Calling All Troops: wake up, quit, and come home - NOW
Paul Street
2008-05-23 | permalink | comment (1) | feedback |

To: All Active-Duty United States Military Personnel

From: A Concerned Citizen

WE HAVE FAILED YOU

The ongoing United States invasion of Iraq has cost the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 1.2 million Iraqis. As of 22 May 2008, the Democratic-led U.S. Senate just passed a bill authorizing another $165 billion "to fund the war in Iraq until President Bush's successor takes over." So Congress will provide another seven month's funding to sustain the bloody, miserable, and prolonged occupation of Mesopotamia. In addition, with money provided by Democratic and Republican legislators, the Pentagon [sic] is building a gigantic hyper-militarized Baghdad embassy that will be the largest "diplomatic" outpost in world history. It will employ 1,000 U.S. U.S. government personnel, including hundreds of CIA operatives. Meanwhile the U.S. maintains a number of huge military bases across Iraq, all permanent by design. (Editor's note: under Iraqi law, the U.S. will have permanent access to these bases).

None of the remaining corporate-sponsored presidential candidates - John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton - will end the occupation between now and 2012. Beneath the Democratic Party's rhetoric of withdrawal, a president Obama or Clinton and a Democratic Congress will maintain a high level of U.S. presence in Iraq indefinitely - unless forced.

There is no functional citizens' anti-war movement currently capable of forcing "homeland" political authorities to break from the status quo of enduring occupation. A majority of Americans have long supported a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, but are unwilling and/or unable to do anything serious to bring about and end to the crime of the century. For various reasons relating to the poverty of America's post-democratic political culture, there is no relief coming for troops from the civilian side. This is a nation where citizens are politically divided, distracted, uninterested, and submissive, and where "elites" are happy to keep them that way.

The Washington war planners enjoy lives of luxury and opulence. So do the leading owners and managers of America's so-called "defense" companies, who have made a profit-killing off all the human killing in Iraq. Meanwhile, untold thousands of U.S. soldiers struggle with lives altered by injuries received in the execution of illegitimate orders. And thousands more U.S troops are slated to die and receive terrible injuries in Iraq in coming months and years.

NO TROOP PARTICIPATION, NO WAR

This is all bad news for most of us and especially you. The good news is that you don't actually need a democracy, a powerful anti-war movement, or an anti-war president to end the horrendous nightmare in Iraq. You can finish it by declining to participate. You can refuse to deploy to Iraq.

Just like a few thousand who have already resisted, you can refuse to carry out actions related to sending others in Iraq. If you are in Iraq or Afghanistan presently, you can refuse to carry out orders. You can refuse to turn your guns on people who recognize you and your commanders as illegitimate colonial occupiers - and you are.

You can end the occupation. No willing participation by troops, no occupation. It's that simple. What are Bush, Cheney, McCain, Rice, Gates, Pelosi, Clinton, Obama and the rest of the American power elite and political class going to do? Physically force you to raid houses, torture people, drop bombs, and drive through Sadr City? Will they walk the patrols themselves? Send their children and/or other loves ones to dodge IEDs and sniper fire? Never!

Hand the whole thing over to Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy? Let's see if they can continue to bring democracy to Iraq.

ILLEGAL AND UNNECESSARY

But my idea isn't just that you COULD end this war. You already know you can, and your SHOULD end it - immediately - for reasons that go beyond the eminently reasonable goal of saving your own lives, limbs, and sanity. The occupation is criminal, unnecessary, wrong, mass-murderous, and profoundly stupid. "The mission" in Iraq lacks basic moral and legal legitimacy.

Let's start with the legal aspect. The invasion had no United Nations (UN) backing. None of the other UN Security Council members shared the U.S. and English government's position that UN resolutions going back to 1990 were adequate to legitimize an invasion in 2003.

Because the U.S. is the aggressor, and Bush ordered a unilateral "preemptive" war, the invasion repudiated the UN Charter's determinations that (i) international security is a collective matter and (ii) self-defense is the only justification for war. Both the UN Charter and the war crime principles laid out by the U.S. and other Allied powers in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War Two forbid aggressive, unprovoked, and so-called preemptive war. In fact, aggressive war was the "supreme crime" for which top Nazis were tried and hanged at Nuremburg. (Editor's note: with Americans serving as judges at real, open, and televised trials).

Any doubt that the Bush administration acted illegally and with criminal intent in invading Iraq is dispelled if you know what the London Times printed on May 1, 2005 (or earlier for those of us who paid attention).

Exactly two years after W. jumped out of a fighter jet to proclaim "Mission Accomplished," the Times published sections of a leaked memorandum summarizing a meeting that took place between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top ministers on July 23, 2002. During the meeting, the July 23rd "Downing Street Memo" (DSM) reveals that Sir Richard Dearlove, Chief of the British Intelligence Service (M16), related information that he received during a meeting earlier that year with CIA Director George Tenet. As far as the Bush-Cheney administration was concerned, Dearlove learned, "military action [against Iraq] was now seen as inevitable [by top U.S. policymakers]. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

At the same meeting, the DSM shows, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw noted that the legal case for invasion "was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran." Additionally, Dearlove noted that the Bush administration and Pentagon had given little thought to how to deal with Iraq "after military action."

