Spring blows in the echoes of Iraq war

Wednesday, March 20, 2013, marked the first day of spring—sunny, blue, cloudless, but cold in New York City, a powerful wind blowing. The same day, but a decade earlier, March 20, 2003, marked the start of the Iraq War. Yet as Jon Queally wrote in Common Dreams, Wednesday, March 20, 2013, the war that was supposed to be over is ongoing, with our troops still there.

He noted, “At least 56 people were reported killed across Baghdad on Tuesday, March 19 in a series of bombings that coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the US bombing campaign known as “shock and awe” and the subsequent US-led ground invasion.

“The bombings, which targeted Shia neighborhoods and establishments, also injured nearly 100 other people.”

Al-Jazeera reported, “At least ten car bombs, including two detonated by suicide bombers, one roadside bomb and two gun attacks struck in and around the Iraqi capital during morning rush hour on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion.

“Sunni fighters tied to al-Qaeda have stepped up their campaign of attacks this year in an attempt to trigger sectarian tensions and undermine Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shia-led government.

“There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blasts.”

Ongoing sectarian and political violence has been the “new normal” in post-occupation Iraq, betraying US promises that the toppling of Saddam Hussein would welcome in a new era of stability, democracy, and prosperity for ordinary Iraqis.

Though Al-Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before the US invasion, it now boldly operates throughout the country. Though no responsibility for the attacks had been claimed, officials speaking to the Associated Press blamed the group.

AP reported on the wave of the March 19 bombings, “The violence started at around 8 a.m., when a bomb exploded outside a popular restaurant in Baghdad’s Mashtal neighborhood, killing four people and wounding 15. It blew out the eatery’s windows and left several cars mangled in the blood-streaked street.”

Minutes later, two day laborers were killed and eight were wounded when a roadside bomb hit the place where they gather every day in an area of New Baghdad.

In the poor Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City, a bomb stuck to the underside of a minibus killed three commuters and wounded seven people. Another car bomb exploded in a commercial street in the same area, killing two people and wounding 11, and yet another bomb struck a police patrol in the neighborhood, killing five people and wounding 13.

Other attacks struck the largely Shiite neighborhoods of Hussainiyah, Zafarniyah, Shula and Utaifiya, as well as the Sunni district of Tarmiyah.

Just outside the capital, a mortar shell landed near a clinic in the town of Taji, killing two people and wounding five. And about 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Baghdad, in Iskandiriyah, a car bomb exploded near a bus stop, killing five people and wounding 20 others.

As for democracy, Tuesday’s attacks have already fulfilled their likely intent by pushing back planned provincial elections.

According to Al-Jazeera, “The attacks came as the cabinet announced on Tuesday that it would postpone provincial elections in two provinces that were scheduled for April by up to six months over security concerns.

“Polls in Anbar province in west Iraq and Nineveh in the north have been delayed, Ali Mussawi, the Iraqi premier’s spokesman said.

“Mussawi said that candidates have been threatened and killed, while there were also requests for a delay from the two provinces.

“Several provincial elections candidates have also been killed in attacks in recent weeks.”

Overall, as Iraqi professor of sociology at London Metropolitan University Sami Ramadan recently commented, the US war on Iraq has been an “unmitigated disaster.”

And what has come of democracy, supposedly the point of it all? The US-led occupying authorities nurtured a “political process” and a constitution designed to sow sectarian and ethnic discord. Having failed to crush the resistance to direct occupation, they resorted to divide-and-rule to keep their foothold in Iraq. Using torture, sectarian death squads and billions of dollars, the occupation has succeeded in weakening the social fabric and elevating a corrupt ruling class that gets richer by the day, salivating at the prospect of acquiring a bigger share of Iraq’s natural resources, which are mostly mortgaged to foreign oil companies and construction firms.

Warring sectarian and ethnic forces, either allied to or fearing US influence, dominate the dysfunctional and corrupt Iraqi state institutions, but the US embassy in Baghdad—the biggest in the world—still calls the shots. Iraq is not really a sovereign state, languishing under the punitive Chapter VII of the UN charter.

Political ironies abound. We have a so-called Shia-controlled government, yet most of Iraq’s Shia population remains the poorest of all. And we have an Iraqi Kurdistan that is a separate state in all but name. The Kurdistan regional government is in alliance with the US and Turkey, a ruthless oppressor of the Kurdish people. It also has growing links to Israel (which it is at pains to deny).

