[Marxism] Howard Zinn: Occupied Zones - Unacceptable regimes in Iraq and the United states

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ABOUT HOWARD ZINN'S COMMENTARY AND HOW TO UTILIZE IT TODAY
By Walter Lippmann, Editor, CubaNews, August 14, 2005

Another wonderful column from Howard Zinn. Should be shared and 
reprinted as widely as possible. He captures the sense of unease 
which pervades the United States today, which is reflected in 
Cindy Sheehan's eloquent appeals to conscience, and addresses it 
all with the authority tht only a war veteran, indeed a former 
combat bombardier, can bring to such commentaries. Viva Zinn!

Howard Zinn, who was, and remains, critical of Cuba's those tough 
self-defensive measures it took in 2003, has continued to visit the 
island where his play has been performed and where his PEOPLE'S 
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is in print for 25 Cuban pesos, which
is equivalent to one dollar. He'd continued as well to speak out  
and write forthrightly for the Cuban Five and against Washington's 
history of terrorism against the island. Here he shows readers the 
links between Washington's occupation of Iraq and the Cuba blockade. 

These have had far-reaching and menacing consequences for what's left 
of democratic rights in the United States. Helping the people of the
United States to understand the costs and consequences of empire is 
as important a task as we can carry out at this time. Today's task 
is to weld together the mixture of body bags, reflective discussions 
like these, and mass mobilizations such as September 24th can boost 
the anti-war sentiment into a qualitatively greater national force.
Please do what you can to see this article reprinted everywhere, 
in newspapers, magazines and even in leaflet format. Viva Zinn!

Read two articles from the Cuban media on Howard Zinn in Cuba:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/zinn-cuba-5-2004.html 
================================================================

LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE
August 2005
Unacceptable regimes in Iraq and the United states

Occupied zones

There are killings every day in Iraq. Occupying troops, diplomats,
aid workers and media people are killed, as are Iraqis, in far
greater numbers. But President George Bush?s war is not only against
opponents in Iraq and the Middle East: it is a war against his fellow
Americans.

By Howard Zinn

http://mondediplo.com/2005/08/04iraq

IT has quickly become clear that Iraq is not a liberated country, but
an occupied country. We became familiar with that term during the
second world war. We talked of German-occupied France,
German-occupied Europe. And after the war we spoke of Soviet-occupied
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, eastern Europe. It was the Nazis, the
Soviets, who occupied countries. The United States liberated them
from occupation.

Now we are the occupiers. True, we liberated Iraq from Saddam
Hussein, but not from us. Just as in 1898 we liberated Cuba from
Spain, but not from us. Spanish tyranny was overthrown, but the US
established a military base in Cuba, as we are doing in Iraq. US
corporations moved into Cuba, just as Bechtel and Halliburton and the
oil corporations are moving into Iraq. The US framed and imposed,
with support from local accomplices, the constitution that would
govern Cuba, just as it has drawn up, with help from local political
groups, a constitution for Iraq. Not a liberation. An occupation.

And it is an ugly occupation. On 7 August 2003 the New York Times
reported that General Sanchez in Baghdad was worried about the Iraqi
reaction to occupation. Pro-US Iraqi leaders were giving him a
message, as he put it: ?When you take a father in front of his family
and put a bag over his head and put him on the ground you have had a
significant adverse effect on his dignity and respect in the eyes of
his family.? (That?s very perceptive.)

On 19 July 2003, shortly before the discovery of authenticated cases
of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, CBS News reported:
?Amnesty International is looking into a number of cases of suspected
torture in Iraq by American authorities. One such case involves
Khraisan al-Aballi. Al-Aballi?s house was razed by American soldiers,
who came in shooting and arrested him and his 80-year-old father.
They shot and wounded his brother . . . The three men were taken away
. . . Khraisan says his interrogators stripped him naked and kept him
awake for more than a week, either standing or on his knees, bound
hand and foot, with a bag over his head. Khraisan said he told his
captors, ?I don?t know what you want. I don?t know what you want. I
have nothing.? ?I asked them to kill me?, says Khraisan. After eight
days, they let him and his father go . . . US officials did not
respond to repeated requests to discuss the case.?

