by Mooneye

Everywhere in the media there is discussion about the “ten year anniversary” of the invasion of Iraq. The clown academy portion of the mainstream media has wondered: “ten years later, was the invasion of Iraq the right thing to do?” The cheerful, forever optimist side of America searches for a glimmer of hope, a silver lining in the vivisection of the Iraqi corpse, which we are told is not a corpse at all but a standing, even thriving by some accounts, democracy–or it possibly will be in a few more years.

“It led to the Arab spring!” proponents of the invasion such as the late Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya howl, as if such an evil seed could ever give rise to a blooming tree in the region bearing fruits of freedom and independence. Not to mention that such claims run counter to what the “natives” who participated in the “Arab Spring” actually say and what they cite as inspiration for their protests against the oppressive regimes that ruled/rule them.

The new Imperialism like the old Imperialism can only envision democracy, representative government and freedom being delivered and bestowed on the “infantile” masses of the Muslim world through the grace of the beneficent White Man, it is after all, his burden.

The chickenhawks must still be shocked, shocked I tell you that their prophecies about a statue to honor George W. Bush being erected in the middle of Baghdad’s Firdous Square have not come to pass. There is however a statue in Iraq honoring the man who threw his shoes at Bush, and yes, most Iraqis, the ones we so graciously blessed with “democracy” believe their country is worse off because of the war.

The architects, liars and cheerleaders of war, the technocrats and the chattering classes of the empire who pissed in the minds of Americans about Iraq’s so-called AlQaeda links, WMD’s, 9/11 connection–and that still favorite word “imminent threat”–largely celebrate the invasion.

Islamophobe and hideous warmongering freak John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN for instance writes,

[I]n any event, the issue was never about making life better for Iraqis, but about ensuring a safer world for America and its allies.”

A rare moment of truth that sums up the matter. This war was never about WMD’s, destroying Iraq was all about US and assorted allies’ “interests.”

In this world of inverted morality, the innocent who have been murdered are just forgotten statistics while the war criminals are fly fishing on the Snake River.

It must be pointed out that there were many citizens in the US who opposed the war, warning us that we were being lied to and that the consequences of this war would be catastrophic.

Initially, most Americans supported the war in Iraq by substantial margins, 76% agreed with the decision to invade Iraq. Today a majority of Americans, 53% believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. My question is: what the hell is wrong with the other 47%?

The mainstream media is a bit more reflective, realizing it rubber stamped government propaganda and fed into the hysteria of invasion with patriotic fervor. Questions regarding blowback, repercussions, ramifications from this war however have not really been analyzed in-depth.

The question remains, have we learned from our folly or will we forget–again?

VIDEO: Arundhati Roy on Iraq War’s 10th: Bush May Be Gone, But “Psychosis” of U.S. Foreign Policy Prevails

A British soldier guards Iraqi prisoners in the city of Basra in April 2003. Photograph: Reuters

We know the US was guilty of systemic torture in Iraq and elsewhere, though no real inquiries or repercussions have resulted because of our use of torture. Of course, we aren’t alone Britain stands accused of systemic torture as well. Horrible stuff like sexual abuse, beatings, threats of rape and execution, violence against wives and children and a good deal of anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamophobia.

Is Britain guilty of systemic torture in Iraq?

(The Guardian)

In the Lebanese capital of Beirut, far from the theatre of war in Iraq and his office in Birmingham, one of Britain’s leading civil rights lawyers has gathered some of the most damning allegations ever levelled against this country’s armed forces – certainly since the worst days of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

As Britain’s invasion of Iraq approaches its 10th anniversary in March, Phil Shiner – who founded the Public Interest Lawyers group – and members of his team have held face-to-face meetings with survivors of alleged abuse and torture by British soldiers and intelligence officers and with relatives of those unlawfully killed during and after the war that defined the premiership of Tony Blair.

The statements – 180 of them, with 871 to follow – go before a judicial review hearing at the high court in London next week in a claim seeking to demonstrate that Britain broke international laws of war by pursuing a policy of systematic torture.

The testimony is shocking, such as from “Khalid”, a detained Iraqi civilian: “[A British soldier] then grabbed my penis and dragged me around the floor while holding it. He also made me squat up and down whilst naked and inserted his finger into my anus. I would have preferred to have been killed than subjected to this.”

A prisoner called Halim claims he was told: “Fuck you and fuck Islam!” by a soldier who then “opened the belt of my trousers and said ‘now jiggy jiggy’. The soldier put his boot in my chest and pulled my trousers down … The soldier put his foot on my chest … lifted me in the air and turned me on to my front … He started rubbing his penis on my back while the other soldiers watched. I felt him ejaculate on my back … I was so upset but he spat in my face. He kicked me and started slapping me.”

A man called “Asif” claims that when soldiers came to arrest his elderly father, he said: “So you are the British people?” He testifies that the soldiers paralysed the old man with the blow of a rifle butt and stamped on Asif’s young son’s head when the boy tried to help his grandfather. “What I know of the British people is the opposite of what you are doing,” said Asif.

And so it goes on, witness after witness, in papers and videos before the court on 29 January, calling for a public inquiry into what is presented as an orgy of sadism, outlawed interrogation methods and unlawful killings by soldiers and intelligence officers against Iraqi civilians and prisoners of war between 2003 and 2008. Iraqi soldiers who surrendered – supposedly protected by the Geneva Conventions – allege that they were forced to sit for hours in harsh sun, kicked, beaten and photographed going to the toilet.

Civilians say they were subjected to hooding, beating, threats of rape and execution, forced nakedness and maintaining stress positions, violence against wives and children, ritual humiliation. And they claim that others, like Baha Mousa, were beaten to death. They say walls of noise were used to drive the prisoners mad and cover the sounds of abuse and pain.

The British government will argue in court that this apparent litany of abuse by troops it sent to “liberate” the Iraqis does not warrant a public inquiry, since it was not “systemic”.

But the high court will be asked to rule that this position is untenable given the weight and range of the allegations. Shiner and lawyers for the families of those killed and survivors of the abuse say the inquiry is a fundamental requirement of articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the right to life and prohibition of torture.

According to Shiner and his supporters, the decision of the high court will signal whether, 10 years after the invasion, Britain is prepared to reckon with its own legacy in Iraq.

“This is the crucial moment of decision,” says Professor Andrew Williams, author of a book on the most infamous single case to date, the torture to death in custody of an innocent hotel receptionist, Baha Mousa. “This is our last chance to get to the truth and find out what went on. It’s the last chance to see who is responsible.”

The legal issue at stake is whether the other abuses were isolated incidents of which commanders were unaware, as the government insists, or systemic and authorised as policy. With these cases comes the contention that the violations were systemic and thereby illegal – with responsibility reaching senior command level – which would put the state in breach of international law and necessitate an independent public inquiry. The victims’ claim before the court says: “No Iraqi appeared to be exempt from ill-treatment from arrest onwards.”

The MoD says the Baha Mousa inquiry, which investigated the killing of Mr Mousa and torture of several other civilians, dealt with any general problems of detention and interrogation. That inquiry reported last year and condemned the use of hooding and stress positions, supposedly outlawed by the UK government in the 1970s.

The MoD also points to its own Iraq Historic Allegations Team, established in 2010, which it says is a sufficient response to the allegations. The team was made up of Royal Military Police officers appointed to internally investigate unlawful killing and torture. But the appeal court ruled in November 2011 that the RMP had been “substantially compromised”, its members having been involved in the system of detention itself.

