The Destruction of IraqWe have destroyed innocent civilian lives. We have destroyed Falluja. (1) Watch the video referenced in the Links section. Additionally, so far, according to a study published in "The Lancet," 100,000 civilians by last November had been killed, even while excluding Falluja deaths! (2) My own estimation is that this would include more than 40,000 children, since the 26 million citizen population of Iraq is 40% less than 16 years of age. (3) The point is that up to November of last year there was an unacceptable level of human carnage and that carnage continues to today. The very presence of an occupying force causes more death. (4) It is a naive perception of what the military's job is in Iraq to claim that they are nation-building for Iraqi citizens. And it is naive to think that the deaths will cease simply by killing more "insurgents" that are created each time some more civilians are killed.
The Progressive Movement is Hindered by Nationalism The United States is not the greatest nation in the world. The truth is that relative to both personal freedoms and rights in other nations, the United States is not the best. We have a good Constitution and Bill of Rights, but we are sliding backward. We do not promote or analyze fairly new, avant-garde advancements in rights like cannabis legalization, complete acceptance of homosexuality, greater separation of church and state, instant run-off voting, transparent democracy, and more worker rights. For an example of an avant-garde Constitution, see the Links Section. (5) Instead, we fight for what we already have and sometimes we lose. Our rights are being destroyed by the Patriot Act, bizarre election fraud, the Bankruptcy Bill, immigrants being hauled away without due process, and citizens being arrested falsely for terrorism. (6) With respect to standard of living, the US is good, but lags behind many so-called first-world nations. (7) That standard of living is being diminished as economic inequality is on the rise under this as well as previous Administrations. (8) The great Franklin D. Roosevelt's works are being undone in favor of corporate welfare, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the military-industrial complex. The methods of implementation are welfare "reform," education "privatization," MediCare cuts and finally Social Security "privatization." (9) So in terms of domestic social, issues, we are in danger of being below par, even a banana republic perhaps.
Most importantly, though, the progressive movement is hindered by a nationalistic foreign policy that does not treat all citizens of the world as equal. Our foreign policies are atrocious and we have a terrible record of promoting death and regime change (10) merely for sake of convenient alliances and that is the goal of our foreign policy, complete and utter control. Staying in foreign lands, like Iraq, only helps to put up such systems for this control. For example, the construction of forts in Iraq (11) allows for permanent stay as in S Korea...and a corporate framework allowing full ownership of Iraq firms by foreign entities (12) helps to control Iraq as well...and the government set up by the US owes its allegiance to the US, not to the Iraqi people. Fanatical nationalism exists in both major US political parties and its doctrine is "Support the Troops" and the omission of concepts like independently-thinking Iraqis and the omission of evidence like dead Iraqi children and legitimate protests. This doctrine does not allow one to walk in an Iraqi’s shoes and to objectively look at the number of civilian deaths. The tragedy of September, 11th, 2001 resulted in three thousand US civilian deaths, (13) but the tragedy of Iraq has resulted in 100,000 civilian deaths. That is more than 30 times the number of US deaths and it means that Iraqis carry the emotional weight of thirty 9-11’s visited upon them, their neighbors, and their families. Imagine 30 such events on our soil and feel what the Iraqis feel.
Our ResponsibilityIt is highly irresponsible for the US to use its monetary resources to line corporate pockets (like Halliburton, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, ESSI, Custer Battles Inc, etc) in this war (14) while meanwhile killing 100,000 civilians, including 40,000 children and hiding all this information from the American people whose interests are allegedly being represented. The irresponsibility is not only extreme violence and carnage against innocents, but it is a 3000-fold violence against their spirits. Let me explain. We have used now approximately $170 billion in the Iraqi war and this has been used over a 2-year period. (15) On the other hand, it costs $24.00 to sponsor 1 child through the Christian Children's Fund for one month. (16) Multiply by that by twenty-four. It costs $576.00 over a two year period to sponsor 1 child. Therefore, if we used the war money to sponsor children (instead of killing them for corporate profit), then we could have sponsored $170 billion/$576 = 295 million kids. Since the 2004 population of Iraq was only 25 million, we are talking about nearly 12 Iraqs. We could have saved 12 Iraqs in that time period! The National Priorities Project estimates that with the money slated for war, "we could have fully funded global anti-hunger efforts for 7 years." (17) Furthermore, we could have saved 295 million/100,000 = 2,950 times as many people as were killed. Yes, that is correct. The U.S. killed an outrageous number of people, 100,000 civilians. But what is more outrageous and what really condemns the whole effort is that we could have saved 3 thousand times that many people! And perhaps what effectively could have diminished world terrorism would have been to help the citizens of the world, rather than hurting them and their families.
Our Rights versus Iraqis’ Democratic RightsIt is a neo-conservative assumption that the United States is the sole world power and the inerrant judge, jury, and police force for that world. (18) All of the above arguments rely on that assumption as much as anything--that our right to somehow judge everyone else unilaterally somehow preempts every other citizen of the world's right to self-determination and self-governance. I have discussed reasons that it would be responsible to leave, but in so doing I failed to mention that we have no right to be responsible for the Iraqi citizens in the first place. The United Nations decided that there was no justification to enter and its Secretary-General called the occupation illegal. (19) Many countries joining the "coalition of the willing" had a significant majority of citizens who did not want to enter the war either. (20) Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been protesting in the streets. (21) Moreover, the vast majority, the
democratic majority, of Iraqi people want us out. (22) If we really believed in the concept of democracy like we claim, then we would respect their majority’s wishes and leave. Now.
Links(1)
http://www.diario.it/?page=wl05060100(2)
http://www.jhsph.edu/PublicHealthNews/Press_Releases/PR_2004/Burnham_Iraq.html(3)
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html#People(4)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=7933(5)
http://www.embavenez-us.org/constitution/intro.htm(6)
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=12126&c=207http://www.johnconyers.com/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={BD0FBB2E-BAE6-4A15-9517-E9E135D8F0C7}
http://elandslide.org/elandslide/index.cfm?campaign=debthttp://www.aclu.org/iclr/jadwat.pdfhttp://www.cognitiveliberty.org/news/cae_arrest1.htmlhttp://www.nlg.org/news/statements/LynneStewart0205.htm(7)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN_Human_Development_Index(8)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient(9)
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0501-04.htm(10)
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/zinn-chap16.html(11)
http://cbsnewyork.com/topstories/topstories_story_018113151.html(12)
http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/mna/mena.nsf/Attachments/Iraq+Joint+Needs+Assessment/$File/Joint+Needs+Assessment.pdf
(13)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_attacks(14)
http://www.publicintegrity.org/wow/resources.aspx?act=totalhttp://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh16145_2005-05-12_15-05-50_wen1632_newsmlhttp://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050526/general_dynamics_contract.html?.v=1http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050412/cgtu080.html?.v=3http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/031205D.shtml(15)
http://costofwar.com(16)
http://www.christianchildrensfund.org/sponsorship/sponsorEntry.aspx(17)
http://costofwar.com/index-world-hunger.html(18)
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=76&ItemID=7712(19)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0916-01.htm(20)
http://www.counterpunch.org/chomsky11142003.html(21)
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/568/568p14.htm(22)
http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=957
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