[Mb-civic] Letter to the British People from a daughter of Iraq & BLAIR'S BLOWBACK

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0507/S00193.htm
A Letter to the British People from a daughter of Iraq

Tuesday July 12 2005

Iman al-Saadun

I'm sending this letter to the British people and in particular to the
residents of London. For a period of hours, you have lived through moments
of desperate anxiety and horror. In those hours you lost a member of your
family or a friend, and we wish to tell you in total honesty that we too
grieve when human lives pass away. I cannot tell you how much we hurt when
we see desperation and pain on the face of another person. For we have
lived through this situation - and continue to live through it every day -
since your country and the United States formed an alliance and laid plans
to attack Iraq.

The Prime Minister of your country, Tony Blair, said that those who
carried out the explosions did so in the name of Islam. The Secretary of
State of the United States, Condaleezza Rice, described the bombings as an
act of barbarism. The United Nations Security Council met and unanimously
condemned the event.

I would like to ask you, the free British people, to allow me to inquire:
in whose name was our country blockaded for 12 years? In whose name were
our cities bombed using internationally prohibited weapons? In whose name
did the British army kill Iraqis and torture them? Was that in your name?
Or in the name of religion? Or humanity? Or freedom? Or democracy?

What do you call the killing of more than two million children? What do
you call the pollution of the soil and the water with depleted uranium and
other lethal substances?

What do you call what happened in the prisons in Iraq - in Abu Ghraib,
Camp Bucca and the many other prison camps? What do you call the torture
of men, women, and children? What do you call tying bombs to the bodies of
prisoners and blowing them apart? What do you call the refinement of
methods of torture for use on Iraqi prisoners - such as pulling off limbs,
gouging out eyes, putting out cigarettes on their skin, and using
cigarette lighters to set fire to the hair on their heads? Does the word
"barbaric" adequately describe the behavior of your troops in Iraq?

May we ask why the Security Council did not condemn the massacre in
al-Amiriyah and what happened in al-Fallujah, Tal'afar, Sadr City, and
an-Najaf? Why does the world watch as our people are killed and tortured
and not condemn the crimes being committed against us? Are you human
beings and we something less? Do you think that only you can feel pain and
we can't? In fact it is we who are most aware of how intense is the pain
of the mother who has lost her child, or the father who has lost his
family. We know very well how painful it is to lose those you love.

You don't know our martyrs, but we know them. You don't remember them, 
but
we remember them. You don't cry over them, but we cry over them.

Have you heard the name of the little girl Hannan Salih Matrud? Or of the
boy Ahmad Jabir Karim? Or Sa'id Shabram?

Yes, our dead have names too. They have faces and stories and memories.
There was a time when they were among us, laughing and playing. They had
dreams, just as you have. They had a tomorrow awaiting them. But today
they sleep among us with no tomorrow on which to wake.

We don't hate the British people or the peoples of the world. This war was
imposed upon us, but we are now fighting it in defense of our selves.
Because we want to live in our homeland - the free land of Iraq - and to
live as we want to live, not as your government or the American government
wish.

Let the families of those killed know that responsibility for the Thursday
morning London bombings lies with Tony Blair and his policies.

Stop your war against our people!

Stop the daily killing that your troops commit!

End your occupation of our homeland!

***


--------

The Guardian - July 11, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/comment/story/0,16141,1525755,
00.html

BLAIR'S BLOWBACK

Of course those who backed the Iraq war refute any link with the London
bombs - they are in the deepest denial

by Gary Younge

Shortly after September 11 2001, when the slightest mention of a link
between US foreign policy and the terrorist attacks brought accusations of
heartless heresy, the then US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice
got to work. Between public displays of grief and solemnity she managed to
round up the senior staff of the National Security Council and ask them to
think seriously about "how do you capitalise on these opportunities" to
fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world. In an
interview with the New Yorker six months later, she said the US no longer
had a problem defining its post-cold war role. "I think September 11 was
one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen. Events are in
much sharper relief."