Meanwhile, conflict over oil and territory is aggravating relations between the centre and the Kurdistan government. Popular anger against corruption and human rights violations is growing; for weeks now, we have had large-scale protests in the west of the country.

Last Tuesday’s violence in Baghdad—catastrophic in its own right and immediate context—also speaks to the ten years of bombings and death that began with a slogan: “Shock and Awe.”

In the end and for many, the US legacy in Iraq can only be measured in the accumulation of destruction that followed the invasion and the invitation to violence that lingers still.

Painfully, three short pages summarize the cycle of ten long years, sectarian violence mixed with random terror attacks, a cycle of poverty hopelessness, a country that’s lost its rudder in the decade-long storm of violence.

Russia Today (RT.com) interviewed Iraqis and asked if life is better now than it was under Saddam Hussein. To a man or woman the answer is no, it is worse. There are no jobs, but plenty of food scarcities. One can never let one’s guard down for fear of walking into an I.E.D. or being fired upon by some random terrorists. Wreckage of burnt cars, dead tanks, scraped Hummers litter the landscape. It’s as if creation has abandoned Iraq, flown with its million dead and two million refugees. The sun seems to be shining through a cloud of fires, oil. garbage, wreckage, bodies.

But here in America, life goes on, even now that we’ve added the War in Afghanistan to our list, the War in Libya (second anniversary), the war in Syria (second anniversary), not to mention conflicts in Mali and North Africa, and back to Pakistan “drone bombing” with an insatiable appetite. Our appetite includes 59 drone flights a day, with 1,700 pilots, and 1,200 ‘sensory operators,’ a plate of death and guts. Yet an eloquent letter to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney written by a Dying Veteran in Veterans Today tears your heart out over the slaughter. Please read it and feel the deep truth of the vet’s pain. Here are the opening paragraphs:

“I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq.

“I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives.

“I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

“I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries, continue . . .

So, we are still in Iraq’s killing chamber, still waiting to face the democracy’s promised spring. Even as Israel would pounce on Iran for having a nuclear program to use for medical purposes. Even as Israel’s store of nuclear weapons runs from 300 to 400 nuclear warheads. This is a sick joke. Even as President Obama courted the killers, Netanyahu and Peres, one more time.

This is an ongoing sick joke of an impotent Congress, the curse of two violent presidents, and a complicit media that will say anything the money and power allotted to them will allow. Should we wrap up our tents and move to the moon? Should we stuff our ears with cotton and put sleep masks over our eyes and tape our mouths shut like mummies? Do we want to get on a kill-list ourselves, or be held for indefinite military detention in keeping with the NDAA act and face torture, imprisonment, or even death by asking for the heads of Bush, Cheney, Obama and their foul neocon convoy?

One good thing would be to visit Architects and Engineers site for 9/11 Truth, now asking for more assistance for victim families. It will stir your interest in the inciting incident of all this havoc. It will prove to you 9/11 was a false-flag op, an inside job.

The answer is not simply to nod no, but to go into the sunshine of truth about life and how it cannot be twisted into death. We should not, as Voltaire suggested, merely “tend our own gardens” and hope for the best, not as this crop of a trillion ghosts inhabits the landscape in the graveyard of late March trees. We must make our understanding fit to keep on living, to speak truth to power, to enumerate, like that dying soldier, the inescapable sins of those who ruled and rule us. This we should do so others won’t forget how the past and present has been so misshapen, like a fetus twisted by depleted uranium’s radioactivity.

One thing’s for sure. It’s not a matter of looking for the white smoke of an ersatz messiah. It rests more in realizing truth as spring, bringing what life it can to us to live and enjoy and help spread good health and life to others who are needy. It is to pull the plug on the Pentagon that’s sucking the people’s taxes like blood for all this death. That would be a start, a good start, at least until the revolution starts full tilt.

For, after all is said and done, that is what there is left to do. To talk about and display the monsters that rose out of America and perpetuated this decade of nothingness, so that more than a dozen years doesn’t yield only loss, when it should bear justice and real punishment for all those fixed in the jaws of greed and violence of 9/11 and its inside job. Let yesterday’s war be resolved in the rebirth of spring, starting today.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.