Iraq locals areaccusing U.S.forces of creatingthe very climate offear they aresupposed to stop.
In Iraq, U.S. Forces Resort To ‘Collective Punishment’By Cliff MontgomeryAccording to residents and officials living in Ramadi, Iraq, U.S. forces have begun to use collective punishment of civilians in cities across the al-Anbar province west of Baghdad.”Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province, is still living with the daily terror of its people getting killed by snipers and its infrastructure being destroyed,” Ahmad, a local doctor who withheld his last name for security purposes told Inter Press Service (IPS), an international wire service. “This city has been facing the worst of the American terror and destruction for more than two years now.”Destroying infrastructure and cutting water and electricity “for days and even weeks is routine reaction to the resistance,” added Ahmad. “Guys of the resistance do not need water and electricity; it’s the families that are being harmed, and their lives which are at stake.”IPS reported Sep. 5 that the U.S. military was bulldozing entire blocks of buildings near the governorate to dampen attacks on government offices, essentially the same tactic Israeli forces have been known to use against Palestinian areas it believes are harboring terrorists.”These Americans have the bad habit of cutting all of the essential services after every attack. They said they came to liberate us, but look at the slow death they are giving us every day,” a local tribal chief who gave his name as Nawaf told IPS.In Haditha, a city of 75,000 on the banks of the Euphrates River in western al-Anbar, collective punishment is continuous, residents say. This was the site of the massacre of 24 civilians by U.S. marines in November 2005.”The Americans continue to raid our houses and threaten us with more violence,” a local tribal leader who gave his name as Abu Juma’a told IPS. “But if they think they will make us kneel by these criminal acts, they are wrong. If they increase the pressure, the resistance will increase the reaction. We see this pattern repeated so often now.”On average at least one U.S. vehicle is reported destroyed every day as the U.S. increases its raids and imposes daily curfews.Therefore the scene is one of destruction in the cities, not rebuilding.”Infrastructure rebuilding is just a joke that nobody laughs at,” Fayiq al-Dilaimy, an engineer in Fallujah told IPS. Far from being a radical cleric, al-Dilaimy was on the rebuilding committee set up after the November 2004 U.S.-led operation which destroyed approximately 75 percent of the city.”People of this city could rebuild their city in six months if given a real chance. Now look at it and how sorrowful it looks under the boots of the ‘liberators’.”A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad did not comment on specific cases, but told IPS that the U.S. military “does its best to protect civilians from the terrorists.”The first U.S. mistake is the same one often made by Israel: short on overall forces, both the U.S. and Israel try to keep the peace with armed forces trained for combat, rather than police officers trained to keep and maintain the peace.The poor soldier and military man can only do what their background and their training tell them is the right move at a certain time. The soldier is not trained to keep the peace, but to win wars. His mentality is necessarily a war mentality–so when trouble breaks out, the soldier does not know how to keep the peace; he understandably sees the trouble as a state of war, and conducts the “peacekeeping” as a war action, using the soldiers’ weapons of siege and destruction.The other problem is one which goes to the heart of Bush’s remaining “rationale” for his Iraq misadventure: building democracy for others, specifically for people you clearly don’t understand.By definition, democracy (Greek, meaning, “rule of the people”) must come from the bottom up–it must come from a nation’s people, from the most oppressed of society to the top, and therefore cannot come from above. Any attempt, regardless of intention, which tries to impose on a people any form of government from the top down is not a democracy, but a tyranny.Like all other leaders, George W. Bush cannot be judged by what he claims to do, but by what he has actually done. And creating any form of government for others from the top down is always tyranny, since it always proclaims, “You are bound to my will, in all cases whatsoever.””And if being bound in that manner,” wrote Thomas Paine in the first paper of his American Crisis, “is not slavery, then there is no such thing as slavery upon earth.”What a shame America’s “leaders,” who speak so eloquently about democracy, know so little about it.
