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The Splendid Failure Of Occupation: How The U.S. Engineered The Iraq

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  • The Splendid Failure Of Occupation: How The U.S. Engineered The Iraq

    THE SPLENDID FAILURE OF OCCUPATION: HOW THE U.S. ENGINEERED THE IRAQI HOLOCAUST
    By B. J. Sabri
    Online Journal Contributing Writer

    Online Journal, FL
    May 31 2006
    http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/artic le_856.shtml

    "Our dark days -- already pitch-black with murder and lies and hatred
    and fear -- are about to grow even darker"-Chris Floyd, columnist,
    Moscow Times [from Blood fruit: the blowback harvest begins]

    Did the United States, under the pretext of "liberating" Kuwait from
    the Iraqi occupation, engineer and execute an Iraqi holocaust to
    implement, consolidate, and entrench American imperialism in Iraq,
    and the Middle East?

    By judging from the scale of destruction and death the United States
    inflicted on Iraq, and by considering the international and regional
    objectives of war, history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East
    since the 1930s, control of oil, Israel, U.S.-Israel relations,
    the answer is yes.

    Even so, to back up the charge that the United States committed
    a holocaust in Iraq, an investigation on the meaning of the term:
    holocaust is indispensable.

    As a first step, to qualify the human destruction in Iraq consequent
    to the Gulf War as a holocaust, we have to dispense at once with
    all preposterous differentiations that American imperialism assigns
    to the use of the term or to any other taxonomic categories of mass
    violence. Second, to debunk completely the imperialist practice that
    restricts the application of the holocaust concept to specific events
    but not to others, a discussion on the use of language and derived
    political vocabulary is in order.

    In language, synonyms do not change the basic meaning of a
    word. Take for example, the words, kill, slay, destroy, slaughter,
    or exterminate. They all mean the same: take life. Yet, the one
    subtlety that distinguishes each term is the imagery associated with
    the given taxonomy.

    What these terms would not tell is the magnitude of those who died.

    Accepted contemporary definitions resolved this problem by adding
    either the qualifier: mass (as in mass destruction) to indicate lethal
    violence against large groups, peoples, or nations; by inventing
    names based on Roman derivation such as genocide; or by reviving the
    ancient Hellenic term: holocaust.

    Before the first Iraqi holocaust (1991), there were many other
    large-scale holocausts committed by marauding, colonialist, and
    imperialist polities. Among these were Mongolian herds in Asia and
    Eastern Europe; European and American colonialism in the Americas,
    Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Africa; Ottomans against Armenians;
    Germans against Jehovah witnesses, Jews, Romanies, communists, etc.;
    Japanese against Chinese and Koreans; Israelis against Palestinians;
    and the United States against Koreans, Vietnamese, and Panamanians.

    A holocaust, as an expression of humanity gone dastardly and violently
    bestial, should have neither trophy nor primacy over other despicable
    events of mass violence. Still, the Iraqi holocaust is prominent among
    all other holocausts for one distinguishing feature: the United States
    planned for it with the acquiescence of other colonialist powers of
    the U.N. Security Council, and with financing from Japan, Germany,
    Saudi Arabia, and other American vassals.

    In the end, and for the first time in history, there has been a
    "legalized" consensus to perform a holocaust, a fundraising to finance
    it, and a deadline to start it.

    Since the end of WWII, the emergence of an anti-colonialist and
    anti-imperialist culture in developing, oppressed, and colonized
    countries (thanks to the great role played by the Soviet Union)
    tuned to investigate historical truths, there were many attempts by
    Western powers to limit the notion of holocausts to the suffering of
    Europeans of Jewish faith at the hands of the Nazi regime.

    Subsequently, U.S. imperialism and Israel transformed the word
    holocaust to an exclusive monopoly belonging to Zionism, and
    capitalized the first letter of the word to distinguish and elevate
    it above all other holocausts.

    Yet, although the mass destruction of a sizable portion of the
    Iraqi people by the United States, Britain, and France, is a fact,
    imperialist circles, the U.N., official media, and mainstream culture
    kept it undisclosed, and rhetorical accounts on Iraq's victims of war
    are bypassed as trivial discussion. Also, imperialist circles often
    refer to the Iraqis they killed in 1991 by the generic, numberless
    phrase: Iraqi deaths in the Gulf War.

