July 9, 2006
Surprise,
surprise. In an interview with John King from CNN last Thursday, Dick
Cheney said that withdrawing US forces from Iraq would be the "worst
possible thing we could do."
Doing
his best to stoke the always simmering fears of so many US residents
(let us be careful how we use the word "citizen"), Cheney said of the
terrorist groups in Iraq, "If we pull out, they'll follow us."
Because
according to Cheney, "This is a global conflict. We've seen them attack
in London and Madrid and Casablanca and Istanbul and Mombasa and East
Africa. They've been, on a global basis, involved in this conflict. And
it will continue - whether we complete the job or not in Iraq - only
it'll get worse. Iraq will become a safe haven for terrorists. They'll
use it in order to launch attacks against our friends and allies in
that part of the world."
Lovely
to watch how people like Cheney, and the minions who support his ilk,
conveniently forget that there was no terrorism in Iraq prior to the US
invasion/occupation. And one must love his "logic." For according to
Cheney, "whether we complete the job or not in Iraq" his beloved
"terrorism" will "continue" ... "only it'll get worse."
Then why stay in Iraq, Dick?
Because
when Dick said, "only it'll get worse," if he'd been referring to the
situation on the ground in Iraq, he'd have been 100% accurate.
For
starters, things for the US military continue to disintegrate. With
raping and pillaging being carried out by soldiers who have long since
surrendered the war for "hearts and minds," other lesser reported
developments underscore the trajectory of the military in Iraq.
According
to the Arabic al-Sharqiyah Television channel, on July 6th : "Gunmen
shot down two US Apaches in al-Zur village, north of al-Miqdadiyah in
Diyala Governorate, northeast of Baghdad. Security sources and local
residents said that both gunships were seen crashing in one of the
village's farms, and reported that a US APC carrying 15 US soldiers was
destroyed in clashes that raged in the cities and villages located
north of al-Miqdadiyah. The US Army is yet to comment on the incident,
which comes at a time when US and Iraqi forces are besieging areas
north of al-Miqdadiyah, including al-Zur village."
This
comes at a time when the US military are once again aggressively
attacking the forces of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - an action which
threatens to spread violence deeper into southern Iraq as well as
unifying Shia and Sunni against the occupation forces. Think March and
April, 2004 - a time when Shia and Sunni were, at times, literally
fighting side by side against US soldiers in places like Najaf and
Fallujah.
While
the military futilely spins its giant wheels in the bloody sands of
Iraq, it continues to be the Iraqi people who are suffering the most.
Here is a recent email from an Iraqi friend:
Dear Dahr,
How are you doing? I hope you are fine. I'm sorry for not
keeping in touch with you, but as you know the situation is bad here
and it gets so much worse and worse that words cannot describe it.
I really want you to remember someone named Abdul Razak who
you met one day here. He was responsible for the corpses' freezer at
one of the hospitals where you visited. This was the man who helped you
as you nearly fainted when you tried to enter the freezer. This man,
unfortunately, was found killed and his body thrown away on a street on
the 4th of April of this year. I met his wife and his five children.
The oldest child is a girl who is 20 years old and the youngest is 6
years old. They live in a rented house. The father's salary was the
only source of money for the whole family. Now, as he is dead, they
have no source of money. I tried to help them by getting some donations
for them from the staff working in the hospital where he used to work,
but it seems that it is not enough. Of course for a big family like
his, this makes it more difficult. But I hope we can ease their pain
and help them manage their life by finding someone who can donate some
money. I am wondering if you can get some donations for this family to
start a new life and construct a small project to help them manage
their life. Thank you in advance ...
I
get these regularly, and several of my colleagues who have also worked
in Iraq are telling me that they too are receiving requests for help
nowadays.
Here is another email I received the day before the aforementioned, from another friend in Baghdad:
Dear friend,
Maybe this is the last message I am going to send ... really I
don't have anyone here. I am like a foreigner in my own country. I am
really feeling very afraid. I am living next to Al Sadr City and the Al
Sadr militia is killing anyone who is Sunni, especially when any
explosion attacks the Shia. They come to our zone and take Sunni people
from their houses and kill them. They killed one of my relatives. They
killed my neighbor, who was only 26 years old. My friend, the situation
now in Baghdad is very bad. Do you know that there is no work and no
safety, even in my own house? I'm very sad to tell you that I am very
tired from changing my house. My family and I leave the house every
month for three weeks and we run away like some one who did a crime.
What is our crime?
We are in a very bad situation. It is so bad now. Please help,
is all that I ask as we need help now. We are living, just waiting for
our turn to die ... Please help us if you can ... I don't have any one
to ask but you.
So
while Iraqis are being killed or fearing death as they suffer through
the daily hell that is the US occupation, Cheney, the real force behind
this "administration," tells CNN, "No matter how you carve it - you can
call it anything you want - but basically, it is packing it in, going
home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the
Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."
Guess
what, Dick - moral and sane Americans "don't have the stomach for this
fight" because this fight should have never taken place. And anyone
with a soul, let alone a conscience, should be more than happy to see
US troops in Iraq "packing it in."
Dahr
Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting
from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at
the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity
Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006.
He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.