{news} Fw: USGP-INT Should Obama supporters send 'no apology' letters toIraqis? (Paul Street, ZSpace)

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
To: <usgp-media at gp-us.org>; <dcsgp at yahoogroups.com>; <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2008 5:17 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Should Obama supporters send 'no apology' letters 
toIraqis? (Paul Street, ZSpace)


> Letters of No Apology
>
> By Paul Street
> August 01, 2008
> Paul Street's ZSpace Page
> http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18325
>
>
> Those people are dead because we wanted them dead.
> - Pentagon spokesman on the killing of 93 people in Chowkar-Karaz, fall of 
> 2001
>
>
> Should Barack Obama's volunteers mail "Letters of No Apology" to survivors 
> of the large number of people killed by U.S. imperial assault in Iraq and 
> Afghanistan?
>
> Recently Obama was asked by CNN's Candy Crowley if "there's anything 
> that's happened in the past 7 1/2 years that the U.S. needs to apologize 
> for in terms of foreign policy?" Obama responded by saying, "No, I don't 
> believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in Iraq was a 
> mistake.  We didn't keep our eye on the ball in Afghanistan.  But, you 
> know, hindsight is 20/20, and I'm much more interested in looking forward 
> rather than looking backwards." The United States, Obama told Crowley, 
> "remains overwhelmingly a force of good in the world" [1].
>
>
> "SHOT AS THEY RAN"
>
> I would like the Afghan "war" [2] enthusiast [3] Barack Obama to write a 
> Letter of No Apology to Orifa Ahmed.  On October 7, 2001, Orifa's house in 
> the Afghan village of Bibi Mahru was destroyed by a 500-pound bomb dropped 
> by an American F-16 plane. The explosion killed her husband (a carpet 
> weaver), six of her children and two children, who lived (and died) next 
> door.  Away visiting relatives when the bombing occurred, Orifa returned 
> to find pieces of her children's flesh scattered around the killing site. 
> She received $400 from U.S. authorities to compensate her for her losses 
> [4].
>
> I would also like Obama to write a "Letter of No Apology" to Gulam Rasul, 
> a school headmaster in the Afghan town of Khair Khana.  On the morning of 
> October 21, 2001, the United States dropped a 500-pound bomb on his house, 
> killing his wife, three of his sons, his sister and her husband, his 
> brother, and his sister-in-law [5].
>
> Another "Letter of Apology" should go to Sher Kahn, an old man who lost 
> seven relatives when the United States assaulted the Afghan village of 
> Niazi Qala on December 29, 2001.  Here is how the British author and 
> filmmaker John Pilger describes the attack:
>
> "The roar of the planes had started at three in the morning, long after 
> everybody had retired for the night.  Then the bombs began to fall - 
> 500-pounders leading the way, scooping out the earth and felling a row of 
> houses.  According to neighbors watching from a distance, the planes flew 
> three sorties over the village and a helicopter hovered close to the 
> ground, firing flares, then rockets.  Women and children were seen running 
> from the houses towards a dried pond, perhaps in search of protection from 
> the gunfire, but were shot as they ran" [6].
>
> "Letters of No Apology" should also go from the "antiwar" Obama campaign 
> to survivors of:
>
> * 35 Afghan refugees who were bombed by the U.S. for riding in a bus in 
> flight from U.S. assault.
>
> * 160 Afghanis killed in repeated U.S. bombings of the village of Karam.
>
> * 93 people killed when U.S. Ac 130 gun-ships strafed the small farming 
> village Chowkar-Karaz. (The Pentagon said the community was "supporting 
> terrorists" and therefore deserved its fate: "those people are dead," a 
> Pentagon spokesman told reporters, "because we wanted them dead.")
>
> * Rampant U.S. torture of civilians and non-combatants employed as part of 
> the "war on terror" at the Bagram military base, near Kabul, since the 
> fall of 2001.
