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Title: ‘Iraqis cannot forget what Americans have done here’
Source:
antiwar.com
URL Source: http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/11/29/ ... what-americans-have-done-here/
Published: Dec 1, 2012
Author: Cathy Breen
Post Date: 2012-12-01 20:04:40 by F.A. Hayek Fan
Keywords: None
Views: 696
Comments: 13
“It is not written in our hearts, it is carved in our hearts.” I awoke this morning still shaken with these words in my head. Yesterday I was in Ramadi and Fallujah. Instead of bringing a message of caring, of empathy for their suffering and a desire for peace, my presence as someone from the U.S, seemed to open wounds that are unfathomably deep. I sat in on a lecture, given in English, to maybe fifty or more young men and women at a college in Ramadi. They were all about 22 and 23 years of age, in their last year of a 5-year program. That means they were about 13 or 14 years old during the U.S. led invasion and beginning of the occupation. I was invited to speak by the president as an “honored guest” after the lecture. To my embarrassment the professor graciously hurried through his lecture on my account. I had everyone’s attention. It was awkward for me, and after introducing myself, I said I would be grateful to hear from them. There was only silence. I am sure my words sounded empty, trite and artificial. Then a young man in the front row only a couple of feet from me said in a quiet voice “We have nothing to say. The last years have been only sad ones.” Again there was silence. Sami, my host from Najaf and part of the Muslim Peacemaker Team, stood and shared. He told the story of how, after the U.S. bombing assaults on Fallujah, he and others came from the Shia cities of Najaf and Karbala, to carry out a symbolic act of cleaning up rubble and trash in the streets of Fallujah. This gesture, he said, melted hearts and healed some of the brokenness between Sunni and Shia. He spoke of the delegation of peacemakers from the United States who were just in Najaf for twelve days, of the work to build bridges and seek reconciliation. An impassioned young woman from the middle of the lecture hall spoke up. It was obviously not easy for her. “It is not,” she said, “about lack of water and electricity [something I had mentioned]. You have destroyed everything. You have destroyed our country. You have destroyed what is inside of us! You have destroyed our ancient civilization. You have taken our smiles from us. You have taken our dreams!” Someone asked, “Why did you this? What did we do to you that you would do this to us?” “Iraqis cannot forget what Americans have done here,” said another. “They destroyed the childhood. You don’t destroy everything and then say ‘We’re sorry.’ “You don’t commit crimes and then say ‘Sorry.’” “To bomb us and then send teams to do investigations on the effects of the bombs…No, it will not be forgotten. It is not written on our hearts, it is carved in our hearts.” We are happy to make bridges between people, said the president of the college, but we will not forget. What can you do? In Fallujah 30% of the babies are born deformed.” What can you do? He spoke of how he’d met an American soldier in the airport. He was part of the Special Forces in Iraq. The soldier told him “The bible tells us not to kill. But we were taught to kill, to kill for nothing. Just kill. I am so sorry.” “Build bridges? the president repeated. Apologize? he said. What can you do?” There was no rancor in his tone or demeanor, only anger and deep pain. A young man said….The U.S. is still here. There are fifteen thousand people at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. [and 5,000 security personal to protect them]. They have their collaborators. The war is not over. We later visited a Sheik in Fallujah in his home. He and Sami embraced warmly and he welcomed us into the sitting area. In the course of our sharing we spoke of our visit to nearby Ramadi, of what was said there. “War always results in two losers,” he said sorrowfully.
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#1. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
“To bomb us and then send teams to do investigations on the effects of the bombs…No, it will not be forgotten. It is not written on our hearts, it is carved in our hearts.” Most Republicans will never understand this, most Democrats will exploit it through selective outrage, and mostly neither will likely read it in the first place. "I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it." - William S Burroughs
I don't blame them in the slightest for how they feel.
There are actually govt agents who spread conspiracy theories among the gullible to help promote the illusion that the govt is all powerful.
Seriously dude, do you need it spelled out? It was for Israel's national security.
No it wasn't. It was mostly for Israel, but not for their security. It was primarily to steal their oil. God is always good!
Peace Loving Jews.
Whatever is running this crazy planet requires constant misery and death. It doesn't matter which nation supplies it. One decade it is Asia, the next Europe. Those in control have the power to create new and more efficient killing hardware. They can hire the mercenaries to use the hardware. The mercenaries families swear this murderous rampage is necessary to "keep us safe". It won't be long before other mercenaries arrive here to stomp our balls, like our troops stomp Asians' now. How many of you are really anti-war? Do you refuse to cooperate entirely or do you pay your fair share? Do you do what's right? Or do you do what's comfortable?