Williams’s book, A Very British Killing: the Death of Baha Mousa, details the killing and flawed investigation and prosecutions which followed, and exposes what he calls “a culture of callous indifference that infected a whole battalion and permeated far up the command chain, both military and governmental. What happened to Baha Mousa, and how the army and the government responded to his death, is emblematic of a whole system in operation.”

Read the rest…

An excellent article by Juan Cole on the mostly wrong arguments regarding the so-called “decline of Christians” in the Middle East. In point of fact the ancient strains of Eastern Christianity: Coptic, Orthodox and other indigenous strains are possibly in a position to see a new era of renewal and unprecedented efflorescence. (h/t: Razainc.)

Christmas 2012: The Flowering of Middle Eastern Christianity and the Challenges it Faces

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

There are more Middle Eastern Christians than ever before, and they are poised between emergence as a new political force in a democratizing region and the dangers to them of fundamentalism and political repression. The arguments you see for Christian decline in the region are mostly wrong. If we count the Christians in the Arab world and along the northern Red Sea littoral (Egypt, the Levant, Iraq and the Horn of Africa to the borders of Ethiopia) they come to some 21 million, nearly the size of Australia and bigger than the Netherlands. (This figure does not count the large Christian expatriate populations in the Gulf emirates or Christians in Iran and Pakistan). They are important in their absolute numbers, which have grown dramatically in the past 60 years along with the populations of the countries in which they live. If the region moves to parliamentary forms of government, they may well be coveted swing voters, gaining a larger political role and louder voice than ever before.

In fact, despite all the hype about the rise of Islam in Europe, Muslims in that continent have on the whole much less potential influence than Christians in the Middle East. About 5% of the French electorate is Muslims, the largest proportion in Europe. But Christians are 10 percent of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and 22 percent of Lebanon. Even in Israel, they are 2 percent of the population, a little less than the percentage of contemporary Italy that is Muslim.

Among the biggest dangers to Middle Eastern Christians in 2012 were these:

1. Israeli occupation has made life in East Jerusalem and the West Bank increasingly unbearable, spurring emigration abroad of Palestinian Christians, who once made up 10 to 20 percent of the Palestinian population. Because they are Christians, these Palestinians may find it easier to get visas to the West.

2. The Syrian civil war has displaced or endangered many Syrian Christians, who make up between 10 and 14 percent of the 22-million strong Syrian population. At the upper estimates, there are as many as three million Syrian Christians. There are allegations that Christians have been targeted by hard line fundamentalist militias, but most probably suffer from the same difficulties other Syrians are facing.

3. Iraqi Christian expatriates in Syria are also in trouble. Before George W. Bush invaded Iraq, there were about 800,000 Christians in a population of 25 million, or 3 percent of the population. Some 400,000 are said to have emigrated, mainly to Syria (and about 10,000 to Lebanon), as refugees. But now many of those who went to Syria are returning to Iraq. Inside Iraq itself,some Christians say the situation has improved for them to the pointthat they are committed to staying in the country rather than emigrating.

4. The newly enacted fundamentalist constitution in Egypt and the power of the Muslim Brotherhood president, Muhammad Morsi, poses dangers to Egyptian Christians. It is alleged that hard line Salafis attempted to intimidate them from voting against the constitution in this month’s referendum. On the other hand, Egyptian Christians have clearly been invigorated by the new press and political freedoms in post-Mubarak Egypt, and are gaining an important set of political voices.

5. In the new country of South Sudan, Christians form between 10% and 50% of the 8 million population (the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church each claim about 2 million believers in that country. Christians in the region may thus have gained a great deal of influence in a whole new state. Earlier estimates from the mid-20th century of only 10% Christian are probably out of date and do not take account of the large number of conversions since then). The challenges here are enormous, though. The partition of Sudan has not in fact led to social peace between the two, with continued confrontation over oil exports and saber rattling. (Sudan is inarguably in the Middle East, and I have hung around with South Sudanese and was surprised how many spoke Bedouin Arabic).

6. Christians are about 60% of the 6 million-strong population of Eritrea. They are Coptic Orthodox, the same as most Egyptian Christians. (Eritrea is not usually counted in as being part of the Middle East, but it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and has substantial cultural and political relations with Yemen and Saudi Arabia, so it is as eligible as Sudan and Somalia). Eritreans suffer under authoritarian government and continued tensions with Ethiopia.

Christians in Iraq and Syria have faced challenges (as have the entire populations of those two countries) in the past year. Christians in Egypt are alarmed by the new political muscle of the Muslim Brotherhood. It would be easy to construct a ‘vale of tears’ kind of narrative of Middle Eastern Christianity in decline, since the communities face political turmoil. It is often alleged that the proportion of Christians in the region has declined, though it is not clear that this allegation is true on a regional basis.

This argument from a declining proportion of the population does not take account of the region’s amazing population growth. It also makes analogies from the small nations of Lebanon and Palestine, which actually have an unusual demographic profile.

It is controversial what proportion of Egypt is Christian, but it is probably around 10 percent. A lot of Christians live in rural areas where census takers may not have gotten a complete count. Egypt’s population is 83 million, so that would give 8.3 million Christians. There is no reason to think that their proportion in Egypt has declined (in fact they may be somewhat higher a proportion now than in the 19th century).

Egypt’s population in 1950 was about 20 million, at which time there were 2 million Christians. Because Egyptian Christians are substantially rural, they appear to have shared in the high population growth rates typical of global south farmers in the second half of the 20th century.

Today’s Christian population in Egypt, some 8.3 million, is roughly the size of the whole country of Austria! Allegations that 100,000 Egyptians have emigrated since the revolution in February 2012, and that most of these are Christians, are not to my knowledge substantiated, and they seem exaggerated. Even if there was something to the assertion, it isn’t a big dent in a population of 8.3 million.

If we went back to 1850, in absolute terms the number of Christians in Egypt and the Levant was tiny. 500,000 in Egypt, 150,000 in Lebanon and Syria together, 35,000 in Palestine, perhaps 45,000 in Iraq. That is 730,000. So in absolute terms, Egypt alone now has more than 11 times as many Christians as lived in the central lands of the Middle East 162 years ago. How is that a decline?

The argument for decline is usually made from Lebanon, where Christians were a bare majority in 1931, but are now something like 22%. But Lebanon’s population was about 800,000 in 1931, so Christians were 408,000. Lebanon’s population is now 5 million, and Christians inside the country are about 1.1 million. So with all the vast Christian Lebanese emigration abroad, to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the United States, Mexico, etc. (with perhaps 6 million Lebanese-descended people in the New World), there are still twice as many Christians in Lebanon in absolute terms now as there were in 1931. And although it is consequential politically that Lebanese Christians are now less than a third of the adult electorate, they are hardly powerless. They dominate the presidency, the officer corps, and the business world, and they are split between allying with the Sunni Muslims and allying with the Shiites, which gives them influence as a swing vote.

Christian power in Lebanon comes in part from the country’s clan system and in part from its long history of parliamentary governance. For instance, it is important for the Shiite party, Hizbullah, to have Christian allies in the Biqaa valley. This principle holds true elsewhere. There is every prospect that as parties are formed and become important in contesting elections in Egypt, the 8 million Coptic Christian votes will be courted, and will make themselves felt in policy. Likewise, if Syria moves to a parliamentary system, the 3 million Christians there will be a force to be reckoned with in Syrian politics.

In Jordan, Christians are 10 percent of the 6 million strong population, or 600,000.

