Accompanying George Packer’s extraordinary piece in the print edition of last week’s New Yorker is a photo of an Iraqi man lying dead on a heap of trash, his hands tied behind his back with black cord. From the camera angle it isn’t clear whether the corpse still has a head. This chilling image encapsulates just about everything there is to know about the current war debacle.
John McCain is drawing much-deserved criticism, even ridicule, for his claim that there are areas of Iraq in which Americans can safely walk. Reporters on the ground have challenged this as untrue, but what makes McCain’s assertion offensive is the idea that American safety should be taken as the true measure of Iraq’s safety. Iraqis continue to be slaughtered every day in considerable numbers. As Packer’s story makes clear, the country is all but unliveable; millions are desperate to leave but cannot. The U.S. has betrayed even those Iraqis who signed on as interpreters and military aides.
The administration and its right-wing media accomplices continue to flog the horse of “good news” from Iraq, attacking critics for emphasizing only the bad news. To anyone following events on the ground, this can only be regarded as a tasteless joke. Of course, there are pockets where Shia militants have temporarily fled the U.S. troop surge, but look at the massacre the Shia “police” just committed in Tal Afar in the north. (And look, of course, at the Sunni-perpetrated car bombing that preceded it.)
Much like Britain’s Christmas ’06 raid on the Basra police compound, this episode shows that we are simultaneously backing and fighting some of the very same Shia-dominated Iraqi forces. Hence the best argument for a troop withdrawal: The administration is trying to reverse its clear failure with an incoherent band-aid strategy that gets U.S. troops killed and fails to make Iraqis safer.
Bush and his allies insist that the current Democratic proposals in Congress will send a message of failure to the Qaedaists of the world. But the fact is that Bush has already sent that message. He lied us into an unnecessary war and then he proceeded to lose that war. This will be his legacy: shoring up the bin Ladenists’ view of the U.S. as a paper tiger, one that couldn’t even decisively defeat the Taliban, let alone pacify Iraq.
So much for the pro-war side. Unfortunately, one of the most aggressive and visible antiwar forces in this country is ANSWER, which circulated this statement in the runup to its March 17 rally:
We are returning to the Pentagon because the Iraq war has resulted in more than 655,000 Iraqi deaths (Lancet), on top of more than 1 million killed by sanctions between 1990-2003. This is genocide.
Endorsed by Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Cindy Sheehan and others, this document misrepresents the Lancet study either through ineptitude or conscious deceit. Even if one accepts the study’s findings — and one shouldn’t, as they’ve been discredited by the antiwar resource Iraq Body Count — it would still bear mentioning what the study actually shows: that the vast majority of Iraqi deaths did not result from U.S. military action, but rather from Iraqi insurgent, militia and criminal violence. It is correct to note that the U.S. invasion killed many civilians, and that this created the conditions in which sectarian violence now flourishes. But this does not constitute “genocide” on the part of the U.S. — and how grotesque that the charge should come from ANSWER, an organization that endorsed the blood-encrusted insurgency [update: and shilled for the genocidal Baathist regime]. From a 2005 Troops Out Now statement:
It is time for the antiwar movement to acknowledge the absolute and unconditional right of the Iraqi people to resist the occupation of their country without passing judgment on their methods of resistance.
How perfectly disgraceful, this invoking of “the Iraqi people,” now that so many of them are dead — literally discarded with the day’s trash — thanks to the very “resistance” that ANSWER applauded.
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