Many Angry Gerbils

A reply to Thomas Friedman (not) on behalf of the Iraqi ‘Government’.

Mr. Friedman,

The fact that you dress up your latest stream of deluded mendacity as a letter on behalf of George W. Bush says much about your ridiculous ego. But at least it suggests you are aware that only the thinnest sliver of the remaining Iraqi population will have any idea of who you are. This is not their loss.

You write that Bush invaded Iraq because of its alleged weapons of mass destruction. And you lie. You lie because you surely know that the Bush Administration never truly believed that Iraq had any such weapons -just as you never did (although you pretended you did at the time).

So Americans are losing their homes. I’m sure that Iraqis will spare time to sympathise. After all, how many Iraqi homes have been lost -to American bombs and missiles? Maybe Americans don’t understand why their government is spending a billion a day in occupying and crushing Iraq but perhaps they would if journalists such as you had the integrity to tell them the truth rather than sing hosannas to the name of Power. 

You say that there has been a debate in America about setting a deadline for withdrawing from Iraq. In doing so, you reveal your own racism and imperialist mindset -that America should have the right to debate the matter. There is no debate in Iraq -they want you out and always have.  

You speak of finding a different war than the one for which you came looking. Again, you trumpet your pathology to the world. You ‘found’ no war in Iraq -you created it, you imposed it, you chose it: “the WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity.” Don’t blame anyone else for what you alone have done. Al-Qaeda, the inflated monster with which you try to terrify us all was not even a force in Iraq before the US came and turned Iraq into flypaper for terrorists throughout the world -just as your own planners had predicted. Even after the invasion, Al-Qaeda was a tiny fragment of those you so deceitfully call “anti-Iraqi” forces. You have been at war with the Iraqi people – and not just since the US invaded their country in 2003. You have been at war with them since you supported Saddam Hussein’s crushing of the Shi’a uprising in 1991 because he was still ‘useful’ to the American state. You declared open war on the Iraqi people the moment you described the ‘best of all worlds’ for Iraq as an ‘Iron fisted military junta’. And you were still at war when you told Iraqi families, who had suffered the horror of having their houses raided by troops to “Suck.On.This”. Don’t dare to pretend that you have anything but contempt for the Iraqi people. You personally, Mr. Friedman, are an enemy of the Iraqi people and of decent people everywhere.

You have the sheer temerity to ask the Iraqis if they “want to see fear”. By all that is profane how dare you? How many other peoples in the world have the Americans taught so comprehensively the gut burning, heart crushing meaning of fear? Fear of the American employee, Saddam, fear of cholera, of cancer, of starvation, of Shock & Awe, of the terrorists you drew to their country. Ask the mothers who were forced to give their children valium during the nights of bombing if there’s anything more you can tell them about fear.

And now you threaten the world with the prospect of a world in which there is “too little American power” - suggesting a period of American isolation, that fiction that no doubt causes grim laughter amongst the nations of South America.

How dare you lecture a people when you cheered every moment that they were brought to their knees? The only words you should ever speak should be pleas for forgiveness for all that you have done. Instead, you continue to disgrace yourself, your family, your nation, and your species with your venomous, smug dishonesty.

I am only grateful that the vast majority of Iraqi people, those who remain, will never read your contemptible words. One day there must be a monument to the dead of Iraq so that their names are never lost to the painful story of our progress. Your name will be dead to history, unread, unspoken, lost like bitter ash lost on the wind.

"Can the US afford to respect Pakistani Sovereignty?"

That was the question posed just over an hour ago by Sean Lay on Radio 4's The World This Weekend.

I don't recall it ever being asked if, given Georgia's aggression in South Ossetia, Russia could 'afford' to respect Georgian sovereignty. Nor whether, given Kuwait's slant oil drilling of Iraqi reserves, Iraq could afford to respect their sovereignty. In the latter case, the question has increased relevance since the US National Security Strategy has long since stated that the US has the right to use military force to protect its overseas economic interests and energy supplies (and access to foreign markets).

There is no doubt, at least in my mind, that there are circumstances in which a compelling case can be made that a country's sovereignty can be outweighed by other factors. The important point, however, is that the issue here is not that the media is evaluating, in each case, the arguments for respecting a given state's sovereignty. They have not weighed Pakistani sovereignty against US interests and Georgian sovereignty against Russian interests and ruled in favour of US action and against Russian action. Instead, the pertinent point is that, of the two, only the US is assumed to have the right to make such calculations in the first place. This is not even said outright because it does not need to be -it is simply understood. The US, as the imperial power, is understood to have interests that outrank those of anyone else and, by virtue of its status as the 'Leader of the Free World', the right to take decisions that are denied to the lesser peoples of the world. 

It is true that there may be some tactical discussion of the costs and benefits of these decisions. So, in the case of bombing Pakistan, the BBC's Owen Bennett-Jones, is permitted to question whether the bombings further the self-evident US intention to 'win hearts and minds'. He is even allowed to make the most powerful criticism a respectable journalist may make of their political masters, that they are not pursuing their stated strategy very well. But Bennett-Jones is 'taken aback' that the Pakistanis resent being shredded by US ordnance to the point that a secular Pakistani -who cannot therefore be said to 'hate our freedoms’ - can ask about the Americans "What are they doing here 12,000 miles away from home?" Of course, it's an obvious question to almost anyone but a carefully trained journalist. Bennett-Jones, on the other hand, has to wrap up such thorny questions -and 'the familiar complaints about foreign policy' - in the soft comforting blanket of 'anti-Americanism'. Corresponding western 'anti-Russianism' does not exist in the lexicon -that was merely legitimate criticism of Russia's refusal to understand that invading sovereign states "is simply not the way that international relations can be run in the 21st century" -unless, of course, that we decide that we cannot afford not to.