War: A Resort to Means That Are Inherently Criminal

The history of trying to obfuscate the truth and distort the image of Iraq has always been the aim of the U.S. aggression against the people of Iraq. There is the added factor now of new breed of ‘journalists’ and ‘bloggers’ ever on the lookout for a story that will tell Westerners all they need to know about Iraq, its problems, dangers, and prospects. Despite this, Iraq remains a nation of proud people struggling to liberate themselves from a murderous colonial Occupation.

In a recent interview (“Iraq Doesn’t Exist Anymore”) with the self-described ‘leftists’ blogger Mick Whitney, Nir Rosen made untruthful and unsubstantiated statements regarding the situation on the ground in Iraq and the Occupation of that country by U.S. forces and their collaborators.

Let’s start with the fact. Nir Rosen is an Israeli-American (‘dual loyalty’) citizen of Iranian descent. Before he was recruited for the war on Iraq, Rosen once wrote; “I had dreamed of joining Israel’s elite special forces” to murder defenceless Palestinians and Arabs. Like many of the new breed of journalists who have been drafted into service, Rosen was an embedded ‘reporter’ with U.S. Armoured Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq. Embedded journalism is the antithesis of independent journalism. In embedded journalism, journalists have to serve power and cover-up war crimes. With his “Middle Eastern appearance”, Rosen is the perfect face of U.S. imperialism.

Rosen publishes in many of the U.S. mainstream media outlets, such as the New York Times, Times Magazine and the Boston Review. However, if Rosen articles about the Middle East, Iraq in particular, had any shred of truth in them, they wouldn’t appear in the New York times, Times Magazine or the Boston Review. Because if Rosen deviates from what Noam Chomsky calls the ‘doctrinal framework’ or the line of serving power, he wouldn’t get his rubbish published there.

In the interview Rosen told Whitney: “The main reason that things have gone so horribly wrong in Iraq is there was no plan for anything; good or bad. The looting was not ‘deliberate’ American policy. It was simply incompetence. The destruction of Iraq’s cultural icons was incompetence, also – as well as stupidity, ignorance and criminal neglect. I don’t believe that there was really any deliberate malice in the American policy; regardless of the malice with which it may have been implemented by the troops on the ground. The destruction of much of Iraq was the result of Islamic and sectarian militias-both Sunni and Shiite-seeking to wipe out hated symbols. The Americans didn’t know enough about Iraq to intentionally execute such a plan even if it did exist. And, I don’t think it did”.

So Rosen and Whitney want us to believe that, the illegal invasion of Iraq was not planned and the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and Police in order to create chaos and insecurity was not deliberate. The mass murder of innocent Iraqi civilians and the destruction of Iraq, including Iraq’s cultural heritage was simply “incompetence”, according to Nir Rosen.

Anyone who has paid serious attention to the aggression against the Iraqi people knows that Rosen is patently dishonest and lack moral principles when he touts the situation there was the result of “incompetence” and the destruction of much of Iraq was the result of the militias. The aggression was not a deliberate “malice” according to Rosen; it just happened. According to Robert H. Jackson, the Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial in 1945 wrote: “Any resort to war — any kind of war — is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property”. Imagine Rosen describing the aggression in Jackson’s term.

The interview was simply a rehashing of Rosen’s crude simplification that fills a need felt by many pro-Occupation fascists to have it confirmed for them that what happen in Iraq was “unintentional”. Our mission was to “spread democracy” and “freedom” because we jus have too much o them in the West. It is just something gone wrong in Iraq and we had no control over it. Once again we are misled by a typical example of the Western man led by moral principles to promote ‘good’.

Repeating the same rubbish he has been perfecting, Rosen told Whitney: “The violence in Iraq was not senseless or crazy, it was logical and teleological. Shiite militias were trying to remove Sunnis from Baghdad and other parts of the country, while Sunni militias were trying to remove Shiites, Kurds and Christians from their areas. This has been a great success. So you have millions of refugees and millions more internally displaced, not to mention hundreds of thousands dead. There are just less people to kill”. Of course, Whitney did not challenge Rosen during the interview, and the interview is posted on all Zionist and pro-Occupation websites.

Whitney and Rosen know very well that before the U.S. illegal aggression against Iraq, Iraqis were living in harmony regardless of religious or ethnic backgrounds. No racist journalist should deny the fact that before the aggression, Iraq was a safe country for every one, including Westerners like Whitney, Rosen and their ilk. Baghdad is a city of one million Kurds. The “great success” of terrorising Iraqis is happening under the radar screen of the Occupation. Indeed, sectarianism is brought by the invasion and subsequent Occupation, like the Cholera epidemic. It is encouraged and nurtured because it is a vital instrument of the Occupation.

