The Iraq War: A Shadow Beneath America's Halo

Ten years ago on March 20, due to two fundamentally fictional factors — anti-terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — America launched a war against Iraq. This led to the deaths of 120,000 Iraqi civilians and over 4,000 U.S. soldiers, in addition to political and social crisis in Iraq. Grave damage to the political system has been deeply hidden, the security situation is grim, and the rebuilding of society is slow. On March 17, the U.S. polling agency Gallup released data showing that the majority of American people believe the war is a mistake. Today, after 10 years, this war may cause the people of the world, including the American populace, to see the shadow that hangs beneath the shining halo of America.

Firstly, America is really not all that democratic, at least not when it comes to international affairs. Before the war began, the international community repeatedly attempted to prevent it from starting, but America clasped the prestige of the Afghanistan War and absolutely ignored the calls from the opposition. President Bush arrogantly asserted that you must either fight alongside the U.S. or stay out of its way. Thus, without approval from the U.N. Security Council, without even the support of America’s allies France and Germany, in the wake of the Tomahawk missiles that pierced the night sky over Baghdad, the boots of American soldiers set foot upon this suffering piece of earth.

Secondly, America doesn’t really hold all that much respect for human rights, at least not when it comes to other “heterogeneous” groups. Two years ago, the progressive American website “Democracy Now!” broadcast two videos. In February 2007, two Iraqis stood under a circling Apache military helicopter with their hands in the air, obviously wanting to surrender; the U.S. soldiers in the helicopter asked their superiors for instructions, and the legal adviser at the U.S. base said that the helicopter must not accept surrender, and thus the two men perished in a tongue of flame. In July of the same year, two Apaches found a group of Iraqis, including two employees of Reuters News Agency: the first, the photojournalist Namir Nool-Eldreen, the second, his chauffeur Saeed Chmagh, and the rest, their guides. The aircraft opened fire, and Noor-Eldreen, along with several of the guides, died on the spot, while Chmagh struggled to crawl away. Then, a van approached the scene; people got out of the van to rescue Chmagh, brought him into the van and at the same time attempted to retrieve the other victims. The helicopter opened fire again. Chmagh, as well as the people in the van, were killed. Two schoolboys inside the van were seriously injured — the van was originally taking the boys to school. “Democracy Now!” host Ms. Amy Goodman, in her introduction to the background of the video, added, “You have seen the images in this video, heard the voices of the U.S. soldiers, laughing and swearing, but they are not hoodlums, rather, they never forget to ask their superiors for instructions, waiting until they are given the command to open fire.”*

Thirdly, over the course of the Iraq War, America has sunk into a moral depression. America has always bragged that it occupies the moral high ground and it is prone to calling opposing countries “hoodlums” and “gangsters.” But in the wake of the exposure of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers in 2004, the sight of such ghastly photographs — such as the picture of a female soldier dragging across the ground like a dog, a completely naked male Iraqi prisoner-of-war — people have been given cause to doubt whether, when it comes to those perpetrators of violence of the U.S. Army, those two terms are really sufficient. Although high-level Americans have, from the start, denied that these are national activities, the Guardian and the BBC recently united to make public information showing that the Pentagon was directly related to the abuse of prisoners. The Guardian reported that in order to extract information from anti-American military POWs, the U.S. Department of Defense sent two high ranking colonels — one on active duty and one retired — to establish a secret police in Iraq and train it to obtain information through torture. These two U.S. consultants certainly do not do the whole job themselves, but sometimes they go to the locations on the ground and participate in the interrogations. The report described some of the details of the torture scene in the following manner: “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with [the American consultant] also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: 'Allah, Allah, Allah!' But it wasn't a kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

*Editor's note: This quote appears to be very loosely adapted from Amy Goodman’s article, found here: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/4/7/collateral_murder_in_iraq