The Empire 390

The Splendid Failure of Occupation

Last Updated: Jan 4th, 2007 - 01:08:31
Part 45: How the U.S. engineered the Iraqi holocaust
By B. J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writer

“Our dark days -- already pitch-black with murder and lies and hatred and
fear -- are about to grow even darker”—Chris Floyd, columnist, Moscow
Times [from Blood fruit: the blowback harvest begins]

Did the United States, under the pretext of “liberating” Kuwait from
the Iraqi occupation, engineer and execute an Iraqi holocaust to implement,
consolidate, and entrench American imperialism in Iraq, and the Middle
East?

By judging from the scale of destruction and death the United States
inflicted on Iraq, and by considering the international and regional
objectives of war, history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East since the
1930s, control of oil, Israel, U.S.-Israel relations, the answer is yes.

Even so, to back up the charge that the United States committed a holocaust
in Iraq, an investigation on the meaning of the term: holocaust is
indispensable.

As a first step, to qualify the human destruction in Iraq consequent to the
Gulf War as a holocaust, we have to dispense at once with all preposterous
differentiations that American imperialism assigns to the use of the term
or to any other taxonomic categories of mass violence. Second, to debunk
completely the imperialist practice that restricts the application of the
holocaust concept to specific events but not to others, a discussion on the
use of language and derived political vocabulary is in order.

In language, synonyms do not change the basic meaning of a word. Take for
example, the words, kill, slay, destroy, slaughter, or exterminate. They
all mean the same: take life. Yet, the one subtlety that distinguishes each
term is the imagery associated with the given taxonomy.

What these terms would not tell is the magnitude of those who died.
Accepted contemporary definitions resolved this problem by adding either
the qualifier: mass (as in mass destruction) to indicate lethal violence
against large groups, peoples, or nations; by inventing names based on
Roman derivation such as genocide; or by reviving the ancient Hellenic
term: holocaust.

Before the first Iraqi holocaust (1991), there were many other large-scale
holocausts committed by marauding, colonialist, and imperialist polities.
Among these were Mongolian hordes in Asia and Eastern Europe; European and
American colonialism in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and
Africa; Ottomans against Armenians; Germans against Jehovah witnesses,
Jews, Romanies, communists, etc.; Japanese against Chinese and Koreans;
Israelis against Palestinians; and the United States against Koreans,
Vietnamese, and Panamanians.

A holocaust, as an expression of humanity gone dastardly and violently
bestial, should have neither trophy nor primacy over other despicable
events of mass violence. Still, the Iraqi holocaust is prominent among all
other holocausts for one distinguishing feature: the United States planned
for it with the acquiescence of other colonialist powers of the U.N.
Security Council, and with financing from Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and
other American vassals.'
Lees verder: http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_856.shtml