    Emphatically though, and based on the planned and executed destruction
    of Iraq's infrastructure, water supply, agricultural-industrial
    base, hospital systems, as well as the use of radioactive uranium
    shells, it is elementary to state that the United States consciously
    applied all three categories of extermination: genocide, holocaust,
    and mass destruction. Why did I include three denominations denoting
    extermination of life as if they were the same? And, what do words
    such as holocaust, genocide, or mass destruction mean any way?

    To find answers, let us discuss the cogent meaning of genocide,
    holocaust, and mass destruction:

    Genocide

    Article 2 of The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
    Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the term as:

    Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
    whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:
    (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or
    mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on
    the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
    destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to
    prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children
    of the group to another group.

    The Convention's language is unequivocal. It states that, "any of
    the following acts committed with intent . . . etc." constitutes
    genocide. By sheer force of logic, items, A, B, and C powerfully
    qualify the premeditated American war on Iraq as a genocide that had
    for finality the destruction of Iraq's military population while,
    in advance, it qualified potential civilian deaths as unavoidable
    "collateral damage."

    Holocaust

    Among the plethora of definitions given to holocaust, WordNet.com
    (by Cognitive Science Laboratory, Princeton University) offers the
    most concise definition of the concept. It says, "holocaust: an act
    of great destruction and loss of life." [Italics added]

    When the United States executed the burning of the cradle of
    civilization, it, unequivocally committed "an act of great destruction
    and loss of life." By the simplicity of WordNet.com's definition,
    that was a holocaust.

    Mass Destruction

    Unlike genocide or holocausts, mass destruction is an ambiguous Western
    (American) military concept that implies mass death caused by weapons
    of mass destruction (WMD.) Are all weapons of mass destruction equal?

    It is a known fact that the United States is the only terrorist state
    who used true WMD: nuclear bombs. Technically, other weapons such as
    chemical weapons that the U.S. categorized as WMD, cannot qualify to
    be of equal value to the dreadful destruction that nuclear weapons
    can do - read below. Aside from that, the United States used Agent
    Orange (contains Dioxin, a lethal toxin) in Vietnam, it bombed Iraq
    (1991), Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq (2003) with radioactive
    uranium shells.

    Simply, it is a propaganda ploy that the United States places nuclear,
    bacteriological, and chemical weapons at equal footing, which is
    false; and attributes equal mass destruction to their potential use,
    which is false too. For instance, it is a known fact that both Iraq
    and Iran used chemical weapons in their eight-year war. Yet, from my
    research on that war, I could not find any documentation confirming
    mass destruction by them. On the other hand, Iraqi and Iranian
    conventional weapons killed hundreds of thousands on both sides.

    To be sure, chemical weapons can kill a lot of people, but the number
    of people who died by them cannot be treated as full-fledged mass
    destruction as in the case of nuclear weapons. For example, in the
    attack against the Iraqi city of Halabja attributed to the Iraqi
    forces fighting separatist Kurds, American and Kurdish propaganda
    kept inflating the figures from 1,500 in 1988 to over 50,000 before
    and after the U.S. invasion in Iraq in 2003, while the true figures
    could range from several hundreds up to 5,000. (Source)

    Compare a chemical bomb with a 15,000-pound "daisy cutter bomb" that
    the U.S. dropped on Afghanistan and on Iraq: "The bomb [daisy cutter]
    sprays a mist of chemicals over a large target area, and then ignites
    the mist for a huge explosion that incinerates everything within up
    to 600 yards."[Source] [Italics added]

    Notice though, that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima turned over 140,000
    people into ashes instantly. Now . . . That was a mass destruction!

    What is the game behind Washington's exaggerated use of the term:
    weapons of mass destruction? Remember one thing: while nuclear weapons
    are expensive and require advanced technological capability, chemical
    and bacteriological weapons have existed in crude forms since time
    immemorial, are cheap, and easy to produce. Then, who is raising the
    uproar on chemical weapons as WMD?