>
> * 64 civilians killed when the U.S. bombed a wedding party in eastern 
> Afghanistan in early July of this year (This was the fourth wedding party 
> blown up by the U.S.-led "coalition" since the fall of 2001).
>
> * 19 women who died in the gynecology wing of a Kabul hospital bombed by 
> the U.S. in October of 2001.
>
> * The countless other U.S. attacks on Afghan villages that have added to a 
> civilian death toll that certainly goes well into the thousands since the 
> U.S. initiated its "liberation" of Afghanistan from a Taliban government 
> the U.S. largely put into place during the 1990s [7].
>
> The people of Afghanistan can be forgiven for thinking it might not be all 
> bad if Uncle Sam has occasionally taken his eye off "the ball in 
> Afghanistan."
>
> U.S.-"liberated" Afghanistan remains desperately poor and violence-plagued 
> under the control of religious extremists, warlords and the deadly U.S. 
> Empire. Women are less safe there now than under the Taliban [8].
>
>
> "AS ILLEGAL AS THE INVASON OF IRAQ"
>
> For what it's worth, prominent legal scholar Marjorie Cohn notes that "the 
> invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq."  As Cohn 
> explains:
>
> "The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their 
> international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military 
> force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. 
> After the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of 
> which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan."
>
> "The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 
> 51 of the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal 
> attacks, not ‘armed attacks' by another country. Afghanistan did not 
> attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi 
> Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack 
> on the United States after September 11, or Bush would not have waited 
> three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The 
> necessity for self-defense must be ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no 
> choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.' This classic principle 
> of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg 
> Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly" [9].
>
> Sold as a legitimate defensive response to the jetliner attacks of 
> September 11, 2001, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken 
> without definitive proof or knowledge that that country's largely 
> U.S.-created Taliban government was responsible in any way for 9/11.  It 
> occurred after the Bush administration rebuffed efforts by that government 
> to possibly extradite accused 9/11 planners to stand trial in the U.S. The 
> U.S. sought to destroy the Taliban government with no legal claim to 
> introduce regime change in another sovereign state.  The invasion took 
> place over the protest of numerous Afghan opposition leaders and in 
> defiance of aid organizations who expected a U.S. attack to produce a 
> humanitarian catastrophe.  And, as Noam Chomsky noted in 2003, U.S. claims 
> to possess the right to bomb Afghanistan - an action certain to produce 
> significant casualties - raised the interesting question of whether Cuba 
> and Nicaragua were entitled to set off bombs
> in the U.S. given the fact that the U.S. provided shelter to well-known 
> terrorists shown to have conducted murderous attacks on the Cuban and 
> Nicaraguan people and governments [10]. Under Bush's rationale for 
> launching his assault on Afghanistan (an attack that Obama wishes to 
> significantly expand), citizens of Latin American states whose 
> dictatorships were schooled in torture at the School of the Americas (Ft. 
> Benning, Georgia) would be free to attack American cities and villages.
>
>
> "IRAQ HAS BEEN KILLED"
>
> As for the U.S. "mistake" in Iraq, where to begin with the Letters of No 
> Apology that Obama and his staff need to write? The U.S. has undertaken a 
> highly criminal occupation of that country against the wishes of the 
> "liberated" nation's own populace.  In a marvelous example of what Obama 
> called (in Berlin last week) U.S. "sacrifice" for "freedom"[11],  the U.S. 
> has inflicted a bloody Holocaust on Mesopotamia, killing (directly and 
> indirectly) as many as 1.2 million Iraqis and maiming and displacing many 
> millions more. According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen last 
> December, "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again.  The American 
> occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked 
> Baghdad in the thirteenth century.  Only fools talk of solutions now. 
> There is no solution.  The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be 
> contained" [12].
>
> I wonder what Rosen would have had to say about the following comment 
> offered by Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors 
> plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that 
> state's Democratic primary: "It's time to stop spending billions of 
> dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the 
> money putting America back together" [13].