Different militia and extremist groups are working as paid death squads for the Occupation. Iraqis have publicly denounced the violence as without distinction (between ‘Sunnis’ and ‘Shiites’) carried out by criminal gang and death squads on the U.S. pay roll. To increase the violence and justify the ongoing Occupation, the U.S. began inciting one faction against the other. Of course, every thing is ‘masterminded’ by the phantom of “al-Qaeda”. [1]

The current division and political violence is an imperialist-Zionist ploy designed to destroy Iraq as a nation. The destruction of Iraq (physically, culturally and militarily) has been the ideological dream of the Israeli leaders and their Zionist supporters in the U.S., the pro-Israel Jewish Lobby. The recent U.S. Senate vote to partition Iraq along ethnic/religious lines is the beginning of an old scheme for the Middle East. This imperialist-Zionist scheme is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Iraqis who are loudly demanding the end to the murderous Occupation.

Rosen failed to admit that Iraqis fought an eight-year war against Iran defended their country with pride regardless of religious affiliation. Iraqis do not see themselves in terms of ‘Shiites’ or ‘Sunnis’. Iraqis identify themselves as Muslim-Arab and see themselves as Iraqis first. They showed this loyalty during the Iran-Iraq war. According to U.S. military findings, when the Iraqi government “initiated a total call-up of available manpower in 1986, the response was good. No draft riots occurred; young men-even college students—reported without incident. The fact that the public answered the call tells us that Iraqis support their government … Eighty-five percent of the army belongs to the sect of Shiism”. [2]

The needless killing of more than 1.3 million innocent Iraqis, mostly women and children, appeared to have escaped Rosen’s reporting. In fact since 1990, the U.S. and Britain declared outright intent to use disproportionate force, mortally targeting Iraqis as a national group. Some 1.5 million Iraqis died, including 500,000 infants, as a result of the 13-years U.S.-UK enforced UN sanctions.

Countless U.S. soldiers are publicly condemning their criminal actions in Iraq. Writing in the Vermont’s Rutland Herald, Matt Howard, a U.S. Marine, reflects on his participation in the deliberate and unprovoked war of aggression against the Iraqi people: “We did not go to war with the country of Iraq; we went to war with the people of Iraq. During the initial invasion we killed women. We killed children. We senselessly killed farm animals. We were the United States Marine Corps, not the Peace Corps, and we left a swath of death and destruction in our wake all the way to Baghdad.”

In Rosen’s view, the total destruction of urban centres such as Fallujah, Tel Afar, Samarra, Al-Qaim, Haditha, Tikrit, and Ramadi, among other cities and towns by indiscriminate bombing is not considered war crimes perpetuated with intent to terrorise and pacify the entire Iraqi population.

It is important to remember that from the outset of the Occupation, the U.S. Administration embarked on dividing Iraqis into religious and ethnic groups and hence planted the first seed for disunity and violence. The U.S.-imposed “Iraqi Governing Council” was the best example of a colonial-imposed puppet government formed along ethnic and sectarian lines. The puppet government is simply an extension of the Occupation. It is voids of anything resembling a democracy. It has no political control whatsoever beyond the ‘Green Zone’ where it is protected by the Occupation. Its main function is to provide a façade and legitimise the Occupation. The recent “agreement” to extend the Occupation in flagrant violation of Iraqi sovereignty is a case in point.

Back in August 2007, Nir Rosen told Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow news: “It’s too late for anything good to happen in Iraq, unfortunately. If the Americans stay, we’ll see a continuation of this civil war, of ethnic cleansing, until all of Iraq is sort of ethnically—or sectarian, homogenous zones, which is basically what’s already happened. If the Americans leave, then you’ll see greater intervention of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, supporting their own militias in Iraq and being drawn into battle. But no matter what, Iraq doesn’t exist anymore”. Not as simple as that, Mr. Rosen.

And what proof is offered for this Zionist propaganda? None. In fact all the evidence pointed to a premeditated and deliberate U.S.-Zionist plan to destroy Iraq as a nation and replace it with a collection of dependent fiefdoms. It is true, if the Americans stay, we’ll see a continuation of a U.S.-perpetuated violence and ethnic cleansing. But this is not what Rosen meant. Rosen failed to acknowledge that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq is supported by the overwhelming majority of Iraqis and will remove the primary cause of the violence.

