiscent of troop levels in 2003, when the
invasion began and before the so-called “Surge.”
Further,
and to take it straight from the horse’s mouth, the first U.S. military commander in Iraq openly announces “a longer
stay in Iraq for U.S. troops.”
In
fact, General Odierno insists, “It’s not
going to end, OK? There’ll always be some sort of low-level insurgency
in Iraq for the next 5, 10, 15 years…” If so, then what are we celebrating? And
what form of “crystal ball” has Gen. Odierno,
asserting that there will always be a need for U.S. troop presence? Unless,
it’s the world’s second largest oil field.
To
the average Iraqi citizen, and rightly so, the Americans are there for
the oil, and the puppet-government with its “no-bid” to “selective-bid”
oil contract policy is there to serve this very purpose. In fact, the
common sentiment in Baghdad today is that we went from
living under the rule of a tyrannical Ali Baba to that of 40-hundred
ruling thieves.
According
to Transparency International, Iraq is among one of the top
countries showing the highest levels of perceived corruption. Jabbar Al-Luaibi, former
head of the South Oil Company in Basrah,
describes the process of the Iraqi’s Oil Ministry of maintaining oil
production records like “driving a car without any indicators on the
dashboard.”
In Iraq today, there is a detention
nightmare, very much reminiscent of Abu-Ghraib
under U.S. authority, and very similar
to the type of torture chambers that this very occupation claimed to
wage war against! Three hundred Iraqi detainees went into a hunger
strike at the Risafa prison in mid-June. The
world did not hear them.
Never
in the history of Iraq have there been elections established on
sectarian and ethnic platforms, thus further reinforcing the birth and
growth of “militias,” and paving the way to U.S.-backed mercenary
groups. The concept is “foreign” in Iraq’s modern history. Even when
the people of Iraq voted, a large majority believed that by voting they
were expediting the process of U.S. troop withdrawal. Sadly not.
The
recent escalation of bombings in Iraq is not due to the
temporary U.S. withdrawal from the major
cities, but rather a statement against a continued foreign occupation.
Bombings will continue as long as there is foreign presence on Iraqi
soil.
The
foremost expert on the logic of suicide terrorism, Robert Pape, states that it is not primarily
motivated by fundamentalism but by the occupation. This motivation is
further aggravated when there is a fundamental difference in faith and
culture between the occupier and occupied people.
Today,
Iraq is a nation of 2 million
war widows, 5 million orphans, 2 million internally displaced, and 4
million refugees surviving under the meanest living conditions in
neighboring countries, topping the UNHCR World Refugee Statistics for
the region. Today 80% of Iraqis civilians have witnessed shootings,
kidnappings, and killings (per UN statistics).
Refugees
who have relocated to the U.S. find it extremely difficult
to adapt to “normalcy.” I teach English as a Second Language to
refugees in Columbus, Ohio. The trauma these people have witnessed is
unimaginable. There is not one family who has not suffered their
child being kidnapped, or lost a loved one to sectarian “revenge”
killings.
I
have personally witnessed the struggle of a 10-year-old to adapt to a
school system and the concept of normal life where people are not
necessarily out there to “kill him!” Jewad,
whose soccer ball rolled onto a corpse in a Baghdad dumpster when he
was nine, can never look at a soccer ball the same way again. Needless
to say, he now has no interest in any ballgame.
In
neighboring countries where there is a huge Iraqi refugee population,
there also exists a thriving sex trade, where the majority of the
victims are female minors as young as 13 years old. The textbook term
for this tragic phenomenon is “survival sex.”
My
cousin who is a refugee in Syria has been insulted time and
time again, when the women in his family were referred to as “refugee
sluts” despite the fact neither he nor his family had set foot in the
red-light areas that the Syrian authorities have now turned into an
“unofficial” lucrative tourist attraction.
Unemployment
rates in Iraq today fluctuate between
27-60% depending on the region and whether or not a curfew is in
effect. Forty percent of Iraq’s professionals and technocrats have left
the country, 2000-plus physicians have been murdered since 2005, and
the health infrastructure is in tatters. Disease is rampant, where
approximately 10,000 are inflicted with cholera. AIDS, which was a not
even significant statistic prior to the invasion, is now at 75,000
cases (WHO). Ten years ago, there were only 12 known cases.
Today
Baghdad is a city of walls. Neighborhoods are
segregated like never before and Baghdad is finally “ethnically
segregated.” The 2 million internally displaced have learned to adapt
to their new “environment,” but traveling from one neighborhood to
another can still cost one his/her life if they do not carry an ID
card.
My
mother’s childhood friend, who needed a kidney dialysis, died on the
way to hospital because the ambulance was stopped multiple times
between neighborhood checkpoints, with some delays amounting to over an
hour. Even if he had made it to hospital, the possibility of his
getting the appropriate treatment in a sanitary environment would have
been negligible.
Three
months before the invasion my mother underwent an angioplasty and
despite the imposition of sanctions then and the lack of non-expired
materials, her surgery was successful.
Early,
this year, my brother’s father-in-law had to be flown into neighboring Amman for the same treatment
because the best Iraqi hospitals could not provide it. He could afford
the flight; other Iraqis in his condition would just perish.
My
own uncle, only six months ago, was wheeled out of an operation room
three times because the dying hospital generators could not take care
of the recurrent power outages. Power outages are still very frequent,
with the population receiving only 50% of the power supply they used to
have prior to the invasion.
Water,
which was not potable prior to the invasion, is still dangerously
contaminated in a lot of areas where people are dependant on well-water
because the pipes that connect them to the general water network that
was bombed during “shock and awe” have still not been repaired.
When
I was growing up in Iraq, and up until the last day
before the invasion, had I been able to visit, I would have been able
to walk the streets dressed as I am now or drive my car in the streets
of Baghdad. I went to school and
completed my graduate degree there; I was one of 12 women who graduated
from my department in 1991.
Then,
if I had wanted to pay a water bill, for instance, I would stand in a
long line, but I would not have to bribe the clerk at the register to
have my transaction completed. For every single government
transaction today, you need to know somebody, and that somebody is
dependent on your money to survive. Otherwise, you can consider it lost
in red tape for up to six months!
When
my mother ventured to renew her passport; she was given two
choices—wait for eight months, or pay $600 (U.S.) to have it delivered in
two weeks. When I used to drive in Baghdad, I was rarely required to
carry an ID. Today, if I don’t, and I fall in the hands of the wrong
militia, I’m potentially looking at a death sentence.
What
caused this nightmare six years ago, and continues to cause it, has not
and is not going away soon. The occupation seems to be there to stay,
and the silence of the American people in the midst of an unprecedented
economic crisis has left them confused and misguided as to what has
brought about all this—namely, America’s foreign wars and
imperialism.
The
Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani people cannot win against the American war
machine. On their own, they are helpless. They have only one hope, you.
We need to build a movement so strong that our voices are heard as one,
so loud that we force the occupiers to leave the Middle East and
elsewhere where they impose their colonial occupations and plunder the
natural resources and wealth of weaker nations. American, Iraqi,
Afghan, and Palestinian peoples are paying a dear price in blood and
treasure for the continuation of these wars and occupations.
My
hope is that this movement unites, that our minor differences are
diminished by our bigger cause, and that this conference will pave the
way for agreement on united actions in the months ahead that will tell
the whole world when we hit the streets this fall, that we are raising
high the banners of “Out Now!” “Out Now from Iraq!” “Out Now from Afghanistan!”
“Out Now for Israeli Troops from Palestine!“
The
world needs to know that the U.S. antiwar movement is not
only alive and kicking, but is determined to end the nightmares in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Palestine.
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