We have long known that the case for (one-sided colonial) war made by the Bush administration - with no small help from dominant U.S. media - was deliberately deceptive. The White House and Pentagon charges that Saddam possessed significant stocks of WMD, that he posed a threat to the U.S. and the West, and that he was linked to 9/11 and al Qaeda were all bogus by design. (Editor's note: Unless you want to believe the lies of Douglas Feith who blamed those English speaking Iraqis on the CIA payroll called the Iraqi National Congress - who conveniently knew all about the WMDs that were not there).

It is worth noting that it is illegal for U.S. government officials to make false statements to the American people and to build a case for war (or any other policy), see United States Code, Title 18, Part 1, chapter 47, section 1001).

IMMORAL

As "Iraq" has been replaced by "the economy" as the leading U.S. election issue, the Iraqi people have continued to suffer a Holocaust. According to journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of Current History, "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century. Only fools talk of solutions now. There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."

As journalist and author Jonathan Steele notes in his book "DEFEAT: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq" (2008), the latest reliable mortality estimates from The Lancet "suggest that more people have been killed in Iraq during the occupation than during the 32 years of Saddam [Hussein]'s rule. Even the [research group] Iraq Body Count, which uses a statistically more conservative methodology and tabulates deaths confirmed by at least two sources," Steele notes, "produces a death toll of civilians killed by violence that averages around 16,000 annually over the first four years of the occupation. The annual rate of killing exceeds Saddam's" (Steele 2008, p. 250).

The supposed "anti-war" candidate, Obama, said the following about Iraq when talking to General Motors workers in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13th 2008: "It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together."

Yes, "put Iraq back together" through an illegal occupation that has killed 1.2 million Iraqis so far and seen over four million refugees. All this after an earlier devastating assault (the absurdly one-sided Persian Gulf "War" of 1991) and a decade plus of illegal, immoral, and deadly, "economic sanctions," which the Clinton administration conceded that killed well more than half a million Iraqi children.

It is no wonder that most Iraqis have long seen the U.S. and British troops in their midst as oppressive imperial occupiers, not liberators. They have long wanted those "foreign invaders" to leave. A survey commissioned by the U.S. State Department and leaked to the Washington Post in the summer of 2006 determined that the large majority of Iraqis wanted US troops out immediately and believed that an American departure would decrease sectarian violence and make their country safer. Three-fourths of Baghdad's residents said a U.S. exit would make them feel more secure. 

American troops in Iraq or ready to deploy there, listen: the Iraqi people, who your president and commanders claim to be liberating, want you out of their country immediately. Honor their wishes.

IMPERIAL: AN INDEPENDENT IRAQ AS A U.S. "GEOSTRATEGIC NIGHTMARE"

American military personnel, ask yourself: why are U.S. troops really in, or going/going back (yet again?) to Iraq in the first place? No more than 2 percent of the Iraqi population has ever believed that America overran Iraq with the intent of promoting democracy and freedom. Most Iraqis have long figured that the U.S invaded to deepen American control over Iraqi oil and to send a message of American dominance across the petroleum-rich Middle East.

They are correct, of course. Iraq would not have been invaded and occupied if it lacked oil. The notion that the U.S. came to "export democracy" is a joke given: (i) the stifling authoritarianism of our corporate-dominated political system (where majority opinion is irrelevant on numerous policy issues); (ii) U.S. insistence on staying long after most Iraqis wanted us out; and (iii) the United States' oil-based sponsorship of the Saudi Arabian regime - one of the most anti-democratic governments on earth. As Noam Chomsky notes:

"It is sheer jingoist sentimentality to believe that the US has any interest in allowing Iraq to govern itself. There is nothing in history or logic to suggest that, nor in current planning, with bipartisan support: the construction of the huge ‘Embassy,' a city within a city, and the enormous military bases around the country, all designed to be permanent, surely. History, logic, and what is going on before our eyes indicate clearly enough that Washington has always intended to establish an obedient client regime in Iraq, and still does, and will do what it can to achieve that, whatever the further cost to Iraqis. An independent Iraq could be a nightmare for US geostrategic objectives in the region."

The notion of an oil-stocked Persian Gulf nation like Iraq being free to do whatever it wants is contrary to long-standing, bi-partisan U.S. foreign policy doctrine holding that U.S. control of Middle Eastern energy resources is critical to the maintenance of American global dominance.

STUPID: "THE OCCUPATION ITSELF WAS THE MISTAKE"

The observation of Dearlove, that Washington was heading into Iraq with "little discussion" of the aftermath is revealing and damning. As Steele (2008) shows, "Washington's war planners took no account of the nature of Iraqi society or Iraq's history, or indeed the deep well of Arab resentment throughout the region that would doom a Western occupation."