We know that fighting during the US offensive in November 2004
destroyed three- quarters of the town of Falluja (population
360,000), killing hundreds of its inhabitants. The objective of the
operation was to cleanse the town of the terrorist bands acting as
part of a ?Ba?athist conspiracy?.

But we should recall that on 16 June 2003, barely six weeks after
President George Bush had claimed victory in Iraq, two reporters for
the Knight-Ridder newspaper group wrote this about the Falluja area:
?In dozens of interviews during the past five days, most residents
across the area said there was no Ba?athist or Sunni conspiracy
against US soldiers, there were only people ready to fight because
their relatives had been hurt or killed, or they themselves had been
humiliated by home searches and road stops . . . One woman said,
after her husband was taken from their home because of empty wooden
crates which they had bought for firewood, that the US is guilty of
terrorism.?

According to the reporters, ?Residents in At Agilia, a village north
of Baghdad, said two of their farmers and five others from another
village were killed when US soldiers shot them while they were
watering their fields of sunflowers, tomatoes and cucumbers.?

Soldiers who are set down in a country where they were told they
would be welcomed as liberators and find they are surrounded by a
hostile population become fearful and trigger-happy. On 4 March
nervous, frightened GIs manning a roadblock fired on the Italian
journalist Giuliana Sgrena, just released by kidnappers, and an
intelligence service officer, Nicola Calipari, whom they killed.

We have all read reports of US soldiers angry at being kept in Iraq.
An ABC News reporter in Iraq recently described how a sergeant had
pulled him aside, saying: ?I?ve got my own Most Wanted List.? He was
referring to the deck of cards the US government published featuring
Saddam Hussein, his sons and other members of the former Iraqi
regime. ?The aces in my deck,? he added, ?are Paul Bremer, Donald
Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz.?

Such sentiments are becoming known to the US public, as are the
feelings of many deserters who are refusing to return to Iraq after
home leave. In May 2003 a Gallup poll reported that only 13% of the
US public thought the war was going badly. In two years the situation
has radically changed. According to a poll published by the New York
Times and CBS News on 17 June, 51% now think the US should not have
invaded Iraq or become involved in the war. Some 59% disapprove of
Bush?s handling of the situation in Iraq. It is also interesting to
note that polls taken among African-Americans have consistently shown
60% opposition to the war.

But more ominous, perhaps, than the occupation of Iraq is the
occupation of the US. I wake up in the morning, read the newspaper,
and feel that we are an occupied country, that some alien group has
taken over. Those Mexican workers trying to cross the border, dying
in the attempt to evade immigration officials (trying to cross into
land taken from Mexico by the US in 1848), are not alien to me. Those
20 million people who are not citizens and therefore, by the Patriot
Act, are subject to being pulled out of their homes and held
indefinitely by the FBI, with no constitutional rights, are not alien
to me.

But this small group of men who have taken power in Washington (Bush,
Richard Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of their clique), they are
alien to me.

I wake up thinking: the US is in the grip of a president who was
first elected in November 2000, under questionable circumstances and
largely thanks to a Supreme Court decision. He remains, since his
re-election last November, a president surrounded by thugs in suits
who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing
about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to
the earth, the water, the air, or what kind of world will be
inherited by our children and grandchildren.

More Americans are beginning to feel, like the soldiers in Iraq, that
something is terribly wrong, that this is not what we want our
country to be. More and more every day the lies are being exposed.
And then there is the largest lie, that everything the US does is to
be pardoned because we are engaged in a ?war on terrorism?, ignoring
the fact that war is itself terrorism, that barging into people?s
homes and taking away family members and subjecting them to torture
is terrorism, that invading and bombing other countries does not give
us more but less security.

