Connections Between the War and the Behavior of its Perpetrators

Billmon has a typically incisive collection of clips that illustrate the similarities between the words of the U.S. Marine corporal who wrote the controversial track, "Hadji Girl," and the story of the rape that other service members alleged planned and undertook recently in Iraq.

This is far from the only connection one could draw. The alleged rape and murder incident reads like the American occupation of Iraq, writ small. Like some horrific variation on a Mandelbrot image, in which each smidgen of the image contains the entirety of the remainder of the image in miniature, the purported attackers of the person and on the family of 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza stand in for the occupation itself, in which covetous Western eyes regarded Iraq as a prize to be taken, with the necessary dehumanization and elimination of any persons getting between the aggressors and their goal.

Is it very difficult to imagine that the horrors inflicted on this family were born of a very similar admixture of lust and fear that seems to motivate the authors of the wider war?

It's worth noting that the troops who stand accused of the attack were reportedly familiar with Abeer Qasim Hamza from seeing her at checkpoints along the road. These checkpoints are, themselves, another practice that puts the lie to the suggestion that this occupation has been undertaken for humanitarian reasons. How many supposedly democratic countries can you name in which soldiers of a foreign occupation force staff checkpoints throughout the country and put the preservation of their own lives and well-being ahead of that of the vehicles' occupants? If you counted more than one, you got further than I did.

A quick look at the checkpoints in Iraq tells a pretty ugly story. After three decades under the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis are conditioned to drive quickly past government installations and checkpoints - this was the expected behavior. Nowadays, however, the identical behavior likely to get someone killed. It's yet another case of the U.S. occupiers being ignorant of history and context, and that ignorance leading to fear, which then takes on the form of violence.

Those who defend the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq claim that these troops have a right to defend themselves. Putting aside the smothering irony of deploying this excuse to justify the actions of an illegal army of occupation, let's take a closer look. If, in fact, the U.S. has sent its troops to Iraq to liberate the people, then by definition, the lives of those troops are expendable in the interests of the lives and freedoms of the Iraqi people. If, in fact, the U.S. were to privledge the lives of Iraqis in this situation, it would assume their innocence first upon approaching a checkpoint, rather than assume that they are a threat.

But this theory runs counter to the American policy, and indeed American practice, because the troops are NOT in Iraq for the benefit of the people. The removal of Saddam Hussein from office is a happy side effect of the U.S. invasion there, but that silver lining does not mitigate the storm cloud that is wreaking havoc on the people of Iraq.

Though there's much speculation about the real reasons that the U.S. attacked Iraq, it is possible that the world will never know the reality of the situation, in part because the instigators and planners of the war have no credibility, and in part because even if they were honest (which they assuredly are not), it is dubious that they could muster a case, no matter how rational or irrational, to justify their actions.