Six Days in Fallujah: This video game is an 'Arab murder simulator,' critics say

By Alaa Elassar, CNN 

Najla Bassim Abdulelah grew up in a war. The regular sight of dead bodies and the memory of her friend being shot next to her as they walked to school stained her childhood.

© Victura, Inc. A scene from the video game "Six Days in Fallujah."

Children's laughter was replaced with an incessant soundtrack of exploding bombs, and she lived with a crippling fear of losing her family.

So when Abdulelah, who now lives in Atlanta, Georgia, heard that "Six Days in Fallujah," a first-person shooter video game set during the Iraq War's bloodiest battle, was on the verge of being released, she was horrified.

"I am disgusted that this is something that will be producing profit when people like me suffered the consequences of this war and will have to watch people play it for fun," Abdulelah, 28, told CNN. "I just can't get past the inhumanity."

For Abdulelah and other Iraq War survivors, the imminent release of "Six Days in Fallujah" threatens to reopen old wounds and trivialize their pain.

They want the game shelved.

But the creators of the video game say it's grossly misunderstood, and that they're merely using gameplay -- the way players interact with a video game -- to teach history.

'A massive killing of Arabs'

Part documentary and part video game, "Six Days in Fallujah" uses gameplay to recount history and recreate true stories from the Second Battle of Fallujah. The offensive, code named Operation Phantom Fury, saw the US Marines lead a joint force of American, British and Iraqi troops into the ancient city.

The battle lasted from November 7 to December 23, 2004, and, according to the US Army, is widely regarded as the US' toughest urban battle since Huế, Vietnam, when ferocious fighting between American troops and North Vietnamese soldiers resulted in the deaths of hundreds -- if not thousands -- of citizens, who were buried in unmarked mass graves by the communist forces.

In Fallujah, US-led forces went house to house hunting for suspected insurgents. Fighters on both sides, as well as thousands of innocent Iraqis caught in the crossfire, did their best to avoid snipers and booby traps.

"We were told going into Fallujah, into the combat area, that every single person that was walking, talking, breathing was an enemy combatant. As such, every single person that was walking down the street or in a house was a target," Jeff Englehart, a former US soldier with the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, said in the 2005 documentary "Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre."

© Victura, Inc. A scene from "Six Days in Fallujah." Developers say they collaborated with more than 100 service members to recreate real events.

US-led forces used more than 300 bombs, 6,000 rounds of artillery and 29,000 mortar rounds, according to the US Marines. Military officials also confirmed that troops used white phosphorous, a highly controversial incendiary weapon that burns the skin.

Ross Caputi, a former US Marine with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, recalls some of the controversial tactics used during the battle, including firing grenades or gun rounds into homes before entering, in case insurgents were hiding inside.

"These tactics were meant to keep us safe. But I learned later that tens of thousands of civilians were still hiding in their houses during the operation, so these tactics would have put them in a lot of danger," Caputi told CNN. "The hardship that Phantom Fury imposed on Fallujans and the destruction it caused made me feel really ashamed of what we were doing."

© Mahdi Mohammad Iraqi-American Mohammed Husain wants "Six Days in Fallujah" shelved.

In the end, more than 80 American soldiers were killed, CNN reported. The number of civilian casualties remains unknown, but at least 800 innocent Iraqis were killed, according to the Red Cross. Local NGOs estimate the battle killed up to 6,000 Iraqis, mostly civilians, The Guardian has reported.

Describing the aftermath, Englehart said, "It seemed like just a massive killing of Arabs. It looked like just a massive killing."


A 'new way to understand' history

"Six Days in Fallujah" was originally developed by Atomic Games and set to be released by Japanese game publisher Konami in 2010. But the Tokyo-based company withdrew from the project a year early due to widespread criticism that it was offensive. Atomic Games went out of business and the project was shelved.

In February 2021, developer Highwire Games and publisher Victura, founded by former Atomic Games CEO Peter Tamte, announced they were resurrecting "Six Days in Fallujah."

The game is set to be released by the end of 2021.

