Stop Blaming the Iraqis for US Crimes Against Peace

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The right wing noise machine has gotten to a lot of people. The machine wants us to believe Iraqis are barbarians, and despite US good will, they are destined to fight with each other. This is the foundation of the US exit strategy; "It's OK to abandon primitive, dark-skinned Arabs that don't want democracy. We tried, but these uncivilized people don't appreciate our sacrifices."

No mention of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) undermining Iraq's civil and security structure, no mention of the CPA opening Iraq's economy to looting by transnational corporations (as if there could be fair competition when 12-years of sanctions made Iraqi company's weak), no mention that the US created a power vacuum, no mention that Ambassador Negroponte and Colonel James Steele introduced the Salvadoran death squad model in Iraq, no mention that the US aggressive war of choice triggered this chaos and constitutes a crime against peace.

No mention that the US is responsible for the chaos and for reparations to Iraq, but that the US is in such deep debt that it will be hard to convince US tax payers to fund reparations. Instead, the so-called "leaders" on both sides of the political spectrum would have us believe that the Iraqis are to blame, so we don't owe them anything.

My experience in Washington suggests that the heads of most people in Washington are spinning with day-to-day deadlines. They have not stopped to think about what I've written above. If they took the time, they might realize that imposing benchmarks on the Iraqis is unfair. Granted, the Iraqis must take the lead in solving the problems facing them; however, the US is responsible for creating many of the problems and is thus responsible for the financial support to enable a process to resolve them.

Update: Unfortunately, the "blame-the-Iraqi" framing of reality has been adopted by the Democratic leadership: "Meet our benchmarks or else."

During the Nuremberg trials, the chief American prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, stated:

To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

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In other words, Bush and the US citizens are responsible for "the accumulated evil of the whole."
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