The WikiLeaks documents and the rape of Iraq

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The WikiLeaks documents and the rape of Iraq
26 October 2010

The nearly 400,000 documents released by WikiLeaks give some indication of the
barbaric reality of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The military reports
contain ample evidence of war crimes, for which the highest levels of the US
military and political establishment are responsible.

The major revelations contained in the documents include:

    * Reports of thousands of previously undisclosed civilian causalities. The
Iraq Body Count, which has kept a conservative estimate of the number of deaths
based on reports in the media, has found in the military logs some 15,000
civilians deaths not included in its earlier count. This is despite the fact
that the documents report no civilian deaths in connection with major US
atrocities, including the US assault that reduced much of Fallujah to ruins in
2004. The documents lend credence to other reports giving a much higher death
toll, including one study by the medical journal Lancet estimating over one
million killed.

    * Clear evidence of specific war crimes. This includes the killing of two
Iraqis seeking to surrender to a US helicopter gunship in February 2007. The
soldiers in the helicopter spoke by radio with an army lawyer who advised them
that people cannot surrender to aircraft—a falsehood—and they proceeded to kill
the individuals in cold blood. The soldiers were part of the same crew that was
involved in the July 2007 killing of 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters
journalists, captured in a video released by WikiLeaks earlier this year.

    * The killing by US forces of 834 people at military checkpoints, including
at least 681 civilians and 30 children.

    * Systematic torture carried out by the Iraqi stooge army and police, with
the de facto sanction and complicity of the American military. US soldiers
reported more than 1,300 claims of torture between 2005 and 2009, including
beatings, burnings, electric shocks, sodomy and rape—similar to the atrocities
carried out by the US at Abu Ghraib. The US military was also aware of cases in
which the Iraqi puppet regime murdered detainees. A March 25, 2006 report on one
prisoner kept by the Iraqi Ministry of Justice is typical: “His hands were
bound/shackled and he was suspended from the ceiling; the use of blunt objects
(pipes) to beat him on the back and legs; and the use of electric drills to bore
holes in his leg.”

    * US soldiers were ordered not to investigate prisoner torture carried out
by the Iraqi stooge forces on the grounds that these incidents did not involve
American troops. More than 180,000 people were detained at some point between
2004 and 2009, or one in 50 Iraqi males.

There will no doubt be further revelations as these documents are examined. They
include a trove of information that has been withheld from the population of
Iraq, the United States and the world.

The US-led conquest of Iraq stands as one of the most barbaric war crimes of the
modern era. Writing in April 2003, one month after the invasion, the World
Socialist Web Site noted that during the buildup to World War II “it was common
to speak of the Nazis’ ‘rape of Czechoslovakia,’ or ‘rape of Poland.” What
characterized Germany’s modus operandi in these countries was the use of
overwhelming military force and the complete elimination of their governments
and all civic institutions, followed by the takeover of their economies for the
benefit of German capitalism. It is high time that what the US is doing is
called by its real name. A criminal regime in Washington is carrying out the
rape of Iraq.” (See, “The rape of Iraq”)

The devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people has only intensified over the past
seven-and-a-half years. The US has engaged in sociocide—the systematic
destruction of an entire civilization. In addition to the hundreds of thousands
killed, millions more have been turned into refugees. There has been a
staggering growth of disease, infant mortality and malnutrition. The US military
has destroyed the country’s infrastructure, leaving an economy in ruins, with an
unemployment rate of 70 percent.

To the horror of the world’s population, the Iraqi people have been made to
suffer an unimaginable tragedy at the hands of the most powerful military force
on the planet. And for what? To establish US domination over the oil-rich and
geostrategically critical country.

Every major institution in the United States is complicit in this crime. In the
face of broad popular opposition within the US, both Democrats and Republicans
authorized the war and have supported it ever since, expending hundreds of
billions of dollars in the process. The American people have sought repeatedly
to end the war through elections, only to be confronted with the fact that the
war continues regardless of which corporate-controlled party is in office.

Obama, elected as a result of popular hostility to Bush and the Republicans and
their policies of war and handouts to the rich, has continued the same policies.
Running as a critic of the Iraq War, he now praises the US military occupiers as
“liberators.”

The Democratic administration has expanded the war against Afghanistan and
Pakistan, vastly increasing the use of drone attacks and targeted
assassinations. The Obama White House asserts the right to kill anyone it
chooses, including US citizens, merely on its say-so that the victim is a terrorist.

The US media, including its liberal wing, promulgated the lies used to justify
the war and, as “embedded journalists,” covered up the atrocities committed by
the US military. Its response to the WikiLeaks revelations compounds its
complicity in war crimes. On the one hand the US media downplays the
significance of the documents, echoing the Pentagon line that they reveal
“nothing new,” and on the other they witch-hunt WikiLeaks and its founder Julian
Assange for helping to bring these atrocities to light.

The absence of any significant protest within the political or media
establishment in the face of these enormous crimes testifies to the wholesale
descent of the American ruling class into lawlessness and criminality.

The architects of these war crimes remain at large. Those who planned and
oversaw the illegal invasion of Iraq—including all the top officials of the Bush
administration and the US military—have yet to be held to account. Obama and his
top officials—Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates—have added their own expanding list
of crimes to those of the preceding administration.

The release of the WikiLeaks documents coincides with an upsurge in the class
struggle. Millions of workers—including most recently in France—are coming into
direct conflict with the corporations and their political representatives, who
are demanding unprecedented austerity measures to pay for the economic crisis.
The struggle against imperialist war must be made a central component of this
offensive of the working class, above all in the United States.

The interests of workers throughout the world are the same, and workers of every
country face the same class enemy. Imperialism, Lenin noted, is reaction all
down the line.

The corporate aristocracy that has unleashed such violence on Iraq will not
hesitate to use violence and terror against the American working class to
protect its wealth and power. The forces turned into hardened killers and
sociopaths in colonial wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan will eventually be
flung against those fighting within the US against unemployment, poverty and
homelessness.

To succeed, the struggle of the working class against war and social reaction
must be guided by a new political perspective and strategy. To end imperialist
war the international working class must wrest power from the blood-soaked hands
of the capitalists and their political representatives and establish democratic
control over the world economy.

Joseph Kishore

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/pers-o26.shtml

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