"It's hard to understand what combat is actually like through fake people doing fake things in fake places," Tamte said in a statement announcing the game's release. "This generation showed sacrifice and courage in Iraq as remarkable as any in history. And now they're offering the rest of us a new way to understand one of the most important events of our century. It's time to challenge stereotypes about what games can be."

To that end, the developers say they collaborated with more than 100 service members who provided testimony, photographs and videos to recreate real events "with authenticity and respect." They also interviewed 27 Iraqis, 23 of whom are from Fallujah.

© Victura, Inc. A scene from "Six Days in Fallujah" shows a US serviceman aiming his weapon at an Iraqi man wearing a traditional headdress.

In the game, a player can choose to be a US serviceman leading a team on missions against insurgents, or an unarmed Iraqi father trying to escape with his family to safety. While playing, gamers will hear from real US service members, who narrate the missions, and Iraqi civilians, who relay their experiences.

© Courtesy Arny Soejoedi Iraqi-American Najla Bassim Abdulelah says "Six Days in Fallujah" is offensive to Iraq War survivors.

"Players will encounter civilians during gameplay, and these people also speak directly to players through video interviews," Tamte told CNN. "We want players to get to know these people as real human beings, rather than just avatars on a computer screen. And we want players to hear these Iraqis' perspectives and stories in their own words."

Developers regularly consult with Iraqis on how they are portrayed in the game, Tamte says. If a player shoots an Iraqi civilian, the mission ends in failure. The only Iraqis who are allowed to be killed are insurgents.

'An Arab murder simulator'

Abdulelah understands the premise of "Six Days in Fallujah" and Victura's rationale for releasing the game. She's a gamer herself.

But she says that taking a real life event, in which people suffered and died, and turning it into a game trivializes the experience.

There are more respectful and credible ways to learn about what happened in Fallujah, she says, pointing to news stories, books and documentaries produced about the battle.

"I got chills in my spine thinking about the idea that they can use the scenario of someone escaping something so tragic for a game," Abdulelah said, referring to the scenario in which a player can choose to be an Iraqi father fleeing with his family. "It brings me to tears. How is this okay?"

Mohammed Husain, also an Iraqi-American, says he was "hurt and disturbed" by news that the game will be released. He worries that the game will lessen the battle's significance, especially among young players.

"Instead of a historical incident, now they'll see it as a game," Husain, 26, told CNN.

Husain, whose parents are Iraq War refugees, also worries that insurgents in the game look like typical Iraqi men, which he said could lead to bias in the real world. Screenshots from the game show some insurgents distinguished by black and white headdress, which is common attire in Iraq and other Arab countries.

"It dehumanizes Iraqi people, showing how some are insurgents, some are Al-Qaeda, some are civilians, with no way of differentiating them. It desensitizes this generation to this kind of violence against our people," he said.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, worries that the game could reinforce harmful stereotypes of Iraqis, as well as other Arabs and Muslims.

CAIR and Veterans for Peace (VFP) repeated calls on Friday to shelve "Six Days in Fallujah." In August, they issued a public letter denouncing it as a game that "glorifies violence that took the lives of over 800 Iraqi civilians, justifies the illegal invasion of Iraq and reinforces Islamophobic narratives."

In April, the two organizations partnered to launch a petition calling on video game companies -- including Microsoft Corporation (Xbox), Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation) and Valve Corporation -- not to host or digitally distribute the game.

Garett Reppenhagen, VFP's executive director, is a former US Army sniper who served in the Sunni Triangle during the Second Battle of Fallujah.

"As a combat veteran and gamer, I find it troubling to see what amounts to an Arab murder simulator, which fails to acknowledge the impact of siege warfare against an unarmed and trapped civilian population," Reppenhagen told CNN.

When asked about criticism of "Six Days in Fallujah" and the petition, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNN: "We're aware of concerns and are looking into the content."

Neither Sony nor Valve responded to CNN's request for comment.

'How would you feel?'

Victura is standing firm in its decision to release "Six Days in Fallujah." It insists the game provides a new and exciting way for people to learn about what happened there.

"When we originally announced Six Days in Fallujah in 2009, we learned that some people believe video games shouldn't tackle real-life events. To these people, video games seem more like toys than a medium capable of communicating something insightful. We disagree," the makers said in a statement in February. "Video games can connect us in ways other media cannot."