You get some sense of what this government means by the war on
terrorism when you examine what the secretary of defence, Rumsfeld (a
face on the sergeant?s most wanted list), said when he was addressing
Nato ministers in Brussels on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. He was
explaining the threats to the West (imagine - we still talk of ?the
West? as some holy entity, as if the US, having alienated most
western countries, including France and Germany, was not now wooing
eastern countries, and trying to persuade them its sole aim was to
liberate the Iraqis, just as it liberated them from Soviet control).

Rumsfeld, explaining the ?threats? and why they are invisible and
unidentifiable said: ?There are things that we know. And then there
are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know
that we don?t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are
things we do not know we don?t know . . . That is, the absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence . . . Simply because you do not
have evidence that something exists does not mean that you have
evidence that it doesn?t exist.?

We are fortunate to have Rumsfeld to clarify such points. That
explains why the Bush administration, unable to capture the
perpetrators of the 11 September attacks, went ahead and invaded
Afghanistan in December 2001, killing thousands of people and driving
hundreds of thousands from their homes. Yet it still does not know
where the criminals are. It also explains why the government, not
knowing what weapons Saddam Hussein was hiding, invaded and bombed
Iraq in March 2003, disregarding the United Nations, killing
thousands of civilians and soldiers and terrorising the population.
That explains why the US government, not knowing who was and was not
a terrorist, confined hundreds of people in Guantánamo under such
conditions that 18 have tried to commit suicide.

The Amnesty International Report 2005, notes: ?The detention facility
at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times . . . When the
most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law
and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with
impunity and audacity.?

The report highlights US attempts to play down the importance of
torture: the US is trying to redefine torture to create loopholes in
the current ban. But, the report stresses, ?torture gains ground when
official condemnation of it is less than absolute?. Despite the
public indignation prompted by torture at Abu Ghraib, neither the US
government nor Congress have called for an independent inquiry.

The ?war on terrorism? is not only a war on innocent people in other
countries, but is a war on the people of the US. A war on our
liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth of the country
is being stolen from the people and handed over to the super-rich.
The lives of the young are being stolen.

The war in Iraq will undoubtedly claim many more victims, not only
abroad but also on US territory. The Bush administration maintains
that, unlike the Vietnam war, this conflict is not causing many
casualties (1). True enough, less than 2,000 service men and women
have lost their lives in the fighting. But when the war finally ends,
the number of its indirect victims, through disease or mental
disorders, will increase steadily. After the Vietnam war veterans
reported congenital malformations in their children, caused by Agent
Orange, a highly toxic herbicide sprayed indiscriminately over the
country.

Officially there were only a few hundred losses in the Gulf war of
1991, but the US Gulf War Veterans Association recently reported
8,000 deaths among its numbers in the past 10 years. Some 200,000
veterans, out of 600,000 who took part, have registered a range of
complaints due to the weapons and munitions used in combat. We have
yet to see the long-term effects of depleted uranium on those
currently stationed in Iraq.

What is our job? To point all this out. Our faith is that human
beings only support violence and terror when they have been lied to.
And when they learn the truth, as happened in the course of the
Vietnam war, they will turn against the government. We have the
support of the rest of the world. The US cannot indefinitely ignore
the 10 million people who protested around the world on 15 February
2003.

The power of government, whatever weapons it possesses, whatever
money it has at its disposal, is fragile. When it loses its
legitimacy in the eyes of its people, its days are numbered. We need
to engage in whatever actions appeal to us. There is no act too
small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history
of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in
history and creating a power that governments cannot suppress.

Original text in English

* Howard Zinn is professor emeritus at Boston University. His works
include ?A People?s History of the United States? (HarperCollins, New
York, 2003) and ?You Can?t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal
History of Our Times? (Beacon Press, Boston, 1994)

(1) On 20 June 2005 US military dead in Iraq totalled 1,724 with
12,896 wounded (source: http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/).



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