To lessen the macabre prospect of Julian Assange spending 175 years in a United States maximum security prison, the US Department of Justice has suggested that he could serve prison time in Australia. Stuart Rees writes that this latest development is part of a culture of revenge.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
One of the founding fathers of US neo-conservativism has died. There’s a saying that ‘we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead’. But while this might be a reasonable rule of thumb for civilians, if applied to public figures it would preclude a proper examination of their impact while in public life. Worse still, doing so could mean shielding serious crimes from the critical examination and condemnation that they rightfully deserve.
On 30 June, former US secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld died at the age of 88. A spokesperson for the family said that his death was caused by a type of blood cancer.
Rumsfeld had a long career in Washington, serving in many different roles under three different presidents. He entered the US congress in 1962 at the age of 30 representing the midwestern US state of Illinois. His first role to bring him major attention was as an aide to the infamously corrupt Richard Nixon. Nixon was US president from 1969 until his resignation in disgrace in 1974. Rumsfeld later became secretary of defence when he was appointed to the role by Nixon’s successor in the White House, Gerald Ford.
But it was for his second stint as secretary of defense under George W. Bush, in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks, that he’s now best remembered. During his time in the Bush administration, he was a close ally of then-vice president Dick Cheney. And along with Cheney, John Bolton, and Bush himself, Rumsfeld was amongst the major proponents for the US’s so-called ‘War on Terror’.
As would be expected, the corporate-owned media largely gave Rumsfeld a free pass in their obituaries. They showed a particular tendency to give inordinate attention to trivia and anecdotes. Some regaled his purportedly prolific production of memos. Others referred to his status as the youngest secretary of state under Ford and then second oldest under Bush. The New York Times, meanwhile, reminisced about “his one-handed push-ups and his prowess on a squash court.”
Fortunately, however, some publications broke the mold. Crucially, they called Rumsfeld out for the liar and warmonger that he was. The Atlantic, for instance, described him as “the worst secretary of defense in American history”. It even deemed him “worse than the closest contender, Robert McNamara”. McNamara served in the role during some of the bloodiest years of the US’s involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia.
But unlike Rumsfeld, at least McNamara admitted some fault and expressed some remorse for his complicity in the hundreds of thousands of deaths his decisions caused. Crucially, he eventually resigned and called for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, stubbornly refused to admit fault and was ultimately fired by the Bush White House in 2006. Till the day he died, he never expressed any regret for the Bush administration’s foreign policy decisions.
Some of the worst of these decisions include:
Rumsfeld was also infamous for his arrogance. He had a penchant for reveling in the US’s peerless military might and unilateralism. He was once asked, for example, whether the US would ‘go it alone’ in Iraq without the support of the UK. Rumsfeld responded dismissively that, though he would welcome British involvement, there were “work arounds” should the UK withdraw support for the planned invasion.
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of Rumsfeld’s character and career, however, was his shameless toadying to corporate interests. Though largely ignored in the corporate media, there is, in fact, considerable evidence that the Bush administration’s foreign policy was guided in large part by the interests of US corporations.
As The Canary has previously reported, in the wake of the Iraq invasion, lucrative contracts were handed to some of corporate America’s biggest players. Petroleum giant Halliburton, for instance, was the recipient of a $1.7bn deal to operate in the oil-rich country. A decade later the amount had risen to over $39bn. Bechtel, another major US corporation, received a $680m contract to rebuilt Iraq’s infrastructure, which was later increased by $350m.
Writing in Jacobin, Ben Burgis points out that:
In 2006, Berlin attorney Wolfgang Kaleck filed a formal criminal complaint against Rumsfeld and several other American officials for their involvement in torture. Needless to say, Rumsfeld never had to see the inside of a courtroom in Germany or anywhere else.
This is a prime example of the incredible, self-serving hypocrisy behind the entire neoconservative mentality. Rumsfeld’s type are constantly banging their drum about ‘law and order’. Yet, as they call for longer sentences for petty street criminals, their own crimes of much greater magnitude are committed in an atmosphere of near total impunity.
