The Iraq genocide
1.11.2014 2 Comments
Barry Lando, at one time an investigative producer for 60 Minutes, made a succinct yet indirect case for identifying America’s efforts in Iraq as a genocide. About the United States’ post-9.11 war Lando wrote the following: “The military onslaught and the American rule that immediately followed, destroyed not just the people and infrastructure of Iraq, but the very fiber of the nation.”
Why genocide? When one couples the invasion and occupation with American long-term support for Saddam Hussein, with George H.W. Bush‘s inciting a rebellion in Iraq which he later would not support, with America’s attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure during and after the Gulf War, with the murderous sanctions regime of the 1990s, the United States has directly or indirectly killed or displaced millions of Iraqis. It has also provoked the peoples of Iraq to take up arms and use them in the struggle for power and advantage in their country. The United States destroyed a nation. This, indeed, is a genocide.
All Tied Up and Nowhere to Go 
For a long time I have been trying to point out that the very term genocide was coined to describe exactly the sort of actions undertaken by the US in Iraq. That is not to say that extermination in gas chambers isn’t genocide, but rather that the term properly covers a range of behaviours and intensities. German death camps were an extreme expression of genocide, as were the Einsatzgruppen, but other German genocide policies and practices had near identical parallels with US actions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The importance of this lies in part in the foolishness of trying to examine US actions as military actions gone wrong. They are not, and understanding US actions in Iraq requires that we use the lens of genocide. These were actions taken with the intent of inflicting destruction on Iraq for clear gains to certain US interests – albeit at the expense of the US people.
I wrote an article summarising some of the issues: http://ongenocide.com/2013/09/28/the-united-states-of-genocide/
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I obviously agree. I suspect we’ve become desensitized to occurrence of genocide because this kind of event is all too common, because it implicates peoples and countries that think too highly of themselves and it is a useful strategy for many powerholders
Thanks for the comment and the link to your site!
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