Ep12: We Need to Talk About Iraq

Everything happening in Gaza is linked to what was done by the US and UK to Iraq. Technologies and techniques of urban warfare, of occupation, of psychological warfare, of oppression, of destruction, of torture and of propaganda were developed and shared between Israeli and the Coalition forces occupying Iraq. Each was used as a training ground and laboratory for the other.

Like Gaza the nature of the violence in Iraq was genocidal. The people were the target. Educators and schools were targeted. Doctors and clinics and ambulances were targeted. Local officials were targeted. The fabric of society was targeted.

Nothing that happened was the byproduct of different acts aimed at only the regime or its military force. Like the Israeli government of today the US lied and deceived so it could wipe out whole families; they schemed so they could destroy water infrastructure and spread disease, and they fought tooth and nail for years to ensure that thousands upon thousands of children would slowly die of easily preventable causes.

Iraq and Palestine are linked through thousands of years of history, and sorrowfully linked as targets for the same imperial project. Of late people who want to highlight the suffering happening now in Gaza have sought to suppress or misrepresent what happened in Iraq. They want to increase the sense of urgency by making the Gaza Holocaust seem unprecedented, as if the human suffering is not enough in itself. This can only harm the cause of the Palestinian people and others. Isolating the current events from the broader sweep of imperialist history (and the absolute necessity of genocide in modern imperialism) plays into the hands of those who are already trying to control the narrative of the Gaza Holocaust.

People like Piers Morgan are trying to co-opt anti-genocide sentiment to their own abominable political project. They openly say that the problem is one of excess, not of fundamental injustice. They believe that Israel has the right to kill innocent people, they just think they have crossed the line in terms of numbers. Likewise Bernie Sanders and innumerable others of his ilk are trying to frame this orgy of genocidal slaughter and the slow starvation of a captive population as the product of the right-wing regime in Israel, when in reality it is the product of a global system that is absolutely reliant on the willing participation of many millions, not least people like Bernie Sanders who vote to send arms to Israel.

Palestinians will never be safe if we cannot accurately understand why such monstrous violence is visited on them. Genocide is a strategy and the Palestinian people are the target. If we accept any analysis that frames the genocide as provoked by hatred or excessive zeal in prosecuting a war then we are dooming the Palestinians to suffer further genocidal violence either through slow strangulation or the swift brutality that arrives after Israel finds the next pretext for "defending" itself.

We need to lift the scales from our eyes about the US empire, its practice of genocide, and its relationship to Israel. The victims of genocide in different times and places are only separate in our minds because it suits the purposes of the perpetrators. We have no choice but to develop a sense of solidarity as an ethos, as a powerful emotion, and as an intellectual conviction. We are not separate. That is not just sentiment, it is the key to understanding the worst violence of the modern world.

Imperial genocides are just as pervasive as class antagonisms, and even more likely to be misrepresented as discrete unrelated phenomena. In reality these events often feature the same personnel (maybe decades apart in time and thousands of kilometres removed in space) committing the same forms of violence and destruction against the same parts of society, but each time with a completely different story of why,

Iraq always had too much potential for strength and development. Its light oil provides far higher profit margins than heavier oil such as that found in Venezuela. Moreover Iraq's potential for nationalistic sentiment is 7000 years deep. The Iraqis were first targeted to exploit their oil, but then were targeted to control how they could use and profit from their own oil. The US would bait Saddam Hussein into two destructive deadly wars leading to hundreds of thousand of lost lives, then impose sanctions killing hundreds of thousands more, then invade causing around a million or more deaths. Most died directly at the hands of the US-led Coalition, but many would die from a civil war that the occupation unleashed. The true losses to Iraq and Iraqis are incalculable because there is no baseline to work from. There is not time when Iraq was left alone to its own affairs to make use of its own wealth.

The past can not be undone. We must look to the future and that begins with refusing to lie about the past and refusing to turn away.