Deep Blade Journal

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): 4 million displaced Iraqis since 2003

The title of this post is the same as that of an oped published Sunday in the Washington Post (reprinted today in the Bangor Daily News) carrying the byline of the Republican presidential candidate, Arizona Senator John McCain. Along with McCain’s properly much-ridiculed April Fools walk through a Baghdad market backed by a powerful militia, his oped would be extremely silly except for the fact that the war McCain so dearly supports is causing death, injury, and displacement for millions of innocent Iraqis.

I won’t take on McCain’s “cautious optimism” point-by-point. Instead I’ll challenge his complete omission of any sense that he understands the full devastating depth and breadth of the total destruction of the foundations of Iraqi society that the war has brought. And, let me say I just cringe at the deep colonial mentality revealed by the “counterinsurgency approach” that McCain argues “for” — “separating the reconcilable population from the irreconcilable.”

If taken to its logical end, the language used here by McCain shows that he believes the part of the Iraqi population who continue to display their opposition to US control of their country is disposable. To me, McCain’s use of “irreconcilable” suggests that in the end his recommended approach would involve applying force in a manner tantamount to genocide. To McCain, “separating” means ridding Iraq of those who never will accept American domination, a clear majority in every study of Iraqi public opinion.

Unfortunately, McCain is correct in one unintended sense. Many Americans who find themselves reading war cheerleading by the likes of the senator are not reading about how terrible the actual war is.

Just today, for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross released a report that describes an Iraq where, “The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable. Their lives and dignity are continuously under threat.” The American media barely has covered this release. It’s a slight footnote in a few news stories and I have seen no mention yet on television.

The report, called “Civilians Without Protection,” (unlike the situation for Senator McCain in the Baghdad market) describes the “ever worsening humanitarian crisis” where “Thousands of Iraqis continue to be forced out of their homes owing to military operations, general poor security and the destruction of houses. And the outlook is bleak, particularly in Baghdad and other areas with mixed communities, where the situation is likely to worsen.”

It’s all so depressing. American public opinion generally has turned against McCain and the war, but there still is woeful ignorance about what is actually happening to the Iraqis as a direct result of the American invasion. We don’t see the most important reporting on the situation.

Patrick Cockburn of the UK Independent, author of The Occupation, a riveting book on Iraq, is an essential antidote to the poison of McCain. His dispatches are not published in American newspapers, but the Internet is an easy way to get them. Here are just a few recent doses of reality filed by Cockburn around the 4th anniversary of the invasion:

• March 19, 2007: Almost Every Aspect of Iraqi Life has Gotten Worse in the Last Four Years

Tony Blair and George Bush still occasionally imply that the picture of Iraq as a war-torn hell is an exaggeration by the media. They suggest, though not as forcibly as they did a couple of years ago, that parts of the country are relatively peaceful. Nothing could be more untrue.

In reality, the violence is grossly understated. The Baker-Hamilton report by senior Republicans and Democrats, led by James Baker, took a single day last summer, when the US army reported 93 acts of violence in Iraq, and asked American intelligence to re-examine the evidence. They found the real figure was 1,100–the US military had deliberately understated the violence by factor of over 10….

• March 20, 2007: Four Years After the Invasion: Iraq is a Vast, Blood-Drenched Human Disaster

Four years after the US and British troops invaded Iraq the country is drenched in blood and its people full of fear. Iraqis often have a look of half-suppressed panic in their eyes as they tell how violent death had touched them and their families again and again….

• April 10, 2007: The Beacon of the US “Success” The Myth of Tal Afar

Embedded American journalists scurried to this poor and depressing Turkoman city between Mosul and the Syrian border to report on the good news. President Bush even singled it out for optimistic comment in March 2006. “Tal Afar shows that, when Iraqis can count on a basic level of safety and security, they can live together peacefully,” he said. “The people of Tal Afar have shown why spreading liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat the terrorists.”

It was always a myth. On March 27, a gigantic truck bomb exploded in a Shia market area in Tal Afar. It was the deadliest single bomb out of the many that have been detonated by Sunni insurgents. The Interior Ministry said that 152 people were killed and 347 wounded in the explosion….

It was always absurd to treat Tal Afar as a possible textbook case of how the US might successfully expedite a counter-insurgency policy.

For more on Tal Afar, see Deep Blade Journal HERE. This SEARCH produces a large catalog of Patrick Cockburn dispatches from Iraq. Cockburn’s book, “The Occupation,” is a highly recommended read.