    Here is the catch: Israel. While some Arab countries developed chemical
    weapons as a minimum "deterrence" against nuclear Israel, imperialist
    states developed nuclear weapons as offensive-defensive weapons to
    establish both deterrence and hegemony. American imperialism, however,
    bundled non-conventional weapons in one category to deflect attention
    from the real issue: Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. Attacking
    Iraq or any other country that opposes Israeli imperialism under the
    pretext of possessing weapons falsely deemed WMD had become a tenet
    of U.S. military strategy in the region and around the world.

    In the specific issue which weapon can cause more deaths, the Gulf
    War proved that that the combination between massive bombardment with
    super-conventional and non-conventional (radioactive uranium that U.S,
    military calls, "depleted") weapons can cause mass destruction equal
    to that caused by full-fledged nuclear weapons.

    Did the United States then commit mass destruction in Iraq?

    A U.S. Department of Defense document: Instruction Number 5240.16.,
    e1.1.4 defines WMD as follows: "Any weapon or device that is intended,
    or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to
    a significant number of people through the release, dissemination,
    or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors;
    a disease organism; or radiation or radioactivity."

    [Italics added]

    The key phrase in this definition is "to cause death and serious bodily
    injury to a significant number of people . . ." But the bombing of
    Iraq in 1991 that left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead because,
    as I just stated, of the combined use of destructive conventional
    weapons as well as uranium and other non-conventional weapons proves
    that the United States wantonly committed an act of mass destruction,
    although it did not use atomic bombs.

    Ashton B. Carter, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Clinton
    administration, and Co-Director of the Preventive Defense Project at
    Harvard's Kennedy School of Government pointed to this intentional
    (although he never dubbed it as such) imperialist reductionism. In
    his article, How to Counter WMD, Carter wrote the following:

    The term WMD generally applies to nuclear, biological, and chemical
    weapons; ballistic missiles; and, more recently, 'dirty bombs,'
    ordinary explosives containing some radioactive material. But this
    definition is too broad. Chemical weapons are not much more lethal
    than conventional explosives and hardly deserve the WMD label.

    Similarly, long-range ballistic missiles are especially destructive
    only if they have a nuclear or biological warhead, and so should not be
    considered a separate category. Dirty bombs cause local contamination
    and costly cleanup but not true mass destruction; they too should be
    given lower priority.

    Having demonstrated that holocaust, genocide, and mass destruction
    share similar meaning, it is inescapable that when we look back at
    the aftermath of Iraq's bombardment and ground "war" that killed tens
    of thousands of Iraqi civilians and military in just 100 hours, we
    cannot name that horrific carnage except by one term: holocaust. Of
    course, other synonyms still apply depending on the context of the
    intended use.

    How did the Iraqi holocaust of 1991 influence the American people
    at large?

    Incessant anti-Iraqi propaganda combined with the adroit use of
    fascist psychological tactics to mobilize the American people to
    support the war were so powerful that an army of Iraqi and Arab haters,
    ideological acolytes of U.S. wars, and bogus freedom lovers from all
    creeds celebrated the Iraqi holocaust as a catharsis for the United
    States (read example). Yet, decency, compassion, and principle still
    prevailed among countless other Americans whom the system could not
    buy, corrupt, or silence.

    Writing for the World Association for Christian Communication,
    Thomas J. Gumbleton, a bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of
    Detroit, addressed the attitude of the American people toward the
    Iraqi holocaust, but not in relation to the Gulf (War) Aggression,
    rather to the price paid by the Iraqis for the genocidal sanctions
    imposed on them after the cease-fire. Sadly, what Gumbleton powerfully
    described has been, through to the present, the norm that still
    governs most people's attitudes toward the atrocities committed by
    the United States in its 16-year continuing unilateral war with Iraq.

    In his article: Choosing not to know: The spiritual crisis that
    faces the nation, Gumbleton recalled what former Secretary of State
    Madeleine Albright told CBS program, 60 Minutes. On that occasion,
    a Nazi-minded Albright stated that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi
    children due to the sanctions was "worth the price." Wrote Gumbleton:

    I believe that the fact that there is not absolute moral outrage in
    our nation when this sort of thing can be shown on '60 Minutes' to an
    audience of millions of people, and everybody goes to work the next
    day without even thinking twice about it, is itself a moral outrage.

