A long time ago somebody linked me to a whole bunch of pictures and video from the invasion, and it was…Barbarossa-type shit. The image of the grinning American trooper hoisting his flamethrower in front of someone’s doomed farm, while not gory, is it’s own kind of horrifying. I highly recommend the article What I saw in Fallujah. It’s tough to read but necessary, from someone who was there on the ground and outside the purview of official media.
CW war crimes, mass human suffering
From the article:
The military was maintaining a strict cordon around most of Fallujah. As I could not enter the city, I set out to interview doctors and patients who had fled and were presently working in various hospitals around Baghdad. While visiting Yarmouk Hospital looking for more information about Fallujah, I came across several children from areas south of Baghdad. One of these was a 12-year-old girl, Fatima Harouz, from Latifiya. She lay dazed in a crowded hospital room, limply waving her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, were both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid sat upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet. Her mother told us, “They attacked our home, and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.”
Victims’ testament
Fatima’s uncle was shot and killed, his wife had been wounded, and their home was ransacked by soldiers. “Before they left, they killed all our chickens.” A doctor who was with us looked at me and asked, “This is the freedom. In their Disneyland are there kids just like this?”
Another young woman, Rana Obeidy, had been walking home in Baghdad with her brother two nights earlier. She assumed the soldiers had shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. She had a chest wound where a bullet had grazed her, but had struck her little brother and killed him. In another room, a small boy from Fallujah lay on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade thrown into his home by a US soldier had entered his body through his back and was implanted near his kidney. An operation had successfully removed the shrapnel, but his father had been killed by what his mother described as “the haphazard shooting of the Americans”. The boy, Amin, lay in his bed vacillating between crying with pain and playing with his toy car.
Later, I found myself at a small but busy supply centre in Baghdad set up to distribute goods to refugees from Fallujah. Standing in an old, one-storey building that used to be a vegetable market, I watched as people walked around wearily to obtain basic foodstuffs, blankets or information about housing. “They kicked all the journalists out of Fallujah so they could do whatever they want,” said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who had escaped from Fallujah three days before. “The first thing they did was bomb the hospitals because that is where the wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people are in the street and the soldiers are rolling their tanks over them. This happened so many times. What you see on the TV is nothing. That is just one camera. What you cannot see is much more.”
There were also stories of soldiers not discriminating between civilians and resistance fighters. Another man, Abdul Razaq Ismail, had arrived from Fallujah one week earlier and had been helping with the distribution of supplies to other refugees, having received similar help himself. Loading a box with blankets to send to a refugee camp, he said, “There are dead bodies on the ground and nobody can bury them. The Americans are dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling some bodies with tanks and leaving them at the soccer stadium.” Another man sat nearby nodding his head. He couldn’t stop crying. After a while, he said he wanted to talk to us. “They bombed my neighbourhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from under them.”
Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man in a torn shirt and dusty pants, told of how he escaped with his family, just the day before, while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, killing his cousin. “They used these weird bombs that first put up smoke in a cloud, and then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burned for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours.”
This was the first time I had heard a refugee describing the use of white phosphorous incendiary weapons by the US military, fired from artillery into Fallujah. Though it is not technically a banned weapon, it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions to use white phosphorous in an area where civilians may be hit. I heard similar descriptions in the coming days and weeks, both from refugees and doctors who had fled the city.
Several doctors I interviewed had told me they had been instructed by the interim government not to speak to any journalists about the patients they were receiving from Fallujah. A few of them told me they had even been instructed by the Shia-controlled Ministry of Health not to accept patients from Fallujah.
It would seem insane to me that none of these people ever went to the Hague if I didn’t know that the US has already threatened to bomb it. As a kid I used to think international law was some solemn thing, now I see It’s a comedy
Fun fact: the Hague Invasion Act was signed in August of 2002
But they achieved all their objectives so well! /s
Look I’m not one to say American invasion was right in any way, but this is a bit of a misleading in title. Most sources in the article reference indirect deaths. If we quantified everything in indirect deaths, death tolls across the board would be inflated in the same proportion. I think it important to keep in mind the U.S. wasn’t fuckin digging mass graves over there. The stated number would mean we would need to kill around 600 people a day for 20+ years. No amount of media corruption in the world could coverup that many deaths. I’ve known and do know people who were natives that served as translators during the war, that’s not how they tell it.
This article is one sided. Doesn’t discuss any of the economic benefits of these actions. Only communist things like megadeaths and habitat destruction.
Also you just know they used some covid style math where everyone who pulled a muscle farting the wrong way is counted as a Iraq war related death. Also doesn’t account for all the deaths prevented by showing the rest of the planet what happens if Raytheon wants to test a new weapon system with near peer, red team targets in realistic testing condition while the CIA decides the collapse of your state would shift the balance of power in your region in a way beneficial to Murica.
Also doesn’t account for all the deaths prevented by showing the rest of the planet what happens if Raytheon wants to test a new weapon system
yeah but they never annexed any land, so it’s ok or something
Who needs to formally annex land when you can install a puppet government, set up military bases for your decades long occupation, and rebuild the economy under the yoke of your own corporations.
