Terrorism: The Occupation’s Responsibility

The moment the United States of America began to feel it suffered exorbitant losses in Iraq, it realized that the time had come to find a way to save face in leaving this Arab country. Thousands of its troops were killed, other thousands wounded and handicapped, and a rising numbers of suicides and mental illnesses among its occupying army were reported. And its failure to achieve what it was trying to achieve by way of colossal profits from looting Iraq’s treasures, especially oil was a factor; The National Resistance had turned it into a bottomless quagmire into which the occupation forces sunk deeper and deeper every day.

So they thrust a security pact and other oil agreements on Iraq hoping that, by these means, they would gain something that would represent “victory” in Iraq. They hoped to gain something that would not leave their invasion worthless in relation to [America’s] strategic interests in the region.

But the Iraqi people took a heroic stand in rejecting the humiliating proposal for a [security] pact, which would turn Iraq into a horse stable and an American military base directed not only against Iraq, but against all of the peoples of the region.

Bush’s dream-like ambitions to enter history as the victor and not the vanquished crashed with the complete popular and Arabic rejection of the [security] pact. By means of this pact, America wanted to show that it was a lady of the world. It failed like it failed in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and other regions of the world. This has made America enter a phase of hardship and recession, of domestic disintegration as revealed by the widening gap between those who amass money and those who don’t. Today, forty million Americans live below the poverty line. They live with social decay, racial divides, the spreading use of drugs, and expanding corruption. This in addition to the choking financial and economic crisis that is spreading like a malignant cancer in the producing sectors – industrial and agricultural. America has become a power that relies on the technology of its advanced weapons. It relies on its monopoly of the right to intervene militarily in any country that opposes it under the false pretexts and slogans of “democracy,” “freedom,” “humanitarian intervention,” etc.

What Iraq has suffered from [the beginning of] its occupation is catastrophic on all levels. There are over one million Iraqi victims of the American occupation. Over four million have fled Iraq to flee the destruction, the ruin, the undoing of the infrastructure, an explosion in unemployment, hunger, and disease, and the loss of security. They fled the instances of division based on sect, ethnicity, religion, and nationality that threaten the unity of Iraq – land and people.

Don’t even mention the looting of Iraq’s oil and non-oil wealth. The core of the hoped-for security and oil agreement reflects the goals of the American occupation of Iraq.

These goals are clear to all. They include complete control over Iraq’s oil wealth, its looting by giant American companies, and the putting in place of a new oil law. The Americans insisted on this to concretize their control over the oil. This began during the first days of the occupation when the occupation granted generous contracts to American companies like KBR, Bechtel, and Halliburton. In 2003, Halliburton’s contracts amounted to $1.7 billion, Bechtel’s contracts were worth $350 million, and Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR) was granted the right to distribute fuel in Iraq. America also stole Iraq’s frozen assets and interest from the “Food for Oil” program, which was valued at more than $20 billion. The money was taken for spending on imaginary construction projects.

The occupiers were not satisfied with looting Iraq’s wealth and oil. They destroyed its artifacts and archaeological sites in an effort to erase the Iraqis’ heritage and great history from their memory. They ruined the city of Babel, which was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World, when the occupation forces set up a military barracks on the site of this archaeological city. They dug a trench and knocked down historical statues.

They disposed of the education system and killed hundreds of college professors and scholars. Al-Anbar University was turned into an American military barracks after a number of its professors were killed. The goal was to empty Iraq of its scientific scholars and force them to leave Iraq.

The planned purpose of this destruction was to send Iraq back to the Stone Age.