Critics want people to learn about the tragedy that unfolded in Fallujah, too. But they say that turning it into a first-person shooter game that's played for entertainment is insensitive and disrespectful, especially when many Iraqis are still reeling from the destruction.

"Six Days in Fallujah" is a "disgrace" to the gaming industry, says Abdulelah. The trauma of Iraqis like herself, she says, should not be "turned into a show and tell."

"This isn't honoring the innocents who died. It's very disrespectful to their memory. Not to mention, this is very recent history. People are still living through and digesting the trauma they've acquired in the Iraq War," she said. "My family and I witnessed mortifying, horrible things ... It's not a memory we want to sit or revisit or talk about."

Hospitals in Fallujah have reported spikes in birth defects and cancer cases since 2005, according to a 2010 study in which some medical experts suggested the use of depleted uranium may be to blame.

Many Iraqis who lived through the war also suffer from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and have yet to receive any type of care for their mental health, according to researchers.

A 2014 study in Baghdad showed that over 80% of the participants reported experiencing at least one traumatic event that led to them suffering from PTSD and other mental health issues.

Husain, who avoids documentaries about the war due to PTSD from his yearly trips to Iraq, including one in which he says he nearly died in a car explosion, says shelving the game "should not be a debate."

When asked if he had a message for Highwire Games and Victura, Husain posed a question of his own:

"Have you people not lost loved ones?" he asked. "How would you feel if you were on the receiving end? If you saw a game about a tragedy that impacted your family, your people? How would you feel?"

Six Days in Fallujah: Preview of video game sparks social media backlash

Game designers accused of promoting militarism and whitewashing American war crimes in Iraq

The controversial "Six Days In Fallujah" shooter game is expected to be completed and released in full in 2024 (Gameplay image, Victura)

By Ayah El-Khaldi
Published date: 29 June 2023 

American game developer Highwire Games and publisher Victura have come under fire after releasing an early access version of Six Days in Fallujah, a first-person shooter game set during the US occupation of Iraq in 2004.

Since its initial announcement almost 18 years ago, the game has garnered continuous controversy, stemming from its attempted portrayal of the second Battle of Fallujah, a gruelling six-week-long conflict in 2004 involving American-led forces and Iraqi armed groups, recognised as one of the bloodiest battles of the US occupation.

Social media users have criticised the creators over the “macabre” decision to model the game, in which users can only play as members of the US counter-insurgency, on real life events and accuse it of whitewashing US crimes in Iraq.

A teaser of the game posted by an official account ignited a firestorm of criticism on Twitter, with social media users arguing that the game trivialises the horrors of war and disrespects the lives lost as a consequence of the US invasion.

Many took to the platform with a biting satirical tone, mimicking the language and style of the original trailer to point out the insensitive marketing tactics of the game.

“Experience what it’s like to be a war criminal as you kill, rape and torture innocent Iraqi civilians because you’re a career terrorist,” said one user.

According to the official website, players are promised an immersive experience in "real-life scenarios," where they step into the shoes of real US soldiers who narrate their first-hand experiences.

The website adds the game's commitment to “authenticity and respect” by mentioning the involvement of over 100 Marines, soldiers, and Iraqi civilians who have contributed photographs, videos, and consultation.

However, early access players pointed out the absence of an option to play from the perspective of Iraqis.

The game, which was released for early access players last week, is expected to be completed and released in full in 2024 across PC and console.

Amidst the ongoing uproar surrounding the exclusion of the Iraqi perspective, users brought attention to another game currently in development.

The alternative game, titled "War Operation™Full Contact", offers players the opportunity to experience the Iraq War from the point of view of an Iraqi soldier defending their country.

One user expressed anticipation, stating, "I'm waiting for my friends at Longmire Studio to finish their game. In it, you can fully play as the heroic Iraqi Resistance."

Speaking to MEE, Yusuf Erdogan and Nabyl Badji from Longmire Studio emphasised that while it is a game, it also serves as a historical work, meticulously reconstructing real-world elements.