Nearly all the benefits but small part of costs of the traditional empire.
And tankies says capitalism bring no progress smh (/s)
Yep, it’s all good as long as land wasn’t annexed
Fucking shameful. I’m sorry world. Please know that many in the US condemn these wars, but there is very little we can do about them.
Don’t be sorry. I was born in Russia, living in the US. You can love your country without supporting the government. You’re not responsible for what your government is doing if you don’t have any way to stop it. Just speak out when you can.
I neither love America nor the government. Our culture is a disease, our cities need to be razed or entirely redesigned, and our land needs to be returned to natives, to Mexico, and to the descendants of slaves.
Our entire society is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.
Lol ok bud.
“Please love America” -Russian guy
Living in Russia I was told that US is the mortal enemy and everything is their fault. Living in the US I’ve learned that it’s actually Russia that is evil and Russians can’t be trusted.
It’s all bullshit. All major governments are playing their own game and citizens are just disposable pawns in that game. Hating each other because of where on the map we were born is just playing into that game. I love and miss my “motherland”. But my motherland is under siege and I can’t go back. The US is far from perfect, but if I still lived in Russia I’d be in jail or worse simply for what I’ve posted so far on Lemmy. Also, since I moved I’ve seen Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden as the president. In the old country it’s been Putin, Putin, Medvedev (Putin), and Putin.
US isn’t “good”. But it is better.
nope. sorry, but your motherland hasn’t been responsible for nearly as much death and destruction as the USA. You think that having a different president means that there is some sort of functional democratic process that represents the people of the US? That is farcical. Sure, it might suck to be in russia and you could go to jail for the things you have said, but Russia is what it is today because of the US’s antagonism towards the soviet union and russia in particular. Russia as it exists now is a consequence of US involvement.. The US ruling-class doesn’t care about democracy or freedom in Russia. The soviet union had its contradictions and problems, but a lot of the soviet union’s problems were the direct result of US meddling. The US has been quite open about that, from its invasion in 1918 to its arming of right-wing extremists with the goal of killing as many soviets as possible. But working people in the US never really decided any of that, because the US government does not have either the form or the function of a governance body that represents working-peoples interests.
Just because you live in the US now, and your life might be better now, doesn’t mean that the US government isn’t the worlds villain… It is no matter how nice you have it there. You can check in with the millions of dead in southeast asia, or the millions dead and displaced in the middle east.
Oh fuck off with that. We could sit here all day copying and pasting Wikipedia articles about crimes against humanity committed by both nations. My life is better here. It probably could be even better somewhere else, but it’s not like moving countries is something people can easily do. You want the world to have a clear constant villain but that’s not how that works. US commuted genocides, Russia/USSR sure as shit did, same with China now. Every country has committed some kind of an atrocity in the recent past. It doesn’t meant that they can be forgiven, forgotten, or excused. All I’m saying is that neither the Russian or the American governments represent the people. It’s just that the foundation of America was built in individualism. And because of that the individual still have more rights and freedoms then in Russia.
Thank you for sharing your opinion despite the constant pressure of tankies here.
It was worse on Reddit.
Russians can’t be trusted
See how racist listening to americans makes you? You’re a “Russian orc” buddy, the slava ukrani brunch ghouls will never accept you, stop embarassing yourself.
Ok bud.
5 million dead buddy. You can’t nationalism that away unless you think brown people are subhuman.
Bush should be in jail for Iraq.
Regarding Afghanistan, we should have focused exclusively on counter-insurgency and let the Loya Jirga do its thing without US interference.
Osama bin Laden was found in Pakistan, so maybe they didn’t need to invade Afghanistan at all.
war is just a way for businesses to shore up their falling profits. destroying another country gives victor companies chances to rebuild, which temporarily shores up profit rates because so much capital is destroyed and the creation of new capital during the windup phase actually increases the rate of profit for a little bit. there are other techniques as well. that said, the corruption was so rampant that they didn’t even execute that well. either way the human costs of continuing to run capitalism as usual are staggering and wars are one of the many facets of that. all the other explanations and media outrage etc and just cover stories to make it palatable for the public, which has already believed the big lies about democracy and freedom existing under capitalism
Your argument would be very convenient for socialists or communists looking for an explanation that blames war on the rich. Unfortunately I do believe it is a gross oversimplification that is neither useful nor particularly true.
While it is true that the military industrial complex has gotten out of control in many western countries since World War II, the argument that private industry is the true beneficiary and intentional instigator of war can be readily disproved. Rather, this assumption made by many on the left is born from a partial realization of the truth that war is about resources, but the argument quickly loses the plot thereafter. War is indeed about resources, both physical and psychological in nature, or put more succinctly, war is about security. Each state actor responds and reacts as necessary in order to ensure their legitimate security needs are met.