a. Israel didn't need Iraq's oil. Egypt was req'd by the 1979 Camp David Peace Treaty to sell Israel gas and oil @ below world market prices. And to supplement Egypt's oil and gas, Israel also bought oil from Nigeria, the UK, and even from some Arab nations ( Saudi Arabia?) via Turkey. Now Israel gets 90% of its oil from Russia and former Soviet republics via a new pipeline that was recently built. www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=40035 snip "In the past, Israel imported oil from Egypt, the North Sea, West Africa, and Mexico. According to officials at the Ministry of National Infrastructures, Israel now imports 90% of its oil from Russia and the Caspian region." b. But Uncle Saddam's downfall was sealed when he offered to pay Pali families $25,000 every time a family member strapped on a suicide vest and popped himself in Israel taking with him some precious Israelis. With that announcement, Uncle Saddam put a target on himself and Iraq. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2846365.stm "Palestinians get Saddam funds" 03/13/2003 www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,48822,00.html "Saddam Pays 25K for Palestinian Bombers" 03/26/02
We need to screw with them too, it seems. Post everything you know about blood diamonds, witches, tire fires, hookers, ambulamps! We'll order colored t-shirts later and sort all this out. "I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it." - William S Burroughs
How incredibly sad, sorrowful, and shameful what the CSers in charge have done to peoples around the world, and here as well.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken Saddam's fate was sealed was when he unhinged his oil sales from USD to Euro, with the plan to then move to gold Dinar. (Anyone leaving USD is an enemy.) No one cared about bombers at all. They still don't. “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken It's too late for hamburgers, want to help me steal a brautosaurus? "I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it." - William S Burroughs
They still don't. That's not true. Arial Sharon cared a lot about the suicide bombers. It was a major Pali threat during the Second Intifada. Sharon threatened Bush that he would nuke Iraq because of Saddam. The suicide bombings pretty much trickled down to nothing after Saddam was captured and the US occupied Iraq. The Iraq Invasion was totally orchestrated by the Israel Lobby for the security of Israel. Once Saddam fell, the neocons thought it would force the Palestinians to acquiese to Israel's demands and also that Syria might be less inclined to cause trouble for Israel thru its previous support of Hezbollah in Lebanon. The neocons didn't give a hoot about Iraq's currency. www.ihr.org/leaflets/iraqwar.shtml "Iraq: A War For Israel" snip Whatever the secondary reasons for the war, the crucial factor in President Bush's decision to attack was to help Israel. With support from Israel and America's Jewish-Zionist lobby, and prodded by Jewish "neo-conservatives" holding high-level positions in his administration, President Bush - who was already fervently committed to Israel - resolved to invade and subdue one of Israel's chief regional enemies. This is so widely understood in Washington that US Senator Ernest Hollings was moved in May 2004 to acknowledge that the US invaded Iraq "to secure Israel," and "everybody" knows it. He also identified three of the influential pro-Israel Jews in Washington who played an important role in prodding the US into war: Richard Perle, chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary; and Charles Krauthammer, columnist and author. [1] Hollings referred to the cowardly reluctance of his Congressional colleagues to acknowledge this truth openly, saying that "nobody is willing to stand up and say what is going on." Due to "the pressures we get politically," he added, members of Congress uncritically support Israel and its policies. Some months before the invasion, retired four-star US Army General and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark acknowledged in an interview: "Those who favor this attack [by the US against Iraq] now will tell you candidly, and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel." [2] Six months before the attack, President Bush met in the White House with eleven members of the US House of Representatives. While the "war against terrorism is going okay," he told the lawmakers, the United States would soon have to deal with a greater danger: "The biggest threat, however, is Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. He can blow up Israel and that would trigger an international conflict." [3] Bush also spoke candidly about why the US was going to war during a White House meeting on Feb. 27, 2003, just three weeks before the invasion. In a talk with Elie Wiesel, the well-known Jewish writer, Bush said: "If we don't disarm Saddam Hussein, he will put a weapon of mass destruction on Israel and they will do what they think they have to do, and we have to avoid that." [4] Jewish-Zionist plans for war against Iraq had been in place for years. In mid-1996, a policy paper prepared for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined a grand strategy for Israel in the Middle East. Entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was written under the auspices of an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Specifically, it called for an "effort [that] can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right..." [8] The authors of "A Clean Break" included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three influential Jews who later held high-level positions in the Bush administration, 2001-2004: Perle as chair of the Defense Policy Board, Feith as Undersecretary of Defense, and Wurmser as special assistant to the Undersecretary of State for Arms Control. The role played by Bush administration officials who are associated with two major pro-Zionist "neoconservative" research centers has come under scrutiny from The Nation, the influential public affairs weekly. [9] The author, Jason Vest, examined the close links between the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), detailing the ties between these groups and various politicians, arms merchants, military men, wealthy pro-Israel American Jews, and Republican presidential administrations JINSA and CSP members, notes Vest, "have ascended to powerful government posts, where... they've managed to weave a number of issues - support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general - into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core... On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war - not just with Iraq, but ‘total war,' as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it... For this crew, ‘regime change' by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative." Samuel Francis, author, editor and columnist, also looked into the "neo-conservative" role in fomenting war. [10] "My own answer," he wrote, "is that the lie [that