Saturday, May 04, 2019

The years and tragedies continue to increase for the Iraq War

Right now in : 1.8 million people have been made homeless by war. 1.9 million people don't have enough to eat. 4.1 million people need shelter. 5.4 million people don't have clean water or are unable to wash. 6.7 million people rely on aid.



The effects of the ongoing war go largely ignored by the world press. Claims of 'compassion' were used to sell this illegal war but the compassion, like Iraq's supposed WMDs, never really existed.

William Rivers Pitt (TRUTHOUT) points out:

Today, conservative Republicans and far too many Democrats preach the gospel of austerity economics while deliberately avoiding a discussion of the lives and money poured into the depleted uranium sands of that brutalized nation. This is how the memory hole feeds.
“We forget what he was,” I wrote about George W. Bush and Iraq in 2017, “we forget the aftermath of what he did, but how? Whence comes this shallow grave of memory? The corporate ‘news’ media, for their part, are all too happy to help us forget, because in that forgetting they are absolved of any culpability for their harrowing judgment and insatiable desire for ratings. The politicians are thrilled we forget because they want to do it all over again, because that’s where the money is. In the end, however, we forget because we choose to, because horror is hard to hold in the heart for so long, because all this is our shame, too, and that is a grueling fact to face.”




On and on it goes.  We're gearing up for yet another presidential election and the media focuses on everything but war as though the Iraq War ended, the Afghanistan War ended.  They didn't.  They're still going on.  US troops are still on the ground in those countries and more. 


The following sites updated:









Fallujah Forgotten

Fallujah Forgotten

I don’t know if most people in the United States ever knew what Fallujah meant. It’s hard to believe the U.S. military would still exist if they did. But certainly it has been largely forgotten — a problem that could be remedied if everyone picks up a copy of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History, by Ross Caputi (a U.S. veteran of one of the sieges of Fallujah), Richard Hill, and Donna Mulhearn.
“You’re welcome for the service!”
Fallujah was the “city of mosques,” made up of some 300,000 to 435,000 people. It had a tradition of resisting foreign — including British — invasions. It suffered, as did all of Iraq, from the brutal sanctions imposed by the United States in the years leading up to the 2003 attack. During that attack, Fallujah saw crowded markets bombed. Upon the collapse of the Iraqi government in Baghdad, Fallujah established its own government, avoiding the looting and chaos seen elsewhere. In April, 2003, the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division moved into Fallujah and met no resistance.
Immediately the occupation began to produce the sort of problems seen by every occupation everywhere ever. People complained of Humvees speeding on the streets, of being humiliated at checkpoints, of women being treated inappropriately, of soldier urinating in the streets, and of soldiers standing on rooftops with binoculars in violation of residents’ privacy. Within days, the people of Fallujah wanted to be liberated from their “liberators.” So, the people tried nonviolent demonstrations. And the U.S. military fired on the protesters. But eventually, the occupiers agreed to be stationed outside the city, limit their patrols, and allow Fallujah a degree of self-governance beyond what the rest of Iraq was permitted. The result was a success: Fallujah was kept safer than the rest of Iraq by keeping the occupiers out of it.
That example, of course, needed to be crushed. The United States was claiming a moral obligation to liberate the hell out of Iraq to “maintain security” and “assist in transition to democracy.” Viceroy Paul Bremer decided to “clean out Fallujah.” In came the “coalition” troops, with their usual inability (mocked quite effectively in the Netflix Brad Pitt movie War Machine) to distinguish the people they were bestowing liberty and justice upon from the people they were killing. U.S. officials described the people they wanted to kill as “cancer,” and went about killing them with raids and firefights that killed a great many of the non-cancer people. How many people the United States was actually giving cancer to was unknown at the time.
In March, 2004, four Blackwater mercenaries were killed in Fallujah, their bodies burned and hung from a bridge. The U.S. media portrayed the four men as innocent civilians who somehow happened to find themselves in the middle of a war and the accidental targets of irrational, unmotivated violence. The people of Fallujah were “thugs” and “savages” and “barbarians.” Because U.S. culture has never regretted Dresden or Hiroshima, there were open cries for following those precedents in Fallujah. A former advisor to Ronald Reagan, Jack Wheeler reached for an ancient Roman model in demanding that Fallujah be completely reduced to lifeless rubble: “Fallujah delenda est!”
The occupiers tried to impose a curfew and a ban on carrying weapons, saying they needed such measures in order to distinguish the people to kill from the people to give democracy to. But when people had to leave their homes for food or medicine, they were gunned down. Families were gunned down, one by one, as each person emerged to try to recover the injured or lifeless body of a loved one. The “family game” it was called. The only soccer stadium in town was turned into a massive cemetery.
A seven-year-old boy named Sami saw his little sister shot. He watched his father run out of the house to get her and be shot in turn. He listened to his father scream in agony. Sami and the rest of his family were afraid to go out. By morning both his sister and father were dead. Sami’s family listened to the shots and screams at the surrounding houses, as the same story played out. Sami threw rocks at dogs to try to keep them away from the bodies. Sami’s older brothers would not let his mother go out to close her dead husband’s open eyes. But eventually, Sami’s two older brothers decided to rush outside for the bodies, in hopes that one of them would survive it. One brother was instantly shot in the head. The other managed to close his father’s eyes and to retrieve his sister’s body but was shot in the ankle. Despite the efforts of the whole family, that brother died a slow and horrible death from the ankle wound, while dogs fought over the bodies of his father and brother, and the stench from a neighborhood of dead bodies took over.
Al Jazeera showed the world some of the horror of the First Siege of Fallujah. And then other outlets showed the world the torture the U.S. was engaging in at Abu Ghraib. Blaming the media, and resolving to better market future genocidal acts, the Liberators withdrew from Fallujah.
But Fallujah remained a designated target, one that would require lies similar to those that had launched the whole war. Fallujah, the U.S. public was now told, was an Al Qaeda hotbed controlled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — a myth depicted as if real years later in the U.S. film American Sniper.
The Second Siege of Fallujah was an all-out assault on all human life that included the bombing of homes, hospitals, and apparently any target desired. A woman whose pregnant sister was killed by a bomb told a reporter, “I cannot get the image out of my mind of her foetus being blown out of her body.” Instead of waiting for people to emerge from houses, in the Second Siege, U.S. Marines fired into houses with tanks and rocket-launchers, and finished the job with bulldozers, Israeli style. They also used white phosphorus on people, which melted them. They destroyed bridges, shops, mosques, schools, libraries, offices, train stations, electricity stations, water treatment plants, and every bit of the sanitation and communication systems. This was a sociocide. The controlled and embedded corporate media excused all.
Within a year after the second siege, with the city transformed into a sort-of open-air prison among the rubble, staff at Fallujah General Hospital noticed that something was wrong. There was a dramatic — worse than Hiroshima — increase in cancer, stillborn births, miscarriages, and never-before-seen birth defects. A child was born with two heads, another with a single eye in the center of his forehead, another with extra limbs. What share of the blame for this, if any, goes to white phosphorous, and what to depleted uranium, what to enriched uranium weapons, what to open burn pits, and what to various other weapons, there is little doubt that the U.S-led Humanitarian War is the cause.
Incubators had come full circle. From the lies about Iraqis removing infants from incubators that (somehow) justified the first Gulf War, through the lies about illegal weapons that (somehow) justified the massive terrorism of Shock and Awe, we were now arrived at rooms full of incubators holding deformed infants quickly dying from benevolent liberation.
The U.S.-installed Iraqi government’s Third Siege of Fallujah came in 2014-2016, with the new tale for Westerners involving ISIS control of Fallujah. Again, civilians were slaughtered and what remained of the city was destroyed. Fallujah delenda est indeed. That ISIS arose out of a decade of U.S.-led brutality capped by an Iraqi government’s genocidal assault on Sunnis went unmentioned.
Through all of this, of course, the United States was leading the world — through the burning of the oil the wars were fought over, among other practices — in rendering not just Fallujah, but most of the Middle East, too hot for humans to inhabit. Imagine the outrage when people who support someone like Joe Biden who played a key role in destroying Iraq (and who can’t even seem to regret the death of his own son from open burn pits, much less the death of Fallujah) discover that almost nobody in the Middle East is grateful for the collapse of the climate into an unlivable inferno. That’s when the media will be sure to tell us who the real victims are in this story.
--
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio.He is a 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
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Some Tweets from Sarah Abdallah