This view was famously espoused by political scientist Kenneth Waltz when he built upon the theories of classic realists such as Machiavelli. Whereas Classic Realism suggests that war is about power, Waltz takes it one step further with Structural Realism and gives us an academic framework to understand the balance of power and the motivation behind state actors. Waltz suggests that these power shifts are the result of states reacting to perceived threats in order to ensure security. For instance, in the Structural Realist view, one could say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to gain security in response to a perceived NATO threat. Using this theory, we could similarly suggest that the US invasion of Afghanistan was a move to obtain greater security in a region that threatened the US hegemony (though the argument starts to break down here when we distinguish between the Taliban and Al Qaeda as neo-realism does not explain the action of non-state actors).
While it would be fair to say that in many western countries, the military industrial complex has acquired a massive amount of power and control over the government, it can hardly be said that war exists only for the benefit of war profiteers who help with nation building. The most obvious proof of this is the fact that war long pre-dates crony capitalism, nation building, and the military industrial complex as a whole. Furthermore, while lobbyists do hold an incredible amount of power, they are certainly not the rulers and final decision-makers of our country. Foreign policy is set by a number of diverse lawmakers and civil servants across the political landscape, but the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, which was opposed by the Military Industrial Complex, as well as the US intervention in Somalia which was wholly a humanitarian mission, are proof that they do not make the final decisions.
Our democracy certainly has many problems. Money pollutes our campaigns, and lobbyists hold far too much power. Trump’s five year lobbying ban for former US officials was a good start until he repealed it. We need more measures that limit lobbyists, and limit the ability of ANY politician or political party from totally derailing our country by putting us into unnecessary wars. We need more checks and balances in our system that prevent career politicians from fucking the rest of us over. And dammit, we definitely need to elect some better people than these jokers we’ve been electing lately. However; war is far more complex than you suggest.
War is not particularly complex, it’s just not something liberals are usually willing to understand as it challenges their little mythologies (many of which you repeated here).
Relatively simple questions are unanswerable by that framework, not even approximately. Let’s try some.
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Who pushes for war in the first place? Where does the impetus come from? Normal folks don’t wake up and say, “yeah I’d like to destroy a country and its people 4500 miles away”, and they definitely don’t have the power to make war happen.
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What gains the consent of the country to support and maintain war? Why do anti-war movements, even with millions of people, fail to stop war?
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Why do the wars end? When they achieve their purpose? What purpose was that?
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Who benefits from the wars? Are they involved in the process?
Of course, the driving factors here are simply capitalism and its political lackeys, attacking from multiple angles to ensure its seat of empire will achieve the desired ends by pushing and by removing obstacles. The impetus is a series of battling foreign policy think tanks, politicians ready to support military spending, a friendly (and racist!) media apparatus, and war profiting companies paying every single one of those groups to keep the heat up for the next boondoggle. Constant vilification of established “enemies” and attempts to create new ones, usually targeted at countries that undermine the power of the global seat of capital and therefore its ability to exploit labor and resources internationally.
This is why Saudi Arabia is an “ally” while Iran is an enemy. All things the same, Americans would be just as racist towards both, care just as little for their lives, know just as little about them. But one cozies up to the hegemony of international capital and the other does not, so you are to hate the one and not the other. Scads of anti-Iranian think tanks and propaganda while the Saudis get occasional mention and can even murder journalists on US soil and get away with it. It’s not actually that complex so long as you don’t believe lies about American democracy, “freedom”, interest in peace, liberal world order, etc.
So when we know that these are the actors and criteria, why some wars and not others? Why not big new wars every 6 months instead of several years? Well, the interests involved are part of global capital, they respond to the rate of profit and crises of capitalism, and politicians are on their side. Both the capitalists and their buddies in Congress know that war is a “stimulus” and they count it as jobs and profits and campaign donations (legalized bribery) and good press. The opportune time is whenever it can be sentimentally capitalized on, whenever they can get away with it. When it’s hurting the “right people” at the time, where they might have to wait for consent to get manufactured first. When times are tough and “jobs” mean particularly more than other people’s lives.
And more deeply and perniciously, capitalism forms society itself, such as the white supremacist settler culture of the United States where it is never that difficult to whip up support against another ethnicity, just requires jumping through a few different hoops depending in which capitalist party you favor. The intense gullibility and susceptibility to propaganda, in part due to schools’ materials being dictated by reactionary school systems that themselves work in concert with large publishers to create verifiably false and simplistic material into history textbooks, lesson plans, etc (see: Texas’ input on other states’ curricula). The precarity forced on so many that they can’t even consider joining an anti-war movement. The normalization of American military violence and widespread societal myths about its impact, its actual activities, its history.
I don’t think any of this is complicated. It is only uncomfortable for some.
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The United States is a constitutional hipocracy. Chomsky has an interesting style of writing…
It’s even worse than that, war on terror alone resulted in over 6 million deaths https://bylinetimes.com/2021/09/15/up-to-six-million-people-the-unrecorded-fatalities-of-the-war-on-terror/
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ah gotcha