These are parlous times for Middle Eastern populations who are challenging older forms of government rooted in mid-20th century notions of nationalism, socialism and a leading role for the military. We don’t know how this story will turn out. The “Islamic winter” notion of the Neoconservatives (who were unhappy that the American public was identifying with rebellious Arab youth), however, is way too simplistic. The Muslim fundamentalists took a bath in the Libyan elections last July. The Nahda Party in Tunisia only got about 37% of seats in parliament and could only form a government in coalition with a secular party; they have renounced trying to put Islamic law or sharia in the constitution. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Muhammad Morsi, won the presidency in June with only 51% of the vote, and his proposed constitution lost in the megalopolis of Cairo and only got a third of registered voters to go to the polls. Egyptian Christian billionaire Naguib Sawiris has founded a political party, and I very much doubt he plans to emigrate.

The old Middle Eastern dictatorships often exploited Christians or subordinated them. The Christians were deprived of a voice and of the chance for autonomous political action just like everyone else. But now, they are potentially in a position to organize, speak out and vote as never before. And they are arguably more numerous in absolute terms than ever before. From the point of view of a social historian, these days could be the beginning of an unprecedented efflorescence of Christianity in the region– not Western-missionary, Christianity, not evangelicalism or fundamentalism, but Coptic Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, and other indigenous and ancient strains. There are no guarantees in life, but let us give them a chance, on this day when their religion was born.

Psy’s “Gangnam Style” made YouTube history today with 1 billion views. Another song by the rising South Korean megastar,”Hey American,” sparked controversy with blunt lyrics described by some as “anti-American.” Psy has issued an apology.

Nevertheless, let’s hope the controversy has helped cut through the thick fog of self congratulatory propaganda that has led many Americans to  believe it is Muslims who “hate us for our freedom,” rather than our hypocritical, aggressive foreign policies and relentless military intervention. Welcome to the global backlash, Gangnam style.

The roots of global anti-Americanism

by Murtaza Hussain, Al Jazeera

The incongruity of it seemed to be nothing short of a betrayal. After lightheartedly dancing his way into the hearts of Americans and gaining entrance to the inner sanctum of their cherished cult of celebrity, the Korean rapper, Psy, whose song “Gangam Style” became the most watched video in the history of YouTube and made him a pop culture sensation, has been revealed to have a politically active past which places him directly at odds with the American mainstream worldview and which violently decries its most basic articles of faith. The man whom they enjoyed as an unthreatening, comically light-hearted foreigner dancing for their enjoyment was revealed to have only years earlier been a vociferous public critic of American policies and the country’s role in the world. In a 2004 performance, the rapper famous for his “invisible horse dance” denounced the United States in a song called “Hey American”:

Kill those f—ing Yankees who have been torturing Iraqi captives

Kill those f—ing Yankees who ordered them to torture

Kill their daughters, mothers, daughters-in-law and fathers

Kill them all slowly and painfully

For an American public conditioned to the type of unquestionable worship of the military embodied in the phrase “Support the Troops”, Psy’s words represent nothing less than sacrilege. This song however was not his only offence.

In a previous performance, he had come on stage to protest the presence of 37,000 US troops in South Korea and smashed a miniature American tank in protest over the killing of two South Korean schoolgirls by American forces stationed in the country.

As it turned out, the Asian pop-star whom Americans had enthusiastically embraced, arguably the first entertainer to bridge the continental divide so successfully, brought with him not just a culturally unique style of song and dance, but also a worldview which is threateningly alien to most Americans.

If even an innocuous pop singer from a country perceived as benign could espouse views the typical American would attribute to menacing terrorists such as al-Qaeda, it begs serious questions about the pervasiveness of global anti-Americanism as well as to what informs it.

A legacy of violence

While the stories of American brutality in places such as Korea are unknown or ignored by the overwhelming majority of Americans, they are less quickly forgotten by the citizens of the countries which have suffered and continue to suffer horrific atrocities at the hands of US troops.

A 2009 investigative film revisiting the massacre documented the words of one Korean survivor who recalled how US troops had indiscriminately murdered men, women and children:During the Korean War, American troops were believed to have been responsible for hundreds of instances of mass-killings of civilians, including the infamous No Gun Ri massacre in which members of the US 7th Cavalry Regiment massacred hundreds of Korean civilians under a railway underpass over the course of three days.

“Children were screaming in fear and the adults were praying for their lives… they never stopped shooting.”

Another Korean War survivor described the common American tactic of firebombing villages with napalm in a scorched-earth campaign which killed countless civilians:

“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes…. Those who survived the flames ran…. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”

The wanton disregard to Korean lives during America’s global campaign against Communism continues to extend to the present day in the form of rape and murder directed towards Korean civilians by US soldiers stationed at bases throughout the country.

In one 2011 incident, emblematic of long-documented practices by US troops in the country, a 21-year-old soldier, Kevin Flippin, broke into a Korean woman’s hotel room and raped and tortured her for several hours before robbing her of the equivalent of roughly US $5 and fleeing back to his base.

Sexual violence and murder has been a recurrent theme throughout the decades of American military presence in Korea and reflects longstanding behaviour in countless other countries across the world subject to US military basing and occupation.

Widespread American unfavourability

While the virulent undercurrent of anti-Americanism which was briefly glimpsed in the revelations surrounding Psy’s political history have their basis in incidents such as these, Korea is far from being the most anti-American country in the world.

Polls of regions such as Latin America have shown anti-American sentiment to be even more rife; a legacy of US military interventionism in the continent which has been most vividly expressed in the form of torture, murder and the subversion of democratically elected leaders over the past several decades.

However, a 2012 Pew Research poll showed the least favourable perceptions of the US today to be in countries within the Arab and Muslim worlds; negative views which are thought to have briefly abated upon the election of Barack Obama but which can now be seen to have returned to their historic lows during the George W Bush era.

Among countries polled the bottom echelon are exclusively countries with Muslim majority populations. Even those such as Turkey and Jordan whose governments are traditionally allied with the US showed overwhelmingly negative attitudes towards America, with the latter polling at a mere 12 per cent favourability.

Tellingly, Jordan also happens to be home to a massive population of refugees from the American invasion of Iraq, the civilian victims of a war who have been forgotten by Americans but continue to live on in desperation and misery in many countries scattered throughout the region.

While an incredible amount of research has gone into formulating complex theories to explain this widespread disdain for the US, Occam’s Razor, the logical principle that the simplest explanation is most often the correct one suggests that the American militarism which once ravaged Korea and which has now been set upon the Muslim world is the cause of this growing antipathy.

Pakistan, which polled at roughly 9 per cent favourability towards the US in a 2010 BBC World poll, once had a vibrantly pro-American polity where Jacquelyn Kennedy was mobbed in the streets with flower garlands by thousands of admirers during a state visit and where American popular culture was once widely revered and emulated.

In recent decades however, all of this has changed, as Pakistanis have been left to witness the staggering human cost of US warfare in neighbouring Afghanistan as well as to deal with the millions of refugees that conflict has sent into Pakistan.

Pakistanis themselves have also increasingly become the direct target of American violence; being gunned down in the streets by rogue CIA officers, murdered by remote operated drones and renditioned for torture at clandestine “black-sites” throughout the world.

By starting a massive war and occupation in Afghanistan which caused widespread destabilisation and social chaos in Pakistan, a country which shares deep ethnic and religious bonds with its neighbour, the US has helped turn a once reasonably benign relationship into an increasingly dangerous one which has fuelled virulent anti-Americanism even among liberal and secular Pakistanis.

The degeneration of American popularity in Pakistan is however only one illustration of a broader trend where wanton militarism has generated negative popular perceptions towards the US.

Arrogance and atrocity

For Americans who are commonly feted with reassurances of their country’s benevolent role in the world, it may come as a surprise that half of all refugees on the planet today are running from American wars.

