In his last speech to the nation, Bush talked about how great things are becoming in Iraq and read a letter from a soldier who reported American soldiers were happy to be there, while the Iraqis were overjoyed. However, Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show,” was seemingly more realistic when he asked why Bush didn’t read the other 10,000 letters from soldiers that read, “Get us out now.”
The truth is this war is pissing off American soldiers all over Iraq. When Rumsfeld tried to visit U.S. troops in Tikrit earlier this month, he had to cancel his speech out of fear of being booed out by soldiers in Iraq. “I don’t give a damn about Rumsfeld. All I give a damn about is going home,” Specialist Rue Gretton said. “The only thing his visit meant for us was we had to clean up a lot of mess to make the place look pretty. And he didn’t even look at it anyway.” And why shouldn’t the US troops be angry? According to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, as of mid-August, U.S. troops were still eating MREs (meals ready to eat). Water shortages among troops have been reported, with each soldier apparently receiving two 1.5 liter bottles of water per day, a pitiful amount considering the average daily summer temperature of Iraq. According to Krugman, the military’s shift towards privatization has meant that logistical support and supplies have, in some cases, failed to be delivered.
Since Bush declared the “end of major combat,” 143 U.S. troops have been killed, bringing the total up to more than were killed in the Gulf War. One thing the U.S. media has not surprisingly failed to pick up on is the number of deaths of Iraqis. British journalist, Robert Fisk, recently reported that a 1,000 Iraqis die each week.
Bush may say that freedom and democracy have come to Iraq however, besides electricity, water and food, freedom and democracy are in short supply and high demand.
So, what is to be done about Iraq? There have been new calls to involve the United Nations in the occupation. So, replace the green helmets with blue ones? Dennis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq (which included heading up the UN oil-for-food program in Iraq) who resigned in 1998 to protest the genocidal impact of the UN-imposed sanctions, recently came out against UN involvement with the occupation forces. “The UN is an organization that has failed the Iraqi people, that has committed murder in Iraq and committed genocide in Iraq for many years, in keeping with the definition of genocide in the UN Convention on Genocide,” Halliday stated. “The UN is seen as an instrument of the U.S.”
So, if U.S. troops don’t want to be there, the Iraqis don’t want an occupation, and the UN will only bring more violence, then what is to be done about Iraq? David Cline, disabled Vietnam War veteran and national president of Veterans for Peace, reported in a recent interview his beliefs: “The idea of self-determination is that people do things in their own way and time … Pretty soon the idea of self-determination and people running their own house gets lost on people who want to barge into someone else’s house. But for the people whose house is barged in on, it isn’t lost.”
The Iraqi people are fighting to get their home and the right to govern themselves, something Americans did over two centuries ago. This is an occupation of U.S. forces against the Iraqi people and until it ends, the Iraqi people have the right to resist in any way necessary. End the occupation. Not next month or next week, end it NOW.
-Ben Larrivee is a middler chemistry major.