Though, of course, reveling in another person’s death would be vulgar, we must also point to the crucial reality. Namely that, thanks to Rumsfeld’s actions and decisions, many people never made it anywhere close to 88 years of age. As Burgis puts it, since he never faced justice for his actions: “In that sense, and only in that sense, Donald Rumsfeld died too soon”.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons – Erik Drost and Flickr – Gage Skidmore
By Peter Bolton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
When word came down yesterday that former Defense Secretary and brazen orchestrator of mass death Donald Rumsfeld had shuffled loose the mortal coil at age 88, CNN and the other networks began to do their standard back-and-fill exercises to shore up the fiction while burying the truth after a genuine monster drops dead. “Controversial,” they called Rumsfeld, while showing footage of him scurrying around the wreckage after the Pentagon attack on September 11. “I think that’s what we’ll all remember,” said one talking head of those images.
Not if I have anything to say about it.
See, on the same day he was doing no more or less than what any average citizen would likely do at an emergency scene, Rumsfeld returned to his office and immediately began scheming to use the attacks as a pretense for invading Iraq.
The post Rumsfeld Was Not ‘Controversial’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Legislation that would end the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq or in situations where U.S. interests are impacted in that region of the world, passed within the House of Representatives on Thursday.
The vote on the bill was technically bipartisan, with 49 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in the House.
The bill, which ends the AUMF that was originally passed in 2002 during the run-up to the war in Iraq, has the support of lawmakers in the Senate as well. The White House has also signaled that President Joe Biden would sign the bill into law if it reached his desk.
“The administration supports the repeal of the 2002 AUMF, as the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on the 2002 AUMF as a domestic legal basis,” the White House said in a statement earlier this week.
“The Iraq War has been over for nearly a decade. The authorization passed in 2002 is no longer necessary in 2021,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).
Ending the AUMF would prevent future administrations from “reaching back into the legal dustbin to use it as a justification for military adventurism,” Schumer added. The AUMF from 2002 has been cited to justify actions by both the Obama and Trump administrations, with former President Donald Trump’s White House most recently using it to defend the military strikes that targeted Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani in January 2020.
The White House has said it wants to go further, eliminating other authorizations that still exist and creating a new framework for how the U.S. military can act in the future. An earlier AUMF, passed just days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, still remains in force, and the authorization from the first war in Iraq in 1991 is still technically on the books.
Activists, organizations and Congress members opposed to the endless wars are calling for those authorizations to be repealed, too.
“Once we pass a repeal of the 2002 AUMF, we must keep up our fight to repeal the 2001 AUMF so that no future president has the unilateral power to plunge us into endless wars,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) said.
“Congress must repeal not only the 2002 but also the more important and even more disastrous 2001 #AUMF, end the #WarOnTerror and repeal the #PatriotAct, and impose strict limits on Presidential authority to make war,” Massachusetts Peace Action tweeted out earlier this year.
The 2002 AUMF, passed months before the U.S. began its military operations in Iraq in 2003, gives the president broad and generalized power to “use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to — (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.” Biden, who is now calling for its repeal, had originally voted in favor of the AUMF.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As people worldwide celebrate the UN’s World Press Freedom Day on 3 May, WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange remains incarcerated.
The US continues to demand Assange’s extradition for his role in obtaining and publishing national defence documents from 2009 to 2011. The leaks, provided by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, are known as the Guantanamo Files, the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary, and the US diplomatic cables (aka Cablegate).
There are noteworthy parallels which can be drawn between Assange’s case and that of famed US Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was a former senior adviser and analyst with the defence and state departments during the Vietnam War. And in fact, he was prosecuted by US president Richard Nixon’s administration with the very same law now being used against Assange.
Ellsberg and Assange each helped to reveal war crimes and other criminality by the US government. They were both subjected to warrantless wiretapping and violations of their privileged communications. And they both faced possible assassination, or at least the risk of serious harm, at the US government’s hands.
Evidence of government misconduct ultimately led to the judge dismissing the case against Ellsberg in May 1973. But in Assange’s case, district judge Vanessa Bairatser either ignored or downplayed the significance of state misconduct directed towards Assange, his family, and his lawyers. Had it not been for her conclusion that Assange was at substantial risk of suicide should he be extradited, judge Baraitser would have granted the US government’s extradition request.