Where all these militias and criminals came from? Who trained them, armed them and finance them? Whitney didn’t ask. Nowhere in the interviews and scattered articles does Rosen tell us that the militias were the creation of the Occupation and that the violence is the only pretext left to justify the ongoing Occupation. Why Iraqis didn’t “hate each other” before the illegal invasion of their country is totally ignored by Western media and remains a mystery to most Westerners.

Furthermore, Whitney did not challenge Rosen how the Americans managed to protect the Iraqi Oil Ministry while at the same time turn blind eye to the looting and burning of Iraq’s most important buildings and Iraq’s cultural heritage. If the looting was not “deliberate” American policy, there must be a selective “incompetence”. Reports after reports showed clearly that the looting was pre-organised policy to strip Iraq of its Muslim-Arab identity and history. It is important to remember that at the time of looting and destruction, the British journalist Robert Fisk was in Baghdad and witnessed a systematic and deliberate attempt to destroy Iraq as a nation.

Again, Whitney failed to ask Rosen how the Americans were able to build the largest C.I.A. station (“U.S. Embassy”) in the world, “the size of Vatican City, with the population of a small town, its own defence force, self-contained power and water, and a precarious perch at the heart of Iraq’s turbulent future”, while most Iraqis left without food, drinking water and electricity. Why Iraq’s healthcare services, including major hospitals and medical centres, and Iraq’s education system including, schools and university remained destroyed and dysfunctional, while Americans are busy building military bases, described by many as “bustling American towns, replete with Burger King, Pizza Hut, shops, traffic regulations and young bikers clogging the roads”? In fact, like most people, many Americans now openly admit that there is a plan to occupy Iraq permanently and loot Iraq of its natural resources.

Finally, Like in Vietnam, the Americans offer the Iraqi people a choice: either you submit to a murderous colonial Occupation or we break you. The Iraqi people refused to submit and the Americans failed to break them.

U.S. policy in Iraq is not simply “incompetence”; it is “an essential component of U.S. policy [since 1990], constituting premeditated genocide against the people of Iraq”, writes Ian Douglas, a professor of Political Sciences and a member of the organising committee of the Brussels Tribunal. Furthermore, the U.S. failed in its imperialist strategy in Iraq not because of “incompetence”, but because “the Iraqi Resistance prevents Iraqi oil from reinforcing the occupation or paying for America’s global war of aggression”, added Douglas. [3].

One question that Mike Whitney didn’t ask Rosen which may clarify Rosen’s perspective is, why thousands of Iraqi scientists, professors, intellectuals and other professionals have been murdered in cold blood? Why at least 40 per cent of the educated and experienced Iraqi professionals have been threatened and forced to leave the country? The aim is to destroy Iraq’s independence by liquidating Iraq’s human resources.

There is no doubt that the premeditated aggression and murderous Occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces and their collaborators have succeeded in destroying the physical state of Iraq and terrorising the Iraqi population. “But, of course, the spirit of the Iraqi people is indestructible. They cannot be broken. They will resist, drive out all intruders, and they will recover. The people of Iraq will overcome the catastrophes of recent years”, writes Denis Halliday, former UN assistant secretary-general and one of the very few honourable voices in the West to publicly condemn the deliberate genocide in Iraq.

Iraq does exist. We should never forget the fact that there is an Iraqi nation and nationalism represented by legitimate National Iraqi Resistance. The U.S. government and its collaborators may have succeeded in killing many innocent Iraqis and removed a sovereign government but the U.S. failed and will not success in its attempt to destroy the Iraqi nation and the Iraq people’s will to resist the Occupation.

Today more than ever there is a need for honest and independent journalists who can stand up and against the active complicity of the mainstream media and in support of the people of Iraq struggle for freedom and independence. Nir Rosen is just another propaganda agent who has shown to be part of a murderous colonial Occupation.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.

Endnotes:

[1] Hassan, Ghali, Iraq: Occupation and Sectarianism; Varea, Carlos, Iraq: Sectarian Violence in Iraq and the New War in the Middle East; Wolf, Max, For Iraq, the ‘Salvador Option’ becomes Reality.

[2] Marine Corps Historical Publication – FMFRP 3-203, Lessons Learned: Iran-Iraq War, December 10, 1990 Chemical Weapons.