The Bush administration sent U.S. military personnel into Iraq with a preposterously flawed historical template - the successful post-WWII occupations of German and Japan, "which met no resistance and went on peacefully for years." By Steele's (2008) account:

"The fact that Iraq was in the Middle East seemed to escape Washington's notice. The Bush administration did not understand that Arabs feel great sensitivity to assaults on their honor, dignity, and independence, especially by Westerners. Most occupations fail. In the Middle East, they fail absolutely. If analogies were relevant when Washington's war planners prepared their attack on Iraq, it was Israel and Palestine that should have been the template, not Germany or Japan" (Steele, 2008 pp. 245-46).

If Washington's planners had taken an honest and serious look at Iraqi and Arab society history and the record of Western invasions and occupations in the Middle East, they would have left Iraq within a year (or less) of their easy victory over Saddam. The current bipartisan U.S. political consensus on "what went wrong" in Iraq is childish nonsense. It holds that the occupation could and should have "worked" if only Cheney and Bush had employed more sophisticated military and political strategies after Saddam's fall. Besides ignoring the criminal and immoral nature of an invasion that "should have worked," this judgment, shared by Democrats, is completely incorrect. As Steele shows, the occupation was fundamentally flawed from the start. "No matter how efficient, sensitive, generous, and intelligent the U.S. occupation authorities had been, they could not have succeeded. The central problem was not that the Americans made mistakes. The occupation itself was the mistake" (Steele, 2008, pp. 1-2).

French officials understood that a Western invasion of Iraq would create deep resistance and provoke what French President, Jacques Chirac, called "a strong reaction from Arab and Islamic public opinion." This was an elementary observation.

American military personnel: it was unforgivably foolhardy for Washington to send U.S. troops to be killed and maimed en masse in the execution of an imperial invasion certain to provoke prolonged and powerful defiance. There is no excuse for such sheer stupidity on the part of the United States' foreign policy "elite."

More then four thousand American troops have paid the ultimate price for the abject idiocy of Washington's criminal war planners. Tens of thousands of current and former U.S. soldiers are dealing with terrible problems resulting from participation in blood-soaked Iraq disaster: severe brain injuries, lost vision, lost hearing, lost limbs, lost memory, lost families, shattered nerves, broken psyches, crushed spines and souls. The list goes on.

CLASS WAR FROM THE TOP DOWN

Please note that the privileged people who order and profit from the colonial occupation of Iraq do not put themselves or their fortunate sons and daughters' lives on the line in that country. They can wear all the lapel pins they want. They can join the President in foregoing golf for the duration of the war. Will they give up the use of their arms and/or legs and eyes for the rest of their lives?

Perhaps they should mine their golf courses with IEDs and position the woods and hills surrounding their putting greens with snipers - Iraq War veterans looking for a job back home, perhaps - to turn their aristocratic sport into a daily date with possible death or crippling?

WHEN THE ORDERS ARE IMMORAL...

American military personnel, consider, the occupation of Iraq is illegal under both national and international law. Besides being stupid, it is unnecessary, immoral, and monumentally mass-murderous. It is opposed by the majority of Iraqis who understand that occupation is not "liberation." It is opposed by the majority of Americans, who need to liberate themselves from a false "homeland" "democracy' that renders public opinion irrelevant on Iraq and numerous other policy issues both foreign and domestic.

The Iraq War is contrary to the interests of your own nation. The United States' global stature and its ability to take care of pressing and growing "homeland" problems like poverty, homelessness, health care, infrastructure, and joblessness have been immeasurably harmed by the criminal Iraq Fiasco. Under Military law and ethical codes, it is not just your right, but your duty to disobey criminal and immoral orders. Note, federal officers take an oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and not to follow the orders of the president. The occupation, enabled and supported by Congress and both leading U.S. political parties, is a grave legal and moral transgression.

American troops: many of you have served in Iraq in the names of "freedom" and "democracy." Please keep your democratic sentiments alive and apply them to places sorely needed - in the streets, workplaces, schools, culture, media, politics and daily life of the United States itself. There are terrible democracy- and freedom-deficits right here, the world's leading mass incarceration state, where the top 1 percent owns nearly 40 percent of the wealth and a probably larger share of the politicians and policymakers. This is a country where tens of millions of children go without adequate food, clothing and shelter and where 47 million people lack basic health coverage while leading corporate investors and managers take regular pleasure in shocking personal luxury.

The wealthy masters laugh while you and your comrades bleed and die. They profit while working-class soldiers hope to survive ridiculous wars of colonial occupation ordered by idiotic criminals who can't be bothered to examine elementary facts about the nations into which they send Americans troops to kill and be killed. We need democratic regime change at home. We need soldiers for freedom and democracy inside America. We need to bring the war home. Fight the rich and powerful, not their wicked wars.

Paul Street
2008-05-23 | permalink | comment (1) | feedback | Digg This! |

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Sources

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004). His next book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008)

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