The wanton, industrial-scale violence, which the US has unleashed upon the civilians of countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia has naturally generated a tidal wave of negative feeling within these countries which many Americans utterly fail to grasp.

Episodes such as the gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family by US troops are emblematic of the fundamental sadism of American policy towards the region. However, in a type of bizarre dark comedy, popularly elected American leaders continue to question the lack of gratitude among the populations upon whom they have let loose this violence.

What this appears to represent is a type of brazen ignorance and egotism which has come to represent mainstream government policy; the type of myopia under which a country can launch a full-scale war, invasion and occupation of another sovereign nation under entirely false pretences, kill hundreds of thousands in the process and create millions of refugees and still at the end sincerely ask the question “Why they do hate us?”

While the US military, whom the American public puts forth as the unquestioned heroes and proud symbols of the apex of their society, finds new and innovative ways to inflict violence upon the populations of Arab and Muslim countries – including wanton, lawless and often completely anonymous target killings, and even recently the sanctioning of killing so-called “hostile children” in Afghanistan, the popular reputation of America as a country naturally sinks to new depths among the countries in the Middle East and around the world.

An illustrative example of the essentially self-destructive arrogance of US policy in the region pertains to that of Afghanistan; where the US in 2001 categorically refused to negotiate with the Taliban when the latter expressed a desire to co-operate with the full spectrum of US objectives and hand over Osama bin Laden, on the rhetorical grounds of “refusing to talk to evil.”

Fast forward 11 years – with tens of thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars wasted, and America is doing exactly this, negotiating with the Taliban exactly as it could have done a decade earlier were it not for flagrantly irrational government policymaking informed by a mixture of arrogance and bloodlust.

For the self-proclaimed preeminent global power to behave in such a shockingly ignorant and destructive manner and to still express wonderment over others’ negative perceptions of it speaks to a deep lack of national self-awareness and perspective which could seriously impede the country from operating an effective foreign policy in the future.

An increasingly poisoned relationship

Even among those within the Arab and Muslim worlds and beyond who admire purported American values such as secularism, free speech and free enterprise, the past decade of increasingly wanton and unrestrained violence has worked to permanently stain the reputation of a country which was at one time held in high esteem across social strata.

American policy towards the Middle East today is popularly perceived to be informed by a cruel, arrogant and fundamentally racist worldview in which subject populations are essentially lesser peoples whose suffering is an accounted-for externality of hegemonic policies.

The type of brutality which Americans inflicted upon Korea decades ago still manifests in the undercurrent of anger held by many Koreans today, so it bears asking how long it will take for negative perceptions of America in the Muslim world to dissipate.

As long as unchecked American militarism in the region continues, these negative perceptions will only escalate and the phenomena of anti-Americanism will continue to spread and damage the ability of the US to find necessary allies in a strategically-important part of the world.

Regardless, as evidence has shown even when such negative feelings are sublimated for the sake of pragmatism, they seldom truly cease to exist. When its history is written, the US will have to come to terms with the legacy of global disdain, distrust and resentment it has engendered over its time as a superpower – a history which may very likely be unkind and incongruent with the image most Americans hold of themselves and of their country.

Murtaza Hussain is a Toronto-based writer and analyst focused on issues related to Middle Eastern politics. Follow him on Twitter: @MazMHussain

***

Would you like your endless war with Coke or Pepsi?

As most of us grow eager for the deluge of campaign ads to finally come to an end, Philip Giraldi’s timely article strikes at the root of America’s misguided policies of bullying, preemption, scapegoating, and denial, all of which are likely to continue no matter who is elected this November.

Blaming the Muslims

It is perhaps human nature to seek to blame someone else for one’s own personal failings. But what is possibly only a misdemeanor in personal interactions becomes rather more serious when entire nations and races are systematically and comprehensively blamed for the failures of other nations to comprehend simple truths. I am, of course, referring to the disastrous foreign policy that we Americans have endured for the past 11 years, which is coming home to roost now in places such as Libya and Syria.

Consider what we have been hearing repeated over and over again about the Middle East and other trouble spots. American bullying, preemption, and a policy of might makes right have not been the problem; some ignorant folks just dislike us because of our freedom. The United States is “exceptional,” which means that it should set the standards for the “free world” and even the not-so-free world, whether they all like it or not. Washington has the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world if there is even the slightest chance that there is some kind of threat lurking.

Neither President Barack Obama nor Gov. Mitt Romney has dared to say the truth, which is that the past 11 years have been disastrous for the United States because of a gross overreaction to a terrorism problem that we helped create. That overreaction has led to one unnecessary major war in Iraq that has helped bankrupt the country while also killing more than 100,000 people who had nothing to do with any threat against the United States. We have even punished the children of those we have killed: witness the stunning rise in birth defects caused by depleted uranium in parts of Iraq where the fighting was most intense.

America’s lashing out has also led to a prolonged slaughter in Afghanistan, which will be worse off when Washington leaves than it was when the U.S. military and CIA arrived. Elsewhere, the U.S. footprint is heavier than ever, with drone operations becoming the warmaking du jour in Africa and Asia. This week we have learned that the CIA is seeking more drones to extend its operations. It seems that the poor folks at Langley actually had to shift some drones from Pakistan to Yemen because they just did not have enough to go around. For those who care, it marks the beginning of the end of the CIA as an intelligence organization and its transition into an international outside-the-Geneva-Conventions killing machine under Director David Petraeus.

At home, the foreign wars have also had an impact. Drones have arrived in America while whole sections of the U.S. Constitution have been abandoned by “temporary” legislation to fight terrorists. Mitt and Barack are both intelligent men and they know perfectly well what is happening, but they will not say anything about it, as it would ruin the narrative that the United States is always good and noble. If only those damned Muslims just didn’t hate our freedom so much.

Make no mistakes that Muslims are the target of American wrath, even if it is largely unstated. The Republican Party is obsessed with bigger defense budgets to fight more wars in Muslim lands and, domestically, making illegal the greatly feared spread of Shariah law. Shariah, for what it’s worth, is the criminal code in only two Islamic countries: Saudi Arabia and Iran. Most other majority-Muslim states use a version of British common law or Roman law. In the United States the threat of any state adopting Shariah is nonexistent, unless one believes the content of the GOP platform.

Opinion polls suggest that Americans do not like Muslims very much. No surprise there, considering the steady diet of negative commentary. On the New York City subway one can learn from posters that Palestinians are savages while Israelis are civilized. For many years, the word “Islamic” has been used in much of the media as an obligatory prefix to the word “terrorist.”

No other group in the U.S. since the Communist purges of the 1950s has been singled out as much as Muslims as the enemy within. Congressman Peter King of New York has held a number of hearings on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and That Community’s Response.” Muslims have been targeted as a group by the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The young Muslims who suddenly find themselves with a new friend in the form of an FBI informant eventually are entrapped into a confession or plea bargain and sent off to jail, with each arrest heralded as a major terrorism case. That many of those cases relied on an informant who offered the suspect a phony gun or bomb and then provided encouragement to commit a terrorist act is eminently clear if one reads the news accounts of the arrest and trial. If there is any evidence that American Muslims are not law-abiding, I have not seen it, and I suspect that if such a statistic were actually compiled it would demonstrate the opposite.

More recently, some Republicans have called for eliminating foreign aid for countries that don’t like us very much and appear reluctant to support our policies. All those countries are, of course, Islamic, and the emails circulating to make the case show burning cars and buildings. All that is needed is cameos of angry-looking men in beards to seal the case. The what-have-you-done-for-me-lately argument fails to take into account what exactly the U.S. has been playing at in those countries for the past 50 years, supporting dictators and turning a blind eye to egregious violations of human rights.

