Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
Yes, General Hertling, foreign fighters are the problem in Iraq
Rami G. Khouri
Jordan Times, Wednesday, October 29, 2003
MY VOTE for the Strange Statement of the Week Award goes to Brigadier General Mark Hertling, deputy commander of the First Armoured Division of the US Army, stationed in Iraq, who told reporters Monday that the coordinated bombings in Baghdad that day were the work of “foreign fighters”. As if Brigadier General Hertling were a favourite son of Tikrit, raised on date palms and memories of Haroon Al Rasheed! What kind of insulting nonsense is this? He gets the award for the sheer audacity and haughty self-indulgence of being a foreign fighter in Iraq blaming other foreign fighters for the violence there. We must navigate this slippery ground if we wish to end the military, intellectual, moral and political violence that defines many aspects of Iraq today. The Americans in Iraq, like the Israelis in Gaza, want the world to believe that evil people who hate goodness, democracy and freedom are waging a campaign that must be stamped out by the force of Good Guy Guns. The actions of the Americans and Israelis, respectively, are not factored into the equation of events on the ground or how the human mind works. This is a form of intellectual terror that is as dangerous as the terror of bombs on the street, and it must be fought just as hard.
The rest of the world takes a more complete and accurate view of the violence in Palestine-Israel and Iraq. It notes that occupation, resistance and assorted degrees of terror (by sovereign states and non-state groups) occur in a linear manner: occupation breeds resistance. This, subsequently and predictably, becomes a cycle of violence that engulfs occupier, occupied, innocent bystanders and other interested third parties who join the fray.
The US wants the world to believe that evil emanates unilaterally from the twisted minds of those who hate freedom and America, and manifests itself in the form of terror attacks such as we witness in Iraq. But the world is not buying this line because this is the sort of lying that our parents taught us to resist, and the sort of political and moral terror that the United Nations Charter was designed to negate.
Rather, the reality is more nuanced, less simplistic and goes something like this: Saddam Hussein ran an evil and terrible regime that caused the Iraqi people great suffering. The world is delighted that he is gone. His removal by the unilateral force of Anglo-American arms has generated a different kind of suffering for many Iraqis, including security concerns, infrastructural problems, political uncertainties and tensions, and degradations and humiliations that are inherent in foreign occupations and the sort of social engineering the US is trying to achieve in recreating Iraq. The Anglo-American assault has also generated new concerns among other peoples in the region who fear the consequences of simplistic American formulae for changing regimes and remaking societies largely in its own image.
The Americans arrogantly portray the choice in Iraq as either the evil of Saddam or the promise of Paul Bremer. This, too, the world is not buying. The world is not that uncomplicated or black and white, regardless of how comfortable the White House is with such simple-mindedness. This paint-and-think-by-numbers approach to the world has unravelled before the realities on the ground.
Most of the peoples in the Middle East and throughout the world today reject the American attempt to blame small groups of terrorists for the violence in Iraq without considering the wider context of the terror. I would guess that most of the world sincerely condemns the terror, delights in the Iraqi people's liberation from the terrible former regime, and sees the end of the violence coming through a speedy, orderly Anglo-American exit from Iraq, and a resumption of Iraqi sovereignty, as per the wishes of the Iraqis themselves.
In other words, the problem in Iraq is both the “foreign fighters” who bomb innocent civilians and foreign occupiers, and the “foreign fighters” from the US, UK, Poland, Spain and other distant and alien lands who perpetuate the distortions and stresses that are inherent in the regime change phenomenon. The record is increasingly clear: three American-driven regime changes in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq have given the world three twisted and violent lands. Foreign soldiers cannot bring peace to distant lands.
Political terror and the terror of bombs have now come together in the lands where America and Israel have sought and made regime changes. Bremer and Osama Ben Laden clearly are not synonymous or morally equivalent. They operate according to very different goals, stimuli and values. But the consequences of their policies end up being very similar — especially when viewed through the eyes of innocent civilians dying on the streets of their own cities, whether in New York or Baghdad.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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