"The development of this game began with the sole aim of offering an alternative vision of war video games, different from games advocating American militarism and heroism that are frequently present in realistic war video games."

The 'War Operation: Full Contact' game depicts Firdos Square, Baghdad in 2003, with a statue of Saddam Hussein (Longmire Studio)

Longmire stated that their precise replication of locations like Firdos Square, a significant location during the Iraq War, down to the hair salons, shops and restaurants, was intended to showcase Iraq not as a mere war-torn landscape but as a city like any other.

The developers denied that their game was created in direct response to “Six Days In Fallujah” but assured that their project “can certainly be a serious response to all games espousing these harmful ideologies detrimental to the Middle Eastern and Islamic communities worldwide".

As the social media debate rages on over the boundaries of video game content and the ethical responsibilities of game developers, several users pointed out that the "Six Days In Fallujah" account was actively blocking and concealing replies that were critical.

Middle East Eye has reached out to Victura for comment, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

The War on Terror Entailed Mass Deception

The United States legitimized military conquest during the War on Terror by using an expansive battlespace that disciplined citizens and soldiers alike. It spread lies, deception, and military propaganda to sow confusion and produce consent.

ROSS CAPUTI

CATALYST
06.29.2023

REVIEW

CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE AND ABIGAIL R. HALL

Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror

Stanford University Press, 2021


The Iraq War — or, more accurately, the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq — is widely remembered by Americans as a mistake. But appreciate for a moment how remarkable it is that our invasion of Iraq could be regarded simply as a mistake. Not only does this reframing presuppose that it was an “intelligence failure” that led us into the conflict rather than a deception by the George W. Bush administration; it also redirects attention from our moral and legal responsibility for the invasion to the pragmatics of empire, in which going to war is decided by a cost-benefit analysis.

Iraq did not have WMDs, or any connections to al-Qaeda, as the Bush administration claimed. So the 4,614 American soldiers who were killed in Iraq did, in the most tragic way, die for nothing. As did over one million Iraqis. The invasion itself was a war crime. Such is the consensus view of legal experts. And by all standards of foreign policy, the entire endeavor was a failure. So how could the fact that we were deceived into supporting an illegal invasion and foreign policy disaster not be front and center in our memory of the conflict?

There are likely several factors, but only one, argue Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall in their new book, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror, threatens to undermine our democracy: propaganda.

More and more in our democracy, information is being wielded like an instrument of statecraft to build domestic support for predetermined policies and to construct legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. Propaganda was once a temporary retreat from the liberal values of transparency and open debate during times of war. But according to Coyne and Hall, it has grown into a permanent and pervasive enterprise of the political elite that threatens to transform our democracy into a veiled authoritarian state. In their words, “Government propaganda is a direct threat to freedom and liberty because it empowers a small political elite who wields awesome discretionary powers to shape policies while keeping citizens in the dark about the underlying realities and the array of alternative options available.”

In short, propaganda is no longer the opaque Uncle Sam posters of WWI. Nor is it simply the sterile and euphemistic speech we’ve all come to expect from government and military spokespersons. Our contemporary propaganda apparatus is a whole-of-government activity with the resources and sophistication capable of inverting the relationship between the citizenry and the state such that the public is regarded as an obstacle to policy rather than its end. And it is exactly these kinds of “information asymmetries” and their causes that are the focus of Manufacturing Militarism.

While the field of propaganda studies has traditionally focused on the rhetorical analysis of propaganda messages, Manufacturing Militarism breaks from this trend by offering a political economy of the propaganda function. Coyne and Hall interrogate the “pathologies” of our democratic system that allow for information asymmetries to develop between policymakers and the public, which incentivize manipulative government messaging, secrecy, and the exaggeration of external threats. While some amount of government secrecy in a war of self-defense might be justifiable (though the United States hasn’t fought one of those in a very long time, arguably ever), Coyne and Hall argue that American policymakers have exploited their prerogative to secrecy and their access to information to their own ends.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Manufacturing Militarism is its final chapter that highlights four potential constraints on our propaganda apparatus — domestic law, whistleblowers, media criticism, and critical citizenship. Unfortunately, the first three offer more loopholes for government officials to exploit than they do protections for the public.

