Jenny’s Pennies

This week marked the five year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. So, this week the Friday Food for Thought is dedicated to that subject. As it is Good Friday (in Swedish called Långfredagen, the long Friday), a day which for many people means reflection and silence, it seems fitting to post this today, even though I am in no way religious.

What you should read:

A war of utter folly, by Hans Blix, head of the UN inspections in Iraq 2003 (the Guardian):

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a tragedy - for Iraq, for the US, for the UN, for truth and human dignity. I can only see one gain: the end of Saddam Hussein, a murderous tyrant. Had the war not finished him he would, in all likelihood, have become another Gadafy or Castro; an oppressor of his own people but no longer a threat to the world. Iraq was on its knees after a decade of sanctions.

The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war. It is improbable that the governments of the alliance could have sold the war to their parliaments on any other grounds. That they believed in the weapons’ existence in the autumn of 2002 is understandable. Why had the Iraqis stopped UN inspectors during the 90s if they had nothing to hide? Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003.

By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks.

‘We live in a nightmare. Death and carnage is everywhere’ Ali, Baghdad resident (the Guardian):

“I stood there in the middle of it all. I saw people picking bodies up and carrying them. A police car arrived and the police started to fire bullets in the air. I ran away and hid at the entrance of a shop. When a woman saw me, she started screaming. There was blood on my arm and on my leg.” A friend of Ali’s stopped a passing ambulance and helped him into it. Inside, he found a man whose face was black from burns and whose shoulder was covered with blood. A younger man was bleeding from his legs. “When he tried to lift one of them it bent not at the knee but from the middle of his thigh,” Ali says. “He was screaming, ‘Fix my leg! Fix my leg!’ ”

At the hospital, Ali and the others sat in a corridor waiting to be treated by the overstretched medical team. “There were children there who were all red,” he remembers. “It looked as if they had no faces, they were so covered with blood.”

After waiting a while he was transferred to another hospital, where a doctor examined him. “The doctor told me I just had two bits of shrapnel in my arm and leg,” Ali says. “He asked me why I was crying. I told him it wasn’t for myself but for all the boys and girls around me.”

Am I a torturer? (Mother Jones)

When I first set off to interview the rank-and-file guards and interrogators tasked with implementing the administration’s torture guidelines, I thought they’d never talk openly. They would be embarrassed, wracked by guilt, living in silent shame in communities that would ostracize them if they knew of their histories. What I found instead were young men hiding their regrets from neighbors who wanted to celebrate them as war heroes. They seemed relieved to talk with me about things no one else wanted to hear—not just about the acts themselves, but also about the guilt, pain, and anger they felt along with pride and righteousness about their service. They struggled with these things, wanted to make sense of them—even as the nation seemed determined to dismiss the whole matter and move on.

This, perhaps, is the real scandal of Abu Ghraib: In survey after survey, as many as two-thirds of Americans say torture is justified when it’s used to get information from terrorists. In an abc/Washington Post poll in the wake of the 2004 scandal, 60 percent of respondents classified what happened at Abu Ghraib as mere abuse, not torture. And as recently as last year, 68 percent of Americans told Pew Research pollsters that they consider torture an acceptable option when dealing with terrorists.

Critics of the administration’s interrogation policies warn that the ramifications will be felt across the globe, including by Americans unlucky enough to be imprisoned abroad. Foreign-policy scholars fear the fallout from Abu Ghraib has already weakened the U.S. military’s anti-terrorism capabilities. Lawyers warn about war-crime tribunals. But hardly anyone is discussing the repercussions already being felt here at home. It’s the soldiers tying the sandbags around Iraqis’ necks and blaring the foghorns through the night who are experiencing the effects most acutely. And the communities they’re returning to are reeling as a result.

Posting will resume on Tuesday - I’m going to my parents for Easter, no internet access.
Have a good Easter. Peace.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 8:36 pm and is filed under Friday food for thought, Human rights, International, Politics, War and military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.