And when the countries in question shake off the shackles of dictatorship and elect a government that takes its religion seriously, there is dismay in the post-Enlightenment West. The development is referred to as a problem that has to be closely monitored by the wise leaders in Washington and Brussels. What is wrong with those people? Don’t they want our freedom? For a Muslim, one’s religion shapes the relationship with the state. It is not firewalled from it and conditions how one behaves when in office, but the distinction apparently escapes those who are shaping our policies in the White House.

There are, of course, a number of political objectives to the Muslim bashing. A large, undifferentiated threat keeps the military industrial complex happy. For the friends of Israel, since Muslims are savages and terrorists, it means that negotiating with them in any serious way or treating them as human beings is a waste of time. For the politicians who spout an anti-Muslim agenda, it keeps them in the limelight and they see an opportunity to become a player in foreign policy. The real lesson should be that the turning on Muslims is not necessarily a problem with those who practice Islam but rather a problem with us. We are the ones who have created the enemy and we are the ones who should have the sense to realize that it is our policies and actions that have poisoned relationships all around the world, and not just in Islamic countries. Will Mitt Romney or Barack Obama someday express that reality? Somehow I don’t think so.

Philip Giraldi is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His recent interview debunking claims that Muslims are stuck in medieval times and have no yearning for democratic governance and commenting on recent events in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan can be found here. 

An extremely important article from Glenn Greenwald. Dr. Hamoodi is facing three years in prison for sending money to impoverished and malnourished relatives in Iraq, defying a sanctions regime that resulted in the deaths of a million, and nearly 500, 000 children. Please sign the petition he mentions (h/t: Saladin aka Big Boss):

Hamoodi’s family has now placed all of their hopes in trying to persude President Obama, or whoever is in the Oval Office after the election, to pardon him or at least commute his sentence. A petition has been created and currently has over 3,000 signatures; you can and, I hope will, add your name here. You can also donate to help his family on this page.

by Glenn Greenwald (The Guardian)

I’m currently traveling around the US on a speaking tour, and as I’ve written before, one of the prime benefits of doing that is being able to meet people and their families whose lives have been severely harmed by the post-9/11 assault on basic liberties. Doing that prevents one from regarding these injustices as abstractions, and ensures that the very real human costs from these government abuses remain vivid.

Such is the case with the treatment of Dr. Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi-American nuclear engineer who just began a three-year prison sentence at the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas penitentiary for the “crime” of sending sustenance money to his impoverished, sick, and suffering relatives inIraq - including his blind mother – during the years when US sanctions (which is what caused his family’s suffering) barred the sending of any money to Iraq.

Yesterday in Columbia, Missouri, I met with Hamoodi’s son, Owais, a medical student at the University of Missouri (MU) School of Medicine, and Hamoodi’s son-in-law, Amir Yehia, a Master’s student in MU’s School of Journalism. The travesty of this case – and the havoc it has wreaked on the entire family – is repellent and genuinely infuriating. But it is sadly common in post-9/11 America, especially for American Muslim communities.

Hamoodi came with his wife to the US in 1985 to work toward his PhD in nuclear engineering from MU and, not wanting to return to the oppression of Saddam’s regime, stayed in the US. He was offered a research professor position at the university, proceeded to have five American-born children, all of whom he and his wife raised in the Columbia community, and then himself became a US citizen in 2002.

But US-imposed sanctions after the First Gulf War had decimated the value of Iraqi currency and were causing extreme hardship for his large family who remained in Iraq. That sanctions regime caused the death ofat least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including 500,000 Iraqi children. In 1991, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq, wrote in Mother Jones about the pervasive suffering, starvation and mass death he witnessed first-hand, and noted that the US-led sanctions regime “killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history”.

The sanctions regime decimated Hamoodi’s family. His elderly blind mother was unable to buy basic medication. His sister, one of 11 siblings back in Iraq, suffered a miscarriage because she was unable to buy $10 antibiotics. His brother, a surgeon, was earning the equivalent of $2 per month and literally unable to feed his family.

Hamoodi was earning a very modest salary at the time of roughly $35,000 per year from the university, but – as would be true for any decent person of conscience – could not ignore the extreme and growing suffering of his family back in Iraq. Because sending money into Iraq from the US was physically impossible, he set up a bank account in Jordan and proceeded to make small deposits into it. From that account, small amounts of money – between $20 and $100 – were dispersed each month to his family members.

When other Iraqi nationals in his Missouri community heard of his helping his family, they wanted to help theirs as well. So Hamoodi began accepting similar amounts of money from a small group of Iraqis and ensured those were disbursed to their family members suffering under the sanctions regime. From 1993 until 2003, when the sanctions regime was lifted after the US invasion, Hamoodi sent an average of $25,000 each year back to Iraq, totaling roughly $250,000 over the decade: an amount that fed and sustained the Iraqi relatives of 14 families in Columbia, Missouri, including his wife’s five siblings.

Nobody, including the US government, claims that these amounts were intended for anything other than humanitarian assistance for his family and those of others in his community. Everyone, including the US government, acknowledges that these funds were sent to and received only by the intended recipients – suffering Iraqi family members – and never got anywhere near Saddam’s regime, terrorist groups, or anything illicit. As a Newsweek article on the Hamoodi case made clear:

“The cash . . . was doled out mostly in dribs and drabs, even the authorities concede; $40 a month to the son of a friend trying to eat while attending medical school, $80 to Hamoodi’s blind mother. There was no suggestion that Hamoodi . . . aided terrorists, or that the money wound up in Saddam Hussein’s hands; his elaborate email trail served as receipts, as tidy as his bookkeeping at the store.

“‘I would get messages from my sisters, I have 11 siblings,’ he says, as he shares a somber meal – piquant red peppers from South Africa, French cheeses, crusty baklava – with his wife and sons at the long dining room table. ‘They would be starving. Starving. So I did what anyone, any American, would do.’”

But in 2002 and 2003, Hamoodi was not just a nuclear engineer. He was also a very outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s plan to attack Iraq. And his position as a nuclear engineer made him a particularly potent threat to the case for that invasion, as he continuously insisted that Saddam did not have an active nuclear weapons program and that the case for the war was grounded in lies. In his antiwar activism, he emphasized how much already-suffering Iraqi civilians would suffer more, and how the invasion would lead to mass instability.

On 18 September 2006, two of Hamoodi’s children, Owais, then 17, and his college-aged sister Lamees, were at home when there was a knock on the door. Owais answered and saw two FBI agents who stood there, and behind them were 35 armed federal agents, many with guns drawn, from ten different federal law enforcement agencies. They told him they had a search warrant to search their home and then entered.

“We wanted to stay and watch what they did, but they told us we had to leave because they claimed they had nobody to keep an eye on us”, Owais told me, noting again that 35 agents were present. The agents spent 9 hours in Hamoodi’s home alone and unsupervised. They took every passport they found, all identification (including the learner’s permit of Owais’ 15-year-old brother, who was left without any identification), family heirlooms, photo albums, and boxes of documents. They even insisted that Owais give them his calculator that he used for algebra class on the ground that it had memory potential. To date – six years later – the family has received none of those materials back.

The massive, flamboyant FBI raid on Hamoodi’s home predictably generated substantial media coverage in his community. “FBI agents today searched the home of a Columbia businessman and former Iraqi who has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq,” read the first line of a long article in the local Columbia Daily Tribune. “People of course automatically assumed terrorism”, said Owais.

