Paul Craig Roberts on the Iraqi Genocide
More refreshing plain-speaking from Paul Craig Roberts (excerpted):
… Bush’s private Waffen SS known as Blackwater has taken to gunning Iraqi civilians down in the streets. How do Blackwater and Custer Battles killers escape the “unlawful combatant” designation?
One can only marvel at the insouciance of the US Congress to the current Iraqi Genocide while condemning Turkey for one that happened 90 years ago.
People seldom see the beam in their own eye, only the mote in the eyes of others. Every member of the Bush Regime is busily at work denouncing Iran for causing instability in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the US has invaded two countries, throwing them into total chaos, while beating the drums for war with Iran and conspiring with Israel to invade Lebanon and to attack Syria.
The indisputable facts are that the US and Israel have attacked four Middle East countries and are determined to attack a fifth. Yet, it is peaceful Iran, at war with no one, that Bush and Israel blame for causing instability in the Middle East.
Not content with its many wars in the Middle East, the Bush Regime is sponsoring wars in Africa and is setting up an African Command. The US government has been bombing and attacking other countries ever since the cold war ended. Instead of peace, the gang in Washington DC chose war.
Other than the Israel Lobby, the greatest supporters of Bush’s wars are Christian evangelicals, specifically the “rapture evangelicals” and the “Christian Zionists.”
I remember when Christianity was about saving one’s soul. Today it is about bringing on Armageddon. While the various evangelical Christians preach war in the Middle East, they condemn Islam for being a “warlike religion.”
Americans are so full of themselves that they are blind to their extraordinary hypocrisy.
The US government has broken every agreement with Russia by withdrawing from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, pushing NATO to Russia’s borders, conniving to place missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic, and buying governments in former Soviet republics and installing US military bases therein.
When Russian President Putin finally has enough and protests, the US Secretary of State blames Putin for being difficult and restarting the cold war.
Few Americans realize it, but they take the cake.
International polls show that the rest of the world regard the US and Israel as the greatest dangers to world peace. Americans claim that they are fighting wars against terrorism, but it is US and Israeli terrorism that worries everyone else. The rest of the world knows that the wars are about US and Israeli hegemony and that the US and Israel are prepared to engage in whatever acts of terror are necessary to achieve hegemony.
That is the bare fact.
When the US dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US empire will come to an abrupt end. Sooner or later the rest of the world will realize this and, in an act of self-protection, dethrone the dollar.
I find the use of the term genocide problematic. The death toll is horrible (whether above a million or “only” hundreds of thousands) and the use of contractors/mercenaries is bad enough, but it isn’t genocide. In order for it to be genocide the United States has to want to destroy the Iraqis, which it doesn’t. Using such terminology can turn off people from the cause of putting a spotlight on the horrible situation in Iraq, it’s counterproductive, and in my mind, just wrong.
Those who make the case for genocide (see for example here, here and here) argue that certain actors do in fact want to destroy the Iraqis and Iraqi society, and it doesn’t have to be the whole “United States” with this intent, I’m sure all decent Americans would find this prospect rightly abhorrent. The same can not be said for those neoconcrazies (this term is not a pejorative emanating from me, it is in reference to the fact they were famously referred to The Crazies before their ascendancy in this administration), nor of the genocidal sanctions regime in which over half a million children died in the decade prior Invasion Mark II, perpetrated in part by an ostensibly “liberal” administration, and for which the price was infamously “worth it”.
You’d have to come up with compelling evidence that somehow all this terrible ongoing and arguably systemic destruction was just a horrible, bumbling mistake (after mistake, after mistake: the War of (t)Error in fact, the Big Lie par excellence). What evidence can you furnish that it was really somehow all due to incompetence? How do you explain the fact that sectarian violence was virtually non-existent before the 2003 invasion? The Abu Ghraib abuses were subsequently revealed to be endemic, not episodic, the same with the Blackwater atrocities.
The evidence suggesting genocidal intent to destroy Iraq is apparent in the ongoing result post invasion. These are the catastrophic conditions using recent figures from a July 30, 2007 Oxfam International and NCCI network of aid organisations report (as compiled from Lendman):
All this from previously one of the most successful societies in the Middle East, with an excellent health system and a generally well-educated populace. See also Naomi Klein’s recent work on the Shock Doctrine for how (non)creative destruction works in the service of ideological aims and some of my posts documenting, for example, likely psy-ops in Iraq.
We also recall that the second invasion of Iraq was apparently conceived in 1992, over a full decade before the invasion, in a preemptive-war advocating policy document entitled Draft Defense Planning Guidance. (See what past US presidents have said on the notion of preemptive war in contrast and illustrate the departure from and hijacking of policy). Signed by the then secretary of defense, Richard Cheney, the Draft Defense Planning Guidance document was prepared by Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, key personages in the Bush II administration.
Significantly, it sank at the time. Its authors were regarded as “the crazies“, even from within the Bush Senior administration.
It resurfaced five years later in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), wherein William Kristol and Robert Kagan set down the central neoconservative tenets of preemptive war and U.S. global (and Israeli regional) dominion. Among the founding members of PNAC were Richard Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Elliot Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld and Jeb Bush. Francis Fukuyama later recanted and spurned the neoconservatives.
Ascribing benevolent intent to individuals and organisations is a natural thing to do. It operates on good faith assumptions and trust, and guards against the possibility of negative self-fulfilling prophecies. When it comes to state power however, it is inadvisable to presume benevolent intent, and certainly never wholly. This particularly applies when we are talking about imperial power. The fabrications that lead to this invasion, occupation and destruction of a whole country also furnish further proof that there was deliberate intent towards genocide, ethnic cleansing, and divide and rule partition.
I don’t believe the genocide description detracts from our scrutiny of the situation, I think its entirely warranted. Besides being right in substance, IMO, it also has the effect of startling more people out of their somnambulance.
Well said, Ann.
To those that question the ‘genocide’ label, I have but two words:
DEPLETED URANIUM
Go do your research on that, Emmanuel.
Thanks and welcome, Trooper.
As seen on your site, here are two videos on depleted uranium. I’ll see about also embedding them shortly as they are very important and worthwhile:
Eric Blumrich: DU IS A Crime (2.34)
Depleted Uranium – The Ultimate Dirty Bomb (9.52)