    To me, that's a case of collateral damage and we justify it somehow.

    It's a 'hard decision,' yes, of course it's a hard decision. I almost
    want to get vulgar in what I want to say in response to that, but
    I'll try to be polite.

    A question, "How did the U.S. engineer the Iraqi holocaust?" And
    by that, I do not mean the details of the operation but rather the
    guiding methodology for war and resulting holocaust.

    As a starter, considering the colossal imbalance of power between a
    developing country and a superpower, U.S. planners knew that a war
    with Iraq would inevitably mean a potential Iraqi holocaust followed
    by swift massive degradation of Iraq as a functional nation and
    more deaths.

    Gen. Michael J. Dugan, former Chief of Staff of the U. S. Air Force,
    externalized the deliberations of the administration when he stated
    (mid summer, 1991) that if war comes, "We will bomb Iraq back into
    the Stone Age." But Dugan went further. In an interview, he delineated
    the role of Israel in the planning for war by stating that "a plan to
    bomb Iraq existed and that Israel would help the Air Force to select
    the targets" [1]. Interestingly, George H. W. Bush fired Dugan. But he
    did not fire him because of objection to the essence of the statements,
    rather because he revealed decisions already taken.

    As you know, what Dugan postulated happened verbatim.

    But to seal the matter, and tie in the Gulf (War) Aggression as a stage
    in the conquest of Iraq, and to cast light on the determination of the
    United States to go to war no matter what happened on the diplomatic
    front, I shall provide more details to support my argument.

    Military Establishment: War as an Ideological Necessity

    Retired Col. Trevor N. Dupuy, U.S. Army provided a terse picture on the
    relation between the ideology of imperialism, rigid indoctrination,
    lust for war, disregard for international law, and by implication
    contempt for human life.

    In the book that he wrote in the summer of 1990 (before the U.S.

    attacked Iraq) Dupuy envisioned many scenarios on how to annihilate
    Iraq. Following in the American strategy to personalize aggressions
    abroad by naming the contenders as U.S. power vs. a foreign leader,
    Dupuy did not propose the annihilation of the Iraqi army but the
    "army of Hussein," as if the Iraqi national army was the personal
    property of the Iraqi president. Dupuy, therefore, named his book:
    How to defeat Saddam Hussein.

    One such scenario envisioned an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait before
    the expiration of deadline imposed by the U.S. (January 15, 1991).

    Dupuy called it, the "January surprise" possibility. The importance
    of this scenario is that, although it did not happen, it confirms
    that U.S. power elites wanted a war with Iraq at any cost. Wrote Dupuy:

    If such a situation [January surprise] transpires, it may be tempting
    to "declare victory" and accept compromise. That, however, would
    simply reward the aggression and would do nothing to implement UN
    Security Council resolutions. Nor would it prevent a recurrence of
    aggression in the future. It would, in fact, be likely to ensure
    future Iraqi aggressions on a much larger scale.

    The appropriate response to a "January surprise" would be to reject
    outright any Iraqi compromise offer, insist on Iraqi acceptance of
    all UN Security Council resolutions, and demand that the Iraqi Army
    begin evacuating Kuwait immediately, perhaps a 48-hour extension of the
    deadline might be offered. . . . This period would be designated as a
    period of "pre-hostilities," during which the allies would themselves
    immediately initiate military activities preparatory to moving into
    Kuwait and engaging any remaining Iraqi forces. [2] [Italics added]

    First, Dupuy (a theoretician and author on U.S. militarism,)
    explained his penchant for war based on presumable "future Iraqi
    aggressions." Two, he postulated, but without any foundation, that the
    absence of war against Iraq would encourage larger scale aggression, as
    if Iraq's regional policy, including options for military intervention
    in Iran and Kuwait, were purely the results of innate aggressive
    impulses but not the outcome of political deliberations by a presiding
    government. Third, he clamored for war despite a hypothetical Iraqi
    withdrawal. Fourth, he deleted the role of the United Nations that
    authorized the war and reassigned it exclusively to the United States.

    All the preceding, and the fact that Dupuy cited repeatedly the
    "danger" Iraq posed to Israel, proves that the project for a war with
    Iraq (and by implication with the Arab world) had become an ingrained
    ideological-military-imperialistic paradigm.

