Is it possible that violence would drop more than 90 percent if we tentatively postulate that Iraqis resent American involvement more than British?

March 20 marks the fifth anniversary of the illegal Iraq War, which former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says violates the UN charter. Over 1,224,553 people have been killed by the war, 99.7 percent of which are Iraqis.

For many college students the war, which began while they were in middle or high school, was a major part of their coming of age experience, as they learned that the U.S. government may not be trustworthy.

Many of us believed in the rationale for the war until repeated experience forced us to acknowledge our government was perpetrating crimes the rest of the world feared from the start. The largest anti-war rally in history took place on Feb. 15, 2003 against the impending Iraq War, with anywhere between 8 and 30 million people protesting worldwide, including tens of millions of Iraqis in Baghdad.

Democracy Now! reports that the Bush administration lied over 935 times to bolster support for the Iraq War. The lying continues.

For example, the administration says we cannot suitably withdraw from Iraq any time soon. However, when the British withdrew from Basra violence fell 90 percent. Major General Binns said: “We thought, ‘If 90 percent of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?’”

Imagine if the U.S. withdrew. Is it possible that violence would drop more than 90 percent if we tentatively postulate that Iraqis resent American involvement more than British?

Yet the administration refuses to even consider calling our troops home. Could it be because the administration has ulterior motives, such as war profiteering?

The U.S.’s economic agenda is demonstrated by the fact that the U.S. embassy in Baghdad was built by a Kuwait contractor drawing forced labor from 3,000 South Asian workers in labor camps, “right under the nose of the U.S. State Department.”

John Owen resigned from the position of U.S. embassy construction manager after revealing “managers at the U.S. Embassy site regularly beat migrant workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached security.” And what do those poor workers receive in exchange for a twelve-hour day of brutal work? A mere $10, or $30 if they’re lucky.

The U.S. prevented Iraqi workers from unionizing and creating the Workers Democratic Trade Union Federation after Hussein was overthrown. Free-market fundamentalists in the Coalition Provisional Authority privatized all state industries besides oil through Order No. 39.

In many ways, the U.S. government is more oppressive to the Iraqi people than Hussein was. The Military Commissions Act, which cancels the writ of habeas corpus for all American citizens and “redefines torture, removing the harshest, most controversial techniques from the definition of war crimes,” also grants U.S. war criminals immunity from prosecution. If our military were not torturing people and committing war crimes, there would have been no need to pass such legislation.

The birth defect rate in Iraq has exponentially increased over 1,000 percent, and cancer rates are 18 times higher since the Gulf War, attributable to American use of depleted uranium (DU) in munitions, which is nevertheless 60 percent as radioactive as typical uranium. Reports document truly unspeakable deformities suffered by the most innocent victims of all, “Infants born without brains, with their internal organs outside their bodies, without sexual organs, without spines, and the list of deformities went on and on.”

The practice of using DU began in the Gulf War, and has been used with a vengeance in the current war. Professor Yagasaki from Ryukyus University estimates that the 2,000 tons of DU used against Iraq in 2003 alone “is the radioactive equivalent of 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.” Since DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, this is sure to become one of the greatest crimes against humanity in all of history.

With the Iraq and Afghanistan wars currently costing $3 trillion when an additional $25 billion would pay for worldwide primary education and primary health coverage, you can judge for yourself which is the better strategy for countering terrorism – the current approach or radically reducing world poverty.

Occupying nations, killing many times more innocents than terrorists, and harboring terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles in our own country makes the U.S. more susceptible to terrorism than before Sept. 11. Alternatively, the U.S. could resuscitate underdeveloped countries whelmed in poverty, thereby mending the social basis engendering fundamentalism. We would thus be making allies of many nations which currently hate our government for interfering in their right to self-determination.

If you are a student who would like to make their voice heard, there is going to be an anti-war demonstration Mar.13 at noon in Spaights Plaza to protest the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

> Comments