A relative of mine, who was a US Army Ranger in Iraq, tells similar stories to the one recounted in the video above. He has said that the aid missions that he trained for in the US – in which the Army had prepared soldiers to help people – turned into killing missions once on the ground and that a soldier’s performance was evaluated by the number of kills per mission. Fifteen members of his squadron were killed in two different truck explosions during his time in Iraq.
In 2005 and 2006 when sectarianism broke out heavily in Iraq, Robert Fisk of The Independent of London reported on accounts of Iraqis who had worked for the American administration in Iraq and were given cell phones and told to deliver trucks to various neighbourhoods and then to phone in after delivered. Some of these drivers, according to Fisk, said that their cell phones didn’t work while inside the truck so they got out and walked to another area to get better reception. After connecting to their contact, they would tell the Americans that the truck was delivered, at which point the truck would explode. Presumably, the American contact believed the driver would have still been inside the vehicle.
Before the US invaded Iraq, there was a lot of talk in the media about the possibility of civil war breaking out between Sunni and Shia. Although, reporters who had covered Iraq for decades and historians were quick to point out that Iraq had never had a civil war. There were even reports that statistically, in the Middle East, Iraqis had the highest percentage of intermarriage between Shia and Sunni concluding that civil war would be far from people’s minds.
Recently, I decided to write about Iraqi refugees in Ireland. I wanted to focus more upon their lives here and what types of struggles they were going through than the environment they were coming from but learned quite a lot after talking to them and other refugees who had come in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. I, like many other Americans, opposed this war since before it started. It was quite obvious to a great many of us how bogus the Weapons of Mass Destruction thing was. But after meeting Iraqis and discussing the state of their nation, I began to think differently. The majority of Iraqis I have met welcomed the invasion of their country as Saddam Hussein really was a tyrant. The majority of Iraqis I’ve met hoped that Iraq would be turned into a South Korea or a Germany, where the US maintained its occupation but growth and new freedoms flourished.
One of the refugees whom I befriended, Mohammad (for safety issues I have not used his real name), was one of these. In discussions with Mohammad, who paid $15,000 to a smuggler to get him out of Iraq, he would often correct me when I would call the US presence in Iraq an “invasion” and say that it was, in fact, perceived of as a “liberation”. It was dumbfounding to me to see that a man who had a good job (he was a doctor), a family life (he is married, has two daughters and a son), is peace-loving and was so negatively affected by the US occupation (his father was murdered in front of their home) would so readily become an apologist for it. And he is not unlike many others.
Although, when I quoted Fisk’s reports about the American regime’s attempts to set people up by getting a Sunni to put a car bomb in a Shia neighbourhood and vice-versa, he replied that this is exactly what the majority of Iraqis believe is happening. Iraqis are loathe to believe that their own people would attack one another. He said that rumours of the Americans making the initial attacks to get the civil war started are rife throughout Iraq. And with the history of American intervention in foreign countries, like El Salvador, how can we rule this possibility out?
And herein lays the problem. What is the US really doing over there? In early 2003, before the invasion, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times said, “Trust me, there is a part of every young Arab today that recoils at the idea of a U.S. invasion of Iraq, because of its colonial overtones. But there is a part of many young Arabs today that prays the U.S. will not only oust Saddam but all other Arab leaders as well… It is not unreasonable to believe that if the U.S. removed Saddam and helped Iraqis build not an overnight democracy but a more accountable, progressive and democratizing regime, it would have a positive, transforming effect on the entire Arab world – a region desperately in need of a progressive model that works.”
The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, recently proposed that a schedule be created for the withdrawal of American troops. But both the American government and Iraqis I have spoken with say that the US cannot pull out of Iraq because the consequences of a withdrawal would be devastating. Although, listening to Iraqis’ suspicions of what the Americans are really doing, my relative’s account of killing missions and Jon Michael Turner’s story above, one cannot help but ask: Are we doing more harm than good?
What do you think? What were the real motives of the US invasion and what are they now? Are Turner’s account and my relative’s experiences actions of individuals or a military under command to incite violence and split a nation? Is civil war being used as a means to keep Iraq under US control? And what are the chances of Iraq becoming a fully integrated, non-violent, member of the international community?
