Should al-Qaeda occupy New York?

By Pham Binh, Traveling Soldier production staff

Two questions – should the U.S. get out of Iraq now and who will take over – came up in two different conversations I had with two different soldiers. Both of them are OIF vets, and one of them has been sent back for a second tour.

To take up the first question, we have to remember that it’s the same people who ordered bombs dropped on Iraq (killing upwards of 100,000 Iraqis) who now claim that: we can’t leave because of all the death and destruction we caused. We have an obligation to clean up this mess.

Imagine if Osama bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda said to the people of New York: “yes we killed 3,000 of your people. But, because of all the death and destruction we caused, we have an obligation to clean up the mess we created. So we are sending an Islamic fundamentalist occupation army of 10,000 fighters to occupy downtown NYC.”

If the logic doesn’t make any sense in New York, it doesn’t make any sense in Iraq. The idea that “we broke it, we own it” is nothing more than the 21st century version of the White Man’s Burden. After all, under the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein electricity was restored in a month after Iraq was bombed to hell after Gulf War I. Two years into Gulf War II, and under the thumb of the most powerful nation with the most advanced technology in the world, electricity is still below pre-war levels.

Every day the U.S. forcibly occupies Iraq, more mosques will be destroyed, more civilians will be killed, more homes will be raided, and more military age men and even some women and children will end up tortured in prisons. In short, the longer the U.S. stays, the more broken, destroyed, and devastated Iraq will be. Politicians who are trying to use people’s sympathy for the suffering of the Iraqis to continue the war that is killing and maiming those same Iraqis are nothing but a bunch of lying, cynical SOBs.

We have to understand why Iraq was invaded in the first place. The goal was to establish a large, permanent American military bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East which could be used for future wars against Syria, Iran or anyone else in the region who decided to give Uncle Sam the finger. The region is home to world’s largest oil reserves, in Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Controlling this huge amount of oil which the rest of the world depends on would give Corporate America a huge amount of power to push around its rivals – Corporate Japan, Corporate China, Corporate France, Corporate Germany, Corporate Russia. That’s why the governments of those countries opposed the invasion and that’s why Washington keeps repeating over and over, “we can’t cut and run.” They don’t want to walk away from this empty handed.

Every day the American military is in Iraq, the more people on both sides die in the pursuit of those goals. Now if politicians in Washington openly said this, that all the killing and dying in Iraq was really all about power politics and empire and the greed of the American elite, no one would stand for it. So they lied about weapons of mass destruction. When that fell through, they came up with another lie: establishing democracy. They even held an election to give people the illusion that democracy was being brought to Iraq by gunpoint. The media “forgot” to mention that all parties were banned that called for resisting the occupation. The media “forgot” to point to the fact that the U.S. government rigged the political set up of the Iraqi government to prevent it from asking the U.S. to get out or from repealing any of the laws put in place by the U.S.

Now that it seems that an Iraqi government is in place, we have a new lie: Iraq’s “democratic” government needs help to “put down the insurgency” which is being led by Saddam loyalists, foreign Islamic terrorists like Al-Qaeda, and paid criminals.

What Washington’s politicians – Bush and Kerry, Democrat and Republican alike – can’t admit is the obvious: that the people who are fighting the U.S. are fighting for their independence. They can’t admit that Iraqis who have had their fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, cousins, friends, and neighbors killed, tortured, or worse, are beginning to fight back. They are fighting just as the Vietnamese did after the U.S. invaded in 1965, just as the French did when the Germans invaded in WWII, and just as Americans did to free this country of British domination way back in 1776.

While they are fighting with AK-47s, mortars, and IEDs, they are also going on strike, demonstrating, and marching through the streets to demand that the U.S. get out. On the second anniversary of Baghdad’s fall, the radical cleric Al-Sadr organized a 300,000-strong demonstration in Baghdad to call for an end to the occupation and for the troops to get out and come home to America where you belong. That was the largest demonstration in Iraq since 1958.

But the Bush administration and their media megaphones like to focus on the beheadings and atrocities of a few extremists within the resistance to give the whole resistance a bad name. Just like when there’s an anti-war protest, they focus on the flag-burning idiots to try to smear all the protestors and their cause. Same shit, different country.

So what happens when the U.S. finally pulls out? Who will take over in Iraq? That’s for the Iraqis to decide – for themselves and by themselves, without outside interference, meddling, or occupation of any sort.

That doesn’t mean that Iraq will become a paradise on earth once they get foreign troops out. A lot will have to be rebuilt and it will probably take years to do. There might be a power struggle, maybe even a civil war. But the meaning of democracy is that people have to sort things out for themselves, and sometimes that process can be messy or ugly, to say the least.

After the American revolution, what happened? Rich white men got to vote and hold political office, wars of extermination against the Native Americans began, and slavery expanded. Women didn’t get the vote, and poor farmers (many of them veterans of the revolutionary war) had their farms confiscated by banks due to debt. Hardly an ideal set up. But it was a step forward from being a British colony. After the Vietnamese won their independence from the U.S. in 1975, what happened? A police state was established, and eventually Nike opened sweatshops. But despite that, it was a step forward from American occupation.

That’s why Traveling Soldier has always been uncompromising in its stand: bring the troops home now. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts.

No more tears. Bring the troops home now

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