It appears today there is a distinct division on how Americans are viewing the news of the war crimes perpetrated on Iraqi detainees by American troops. Although the President and the Secretary of Defense have both “apologized” for these actions, their minions in the press and their shills on the radio are trying mightily to rationalize these acts away.
Just the “horrors” of war some say. You know, kind of like “collateral” damage. While there are others claiming the stories are much worse than reality, while even the Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee are working hand in hand with their fellow Republicans to keep a great deal of the new evidence of sex crimes and murder, perpetrated against these Iraqis who had been convicted of no crime, out of the hands of the American People.
Perhaps, some of these photos and videotapes the Senate is hiding will find their way into the hands of the foreign press. Then they will be available for the whole world to see on the Internet. Even while our politicians on both sides work like cats in a sandbox to cover up the truth from the citizens of this country, and the world.
All of this is not new. The much-worshipped first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, conducted just such a war against the citizens of the South. Murder, rape, pillaging and theft were rampant, perpetrated by the Union Army. Charles Adams documents in his fine work, “When in the Course of Human Events” that some Northern newspapers even called for the total annihilation of the entire people of the South.
Lincoln, the master of duplicity, had issued a “code of conduct” if you will, for the Northern Army. It was known as General Order No. 100, also known as the “Lieber Code”. As professor Thomas DiLorenzo points out “The Code’s author was the German legal scholar Francis Leiber, an advisor to Otto von Bismarck and a staunch advocate of centralized governmental power. In his writings Lieber denounced the federal system of government created by the American founding fathers as having created "confederacies of petty sovereigns" and dismissed the Jeffersonian philosophy of government as a collection of "obsolete ideas." In Germany he was arrested several times for subversive activities.”
This code, while mentioning the illegality of waging war against the civilian populace, gave total discretion to the commanders in the field to dismiss the code if situations “warranted.”
Like the war against Iraq, the war Lincoln brought to the south, targeted civilians from the very beginning. Did not the sanctions of the past 13 years weigh much more heavily on the civilians than it did the military in Iraq? Do you really think for a moment that Saddam and his legions went without essentials?
Compare if you will these sanctions against Iraq and Lincoln’s “Anaconda Plan.” Lincoln’s idea was to blockade the Southern ports (an act of war) to starve the Southern populace into submission. Drugs and medicines were on the list of banned items. Ironic is it not that George W. Bush included vaccines for infants in the things to be denied Iraq by the embargo.
If Madeline Albright found the deaths of 250,000+ civilians, many of them children and elderly, “acceptable,” do you really think our government cares about a few thousand tortured detainees?
Lincoln certainly had nothing but praise for his commanders who perpetrated acts of violence on civilians in the South. In the early stages of the war, Commanding General George McClellan, reacting to acts of terrorism against the citizens in the South, wrote Lincoln a letter requesting the war be conducted in accordance with “the highest principles known to Christian civilization” and to avoid targeting the civilian population. Lincoln relieved McClellan of his command shortly thereafter and obviously ignored the letter.
In Iraq, as we did in Vietnam, the citizens are seen in the light of “collective responsibility” for acts perpetrated on soldiers. I’m sure the phrase “Kill them all, let God sort them out” is just as popular with the troops today as it was with soldiers I served with some 39 years ago. Try to explain to a foot soldier who lives with fear every moment, sees obvious civilians blown to bits by U.S. rockets and bombs, that for him to shoot civilians is a crime. This creates a lose-lose situation. The more of these folks they shoot the more enemies they create. Just look at Vietnam. Many estimate their casualties exceeded a million or more, and our troops never lost a major battle. Yet, we left with our tails between our legs.
If our soldiers were used as they were designed to be, for defense of our country only, they would not be faced with this mind-destroying dilemma
As we read about the battle for the city of Fallujah, think back to General Sherman’s acts against the city of Randolph, Tennessee in 1862. When Confederate Sharpshooters from the town fired upon federal gunboats, Sherman had the entire town burned to the ground. He took civilian hostages from the town and in some instances traded them for Federal soldiers or just executed them. Does the word My Lai come to mind here?
Jackson and Meridian Mississippi would face the same fate from one of Lincoln’s favorite Generals. They would both be burned to the ground even though there were no Confederate Armies in the area. Sherman’s soldiers then sacked the town and, as Sherman biographer John Marzelek wrote, soldiers "entered residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value . . . those articles which they could not carry they broke."
Sherman would write of the campaign "for five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists."
Professor DiLorenzo writes in his work, Targeting Civilians, that in 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish was for "a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing." This has a remarkable resemblance to words I hear from folks at such Neocon worshipping sites as FreeRepublic.com
I’m sure the Neocons and John Kerry (who has said Bush is just not doing enough) would love to have Generals such as Sherman. He was a no holds barred kind of guy, just like they are. In October of 1864 Sherman ordered a subordinate, General Louis Watkins, to go to Fairmount, Georgia, "burn ten or twelve houses" and "kill a few at random," and "let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon."
Professor DiLorenzo also says in his work “Although it is rarely mentioned by 'mainstream' historians, many acts of rape were committed by these federal soldiers. The University of South Carolina’s library contains a collection of thousands of diaries and letters of Southern women that mention these unspeakable atrocities.”-Anyone beginning to pick up a pattern here?
DiLorenzo continues: “Sherman’s’ band of criminal looters (known as "bummers") sacked the slave cabins as well as the plantation houses. As Grimsley describes it, "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked." A routine procedure would be to hang a slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners’ valuables were hidden.
Then there was the much heralded “March to the Sea” wherein Sherman claimed in his memoirs that his army “destroyed more than $100 million in private property and carried home $20 million more.”
General Philip Sheridan perpetrated like terror on the citizens of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. In the autumn of 1864 Sheridan’s 35,000 infantry troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan described it in a letter to General Grant, in the first few days he "destroyed over 2200 barns . . . over 70 mills . . . have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed . . . not less than 3000 sheep . . .. Tomorrow I will continue the destruction."
Again from Professor DiLorenzo, “One soldier wrote home that he had personally set 60 private homes on fire and opined "it was a hard looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year." A Sergeant William T. Patterson wrote that "the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy [by defenseless women]... I never saw or want to see again."
Michael Gaddy |