For those interested in keeping the earth intact in its present shape so
that we might one day live on it peacefully, the bombings of July 7
provide no such "opportunities". They do not "clarify" or "sharpen" but
muddy and bloody already murky waters. As the identities of the missing
emerge, we move from a statistical body count to the tragedy of human loss
- brothers, mothers, lovers and daughters cruelly blown away as they
headed to work. The space to mourn these losses must be respected. The
demand that we abandon rational thought, contextual analysis and critical
appraisal of why this happened and what we can do to limit the chances
that it will happen again, should not. To explain is not to excuse; to
criticise is not to capitulate.

We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order
or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for
human life or political consequences, employing violence as their sole
instrument of persuasion, they slaughtered innocent people
indiscriminately. They left us feeling unified in our pain and resolute in
our convictions, effectively creating a community where one previously did
not exist. With the killers probably still at large there is no civil
liberty so vital that some would not surrender it in pursuit of them and
no punishment too harsh that some might not sanction if we found them.

The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just
as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London. The two should not
be equated - with over 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing
wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged or flattened, what
Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British
support, was more deadly. But they can and should be compared. We do not
have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage or resilience. Our blood is no
redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive
than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imagination could not
stretch to empathise with the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have
something closer to home to identify with. "Collateral damage" always has
a human face: its relatives grieve; its communities have memory and demand
action.

These basic humanistic precepts are the principle casualties of
fundamentalism, whether it is wedded to Muhammad or the market. They
were clearly absent from the minds of those who bombed London last week.
They are no less absent from the minds of those who have pursued the war
on terror for the past four years.

Tony Blair is not responsible for the more than 50 dead and 700 injured on
Thursday. In all likelihood, "jihadists" are. But he is partly responsible
for the 100,000 people who have been killed in Iraq. And even at this
early stage there is a far clearer logic linking these two events than
there ever was tying Saddam Hussein to either 9/11 or weapons of mass
destruction.

It is no mystery why those who have backed the war in Iraq would refute
this connection. With each and every setback, from the lack of UN
endorsement right through to the continuing strength of the insurgency,
they go ever deeper into denial. Their sophistry has now mutated into a
form of political autism - their ability to engage with the world around
them has been severely impaired by their adherence to a flawed and fatal
project. To say that terrorists would have targeted us even if we hadn't
gone into Iraq is a bit like a smoker justifying their habit by saying, "I
could get run over crossing the street tomorrow." True, but the certain
health risks of cigarettes are more akin to playing chicken on a four-lane
highway. They have the effect of bringing that fatal, fateful day much
closer than it might otherwise be.

Similarly, invading Iraq clearly made us a target. Did Downing Street
really think it could declare a war on terror and that terror would not
fight back? That, in itself, is not a reason to withdraw troops if having
them there is the right thing to do. But since it isn't and never was, it
provides a compelling reason to change course before more people are
killed here or there. So the prime minister got it partly right on
Saturday when he said: "I think this type of terrorism has very deep
roots. As well as dealing with the consequences of this - trying to
protect ourselves as much as any civil society can - you have to try to
pull it up by its roots."

What he would not acknowledge is that his alliance with President George
Bush has been sowing the seeds and fertilising the soil in the Gulf, for
yet more to grow. The invasion and occupation of Iraq - illegal, immoral
and inept - provided the Arab world with one more legitimate grievance.
Bush laid down the gauntlet: you're either with us or with the terrorists.
A small minority of young Muslims looked at the values displayed in Abu
Ghraib, Guantnamo Bay and Camp Bread Basket - and made their choice. 
The
war helped transform Iraq from a vicious, secular dictatorship with no
links to international terrorism into a magnet and training ground for
those determined to commit terrorist atrocities. Meanwhile, it diverted
our attention and resources from the very people we should have been
fighting - al-Qaida.

Leftwing axe-grinding? As early as February 2003 the joint intelligence
committee reported that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to
represent "by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and
that that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". At
the World Economic Forum last year, Gareth Evans, the former Australian
foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group thinktank,
said: "The net result of the war on terror is more war and more terror.
Look at Iraq: the least plausible reason for going to war - terrorism -
has been its most harrowing consequence."

None of that justifies what the bombers did. But it does help explain how
we got where we are and what we need to do to move to a safer place. If
Blair didn't know the invasion would make us more vulnerable, he is
negligent; if he did, then he should take responsibility for his part in
this. That does not mean we deserved what was coming. It means we deserve
a lot better.

***



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