The debate on Iraq continues to obscure and ignore the obvious – no country can colonize another without resistance. And by resistance, I mean violent resistance.
Nobody should be surprised by a regular civilian mob brutally lynching four American mercenaries working for Blackwater USA. Frantz Fanon (in The Wretched of the Earth) taught us that the psychology of the colonized would force them to manifest their anger and humiliation in violent ways. What occurred in Fallujah was the logical outcome of a people oppressed, angered, humiliated and feeling powerless to evict the foreign interlopers in their midst. Would we act any different if we were colonized?
The problem in Iraq is not that the Iraqis are ungrateful, or that they’re Baathist “dead-enders,” terrorists or religious fundamentalists fighting us. The problem is one of ideological misconceptions and an unwillingness to admit reality and truth. Ideology is what fuels this war. It’s the combined interests and ideology of neoconservatives (who wish for a U.S. imperial status), greedy corporate executives (who lust for the Iraqi oil), coupled with a general American consent to warfare as a tool to impose American political visions on other nations. Only this unholy concoction of ideologies could explain the frat-boy provocation of President Bush, when he called for the Iraqi insurgents to “Bring it on.” Bring it on they did, and we have over 600 U.S. soldiers dead and thousands wounded to prove it.
The first step toward admitting reality is exposing the lies that justified the war. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, and even if they did have them, that’s not a justification for war against a country. Many countries have WMDs, and we don’t invade them. Iraq was no threat to us – it didn’t have the missile delivery technology to reach beyond Israel, Iran, Kuwait, or Turkey, let alone Europe or the United States. Its army was no match for our professional army, nor it could threaten us. Why did President Bush and the rest of the administration tried to fool us that Iraq was a threat?
The justification that we invaded Iraq to rid the Iraqis of Saddam Hussein was purely for “domestic consumption.” It was a feel-good balm for our uneasy consciences. The irony and hypocrisy of justifying a war on the removal of a tyrannical and brutal dictator that had been our “bed-buddy” for over 20 years was not lost on the rest of the world (although the American public fell for it).
The golden moments of American hypocrisy must have been Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell’s principled denunciations of Saddam’s very real crimes against humanity, while conveniently hiding the fact that the United States knew of those crimes when they occurred, and continued to funnel billions of dollars in financial, military, and political aid to the Hussein regime. Rumsfeld himself has been videotaped shaking the hand of Hussein in the 1980s.
In fact, many times, possible civilian coups against Saddam Hussein were brutally repressed by Hussein with the aid of the American C.I.A, which informed Hussein of the coups before they were ready to threaten him. The American government signed the death warrants of thousands of Iraqi civilians for the crime of attempting to overthrow Hussein. And then, we are supposed to really believe that the U.S. had nothing but pure intentions in the Iraqi war?
What about the Al-Qaeda “boogeyman”? U.S. administration officials, all the way up to President Bush, used every dictionary and thesaurus term for “threat” to scare the American public into thinking that Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda. Only this truth explains why 60 percent of the American public thought that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11. At the end of the day, after the war was ongoing and the justification was no longer needed, it was conveniently discarded by Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush in speeches admitting that there was no Al-Qaeda link to Saddam Hussein. Sad to say, but the American public was bamboozled just as badly as the German nation was bamboozled by Hitler, when he ascribed blame for German problems to Jews and other social dissidents.
Finally, what about the “bringing democracy” justification? At the end of the day, the American colonial occupiers have censored newspapers, shot at peaceful Iraqi demonstrations, broken down doors and searched Iraqi families, tried to institute an “elites-only” style of caucus-elections democracy and ruled Iraq from behind large concrete walls. The only person in Iraq that deserves the credit for fighting for “direct elections” is Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who has used his religious authority to press the U.S. administration to discard their previous, elitist “democratic” ideas. From a point of view of history, it wasn’t the U.S., which pushed for “democracy” in Iraq; it was Iraqis themselves, who demanded “direct elections” in opposition to American political plans.
Flash forward to the present. Sunni Muslims in the “Sunni Triangle” have been making us pay dearly for our colonial arrogance. Then, Paul Bremer provokes Muqtada Al-Sadr and his “Mahdi Army” of Shi’ite followers into open rebellion by closing down a newspaper that had a circulation rate of, at most, 10,000. Now, Sunnis and Shi’ites are against us, with the possibility that the rest of the peaceful population will take sides with them. And, somehow, we cannot understand why people are shooting at us instead throwing flowers at us for “liberating them.”
It’s pretty simple: what the U.S. is facing in Iraq is a genuine, nationalist, patriotic, Iraqi rebellion against colonial rule. It is no longer relevant that we think of ourselves as liberators or that our troops feel themselves justified in being in Iraq. What matters now is that the Iraqi people have taken up arms against us, which makes the situation a colonial-national liberation struggle. In those terms, we are the colonizers and they the freedom fighters. Our heroes become U.S. colonial soldiers. The terrorists become Iraqi patriots. And Operation Iraqi Freedom becomes Operation Failed Colonial Attempt.
This is why we will fail in Iraq. Because, only we remain fooled. For the Iraqis and the rest of the world, the matter is clear. They will massacre, machete, shoot, bomb, burn, drag and castrate every American soldier they get their hands on until we learn that supreme basic law: do onto others what you would want them to do unto you. We tried to colonize them, and they are killing us for it. We can ratchet up our murder against Iraqis and try to repress the uprising (which would only dig the colonial hole deeper), or we can admit defeat in this colonial adventure and withdraw. In other words, we can be in Iraq for 10 more years and make it another Vietnam, or we can do a “Saigon” and bolt from Iraq. Now.
We need to stop the “patriotic” whitewashing of the truth. The propaganda has it backwards: Iraq is their country and we are the colonial interlopers. We can no longer try to dictate what is right and wrong to Iraqis. We should withdraw from Iraq … or face a national liberation struggle that will be impossible to stop.
Rene Gonzalez is a UMass graduate student.