Several years later, Hamoodi was finally indicted and for the first time learned of his “crime”: that, as this excellent Inside Columbia article on his case put it, he “ran afoul of a couple of Gulf War-era executive orders, an act of Congress and Treasury Department regulations” banning the sending of any money to Iraq.

From the start, Hamoodi fully cooperated with federal investigators. He readily admitted that he had sent the money to Iraq to help his starving family and those of other families in Columbia. Calling it a “crime of compassion”, he pled guilty to the charge of engaging in “a conspiracy to violate the International Economic Emergency Powers Act”.

Owais says his father’s guilty plea was accompanied by the near certainty that he would receive no jail time. “There were like five other cases involving much greater amounts sent to Iraq, some with accusations that the money had reached the regime, and very light sentences were given, including by the same judge in my father’s case, who had just given another Iraqi national probation for having sent more money than my father.” Moreover, delays in the proceedings meant that the sentencing hearing was not going to occur until the Summer of 2012 — nine years after the sanctions expired, and nine years after Hamoodi had sent his last payment back to Iraq.

But on 16 May 2012, Hamoodi stood before US District Judge Nanette Laughrey, a Clinton appointee, as she sentenced him to three years in a federal penitentiary – only two years less than the maximum sentence under federal sentencing guidelines for this offense – followed by three years probation. Hamoodi’s son-in-law, Amir Yehia, was at both his father-in-law’s sentencing hearing and the one of another Iraqi national who had received probation from Judge Laughrey just four months earlier for a similar offense. “This time, it was like she was a totally different person,” he told me. “I don’t know if she was pressured or had received pushback after the probation she gave in the other case, but it was amazing how completely different she was at his hearing.”

In a country that has stood by while torturers, government kidnappers, and Wall Street thieves have been completely protected – to say nothing of those who aggressively attacked Iraq – Judge Laughrey, as recounted by Inside Columbia, invoked the mandates of the “rule of law” to explain why Hamoodi, now 60, would have to spend the next three years in a federal prison despite having harmed absolutely nobody:

“‘He obviously has a model family, a lovely family, lovely children . . . I am sure it is largely as a result of your leadership in the family,’ [the judge] told [Hamoodi]. ‘But I have also had to take into account what you did . . . you disagreed with the law, and you decided not to comply with the law. That does not show respect for the rule of law, which is the foundation of this country.’”

The lawyer from the Obama justice department – the same agency that shielded all Bush-era criminals from even an iota of accountability on the ground that we must “Look Forward, not Backward” – invoked the same rationale for why Hamoodi must be punished for the payments he sent to his suffering family nine years ago:

“‘It’s easy to say it’s all in the rearview mirror, the sanctions have expired[', said Garrett M. Heenan]. ‘But it is still a serious crime, and the larger United States government interests in having sanctions and, moreover, having people in the United States – citizens – abide by the requirements of [the] Treasury [Department] and not violate those sanctions is an important thing that the United States would seek to promote.”

As of three weeks ago – beginning on 28 August – Hamoodi is now at Fort Leavenworth, where he just began serving his three year sentence. Yehia, his son-in-law, says that he is holding up reasonably well but is extremely worried about how his family will manage. Owais says that he’s most concerned about his youngest brother, now in the tenth grade: “That’s a really vulnerable time for a kid, and now he has to live it with his father gone, in prison.”

As harrowing as this is, these stories are incredibly common in American Muslim communities. But what makes this case particularly horrific is that the suffering Hamoodi sought to alleviate was caused by the very same US government that is now imprisoning him for his humanitarianism.

The reason his relatives were starving and living in abject misery was precisely because the US government enforced years of brutal sanctions. To have that same government then turn around and punish him for the “crime” of helping his family members survive is warped sadism. I really don’t see how prosecutors and judges who participate in these sorts of travesties can live with themselves. Worse, US officials who twice completely destroyed Iraq – first with the sanctions regime, then with an aggressive war – are permitted to thrive in freedom and enrich themselves. As one local activist, Jeff Stack, wrote after Hamoodi received his shocking sentence:

“Who will truly be served by incarcerating our friend Shakir Hamoodi? Certainly not his wife and their five children, who collectively exemplify what is most hopeful and encouraging about this nation. They are hard-working and high-achieving contributing citizens. Three of their children have completed undergraduate degrees. Two of them finished master’s programs and one is attending medical school. The youngest two are in college and high school.

“Society won’t benefit by his costly imprisonment, which will leave a painful void in our community. He poses no threat. . . . The [Newsweek] article notes Justice Department officials provided the reporter a list of seven individuals who have been incarcerated for violating sanctions. The 59-year-old Columbia resident stands out as the only one facing prison for undertaking purely humanitarian actions and taking nothing for himself.”

Hamoodi’s family has now placed all of their hopes in trying to persude President Obama, or whoever is in the Oval Office after the election, to pardon him or at least commute his sentence. A petition has been created and currently has over 3,000 signatures; you can and, I hope will, add your name here. You can also donate to help his family on this page.

The 9/11 attack was exploited to create what New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal has accurately described as “a separate justice system for Muslims”. These are the kinds of horrific injustices which that separate – and decidedly not equal – system routinely creates.

Everybody “knows” Muslims are constantly raging about everything. Or are they?

Gawker‘s response to Ayan Hirsi Ali’s latest screed:

13 Powerful Images of Muslim Rage

by Max Reed, Gawker

“MUSLIM RAGE,” screams Newsweek‘s new cover story about last week’s violent anti-American protests. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the well-known anti-Islam activist, is here to tell “us” (The_West) how to “end it.” And it’s true, isn’t it? All Muslims are constantly raging about everything. So to pay tribute to Ali’s article — which describes the protesters as “the mainstream of contemporary Islam” — and the subtle, smart cover that accompanies it, we’ve collected 13 striking, powerful images of MUSLIM RAGE.

What are Muslims so mad about? Twitter (“Want to discuss our latest cover? Let’s hear it with the hashtag: #MuslimRage,” Newsweek begs us) has some answers:

Indeed, as everyone knows, Muslims, and especially Arab Muslims, have no lives, feelings or thoughts external to constant, violent rage, directed at old white people living in the Midwest (due to their freedoms). Sure, only a few thousand people out of populations of millions turned out to protest this goofy anti-Muhammad movie from YouTube, and sure, there was loud outcry against the violence across the Muslim world. But have you seen this photo? Those guys are mad.

It’s hard to find a better image than the one on the Newsweek cover to really communicate how rage-filled Muslims constantly are, but we’ve found a few that will strike a chill into your heart:

#1 Check out these violent, angry Egyptians:

#2 Two furious Iraqis:

#3 Iranian Muslims #snowrage:

#4 This Egyptian guy is filled to the brim with #MuslimRage:

#5 A group of Egyptians gather in Cairo to vent their rage:

#6 A wrathful Jordanian girl:

#7 Insane #MuslimRage:

#8 Terrifying image of violent, rampaging Iraqis:

#9 How can we stop #MuslimRage like this, from Iran?

#10 Look at this enraged Iraqi and tell me you’re not scared:

#11 Irate Egyptians taking a break from their #MuslimRage:

#12 An Egyptian family, foaming at the mouth:

#13 #MuslimRage:

***********

Loonwatchers share their own “very, very scary” photos of Muslim rage.

 
At a vigil to remember Ambassador Stevens last Friday in Cincinnati:

Photo credit: UC Newsrecord

Recently, we’ve had trollish commenters pop up on our site defending the invasion and decimation of Iraq by the USA. It seems that the whitewashing of the war and historical amnesia has already settled in.

