Washington Escalates Slaughter in Iraq
Bill Van Auken
The mass media, which has shown little inclination to highlight the daily death toll of American troops, now totaling over 2,500—much less the far greater toll of Iraqi dead, estimated in the hundreds of thousands—has exhibited keen interest in the fate of the two executed enlisted men, including gruesome details of their deaths. Their aim is to whip up an atmosphere of hatred and revenge against the Iraqi population.
Brutal killings of occupation troops are the inevitable product of every colonial war fought in the history of mankind. Yet virtually every US television announcer and every newspaper headline writer has felt a duty to proclaim the “barbaric” and “savage” character of these particular deaths, words that are never applied to the torture deaths of Iraqis in the confines of Abu Ghraib and other US detention centers, the slaughter of men, women and children in their own homes by 500-pound bombs, or the indiscriminate killing of civilians on Iraqi roads in the name of “force protection.”
The media has granted instant credibility to an Internet posting which claims that the purported new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq—Abu Hamza al-Muhajir—personally beheaded the American soldiers. This dubious claim is promoted to provide a personification of evil for mass consumption, with the aim of conditioning the American people for the mass killing that is about to be carried out in their name.
Government and media propaganda aside, these killings are a telling indication that more than three years after invading and occupying Iraq, US forces have failed to secure the very ground upon which they stand. The ability of masked gunmen to seize the soldiers, hold them for three days, kill them and dump their bodies, and then mine both the location of the corpses and the road leading to it, without being captured or detected by the thousands of troops searching for them, is evidence that those fighting the US occupation enjoy widespread support and sympathy from within the Iraqi population.
It should be recalled that the bloodbath unleashed upon Fallujah in November 2004 followed the killing and mutilation of four military contractors—hired mercenaries—who were ambushed while driving through the Iraqi city. The city was turned into a free-fire zone and much of it was reduced to rubble by means of high explosive bombs, complimented by napalm and chemical weapons.
Similar atrocities are being prepared against the capital of Anbar Province, Ramadi, which has been placed under US military siege. Warplanes and attack helicopters fly continuously over the city, dropping bombs, while battle tanks patrol the streets. A series of roadblocks have sealed off all roads in and out of Ramadi, and residents have been subjected to the cutoff of basic services such as electricity, water and emergency medical care.
An entire US Marine brigade—some 2,500 troops—has been deployed in and around the city, while an additional 1,500 US soldiers have been brought to Iraq specifically for the operation in Ramadi, long considered a center of resistance to the American occupation. Another two battalions of US-trained Iraqi government troops have been mobilized.
While many families have fled Ramadi, it is estimated that as many as 150,000 Iraqis—among them the poor, the elderly and the disabled—remain within the city, unable to leave. Once the all-out US offensive begins, these men, women and children will be classified as “terrorists” and many will be included in the reported toll of enemy forces killed in combat.
Another war crime is being prepared, even as evidence mounts that the US war and occupation of Iraq consists of countless acts of brutality and murder.
The search launched in the wake of the capture of the two US soldiers has itself been accompanied by massive violence. According to the Pentagon, the US deployed some 8,000 troops in the operation and “cleared” at least 12 villages, forcibly detaining large numbers of Iraqis.
In Baghdad itself, a security crackdown has been launched following George Bush’s grandstanding visit to the Green Zone last week. Security sweeps are being conducted by combined units of US and Iraqi puppet troops, while a dusk-to-dawn curfew has been put in place. Last month, according to official Iraqi sources, some 2,155 people suffered violent deaths in the capital, many of them victims of US-trained death squads.
Another atrocity was carried out by the US military this week in a village near the city of Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. According to published reports, between 13 and 15 Iraqis were killed in an air raid and subsequent assault by US airborne troops. The dead consisted primarily of poultry farm workers, gunned down by American forces, but also included one child.
Even before the investigation into the massacre of 24 civilians in the town of Haditha has concluded, the US Army has charged three American soldiers—all members of the 101st Airborne, the unit of the two soldiers captured and executed this week—with murder in the summary execution of three Iraqis last month.
Those killed were among some 200 detained by American troops in a May 9 raid at a chemical plant near the Thar Thar canal in northern Salahuddin province. According to the Pentagon’s account, not only did three soldiers participate in the executions, they threatened to kill a fourth member of their unit if he said anything about the murders.
The growing number of criminal charges against US troops are symptomatic of an occupation and war that are themselves crimes, involving unimaginable violence and deprivation inflicted on the Iraqi people.
The great bulk of atrocities are carried out with official sanction and go unreported by the American media and unopposed by the ostensible political opposition, the Democratic Party. The US public is kept almost entirely in the dark about the horrors that are being carried out in its name under the phony mantle of the “global war on terrorism.”