Both Ellsberg and Assange helped bring to light information about war and international politics that was demonstrably in the public interest.
Ellsberg, who unlike Assange is a US citizen, worked for the government and was the one who leaked the documents. His revelations exposed the myriad of lies and secrets, over four separate presidencies, that facilitated the US invasion of Vietnam. Lies which ultimately led to a war responsible for killing around 3.8 million Vietnamese people (with one estimate as high as 7.3 million). It was also responsible for killing over 58,000 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Laotians and Cambodians. The war also resulted in up to 500,000 women turning to sex work. And it saw the US military dump 70 million litres of highly toxic herbicides, namely, “Agent Orange”, throughout the countryside.
Ellsberg’s charges related to him copying the Report of the Office of The Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force (aka Pentagon Papers). He then passed these on to the New York Times and Washington Post. The outlets proceeded to publish excerpts. But his leaks were ultimately dwarfed in size by the 700k documents Manning passed on to WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010.
Ellsberg told the court in Assange’s extradition case:
“these 7,000 pages of top secret documents demonstrated that the conduct of the war in Vietnam had, over more than one administration, been started and continued by the US Government in the knowledge that it could not be won
He added “that President Johnson and his administration had lied to Congress and to the public in relation to its origins, costs and prospects”.
Assange and WikiLeaks’ publications similarly revealed war crimes. These include the massacre of 18 Iraqis (as seen in the notorious Collateral Murder video), an estimated 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths, and widespread torture of detainees. The documents also exposed state wrongdoing. For example, US government pressuring Germany not to to prosecute CIA officers for their role in the kidnapping and brutal torture of German citizen Khaled El-Masri.
The 1917 Espionage Act was supposedly created to prosecute spies during WWI. Yet neither the indictments against Ellsberg nor Assange ever alleged that either was working as a spy.
The act was notoriously used by Woodrow Wilson’s government to successfully prosecute thousands of Americans simply for opposing US involvement in the First World War.
Ellsberg faced 115 years in prison on a 12-count indictment. He was the first whistleblower to be charged under the Espionage Act for leaking documents to the press.
Meanwhile, Assange faces up to 175 years imprisonment. 17 of the charges are filed under the Espionage Act, making up 170 years of the total. If he’s extradited, Assange will also make history as the first publisher to ever be prosecuted under the Espionage Act – simply for obtaining and publishing government secrets.
James Goodale represented the New York Times when Nixon tried to stop them from publishing the Pentagon Papers. He recently told journalist Kevin Gosztola:
I do not think that [Assange] should be tried under the Espionage Act, because the act was designed for espionage and not for reporting the truth, which is what Assange did.
The final charge against Assange – one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusions – could result in up to five years imprisonment. It originally related solely to an alleged conversation that Assange had with Manning. During this, they discussed the possibility of cracking a password ‘hash’ (something that ultimately never happened). At the last minute, the US government controversially widened the eighteenth charge to include “a vague and inexact assortment of general allegations about conduct Assange may or may not have engaged in from 2009 to 2015”.
Ellsberg explained to The Canary that the majority of charges against Assange under the Espionage Act are “strict liability” offences. This means that the “purpose, motivation, or even impact of the revelation is not to be considered”, he said. When Ellsberg was on trial he, “wasn’t able to answer the question ‘Why did you copy the Pentagon Papers?’. Nor has anyone of a dozen or more people who have been tried [under that act] since – mostly under Obama and Trump”.
If a defendant attempts to raise their motivations when being tried under the Espionage Act, Ellsberg explained, the judge will shut them down.
This is also a point made recently by CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling was tried for allegedly blowing the whistle on a botched CIA programme targeting Iran’s nuclear facility. It’s a charge he vehemently denies, despite being convicted. Sterling told Jacobin:
The jury pool from which they will be selecting in the Eastern District of Virginia is made up of individuals who all have some sort of tie — family, their own experience — to the intelligence community or the military apparatus there.
He also said:
I think that court has, time and time again, shown itself to be pro-CIA and pro-US government, and pretty much allowed the government to rule the case and take it in whatever direction they want. And that’s going to be to paint Julian in the worst light, with a favourable jury, and, overall, to go for a conviction.