Loonwatcher Solid Snake made an excellent point about the way in which we make Muslim victims of America’s wars and aggression essentially “invisible.” Here is a recent two part series from AlJazeera’s Faultline documentary series that puts the focus back on the nation we invaded ten years ago, their reaction to our presence, what they believe they have benefited and lost, and the prospects for the future.

Faultlines: Iraq After the Americans, Part 1:

 

Part 2:

(Updated – see below)

Following the 9/11 attacks, President George Bush signed into law the Patriot Act and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA), both of which gave “the government sweeping authority to spy on individuals inside the United States.”  IRTPA also established the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which began publishing annual terrorism reports since 2005.  The 2011 report, released to the public last week, ominously warned of “the persistent treat terrorism poses.”

Yet, the NCTC’s own data belies its predetermined conclusions: the threat of terrorism to the average American is virtually non-existent.  In the entire year of 2011, exactly zero civilians in the U.S. were killed by terrorism.  In fact, not a single civilian in the U.S. has been killed by Islamic terrorism since 9/11, well over a decade ago.  Put another way: more Americans are killed from being crushed to death by their television sets than by terrorism, a realization that should put “the persistent threat” of terrorism into some much-needed perspective.

The same is the case across the pond: Europol has released yearly terrorism reports since 2006.  Going through these, one cannot find a single civilian in Europe who has been killed by Islamic terrorism.  (It should be noted, however, that the as of yet unreleased 2012 report will no doubt reflect the Toulouse shootings, which resulted in the death of four civilians.)  Indeed, the truth is that less than 1% of terrorism in Europe is done by Muslims.

In other words, the threat of Islamic terrorism in the Western world is very minimal.  It has been grossly exaggerated in order to justify the multiple wars being waged in Muslim majority countries.  The charge is led by anti-Muslim ideologues, but the overarching premise–that Islamic terrorism is a great threat to Western civilization (even an existential threat to it)–is accepted by virtually all segments of American society.

*  *  *  *  *

Not only do Muslims inflict zero civilian deaths in America and Europe, they bear the brunt of terrorism in the Middle East and South Asia.  The 2011 NCTC report found that the vast majority of deaths from religious terrorism were in fact Muslims.  The report reads:

• In cases where the religious affiliation of terrorism casualties could be determined, Muslims suffered between 82 and 97 percent of terrorism-related fatalities over the past five years.

• Muslim majority countries bore the greatest number of attacks involving 10 or more deaths, with Afghanistan sustaining the highest number (47), followed by Iraq (44), Pakistan (37), Somalia (28), and Nigeria (12).

• Afghans also suffered the largest number of fatalities overall with 3,245 deaths, followed by Iraqis (2,958), Pakistanis (2,038), Somalis (1,013), and Nigerians (590).

The bulk of these terrorist attacks were carried out by Sunni extremists, including Al-Qaeda and the Taliban (see p.11 of the report).

Based on these two facts–1) that Muslims are the number one victims of Islamic terrorism, and 2) that Sunni extremists such as Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are most responsible for this—the American mind, fully ensconced in the national mythology, reaches the conclusion that Muslims ought to support America’s War on Terror; or, worded in an even more imperial tone:

Muslims should be grateful to us for fighting for them against the Bad Guys.

And yet, grateful is the last word to describe Muslim sentiment.  Muslims around the globe (including in Afghanistan and Iraq), overwhelmingly disapprove of the so-called War on Terror.  In fact, they hold very negative views of the United States (at least in regard its foreign policy), viewing “‘U.S. interference in the Arab world’ as the greatest obstacle to peace and stability in the Middle East.”  This, in spite of the majority holding very negative views towards Al-Qaeda and its tactics.

So, why aren’t these Moozlums grateful for all that we’ve done for them?

It’s because they know what is painfully obvious: it is U.S. military intervention in the region that is most responsible for creating the problem of terrorism.

This becomes very clear if we look at the three countries that have reported the highest number of terrorism-related fatalities (according to NCTC data):  Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  These three countries alone accounted for 64% of terrorism-related fatalities in 2005, 74% in 2006, 77% in 2007, 59% in 2008, 61% in 2009, 66% in 2010, and 68% in 2011.

Iraqis specifically have suffered the most from terrorism: according to the NCTC, from 2005 to 2007 some 55-65% of terrorism-related fatalities occurred in Iraq alone.  The 2009 report declared: “Since 2005, Iraq continues to be the country with the most attacks and fatalities due to terrorism.”

The report also stated that the group most responsible for terrorism was (and continues to be) Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).  What the NCTC failed to point out, however, was that (in the words of Barack Obama) “Al-Qaeda in Iraq…didn’t exist before our invasion.”  Al-Qaeda in Iraq was founded with the intent to “[e]xpel the Americans from Iraq” and topple the interim government propped up by the United States.  The Iraqis can thank the United States for creating the conditions that spawned this terrorist group, as well as for the resulting violence.

In fact, is it very easy to see the correlation between the U.S. invasion and terrorism in Iraq using the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI), which has tracked terrorist incidents for several decades.

In the year before the Iraq War (from 3/19/2002 to 3/19/2003), there were only 13 terrorist attacks and 14 terrorism-related deaths in Iraq.  In the year after the Iraq War (from 3/20/2003 to 3/20/2004), there were 225 terrorist attacks and 1,074 terrorism-related deaths.  In other words, the U.S. invasion of Iraq resulted in an over 1600% increase in terrorist attacks and an over 7500% increase in terrorism-related deaths in just one year.  

At the height of the Iraq War, there were 3,968 terrorist attacks, resulting in 9,497 deaths–which amounts to an over 30,000% increase in terrorist incidents and over 67,000% increase in terrorism-related deaths as compared to pre-war years.

Here is a graphical representation to help visualize the data from RDWTI:

With the U.S. invasion Iraq went from having a virtually non-existent terrorism problem to becoming the world champion of terrorism, a title it continued to hold up until 2010.  It is difficult to attribute this to mere coincidence.

In 2011, Iraq dropped to second place, being overtaken by another one of America’s arenas of war: Afghanistan.  This war-torn country is a second example of how U.S. military intervention created the problem of terrorism.

According to the NCTC reports, the Taliban have been responsible for the vast majority of terrorism-related deaths in Afghanistan.  Yet, prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban were not terrorists, at least not how the term is commonly employed today by the United States.  Certainly, they were theocratic tyrants who imposed a frighteningly fundamentalist interpretation of Islam on the Afghan people.  But, the Taliban at this time weren’t associated with Al-Qaeda style tactics such as suicide attacks, car bombs, or IED explosives.

The RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents supports this assertion, recording only two incidents involving the Taliban in the year prior to 9/11: an assassination attempt of a rebel leader and a rocket attack.

As government documents reveal, it was only after ”[t]he Taliban was driven from power in late 2001, during the course of a United States-led invasion of Afghanistan” that “the Taliban has operated as a violent insurgent organization–bent on driving the United States and its allies from Afghanistan…resort[ing] to armed violence: car bombings; suicide strikes; rocket attacks; kidnappings; and murder.”  The Taliban resorted to terrorist tactics in their fight against foreign occupiers and the U.S.-installed puppet regime in Kabul.  This conflict, almost wholly a result of U.S. actions, is responsible for the violence and wave of terrorism that has rocked Afghanistan for the last decade.

Using the data from RDWTI, we find that in the year just prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, there were only three terrorist attacks in the country, resulting in eight fatalities.  By 2008, the number of terrorist attacks had jumped to 450 and the number of terrorism-related deaths to 1,228.  In other words, the U.S. War in Afghanistan resulted in a 15,000% increase in both terrorism related incidents and deaths. 