  •   Retweeted
    For truth and news about Syria, follow my friend who just joined Twitter.
  • Horrible. Putin’s bombs have killed a 14-month old baby girl & her pregnant mother. Oops. Wait. That’s just Israel using that 4 billion in American taxpayer money to murder more Palestinians in with total impunity. Nothing to see here. Move along.
  •   Retweeted
    Another establishment media stooge blatantly lying to Americans about Trumps coup attempt in oil rich Venezuela. Corporate news: Always pro war. Always lying to their own audience for $.
  • 43.1 million Americans live in poverty. 550,000 Americans are homeless. Michigan’s Flint still does not have clean water. Not enough money to provide healthcare and education for all. So how shall we make America great again? By starting a new war in of course! 🤗
  •   Retweeted
    Our leaders, beginning with Pres. Trump, should be serving the interests of the American people, not foreign governments—like the theocratic dictatorship of Saudi Arabia. Such self-serving powerful politicians are selling out America’s interests for Saudi blood money. Shameless.
  • Massive rallies of all across today for the 25th weekend in a row. Somebody tell Emmanuel Macron the aren’t going anywhere 🤗
  • Bill Clinton & Madeleine Albright’s sanctions on -> killed over 500,000 Iraqi babies. Trump’s sanctions on -> killed over 40,000 Venezuelans since 2017. Sanctions kill ordinary people. Sanctions 👏 are 👏 crimes 👏 against 👏 humanity👏
  • On this , let us remember that Julian Assange is sitting behind bars for publishing truth and exposing US war crimes in to the world, while those who invaded Iraq on a pack of lies, killing a million human beings & giving rise to ISIS, still walk free.
  •   Retweeted
    One of Trump's great frauds is endorsing a G. W. Bush-style neocon regime change project regarding Venezuela, filling his administration with literal Bush appointees like Bolton, and convincing his supporters that this constitutes an "America First" agenda
  •   Retweeted
    Neocons/Neolibs & MSM all sing from the same songsheet: War war war!!! Trump never gets positive media unless he's threatening war/carrying out military action. Today, Venezuela. Tomorrow, Iran? Cuba? Who’s next? No wonder NK won't give up their nukes.
  • So let me get this straight: The US claims a “brutal dictator” who is “starving his own people” in needs to be ousted, while it continues assisting the actual brutal dictators of Saudi Arabia starve millions & commit genocide in ? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
  • If our mainstream media was honest in its coverage of , it would show us the massive crowds of Venezuelans that flooded the streets on to oppose the US-backed military coup attempt, and to support their democratically elected government.
  •   Retweeted
    John Bolton said that Russia should not interfere in Venezuela because the country falls in "our hemisphere"? Does the Ukraine and Crimea also fall into "your hemisphere"?
  • Yeah. Like all those bombs Obama dropped on 8 different countries throughout his presidency, and all the jihadists he armed didn’t bring any fear to millions of families, nor kill and displace millions more — it was all candies, cookies, donuts, puppies and really pretty flowers.
  • Wow. Absolute chaos today in on . But most media outlets won’t be broadcasting Macron’s police assaulting and tear gassing unarmed protesters. They’re too busy generating propaganda to start a war in .
  • Starving millions and millions of men, women and children in to death is “in America’s best interest” according to warmonger Mike Pompeo. And yet this is the same individual who will deliver “freedom” and “democracy” to the people of ? Get the hell outta here.
  • The source is the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in a study conducted by American economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs.
  •   Retweeted
    This man helped kill over 1,000,000 Iraqis - 500,000 of whom were UNDER THE AGE OF 12. He is a mass-murderer and liar. Anything he says is worthless. Everything he does is criminal. He belongs in a prison-cell - not on Twitter attempting to lie the World into another genocide.
  • Your sanctions have killed at least 40,000 Venezuelans since 2017. You don’t give anymore of a damn about the people of than you do about the people of , where you’re helping Saudi Arabia commit genocide.