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.
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
W raised the banner saying “Mission Accomplished” what more do you want? Jeez.
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.
By the standards of Reddit, we are all guilty for failing to overthrow the governing class and US citizens deserve to be bombed
I for one agree
Aren’t US republicans always proudly saying that their second amendment is meant to prevent exactly that?
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.
There is an American culture of world-historical importance. It’s just not the white culture. Black music for instance has unparalleled influence partly because of its quality. White music culture has made no contributions to modern (including popular art) equal to, say, Jazz, Blues, Gospel, RnB, Hip-Hop, detroit techno, chicago house…I could go on. Of course white people in general, especially the bourgeois, have little to no access to or knowedge of these cultures, unless its been given to them through a gentrified, fetishized filter that doesn’t understand the value of these musical traditions. Alternatively they treat is as jokey party music for them to sniff coke to.
Apart from that I agree that the mainstream of American culture is literal proof of the decadence of a civilization.
I’d also say that apart from key land needing to be returned to give to native americans and key minorities, the most important thing is that there is equitable land and housing reform that ensures an equitable distribution and standard of living for everyone in the broader working class, though this doesn’t preclude certain groups being given more immediate priority.
But yeh America is satanic. Literal Mammon worshipers.
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.
didn’t libya got turned into a slave trading nation, lol?
Ya, America saw a rising star in Africa, couldn’t exploit it, and kicked it over a millenia into the past. You aren’t allowed to prosper unless American corporations get the biggest slice of your pie.