There is, in fact, a set of domestic laws in place aimed at constraining the abuses of propaganda; but due to a conjunction of factors — a lack of federal oversight, unwillingness on the part of the DOJ to prosecute, and the difficulty of defining what exactly constitutes propaganda — these laws have done little to protect Americans. Similarly, flaws in the legal protections for whistleblowers make the dissemination of classified information, even if it reveals government deception and wrongdoing, an act of martyrdom, as the examples of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning demonstrate. Even journalists and media corporations can be prosecuted for publishing classified information. When the media is willing to report critically on government and military actions, they can provide an important check on government propaganda. And there have been exceptionally brave journalists who, at great personal risk, have pulled the curtains back on government deception. However, these individuals are often bucking the trend of media complicity with government propaganda.

With little reason to believe that the federal government will police its own propaganda activities, Coyne and Hall place their hopes in an informed and vigilant citizenry. Since consent is the objective of propaganda, Americans need only realize, they argue, that by removing their consent, by demanding transparency and access to information, we have the power to undermine the would-be propagandists.

There’s only one problem. We can only speak out against propaganda if we can recognize it in lies and misinformation. And if we couldn’t do this in 2003 to stop the invasion of Iraq, why should we think we’re capable of this now?

Coyne and Hall’s case study of the propaganda leading up to the Iraq invasion illustrates my point well. They rightly highlight the Bush administration’s manipulation of the intelligence surrounding Iraqi WMD programs and the alleged connection with al-Qaeda, and are duly critical of the practices of press information centers, the embedding of journalists in military units, and the selective leaking of intelligence that created such a distorted public understanding of our mission in Iraq. However, the historical narrative they offer reproduces elements of propaganda. There is no mention of war crimes nor any detailed account of Iraqi experiences or perspectives. Also, some of the legitimizing vocabulary of American propagandists slips through in their analysis. Was it a war? Was there even an insurgency, as Coyne and Hall presuppose? I don’t point this out as irony or as a takedown but only to highlight the level to which propaganda has saturated the historical memory of the conflict and the challenge this poses to scholars.

It was in the spring of 2004 when the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) — the occupation government in Iraq — made a deliberate shift in its characterization of the anti-occupation militants from being “former regime elements” and “criminals” to “insurgents.” The term “insurgent” was chosen specifically because it denied the militants the status, as far as international law is concerned, of being belligerents. And the dubbing of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a “war” was a similar attempt at perception management. For the same reason that the appellation the “German-Polish War of 1939” obscures Nazi aggression, the characterization of our actions in Iraq as a “war” was an attempt to legitimize the invasion. Legitimacy was, after all, the primary military objective of the occupation, and US forces sought to achieve this objective through military means, including propaganda.

So if Coyne and Hall’s very excellent case study on Iraq propaganda assumes some of the vocabulary and framing peddled by the war’s propagandists, how can we expect ordinary citizens to speak out against propaganda when even the experts don’t always know it when they see it?

After all, Coyne and Hall admit that contemporary propaganda is diffuse while being hidden in plain sight. Manipulative government messaging has invaded our personal lives through pop culture and the news media. It is present in everything from sporting events to superhero movies, through the Department of Defense’s efforts to parade soldiers around during every halftime show and the State Department’s efforts to liaison with Hollywood. Our lives are saturated with militaristic messages that are impossible to trace, even if we’re capable of recognizing them as propaganda. I agree with Coyne and Hall that change must begin with critical citizenship, but I’m skeptical that such an awakening could occur without targeted political action. And the areas highlighted in their final chapter, perhaps especially domestic law, offer a good place to start.

One could read the sense of urgency in Manufacturing Militarism as a call to action, one intended to shock readers out of their lethargic trust in government officials and compel them to action. But how long have things been this bad? The tools of political economy that Coyne and Hall bring to the study of propaganda undoubtedly shine new light on its function in our democratic system. But for all their attention to the propaganda function, one could ask for greater attention to the propaganda apparatus and how it has evolved over time. One might assume from their analysis that our propaganda during WWII and Vietnam was equally deleterious as it is today. I don’t believe this to be true. American propaganda, in recent decades, has only become more militarized and opaque across government communications.