Both Ellsberg and Assange faced warrantless wiretapping and the unlawful interception of privileged and private communications.
A ‘clandestine unit‘ of Cuban Americans working for the White House “Plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. They were looking for confidential information about the whistlblower’s mental state with which to discredit or blackmail him, Ellsberg said.
The FBI also, 15 times, illegally recorded Ellsberg’s conversations with Morton Halperin, a staffer on the US National Security Council. This fact only became public during Ellsberg’s trial.
The Ecuadorian government originally hired Spanish firm UC Global to provide security for their embassy in London while Assange was an asylee there. As The Canary previously noted, the firm started to spy on Assange, his visitors and lawyers on behalf of the US government. This is according to what two UC Global whistleblowers later told Westminster Magistrates’ Court. UC Global placed the inside of the embassy under audio/visual surveillance at the request of their “American friends”. And it even directed a live video feed of the surveillance back to the US.
David Morales, the CEO of UC Global, is currently facing trial in Spain for his alleged role in this criminal conspiracy. He “indicated that the aim was that the surveillance, control of information and recordings should focus on the meetings of the asylee”. Assange’s lawyers in particular were deemed “priority targets” for surveillance. So much so that even the toilets in the embassy were bugged with microphones.
To block laser microphones from the building across the street from picking up conversations inside the embassy, Assange started to use a white noise machine. According to one of the whistleblowers, stickers were placed on the embassy windows to counteract the vibrations from the machine.
Ellsberg also told The Canary about “an attempt on my life or an attempt to incapacitate me again” by the “Plumbers”.
Ellsberg said that on 3 May 1972:
on the orders of the oval office, 12 CIA assets, employees and contract for the CIA in the Bay of Pigs, were brought up from Miami to ‘incapacitate, Daniel Ellsberg, totally’
He explained the findings of a special prosecutor’s investigation. The prosecutor interpreted this “as meaning they meant to kill me, [though] it’s not clear. I think the main purpose was to make sure I stopped talking”. One of the assets testified “that his assignment was to break both my legs”, Ellsberg said. “But, I think that wouldn’t have been enough to shut me up, so I think they did mean to go beyond that”.
Assange likewise faced possible serious injury or death at the hands of the US government or its assets.
One of the UC Global employees, in his affidavit to the court, explained that around December 2017 Morales told his staff[pdf, pg 7] that the Americans “were desperate”. And Morales “even suggested that more extreme measures” should be employed against Assange. These specifically included the possibility of kidnapping him or “even the possibility of poisoning Mr. Assange”.
Despite the clear similarities between the two cases, the determinations by the judges in Ellsberg’s trial and Assange’s extradition hearing diverge markedly.
Judge Matthew Byrne believed that the charges against Ellsberg and his co-defendant raised “serious factual and legal issues”. But the government misconduct which came to light was simply too much for him to ignore.
In dismissing the case against Ellsberg, judge Byrne said:
the conduct of the government has placed the case in such a posture that it precludes the fair dispassionate resolution of these issues by a jury
Byrne concluded that the:
totality of the circumstances of this case” offend “a sense of justice”. “The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case…. I am of the opinion, in the present status of the case, that the only remedy available that would assure due process and the fair administration of justice is that this trial be terminated
By contrast, judge Baraitser was not swayed by the evidence of misconduct directed towards Assange or his legal team.
Baraitser wrote in her judgement that “it would be inappropriate for this court to make findings of fact on allegations still being investigated in Spain and on the basis of partial and incomplete evidence”. Paradoxically, by that logic, if the Spanish government decided not to launch a prosecution against Morales, the UC Global whistleblower testimony might have carried greater weight.
It’s unclear why an ongoing prosecution of Morales in Spain should have any bearing on Baraitser’s ability to weigh the reliability of the statements from US Global employees. The case before Baraitser required her to consider whether Assange should be extradited. It did not require her to make a legal finding as to the guilt or innocence of Morales.
Baraitser also determined, perhaps somewhat naïvely, that there’s “no reason to assume” the surveillance of Assange and his lawyers related to the US case against him. The US government “would be aware that privileged communications and the fruits of any surveillance would not be seen by prosecutors assigned to the case”. Baraitser said any such evidence would be “inadmissible at Mr. Assange’s trial as a matter of US law”. This finding also misses the seriousness of the alleged criminal conduct and violation of Assange’s legal professional privilege. This would stand irrespective of whatever evidence is ultimately used from the surveillance in a future trial.
