This brief re-entry of Iraq into public discourse in the United States—a re-entry that is intended only to clear the way for a final dismissal, since the war is now, according to this narrative of events, “over”—reminds us of the extent to which Iraq has fallen out of the collective consciousness in the US. It must not be allowed to do so, and the notion that the withdrawal of US troops (leaving behind the largest US embassy in the world in Baghdad and consulates in Basra, Erbil, and Kirkuk, along with at least 16,000 Americans employed by the US government—a large percentage of them “security contractors,” that is, armed mercenaries of the sort that have caused so much carnage in Iraq) should be understood as meaning the “end” of the Iraq War must not be allowed to stand unchallenged. It is an opportune moment, in other words, for some remembering, and, if we can make it happen, some accountability.
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?…there is something deeply disturbing in the fact that so many commentators were able to “look past” Hitchens’ support for the war in order to praise his prose style or his contrarian nature. This fact “tells us something about the culture he helped create and has left behind. It’s a culture that has developed far too easy a conscience about, and sleeps too soundly amid, the facts of war.” This is true in general, as one of the effects of the War on Terror: it has bequeathed us a population in the US that, while eventually manifesting opposition to the war in Iraq, has shown little sustained opposition to the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and little or no sense of shame or outrage over the death by drone bombing of large numbers of civilians in Pakistan, nor over the assassination of US citizens by the Obama administration in Yemen.
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The “wrongness” of the Iraq war, for most Americans, to this day still has little or nothing to do with its effects on Iraqis; it has much more to do with the “costs” to the US, whether in American lives or in economic terms—in other words, with American self-interest. As Younge points out, “the most important single factor shaping Americans’ opinions about any war is whether they think America will win.” In attempting to sway public opinion against the war by appealing to notions of self-interest, the anti-war movement as a whole lost a chance to undo this form of solipsistic thinking, which might have given way to a form of internationalism that would have understood the war to be wrong first and foremost for, and from the perspective of, the Iraqis were the objects of the US-led attack. Instead, we are left today with a context in which the withdrawal of US forces means, for most Americans, that the war is now over, and with it, any requirement to think further about Iraq—summed up by The Onion, with its usual bitter brilliance, through the satirical headline: “Fifty-four Iraqis Die in Not Our Problem Anymore.”
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One of the rallying cries of the Occupy movement has been a call for accountability, a call for bringing the criminals who make up the one percent to justice. So let this call for accountability extend to the crimes committed by the US government and its supporters against the people of Iraq through years of war and sanctions. And let this be part of the forging of a larger international solidarity on the part of the US left, the making of a popular movement that could both take up the fight to end US hegemony in the Middle East (need I remind readers that the military junta that is currently slaughtering protesters in Cairo is being armed in the most direct way by the US government, and that some of the same war criminals who were the architects of the attack on Iraq are now drumming up support for US intervention to protect “America’s interests” in Syria?) and, simultaneously, find creative ways to work in solidarity alongside and in support of popular movements throughout the region? The legacy of internationalism (including the legacy of Orwell) has for too long been held captive by the likes of Hitchens and his ilk; it’s time to put it back to work.
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More here.