While there is increasing evidence that the US attempt to conquer Iraq and install a puppet regime to ensure US control over the country’s oil reserves has produced a debacle, there is no indication that either the Bush administration or its nominal political opponents in the Democratic Party have any intention of calling the bloodbath to a halt.
On the contrary, the preparations for an assault on Ramadi and the crackdown in Baghdad suggest that the Bush administration is planning to employ naked force and mass terror to produce at least the appearance of a changed situation on the ground in Iraq before the November mid-term elections.
While such political calculations play a major role in this military strategy, on a more fundamental level, the US ruling elite remains committed to a policy of subjugating Iraq to semi-colonial domination. The phony debate on the war in Congress and within the Democratic Party is not over whether to end the occupation, but how to make it succeed.
The so-called “antiwar” faction of the Democrats, including the party’s former presidential candidate, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, is proposing not an end to the colonialist adventure in Iraq, but merely a “redeployment” to carry it out more effectively and with fewer American casualties. The predominant faction in the party, personified by New York Senator Hillary Clinton, maintains a policy of continuing the present deployment, differing little with the Bush administration.
Virtually every major newspaper, from the supposedly liberal New York Times to the hard-line Republican Wall Street Journal, has published editorials in the past week warning that demands to withdraw US troops or even to set a timetable for reducing force levels are unacceptable.
What accounts for this remarkable unanimity among those entrusted with manufacturing public opinion behind a position that is manifestly at odds with the popular antiwar sentiment reflected in every opinion poll? It reflects a broad consensus within America’s financial elite that the project of conquering Iraq—whatever differences might exist over its execution by the Bush administration—must continue, no matter what the cost in human life and financial resources. The profit interests of America’s multi-millionaires and billionaires are bound up with Washington’s attempt to use military force to achieve global hegemony, and no amount of killing is too great to secure them.
An end to this filthy war can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of American working people against these interests and the two-party system that exists to defend them. The Socialist Equality Party has placed at the center of its intervention in the US midterm elections the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American military forces from Iraq, and that all those responsible for the illegal and unprovoked invasion be compelled to face trial before a war crimes tribunal.
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American Dead and Dying
by Hank Roth
By July 2005, about 10,000 American troops have died from the war in Iraq. The number given by the Bush administration is bogus. They say officially over 1,800 now dead and about 12,000 wounded. Those numbers are horrific but they are also a lie. When has this administration ever told the truth?
U.S. Military Personnel who died in German hospitals or en route to German hospitals have not previously been counted. They total about 6,210 as of 1 January, 2005. The ongoing, underreporting of the dead in Iraq, is not accurate.
The DoD is deliberately reducing the figures. A review of many foreign news sites show that actual deaths are far higher than the newly reduced ones. Iraqi civilian casualties are never reported but International Red Cross, Red Crescent and UN figures indicate that as of 1 January 2005, the numbers are just under 100,000. (Brian Harring, Domestic Intelligence Reporter - TBRnews - http://tbrnews.org/Archives/a1682.htm)
Brians conclusion is that DOD is intentionally and by design significantly under-reporting the numbers of killed and wounded in Iraq. He reports that the shipping manifest from the Military Air Transport System which transports the dead to Dover Air Force Base indicate that there have been more bodies shipped to Dover than officially reported by the Department of Defense. There is no surprise there. When has this administration ever told the truth?
Brian additionally writes: The government gets away with these huge lies because they claim, falsely, that only soldiers actually killed on the ground in Iraq are reported. The dying and critically wounded are listed as en route to military hospitals outside of the country and not reported on the daily postings. Anyone who dies just as the transport takes off from the Baghdad airport is not listed and neither are those who die in the US military hospitals. Their families are certainly notified that their son, husband, brother or lover was dead and the bodies, or what is left of them (refrigeration is very bad in Iraq what with constant power outages) are shipped home, to Dover AFB. You ought to realize that President Bush personally ordered that no pictures be taken of the coffined and flag-draped dead under any circumstances. He claims that this is to comfort the bereaved relatives but is designed to keep the huge number of arriving bodies secret. Any civilian, or military personnel, taking pictures will be jailed at once and prosecuted.
The TBR News estimate when their story was written is that out of about 160,000 sent to Iraq, 26,000 military personnel have either deserted, been seriously wounded, or died.
Based on current estimates which are predicated on numbers of bodies shipped to Dover and DOD statements issued to date, the informed assumption must be that at least 10,000 are dead from the war in Iraq and about 25,000 seriously wounded as of July 2005. Also counted should be those returning soldiers who died as a result of their service in Iraq. Not counted also are the tens of thousands who will die prematurely from cancer from their exposure to depleted uranium and chemicals used in the war.
In addition to which there are soaring numbers of suicides, which are higher than previous wars, and the forced hospitalization for drugs plus crime of murder of Iraqi civilians and other soldiers, and such things as rapes, and behavior problems leading to Court Martial, etc.
Progressive News and Views
By : Hank Roth
July Saturday 23rd 2005