The US government has appealed Bairatser’s decision not to extradite Assange on health grounds. And its application, along with a reply from the defence, is being considered by the High Court. The defence has also filed a cross-appeal, which also seeks to challenge at least some of Baraitser’s findings.
US president Joe Biden has claimed that his presidency will mark a break from that of former president Donald Trump, including in relation to attacks against the press. But his government remains committed, at least for now, to Assange’s prosecution for his role in revealing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other forms of wrongdoing by the state.
Featured image via YouTube/screenshot
This post was originally published on The Canary.
Just about everyone was shocked by what happened at the Capitol building on January 6th. But as a former soldier in America’s forever wars, horrifying as the scenes were, I also found what happened strangely familiar, almost inevitable. Continue reading
The post On January 6th, the U.S. Became a Foreign Country appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.
While the world is consumed with the terrifying coronavirus pandemic, on March 19 the Trump administration will be marking the 17th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by ramping up the conflict there. After an Iran-aligned militia allegedly struck a U.S. base near Baghdad on March 11, the U.S. military carried out retaliatory strikes against five of the militia’s weapons factories and announced it is sending two more aircraft carriers to the region, as well as new Patriot missile systems and hundreds more troops to operate them. This contradicts the January vote of the Iraqi Parliament that called for U.S. troops to leave the country. It also goes against the sentiment of most Americans, who think the Iraq war was not worth fighting, and against the campaign promise of Donald Trump to end the endless wars.
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. armed forces attacked and invaded Iraq with a force of over 460,000 troops from all its armed services, supported by 46,000 UK troops, 2,000 from Australia and a few hundred from Poland, Spain, Portugal and Denmark. The “shock and awe” aerial bombardment unleashed 29,200 bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first five weeks of the war.
The U.S. invasion was a crime of aggression under international law, and was actively opposed by people and countries all over the world, including 30 million people who took to the streets in 60 countries on February 15, 2003, to express their horror that this could really be happening at the dawn of the 21st century. American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, compared the U.S. invasion of Iraq to Japan’s preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and wrote, “Today, it is we Americans who live in infamy.”
Seventeen years later, the consequences of the invasion have lived up to the fears of all who opposed it. Wars and hostilities rage across the region, and divisions over war and peace in the U.S. and Western countries challenge our highly selective view of ourselves as advanced, civilized societies. Here is a look at 12 of the most serious consequences of the U.S. war in Iraq.
Estimates on the number of people killed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq vary widely, but even the most conservative estimates based on fragmentary reporting of minimum confirmed deaths are in the hundreds of thousands. Serious scientific studies estimated that 655,000 Iraqis had died in the first three years of war, and about a million by September 2007. The violence of the U.S. escalation or “surge” continued into 2008, and sporadic conflict continued from 2009 until 2014. Then in its new campaign against Islamic State, the U.S. and its allies bombarded major cities in Iraq and Syria with more than 118,000 bombs and the heaviest artillery bombardments since the Vietnam War. They reduced much of Mosul and other Iraqi cities to rubble, and a preliminary Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report found that more than 40,000 civilians were killed in Mosul alone. There are no comprehensive mortality studies for this latest deadly phase of the war. In addition to all the lives lost, even more people have been wounded. The Iraqi government’s Central Statistical Organization says that 2 million Iraqis have been left disabled.
By 2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that nearly 2 million Iraqis had fled the violence and chaos of occupied Iraq, mostly to Jordan and Syria, while another 1.7 million were displaced within the country. The U.S. war on the Islamic State relied even more on bombing and artillery bombardment, destroying even more homes and displacing an astounding 6 million Iraqis from 2014 to 2017. According to the UNHCR, 4.35 million people have returned to their homes as the war on IS has wound down, but many face “destroyed properties, damaged or non-existent infrastructure and the lack of livelihood opportunities and financial resources, which at times [has] led to secondary displacement.” Iraq’s internally displaced children represent “a generation traumatized by violence, deprived of education and opportunities,” according to UN Special Rapporteur Cecilia Jimenez-Damary.
