While I understand this guy's point, I would advise him not to "hold his breath" until an American mainstream paper talks about "four American mercenaries" - particularly the Washington Post. I just don't think the bulk of the American public is ready for the concept "American mercenary". Mention mercenary to most people, and they automatically think foreign mercenary.
JMO
The Globalization of Slaughtering
Abu Spinoza
The U.S. contractors who were killed in Fallujah were not civilians, as is being touted in the headlines of the corporate press. "U.S. Vows to Find Civilians' Killers," (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43397-2004Apr1.html ) the Washington Post headline said.
Rather, the "four American civilians" were Blackwater mercenaries who went to Iraq to support an illegal occupation and make a fast buck for themselves. The use of mercenary forces is a manifestation of the corporate globalization of slaughtering and violence. A Washington Post report states: "The four men brutally slain Wednesday in Fallujah were among the most elite commandos working in Iraq to guard employees of U.S. corporations and were hired by the U.S. government to protect bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers." These men were working "under a subcontract to a company named Regency Hotel and Hospitality." The "armed commandos earn an average of about $1,000 a day."
Though these men were soldiers of fortune, lured to Iraq by the desire to make money and to serve the occupation authorities lording over Iraq, the Fallujah crowd's actions, which amounted to a form of lynching, not dissimilar to ones that have taken place in North America, were deplorable. Even mercenaries deserve a proper and decent burial. It should be said that the lynching was not carried out by the Iraqi resistance fighters, who quickly left after shooting the mercenaries. The Post reported that "the men were not victims of a random ambush but were set up as targets."
It appears that the Iraqi resistance had systematically planned to kill the men from Black Water. The lynching, which took place afterwards, was the act of the spontaneous angry crowd that gathered after the killings.
The obvious question to ask is: Why are Iraqis so angry? Why did they act as they did? It is not a difficult question to address. If a country has been subjected to several wars, years and years of sanctions that had a debilitating effect on the society and the economy, and continued imperial ravages, then its population may not be gentle with the occupiers. This would be true of any society, whether Western, Arab, or Asian, or any other. Would North Americans have behaved differently under similar circumstances?
Are Iraqis under occupation expected to behave like angels when the occupiers themselves fail to abide by the rules of war, international law, Geneva Conventions, and basic morality? One crime does not justify another, but if one is trying to explain and understand what happened in Fallujah, it does not make sense to ignore the crimes of occupying power. As Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:
"This incident happened in Fallujah where two days before that, the American army shot many, many people, women and children, on the streets, and — in a bizarre shooting incident that was unjustified, killing many people. Fallujah has been a place where the U.S. Army has actually used brutal force to suppress the people there, including using the F-15s, and F-16s to attack villages and place where they think the resistances are, which is unjustified to use high explosives against individuals. This resulted in many, many casualties in the province. Added to it, they have detained, for 50 or 60 days, hundreds of people on and off, which alienated the people against the American forces and the American contractors or the American security contractors, which are really a private army, uncontrollable by the U.S. This is part of the privatization of the war. Two days ago, three days ago, there was a similar incident in Mosul, where two contractors were killed, under electricity. They were going to the electricity generating plant. The important — the thing that I know is in the media says that the contractors were involved in protecting the food supply. This is the food supply for the U.S. Army, not to be confused with providing help to the local population or anything. It's just a routine U.S. convoy that may have food and may have on other occasions, armaments or anything. So, the resentments of the people of Fallujah are justified. What happens to them is — it's a sad thing, but you know, brutality breeds brutality, and violence breeds violence, and he who started first should take the responsibility, and I think the U.S. army has used an unjustified force against the people of Fallujah, and they have brutalized the people of Fallujah to the point where they had to respond with the same brutality."
If one wishes to face the facts, then one would realize that the Anglo-American occupiers have shown little respect for the lives of Iraqi civilians, Iraqi soldiers, and prisoners of war. Philip Kennicott, a Washington Post staff writer, admits at the end of an article: "This is what it looks like to objectify people. We should know, we've done it before, to our own people and to others. We couldn't have gone to war, in the first place, if we hadn't used our powers of abstraction, distancing and objectification, to minimize the human consequences of our still-fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction." Indeed this is true. The ease with which the imperial Masters of the Universe kill Africans, Afghans, Iraqis, Columbians, Palestinians, Timorese, and others with missiles, cluster bombs, F-16s, helicopters, and computer touch screen application from remote distances with the aid of sophisticated technology does not generate bad press in the corporate media. But the diabolical ugliness and the criminality of such slaughter is no less. Indeed by any reasonable "metric" the violence of the Masters of the Universe exceeds the violence of the wretched masses. Why is it that no editorials appear in the corporate press about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who perished due to sanctions, tens of thousands who died during the recent Anglo-American invasion, and the thousands of innocent Afghans [PDF] who were killed in the name of war against terrorism?
The primary responsibility for stopping the cycle of violence and needless deaths always lies with the stronger party, especially if it also the guilty party to the war. U.S. military spokesmen have expressed the occupation authorities' intention to "pacify its restive population" through "forceful response by the Marines." Pacification is often a codeword for collection punishment of civilians. Rather than speaking about seeking vengeance, the U.S. authorities would be well advised to seek an exit out of this brutal, nasty, and horrific occupation.
Despite government and corporate propaganda, public tolerance of the invasion of other people's countries is quite low. The anti-war movement's real challenge is to put more and more pressure on the Masters of the Universe to immediately and unconditionally withdraw Anglo-American troops out of Iraq and elsewhere. If the Iraqi resistance and the anti-war movement are able to exert sufficient pressure to oblige an Anglo-American military withdrawal from Iraq, it would be a major victory for progressive people worldwide. Such a move could certainly help reduce violence, state terrorism and retail terrorism.
pressaction.com
lurqer |