The transformation of propaganda from public relations into a warfighting activity occurred shortly after the 1991 Gulf War, when the US military underwent a revolution in military affairs that gave new strategic importance to the application of soft power in combat operations. By the start of the Global War on Terror, the new military discipline of information operations had been integrated into all combat activities. Moreover, the new strategic emphasis on soft power rendered the traditional concept of a battlefield obsolete, to be replaced by a multidomain battlespace reaching into the abstract realms of information and cyberspace. These doctrinal and conceptual developments have created a militarized way of thinking about information and purveyors of information among American propagandists, and one consequence of this has been an erosion of the distinction between the war zone and the home front. For the last two decades, Iraqis and Americans have been living in a battlespace together, without knowing it, and we have both been subject to the same propaganda.

Information operations may be the most dangerous wing of our propaganda apparatus, since they mislead us in the area of policy with the most human lives at stake. But propaganda is now a cross-government activity, unified by the concept of strategic communications, with a militarized cynicism toward the consent of the governed permeating our political institutions.

Three years ago, in a call with the president on how to handle the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, then secretary of defense Mark Esper urged state governors “to dominate the battlespace.” During the early years of the Global War on Terror, many commentators warned that our adoption of counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan threatened to leak into our domestic security apparatus, furnishing the police and the FBI with the rationale to view the American public as the enemy. In many ways, these warnings have proven true. Unfortunately, the danger posed by the battlespace was overlooked, and we are only now beginning to recognize how it empowered a political elite to view our hearts and minds as objects to be governed.

The winning of Iraqi hearts and minds was the central military objective of the occupation, and the word “winning” accurately reflects the extent to which persuasion was being treated as a military activity. We certainly weren’t there to respect Iraqi hearts and minds. We were there to win them. And if Iraqis wanted something other than what we were offering, this was viewed as only a temporary state of affairs until we could convince or coerce them to want something else.

The American state-building mission in Iraq depended on, if not actual Iraqi consent, at least the appearance of their consent as its source of legitimacy. Iraqis, in fact, violently rejected the American mission in the form of an armed national liberation movement. But through the practice of perception management, the United States was able to depict the Iraqi resistance as an ideologically fringe movement of religious extremists in order to secure the consent of American audiences for the continuation of the occupation.

If I could offer an example from my own research to highlight the problem, the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is illustrative, but not exceptional. His name first entered American political discourse in 2002, when the Bush administration alleged that he, a jihadist who had joined Osama bin Laden’s cause in Afghanistan, was now leading a terrorist cell in northern Iraq. After the invasion, nearly a year passed before his name reemerged, curiously around the same time the CPA began characterizing the anti-occupation violence as an insurgency led by al-Qaeda. A communication that he had written to the al-Qaeda leadership was intercepted by the United States and leaked to the New York Times, which ran the story alleging scary new developments for American forces in Iraq.

After the United States was forced to cancel its first attempt to sack Fallujah in April 2004 due to political backlash for the deaths of over five hundred civilians, American military spokespersons began claiming that Zarqawi himself was in Fallujah recruiting soldiers for al-Qaeda in Iraq. No hard evidence has ever been produced placing Zarqawi in Fallujah. Nonetheless, his presence was uncritically accepted in the American media and was treated a casus belli for the second siege of Fallujah in November 2004. Just before the second siege began, Fallujah’s political and military leadership held negotiations with the new Interim Iraqi Government (IIG) and US officials to reach a peace settlement. However, the United States and the IIG demanded that Fallujans turn over Zarqawi as a condition for peace. The operation proceed, this time killing an estimated four to six thousand civilians, producing over two hundred thousand refugees, and destroying half the city. Yet through a reinvigorated campaign of information operations, the US military was able to sell the story to the Western media that we had in fact “liberated” Fallujah.