>
> "We should support the millions of Iraqis," Obama told 200,000 rapt 
> listeners in Berlin, "who seek to rebuild their lives even as we pass on 
> responsibility to the Iraqi government"[14].
>
> "Rebuild their lives" from exactly what, pray tell?  Senator Obama did not 
> elaborate on the two U.S. military attacks, the decade plus of murderous 
> "economic sanctions" (which killed more than half a million children - a 
> cost that the current Obama advisor and supporter Madeline Albright called 
> a "price worth paying"), and the ongoing invasion's ever-climbing death 
> toll. Obama will continue the occupation as president, something known by 
> those who care to read between the lines of his populace-pleasing campaign 
> rhetoric.
>
> Reading Obama's line about "freedom"-loving America's overseas "sacrifice" 
> in his Berlin Address, I was reminded of something he said in a speech to 
> The Chicago Council on Global Affairs in the fall of 2006: "The American 
> people have been extraordinarily resolved [in alleged support of the Iraq 
> "war" - P.S.]. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded 
> in the streets of Fallujah [15].
>
> This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for 
> colossal U.S. war atrocity - the crimes included the indiscriminate 
> slaughter of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, 
> and the practical leveling of an entire city - by the U.S. military in 
> April and November of 2004. The town was designated for destruction as an 
> example of the awesome state terror promised to those who dared to resist 
> U.S. power. Not surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant 
> symbol of American imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds.  It was a 
> deeply provocative and insulting place to choose to highlight American 
> "sacrifice" and "resolve" in the brazenly imperialist occupation - 
> described as "a colonial war" by the grand U.S. imperial strategist 
> Zbigniew Brzezinski (an Obama foreign policy advisor) - of Iraq [16].
>
> Recycling the imperial discourse of elite Democratic "doves" during and on 
> the Vietnam War [17], Obama insists that the monumentally illegal and 
> transparently petro-colonial occupation of Iraq was a "strategic blunder" 
> resulting from "our" over-zealous "good intentions" (sometimes we just get 
> a little crazy with our noble passion to spread liberty).
>
> Not true: Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) is an imperial CRIME 
> (aggressive warfare was the top crime for which Nazi leaders were executed 
> at Nuremburg) obviously dedicated to deepening U.S. control over 
> hyper-strategic oil resources in the world's energy heartland while 
> serving the ongoing interests of the American military-industrial complex 
> [18].
>
> Barack No Apology (Because We Are Good) Obama wants badly to expand what 
> he calls George W. Bush's "good" and "proper" war on Afghanistan while 
> claiming to want to reduce America's "mistake[n]" presence in Iraq.
>
> The world should beware. Superpower may be getting ready to take on some 
> outwardly new faces, but its dangerous national narcissism will live on 
> along with its empire of bases, bullets, and bombs.
>
> Veteran radical historian Paul Street (paulstreet99 at yahoo.com) is the 
> author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 
> (Boulder, CO: Paradigm) and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis 
> (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). His next book is Barack Obama and 
> the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm: mid-August of 
> 2008, can be advance ordered at 
> http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987).
>
>
> NOTES
>
> 1. "Transcript of Obama Interview on CNN" (July 25, 2008), The Page, read 
> at http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-obama-interview-on-cnn/. 
> Regarding "force for good":  never mind that the hyper-consumerist 
> automobile-addicted U.S. is home to 5 percent of world's population but 
> generates a quarter of the planet's climate-baking carbon emissions. 
> Forget the brazenly imperial 720-plus U.S. military bases that are 
> stationed in nearly country on Earth, the threat and recurrent reality of 
> U.S. military assault, the U.S.-spread mass culture of commodified 
> nothingness, and the dedicated U.S. advance of a negative (corporate) 
> globalization model that consigns billions to extreme poverty while the 
> ever richer planetary Few enjoy spectacular opulence (and related 
> political hyper-power) and you begin to get a sense of why many world 
> citizens might think "America is part of what has gone wrong in the 
> world."