While the U.S. military downplays Iraqi casualties, it precisely tracks and publishes its own. As of February 2020, 4,576 U.S. troops and 181 British troops have been killed in Iraq, as well as 142 other foreign occupation troops. Over 93 percent of the foreign occupation troops killed in Iraq have been Americans. In Afghanistan, where the U.S. has had more support from NATO and other allies, only 68 percent of occupation troops killed have been Americans. The greater share of U.S. casualties in Iraq is one of the prices Americans have paid for the unilateral, illegal nature of the U.S. invasion. By the time U.S. forces temporarily withdrew from Iraq in 2011, 32,200 U.S. troops had been wounded. As the U.S. tried to outsource and privatize its occupation, at least 917 civilian contractors and mercenaries were also killed and 10,569 wounded in Iraq, but not all of them were U.S. nationals.
More than 20 U.S. veterans kill themselves every day—that’s more deaths each year than the total U.S. military deaths in Iraq. Those with the highest rates of suicide are young veterans with combat exposure, who commit suicide at rates “4-10 times higher than their civilian peers.” Why? As Matthew Hoh of Veterans for Peace explains, many veterans “struggle to reintegrate into society,” are ashamed to ask for help, are burdened by what they saw and did in the military, are trained in shooting and own guns, and carry mental and physical wounds that make their lives difficult.
On March 16, 2003, just days before the U.S. invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney projected that the war would cost the U.S. about $100 billion and that the U.S. involvement would last for two years. Seventeen years on, the costs are still mounting. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated a cost of $2.4 trillion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes estimated the cost of the Iraq war at more than $3 trillion, “based on conservative assumptions,” in 2008. The UK government spent at least 9 billion pounds in direct costs through 2010. What the U.S. did not spend money on, contrary to what many Americans believe, was to rebuild Iraq, the country our war destroyed.
Most of the men (no women!) running Iraq today are still former exiles who flew into Baghdad in 2003 on the heels of the U.S. and British invasion forces. Iraq is finally once again exporting 3.8 million barrels of oil per day and earning $80 billion a year in oil exports, but little of this money trickles down to rebuild destroyed and damaged homes or provide jobs, health care or education for Iraqis, only 36 percent of whom even have jobs. Iraq’s young people have taken to the streets to demand an end to the corrupt post-2003 Iraqi political regime and U.S. and Iranian influence over Iraqi politics. More than 600 protesters were killed by government forces, but the protests forced Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to resign. Another former Western-based exile, Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, the cousin of former U.S.-appointed interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, was chosen to replace him, but he resigned within weeks after the National Assembly failed to approve his cabinet choices. The popular protest movement celebrated Allawi’s resignation, and Abdul Mahdi agreed to remain as prime minister, but only as a “caretaker” to carry out essential functions until new elections can be held. He has called for new elections in December. Until then, Iraq remains in political limbo, still occupied by about 5,000 U.S. troops.
When the U.S. invaded Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council, the first victim was the United Nations Charter, the foundation of peace and international law since World War II, which prohibits the threat or use of force by any country against another. International law only permits military action as a necessary and proportionate defense against an attack or imminent threat. The illegal 2002 Bush doctrine of preemption was universally rejected because it went beyond this narrow principle and claimed an exceptional U.S. right to use unilateral military force “to preempt emerging threats,” undermining the authority of the UN Security Council to decide whether a specific threat requires a military response or not. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general at the time, said the invasion was illegal and would lead to a breakdown in international order, and that is exactly what has happened. When the U.S. trampled the UN Charter, others were bound to follow. Today we are watching Turkey and Israel follow in the U.S.’s footsteps, attacking and invading Syria at will as if it were not even a sovereign country, using the people of Syria as pawns in their political games.
