UNITED FOR
PEACE OF PIERCE COUNTY
"We
nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than
cooperative diplomacy."
ON THE IRAQI
CATASTROPHE
January 6,
2005
The security situation continues to
worsen in Iraq. In Baghdad, the nation's capital, violence is reported to have
reached a level that has brought ordinary day-to-day life to a halt. Even the
interim prime minister is now describing the situation as "our catastrophe." The
situation is, in fact, so disastrous that it is too dangerous to describe: On
the same day that an article by Florence Aubenas was published in
Libération (Paris) about the situation in Baghdad, the reporter left her
hotel with an interpreter and has not been seen since.
Florence Aubenas's January 5
article began: "Things are calm ― too calm. In the center of
Baghdad, not a single car ― almost ― honks on the streets, their asphalt
broken by tanks. Most of the districts stay silent, schools are half full,
stores are closed. A curfew seems already to have been imposed on official
buildings, the protected ministers’ residence, the headquarters of political
parties, and the commissariats. Yet it’s the middle of the day. In the immobile
city, there’s only one question worth asking: where will violence break out
next?" She showed extreme courage by going to sites where violence had occurred
to discuss the situation with ordinary Iraqis. Only hours after the
assassination of the governor of Baghdad on Jan. 4, she was on the spot, and
later described what she saw: "Next to cars consumed in smoke, the few
passers-by ask, almost as a courtesy: 'Who was it?' A cigarette seller, two
guards, and the city’s governor have just died. A neighbor maintains that the
cigarette seller’s name was Hamid, but no one remembers the name of the
governor." Now, after only three weeks in Iraq, this veteran of reporting on
conflicts in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Afghanistan is missing, and ― who knows? ―
perhaps dead.
What can be done? To begin with,
Americans must acknowledge that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is now
exacerbating the very evils that they are supposed to alleviate. U.S. troops are
in Iraq to provide security, but their presence causes insecurity. The Bush
administration is caught in a catch-22 of its own making. There are no good
solutions to the catastrophe that American mistakes and crimes have
wrought.
Whatever course the United States
pursues in coming months, many thousands of innocent lives will be lost. Many
thousands more will be blighted. This includes perhaps 100,000 U.S. soldiers who
will return "uninjured," but with grave psychological disorders including severe
depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as thousands more who
will develop major, often life-threatening health problems in the coming
years.
Extrication of U.S. forces is part
of the solution to the problem of Iraq. This extrication will itself bring many
terrible consequences. But this cannot be avoided. Iraq is a tragedy: there are
no good solutions.
Elections should be part of the
solution in Iraq, but we have no confidence in the electoral process that has
been designed. Massive boycotts and widespread intimidation are problems that
are widely discussed in the media. Less discussed is the spending of tens of
millions of dollars of U.S. government funds through the National Democratic
Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican
Institute (IRI), which purport to be "not even slightly outcome-oriented," but
which in fact work to produce an Iraqi government that is compatible with the
political, economic, and strategic interests of the U.S. national security
state. The NDI and the IRI are part of a system created
during the Reagan administration to enable the U.S. to manipulate
foreign elections, after President Jimmy Carter put strict limitations on the
creation of CIA front groups ― which, in the generation following World War II,
were the instrument of choice to achieve this end. (We do not doubt, however,
that the CIA station in Baghdad is also involved in the Iraqi elections in many
ways.)
What, then, should be done? United
States policy is so deeply flawed, so wrong, that we believe progress requires
recognition by the United States that it made an error of historic proportions
in intervening militarily in Iraq. We are not so naive as to think there is any
prospect of the George W. Bush administration doing so, but before the United
States can begin to play a constructive role in the contemporary world, U.S.
public opinion will have to undergo a veritable revolution. Otherwise U.S.
policies will be unable to be true to the fundamental values of the American
people.
Martin Luther King Jr., in his
famous Riverside Church speech on April 4, 1967, described the
needed revolution, when he said: "A true revolution of values will soon cause
us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present
policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's
roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that
the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be
constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True
compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and
superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs
restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the
glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look
across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums
of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no
concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: 'This is not just.'
It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say:
'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to
teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of
values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: 'This way of settling
differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm, of
filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs
of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and
bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot
be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after
year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual death."
On April 8,
2004, UFPPC adopted a statement "On the Worsening Situation in Iraq."
Its conclusion is just as applicable now as it was nine months ago:
"Progress in Iraq requires that the
U.S. acknowledge its errors and its responsibilities. There must be an overt
revolution in U.S. policy toward Iraq, one that acknowledges that the war was
. . . an 'unwarranted intervention,' and embraces a fundamentally
different policy. Such a forthright declaration, together with the will to
cooperate with, rather than flout, the will of the international community of
nations, is the only recipe for hope in Iraq at the present time. We call on
U.S. authorities to reverse course by admitting past mistakes, drawing
appropriate lessons, and cooperating with other nations in a spirit of
contrition to enable the founding of a legitimate government that represents the
will of the peoples of Iraq, using this occasion as an opportunity to strengthen
the authority of the United Nations in dealing with international
catastrophes."
Since those words were written, the
number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq has more than doubled, from about 600
then to 1,350 today, according to the web site Iraq Coalition Casualty
Count. And there is no end in sight.
United for Peace of Pierce County
calls upon all U.S. citizens to bring pressure to bear upon public officials to
acknowledge the errors that have brought about this catastrophe, and to shoulder
the responsibilities that follow from them: (1) withdrawal of U.S. troops from
Iraq according to a strict timetable; (2) compensation for wrongs inflicted on
the Iraqi people; (3) alleviation of Iraq's international debt; and (4)
cooperation with the international community in a spirit of contrition while
working toward the healing of Iraq.
UNITED FOR
PEACE OF PIERCE COUNTY
"We
nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than
cooperative diplomacy."