>
> 2. It is getting tiresome to hear Obama repeatedly refer to the United 
> States as living "in a time of war."  The U.S. is engaged in one-sided 
> imperial violence against Iraq and Afghanistan. The "force for good" is 
> "waging a colonial war" (Zbigniew Bzrezinski) on relatively defenseless 
> others in distant imperial hinterlands.  Ordinary Americans are not living 
> through "wartime conditions" and are in fact being encouraged to stay 
> soft, consumerist, spectator-ized, and demobilized, though a relatively 
> small and disproportionately working-class segment of the U.S. populace is 
> enlisted into the hard culture of militarism (the U.S. power elite having 
> learned from Vietnam not to involve the general populace in ugly colonial 
> campaigns abroad). For some useful reflections, see Sheldon Wolin, 
> Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted 
> Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and (on 
> class, Vietnam, and military
> recruitment) Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: 
> Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (New York: Metropolitan, 2005), pp. 
> 133-134.
>
> 3.  For some interesting details from the primary campaign trail, see Paul 
> Street, "Obama's Good and ‘Proper' War," ZNet (March 5, 2008), read at 
> http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16760.
>
> 4. John Pilger, Freedom Next Time: Resisting the Empire (New York: Nation 
> Books, 2007), pp. 284-85.
>
> 5. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp.285-86.
>
> 6. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, p. 286.
>
> 7. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 287-293; John Pilger, "Obama, The Prince 
> of Bait and Switch," The New Statesman, July 26, 2008. For details on 
> sources on hundreds of U.S. and related "coalition" and Northern Alliance 
> attacks leading to many civilian deaths between the fall of 2001 and the 
> U.S. invasion of Iraq, see University of New Hampshire professor Marc 
> Herold, "Daily Casualty Account of Afghan Civilians Killed by U.S. Bombing 
> and Special Forces Attack, October 7 [2001] Until Present Day" (March 15, 
> 2003), read at http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mwherold/
>
> 8. Pilger, Freedom Next Time, pp. 264-293.
>
> 9. Marjorie Cohn, "End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan," ZNet (July 
> 30, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18303.
>
> 10. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America's Quest for Global 
> Dominance (New York: Metropolitan, 2003), pp. 199-206.  See also Rajul 
> Mahajan, The New Crusade: America's War on Terror (New York: Monthly 
> Review, 2002), p. 21.
>
> 11. Remarks of Barack Obama: "A World That Stands As One," Berlin, Germany 
> (July 24, 2008), read at 
> http://www.barackobama.com/2008/07/24/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_97.php
>
> 12. Nir Rosen, "The Death of Iraq," Current History (December 2007), p. 
> 31.
>
> 13. WIFR Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois, "Obama Speaks at General 
> Motors in Janesville," February 13, 2008, read at 
> http://www.wifr.com/morningshow/headlines/15618592.html.
>
> 14. Obama, "A World That Stands As One."
>
> 15. Barack Obama, "A Way Forward in Iraq," Speech to Chicago Council on 
> Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006), available online at 
> http://obama.senate.gov/speech/061120-a_way_forward _in_iraq/index.html.
>
> 16. Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Five Problems With the President's Plan," 
> Washington Post (January 12, 2007), read at 
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/11/AR2007011101572_pf.html.
>
> On Fallujah, see  Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2005, 
> p. xii; Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York: New 
> Press, 2006), pp. 27-28; Paul Street, "Vilsacking Iraq," ZNet Magazine 
> (December 22, 2006);
>
> 17. Noam Chomsky, "'Good News': Iraq and Beyond," ZNet (February 16, 
> 20088), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16522; 
> Noam Chomsky, "The Mechanisms and Practices of Indoctrination" (1984), 
> pp.207-208 in Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. C.P. 
> Otero (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).
>
> 18. For details and sources, see Paul Street, "Largely About Oil: 
> Reflections on Empire, Petroleum, Democracy, and the Occupation of Iraq," 
> Z Magazine  (January 2008): 38-42.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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