a massively-armed Iraq posed a grave and imminent threat to the US] was fabricated by neo-conservatives in the administration whose first loyalty is to Israel and its interests and who wanted the United States to smash Iraq because it was the biggest potential threat to Israel in the region. They are known to have been pushing for war with Iraq since at least 1996, but they could not make an effective case for it until after Sept. 11, 2001..." In the aftermath of the 2001 Nine-Eleven terror attacks, ardently pro-Zionist "neo-conservatives" in the Bush administration - who for years had sought a Middle East war to bolster Israel's security in the region - exploited the tragedy to press their agenda. In this they were backed by the Israeli government, which also pressured the White House to strike Iraq. "The [Israeli] military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq," reported a leading Israeli daily paper, Haaretz, in February 2002. [11] The Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian, the respected British daily, reported in August 2002: "Israel signalled its decision yesterday to put public pressure on President George Bush to go ahead with a military attack on Iraq, even though it believes Saddam Hussein may well retaliate by striking Israel." [12] Three months before the US invasion, the well-informed Washington journalist Robert Novak reported that Israeli prime minister Sharon was telling American political leaders that "the greatest US assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime." Moreover, added Novak, "that view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason why US forces today are assembling for war." [13] Israel's spy agencies were a "full partner" with the US and Britain in producing greatly exaggerated prewar assessments of Iraq's ability to wage war, a former senior Israeli military intelligence official has acknowledged. Shlomo Bron, a brigadier general in the Israel army reserves, and a senior researcher at a major Israeli think tank, said that intelligence provided by Israel played a significant role in supporting the US and British case for making war. Israeli intelligence agencies, he said, "badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons [of mass destruction] existed." [14] The role of the pro-Israel lobby in pressing for war has been carefully examined by two prominent American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard University. [15] In an 81-page paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," they wrote: "Pressure from Israel and the [pro-Israel] Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure... Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel's Likud Party. In addition, key leaders of the Lobby's major organizations lent their voices to the campaign for war." Important members of the pro-Israel lobby carried out what professors Mearshiemer and Walt call "an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq. A key part of this campaign was the manipulation of intelligence information, so as to make Saddam look like an imminent threat." For some Jewish leaders, the Iraq war is part of a long-range effort to install Israel-friendly regimes across the Middle East. Norman Podhoretz, a prominent Jewish writer and an ardent supporter of Israel, has been for years editor of Commentary, the influential Zionist monthly. In the Sept. 2002 issue he wrote: "The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil [Iraq, Iran, North Korea]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ‘friends' of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen." Patrick J. Buchanan, the well-known writer and commentator, and former White House Communications director, has been blunt in identifying those who pushed for war: [16] "We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging US relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people's right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity... "Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? "Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud." Uri Avnery - an award-winning Israeli journalist and author, and a three-time member of Israel's parliament - sees the Iraq war as an expression of immense Jewish influence and power. In an essay written some weeks after the US invasion, he wrote: [17] "Who are the winners? They are the so-called neo-cons, or neo-conservatives. A compact group, almost all of whose members are Jewish. They hold the key positions in the Bush administration, as well as in the think-tanks that play an important role in formulating American policy and the ed-op pages of the influential newspapers... The immense influence of this largely Jewish group stems from its close alliance with the extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who nowadays control Bush's Republican party. ... Seemingly, all this is good for Israel. America controls the world, we control America. Never before have Jews exerted such an immense influence on the center of world power." In Britain, a veteran member of Britain's House of Commons bluntly declared in May 2003 that Jews had taken control of America's foreign policy, and had succeeded in pushing the US into war. "A Jewish cabal have taken over the government in the United States and formed an unholy alliance with fundamentalist Christians," said Tam Dalyell, a Labour party deputy and the longest-serving House member. "There is far too much Jewish influence in the United States," he added. [18]
F**k it send me a dollar, I'll send it right back eh? "I am not one of those weak-spirited, sappy Americans who want to be liked by all the people around them. I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it." - William S Burroughs
“Iraqis cannot forget what Americans have done here,” said another. “They destroyed the childhood. You don’t destroy everything and then say ‘We’re sorry.’ “You don’t commit crimes and then say ‘Sorry.’”
#2. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#3. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
Someone asked, “Why did you this? What did we do to you that you would do this to us?”
#4. To: scrapper2 (#3)
Seriously dude, do you need it spelled out? It was for Israel's national security.
#5. To: RickyJ (#4)
"Satan / Cheney in "08" 
#6. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#7. To: RickyJ (#4)
No it wasn't. It was mostly for Israel, but not for their security. It was primarily to steal their oil.
#8. To: kawika (#6)
(Edited)
Whatever is running this crazy planet requires constant misery and death. It doesn't matter which nation supplies it. One decade it is Asia, the next Europe.
#9. To: F.A. Hayek Fan (#0)
#10. To: scrapper2 (#7)
#11. To: Lod (#10)
#12. To: Lod (#10)
No one cared about bombers at all.
#13. To: scrapper2 (#12)
Very superstitious, nothin' more to sayVery superstitious, the devil's on his way
Thirteen month old baby broke,
the lookin' glass
Seven years of bad luck, good things in your past
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