    To summarize, Dupuy's imperialistic attitudes for a war with Iraq
    clarified one fundamental aspect that unifies U.S. imperialists:
    while American propaganda machine depicted the United States as
    searching for a political settlement, its leadership had already made
    its choice: war.

    For instance, in his meeting with Tariq Aziz in Geneva, Switzerland
    (a few days before the war) James Baker essentially adapted Dupuy's
    position: a war must happen. Does that premeditated position constitute
    engineering for holocaust? If a superior military power plans a war
    against a weak country, then it, logically, is engineering a holocaust
    among the attacked population.

    The case of Tariq Aziz and James Baker

    The meeting between former Secretary of State, James Baker and former
    Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz proves beyond any doubt that the
    United States of America is permanently a belligerent state, whereby,
    given the option between war and peace, it will choose war. Moreover,
    the predilection of war is decisively a manufactured impulse whose
    function is to preempt negotiations. But if negotiation to avoid
    war and save life can succeed, why abort it, unless the plan for
    genocide to implement imperialism is the dynamo that moves American
    decision-making?

    James Baker: "I have met with Tariq Aziz not to negotiate, as we made
    it clear we would not do - that is, negotiate backwards from United
    Nations Security Council resolutions . . . Either comply with the
    will of the international community [meaning the United States] and
    withdraw peacefully from Kuwait or wait to be expelled by force" [3]

    James Baker and the United States dubbed the meeting with Tariq Aziz
    with the propagandistic stunt, "going the extra mile to avoid war."

    But in Geneva, there was no extra mile to go or attempts to
    negotiate. To reinforce the determination for war, hence, for planned
    genocide, Baker treated the deadline by the U.S.-controlled U.N.

    Security Council as if it were an immutable physical law of nature.

    But, the United States, who imposed on the "United Nations" the
    verdict to destroy Iraq, could have changed the rules without calling
    any U.N. ambassador.

    Did Tariq Aziz come to negotiate?

    Tariq Aziz: Pierre Salinger stated that the meeting between Baker
    and Aziz failed because "Aziz did not come with any new proposal."

    Surprisingly, Salinger contradicted himself within the same
    paragraph. He, himself, stated that Aziz did come with a proposal;
    it might have not been new, but considering the nearing deadline and
    the high-level encounter, it was a serious proposal that, however,
    pivoted on a simple request to extend the expiration of the deadline.

    Let me explain. Wrote Salinger, "He [Aziz] had come with only one
    objective: to persuade the United States to withdraw the January 15
    deadline adopted by the United Nations. Saddam Hussein was not a man
    who adopted deadlines. And he sent Tariq Aziz to Geneva to make clear
    that Iraq was ready to talk about a peaceful solution, but only after
    January 15. This was something that Secretary of State Baker would
    never accept." [4]

    The sentence that Iraq "was ready to talk about a peaceful solution,
    etc." was, indeed, a workable proposal since it clearly indicated
    that Iraq was ready to give up Kuwait on a condition that the U.S.

    not humiliate it by an artificial deadline.

    Why did Baker and the United States not accept postponing a deadline
    for holocaust?

    You guessed it! The United States had other calculations. So what
    were they?

    Next: Part 46: Preliminary remarks on the second stage of conquest

    Notes

    [1] Pierre Salinger, Secrete Dossier, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 174

    [2] Trevor N. Dupuy, How to Defeat Saddam Hussein, Warner Books, 1991,
    [Dupuy published the book in 1990 under different title: If war comes,
    how to defeat Saddam Hussein]

    [3] Pierre Salinger, Secrete Dossier, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 209

    [4] Ibid, p. 210

    Recommend Reading

    James Ridgeway, editor, The March to War, Four Walls Eight Windows,
    1991

    Jean Edward Smith, George Bush's War, Henry Holt and Company, 1992

    Ramsey Clark and others, War Crimes, Maisonneuve Press, 1992

    Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck, Beyond the Storm, Olive Branch
    Press, 1991

    Martin Yant, Desert Mirage, Frometheus Books, 1991

    B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist. Email:
    [email protected].

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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