The second victim of the invasion was American democracy. Congress voted for war based on a so-called “summary” of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that was nothing of the kind. The Washington Post reported that only six out of 100 senators and a few House members read the actual NIE. The 25-page “summary” that other members of Congress based their votes on was a document produced months earlier “to make the public case for war,” as one of its authors, the CIA’s Paul Pillar, later confessed to PBS Frontline. It contained astounding claims that were nowhere to be found in the real NIE, such as that the CIA knew of 550 sites where Iraq was storing chemical and biological weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell repeated many of these lies in his shameful performance at the UN Security Council in February 2003, while Bush and Cheney used them in major speeches, including Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. How is democracy—the rule of the people—even possible if the people we elect to represent us in Congress can be manipulated into voting for a catastrophic war by such a web of lies?
Another victim of the invasion of Iraq was the presumption that U.S. presidents and policy are subject to the rule of law. Seventeen years later, most Americans assume that the president can conduct war and assassinate foreign leaders and terrorism suspects as he pleases, with no accountability whatsoever—like a dictator. When President Obama said he wanted to look forward instead of backward, and held no one from the Bush administration accountable for their crimes, it was as if they ceased to be crimes and became normalized as U.S. policy. That includes crimes of aggression against other countries; the mass killing of civilians in U.S. airstrikes and drone strikes; and the unrestricted surveillance of every American’s phone calls, emails, browsing history and opinions. But these are crimes and violations of the U.S. Constitution, and refusing to hold accountable those who committed these crimes has made it easier for them to be repeated.
During the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped 340 tons of warheads and explosives made with depleted uranium, which poisoned the soil and water and led to skyrocketing levels of cancer. In the following decades of “ecocide,” Iraq has been plagued by the burning of dozens of oil wells; the pollution of water sources from the dumping of oil, sewage and chemicals; millions of tons of rubble from destroyed cities and towns; and the burning of huge volumes of military waste in open air “burn pits” during the war. The pollution caused by war is linked to the high levels of congenital birth defects, premature births, miscarriages and cancer (including leukemia) in Iraq. The pollution has also affected U.S. soldiers. “More than 85,000 U.S. Iraq war veterans… have been diagnosed with respiratory and breathing problems, cancers, neurological diseases, depression and emphysema since returning from Iraq,” as the Guardian reports. And parts of Iraq may never recover from the environmental devastation.
In secular 20th-century Iraq, the Sunni minority was more powerful than the Shia majority, but for the most part, the different ethnic groups lived side-by-side in mixed neighborhoods and even intermarried. Friends with mixed Shia/Sunni parents tell us that before the U.S. invasion, they didn’t even know which parent was Shia and which was Sunni. After the invasion, the U.S. empowered a new Shiite ruling class led by former exiles allied with the U.S. and Iran, as well as the Kurds in their semi-autonomous region in the north. The upending of the balance of power and deliberate U.S. “divide and rule” policies led to waves of horrific sectarian violence, including the ethnic cleansing of communities by Interior Ministry death squads under U.S. command. The sectarian divisions the U.S. unleashed in Iraq led to the resurgence of Al Qaeda and the emergence of ISIS, which have wreaked havoc throughout the entire region.
When President Bush declared his “doctrine of preemption” in 2002, Senator Edward Kennedy called it “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.” But the world has so far failed to either persuade the U.S. to change course or to unite in diplomatic opposition to its militarism and imperialism. France and Germany bravely stood with Russia and most of the Global South to oppose the invasion of Iraq in the UN Security Council in 2003. But Western governments embraced Obama’s superficial charm offensive as cover for reinforcing their traditional ties with the U.S. China was busy expanding its peaceful economic development and its role as the economic hub of Asia, while Russia was still rebuilding its economy from the neoliberal chaos and poverty of the 1990s. Neither was ready to actively challenge U.S. aggression until the U.S., NATO and their Arab monarchist allies launched proxy wars against Libya and Syria in 2011. After the fall of Libya, Russia appears to have decided it must either stand up to U.S. regime change operations or eventually fall victim itself.
The economic tides have shifted, a multipolar world is emerging, and the world is hoping against hope that the American people and new American leaders will act to rein in this 21st-century American imperialism before it leads to an even more catastrophic U.S. war with Iran, Russia or China. As Americans, we must hope that the world’s faith in the possibility that we can democratically bring sanity and peace to U.S. policy is not misplaced. A good place to start would be to join the call by the Iraqi Parliament for U.S. troops to leave Iraq.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK, and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
This post was originally published on Truthdig RSS – Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists.
.jpg){kind=link}