Here’s what it looks graphically:

The U.S.-led War in Afghanistan has created a worsening terrorism problem for Pakistan as well.  There are many complex reasons for this spike in violence within Pakistan (which are beyond the scope of this article), but all are ultimately rooted in America’s War on Terror.  Using the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents, we find that there was an over 650% increase in terrorism-related fatalities in Pakistan as a result of America’s war (568 deaths in 2008 as compared to 73 in 2000).

Lest Democratic supporters be tempted to think that the blame belongs to George Bush’s administration alone, let them be informed that war-making has bipartisan consensus.  President Barack Obama has continued the legacy of warring in the Muslim world.

We can actually trace American war-making using Muslim corpses as an indicator.  Obama promised to shift focus from Iraq to Afghanistan.  U.S. troop levels in Iraq were a quarter of what they were in 2011 as they were in 2007; coincidentally, in the same time span Iraqi fatalities from terrorism fell to a quarter of what they were (according to NCTC data).

Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama tripled U.S. troops in Afghanistan between 2008 and 2011.  According to NCTC data, between 2008 and 2011 there was an over 130% increase in terrorist attacks and 68% increase in terrorism-related deaths in Afghanistan.

Obama has also stepped up the war in Pakistan.  NCTC data reveals a 500% increase in terrorism-related fatalities in Pakistan from 2005 (338) to 2011 (2,033).  For the past few years, Pakistan has earned the dubious rank of third when it comes to terrorism, behind only Iraq and Afghanistan.

*  *  *  *  *

Before the so-called War on Terror, levels of terrorism in Muslim lands were similar to what they were in other parts of the world.  For example, the RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents indicates that, up until the U.S.-led War on Terror, the Middle East and Latin America had similar incidents of terrorism; it was only after the U.S.-led War on Terror that terrorism in the Middle East shot way up:

In the year 2000, there were a total of 404 terrorist attacks in all of the Middle East and South Asia.  By 2006, this number jumped to 5,738–an increase of more than 1300%!  This is what America’s War on Terror has done for terrorism in the Muslim world.

The same trend holds for terrorist attacks globally.  In the year 2000, there were 1,151 total terrorist attacks.  By 2006, this number had rocketed up to 6,660.  In other words, the U.S.-led War on Terror caused a more than 470% increase in worldwide terrorism.

Islamophobes would have us believe that it is Islam itself that is responsible for the upsurge in terrorism.  Most Americans, even many liberals, believe that “radical Islam” is the root of the problem.  The data, however, suggests that it is the United States of America that is most responsible for creating the conditions on the ground that inexorably lead to terrorism.

It is difficult to deny the correlation between the U.S.-led War on Terror and the rise of terrorism worldwide.  Is it not a great irony of our times that the very policies designed to combat terrorism are most responsible for creating terrorism?  To add another layer of perverse irony, the steep rise in terrorism–a direct result of U.S. action–is used to justify further such action.

In the words of Glenn Greenwald:

How could any rational person expect their government to spend a full decade (and counting) invading, droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men in multiple countries and not have its victims and their compatriots be increasingly eager to return the violence?

But it is Muslims who not only have to deal with American “inva[sions], droning, cluster-bombing, occupying, detaining without charges, and indiscriminately shooting huge numbers of innocent children, women and men”, but also have to bear the brunt of the terrorism that inevitably follows.  It is truly a double whammy for them.

The vast majority of Americans will never face religious terrorism in their lives: less than 1% of victims of religious terrorism are U.S. civilians.  Meanwhile, up to 97% are Muslims.

It is truly an Orwellian world we live in.  The nation most responsible for creating rampant terrorism lays the blame on the victims of such terrorism.  Muslims are told that “they aren’t doing enough to combat terror”, even while Americans do their utmost to reflexively continue such action as would ensure the continued survival–nay, the rapid proliferation–of terror.

Danios was the Brass Crescent Award Honorary Mention for Best Writer in 2010 and the Brass Crescent Award Winner for Best Writer in 2011.

Update I (6/19/12):

The original version of the article suffered from minor mathematical errors, which have now been corrected (h/t JSB).

George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their legal advisers have been convicted of war crimes by a tribunal in Malaysia. (h/t: Al)

(via. Information Clearing House):

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were today (Friday) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.

This verdict does not currently have any sort of enforcement power behind it but the hope is that it will be taken up by the International Court,

War crimes expert and lawyer Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in America, was part of the prosecution team.

After the case he said: “This is the first conviction of these people anywhere in the world.”

While the hearing is regarded by some as being purely symbolic, human rights activist Boyle said he was hopeful that Bush and Co could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world.

“We tried three times to get Bush in Canada but were thwarted by the Canadian Government, then we scared Bush out of going to Switzerland. The Spanish attempt failed because of the government there and the same happened in Germany.”

Boyle then referenced the Nuremberg Charter which was used as the format for the tribunal when asked about the credibility of the initiative in Malaysia. He quoted: “Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.”

The US is subject to customary international law and to the Principles of the Nuremberg Charter said Boyle who also believes the week-long trial was “almost certainly” being monitored closely by both Pentagon and White House officials.

Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution said: “The tribunal was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Courts”.

He added that he was optimistic the tribunal would be followed up elsewhere in the world where “countries have a duty to try war criminals” and he cited the case of the former Chilean dictator Augustine Pinochet who was arrested in Britain to be extradited to Spain on charges of war crimes.

“Pinochet was only eight years out of his presidency when that happened.”

The Pinochet case was the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former heads of state, despite local amnesty laws.

Throughout the week the tribunal was packed with legal experts and law students as witnesses gave testimony and then cross examination by the defence led by lawyer Jason Kay Kit Leon.

The court heard how
· Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers.
· Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall.
· Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement.
· Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter.

The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.

Moazzam Begg, now working as a director for the London-based human rights group Cageprisoners said he was delighted with the verdict, but added: “When people talk about Nuremberg you have to remember those tried were all prosecuted after the war.

“Right now Guantanamo is still open, people are still being held there and are still being tortured there.”

In response to questions about the difference between the Bush and Obama Administrations, he added: “If President Bush was the President of extra-judicial torture then US President Barak Obama is the President of extra judicial killing through drone strikes. Our work has only just begun.”

The prosecution case rested on proving how the decision-makers at the highest level President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, aided and abetted by the lawyers and the other commanders and CIA officials – all acted in concert. Torture was systematically applied and became an accepted norm.

According to the prosecution, the testimony of all the witnesses exposed a sustained perpetration of brutal, barbaric, cruel and dehumanising course of conduct against them.
These acts of crimes were applied cumulatively to inflict the worst possible pain and suffering, said lawyers.

The president of the tribunal Tan Sri Dato Lamin bin Haji Mohd Yunus Lamin, found that the prosecution had established beyond a “reasonable doubt that the accused persons, former President George Bush and his co-conspirators engaged in a web of instructions, memos, directives, legal advice and action that established a common plan and purpose, joint enterprise and/or conspiracy to commit the crimes of Torture and War Crimes, including and not limited to a common plan and purpose to commit the following crimes in relation to the “War on Terror” and the wars launched by the U.S. and others in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

President Lamin told a packed courtroom: “As a tribunal of conscience, the Tribunal is fully aware that its verdict is merely declaratory in nature. The tribunal has no power of enforcement, no power to impose any custodial sentence on any one or more of the 8 convicted persons. What we can do, under Article 31 of Chapter VI of Part 2 of the Charter is to recommend to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission to submit this finding of conviction by the Tribunal, together with a record of these proceedings, to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

“The Tribunal also recommends to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission that the names of all the 8 convicted persons be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and be publicised accordingly.

“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions if any of these Accused persons may enter their jurisdictions”.