It was later revealed, in 2006, that the US military was conducting a psyop to exaggerate Zarqawi’s role in the anti-occupation violence. Military spokespersons claimed that the objective wasn’t to target Americans but Iraqis with misinformation. However, most Fallujans didn’t even believe Zarqawi existed. They regarded him as no more than a boogeyman invented by the Americans to justify attacking their city. In fact, Fallujah’s own city council was so frustrated by the US military’s repeated appeals to the presence of Zarqawi as a justification for bombing his “network” in Fallujah that they placed a bounty on his head. Meanwhile, Zarqawi had become a familiar, menacing figure in the American news coverage of the occupation and American audiences had come to believe deeply that he posed an existential threat to the Iraqis we claimed to be liberating, to our soldiers in Iraq, and to American national security more generally.

In the case of Zarqawi, it is near impossible to separate the outsize myth of Zarqawi’s deeds and his role in the anti-occupation violence from fact. The Zarqawi psyop spread such pervasive rumors about his leadership role and his presence in Fallujah that they became conventional wisdom among American policymakers and military planners. So as a Marine infantryman in Fallujah in 2004, I believed it when a platoon commander told us that he just received word from our intel shop that Zarqawi was just a few blocks away and he was wounded in the leg. Keep fighting, he said. To this day, I still struggle to understand which levels of command were in on the deception and who believed our own propaganda.

Coyne and Hall have issued us an important wake-up call to the dangers of our propaganda apparatus, currently subject to no checks and balances apart from the feeble Freedom of Information Act. (At the time of writing, I have had a FOIA request in the queue with CENTCOM requesting documents on information operations in Iraq for over three years now.) But awareness that we do in fact have a propaganda apparatus may not be enough, as the Zarqawi psyop illustrates. Even experts struggle to sift truth from propaganda without intimate knowledge of how our apparatus is structured and what each component is doing. But we must start somewhere, and Manufacturing Militarism is a welcome call to action.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ross Caputi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the main author of The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History (2019) and is the director of archives at Archive Iraq.

WAR CRIME

Excruciating burns and lifelong suffering: The use of white phosphorus from Fallujah to Palestine

Saoud Khalaf
13 October, 2023

Israel's war crimes in Gaza have involved the use of the illegal chemical weapon white phosphorus, which causes horrific deformities and death. However, this isn't the first time it has been used, as the Iraqi city of Fallujah knows all too well.

A chemical that burns flesh to the bone, turns your eyelids inside out, accumulates toxic fluid in your lungs, and causes an excruciating death within 24-48 hours.

Cities have been turned into dystopian horrors. Babies are born with harrowing neural anomalies, two heads, others with none, missing limbs, or none at all: a living hell.

These are just some of the effects of white phosphorus, a chemical weapon used by Israel on the citizens of Gaza in the past few days, increasing the suffering of a civilian population already living under blockade.

The Iraqi perspective on the use of chemical weapons is deeply rooted in our own tragic history, spanning over two decades of US-led occupation of our homeland.

Iraqis are well aware of the chemical's effects, therefore we are in a unique position to raise awareness of these horrible atrocities.

"What does the future hold in store for Gaza's next generation? They will likely be born under blockade, and run the risk of suffering from birth defects as a result of their occupier's use of chemical weapons"

For those unaware, white phosphorous is a barbaric instrument of warfare. According to international humanitarian law, its use constitutes a war crime. Underpinned by international law and a focus on human rights, this article focuses on why this cruel chemical should never, ever be used.

Human Rights Watch charged Israel with using white phosphorous in Gaza, saying it has a "significant incendiary effect that can severely burn people and set structures, fields, and other civilian objects in the vicinity on fire".

The US-based rights group said it verified videos taken in Lebanon on 10 October and Gaza on 11 October, which showed "multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border".

It provided links to two videos posted on social media that it said showed "155mm white phosphorus artillery projectiles being used, apparently as smokescreens, marking, or signalling".

"The use of white phosphorus in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, magnifies the risk to civilians and violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk," Human Rights Watch stated in their report.



White phosphorous is an incendiary weapon, with the UN defining incendiary weapons as “designed to set fire to objects or cause burn or respiratory injury to people through the action of flame, heat, or combination thereof, resulting from a chemical reaction of a flammable substance.”

The aftereffects and injuries from exposure to incendiary weapons “are severe and their effects are often fatal. Victims who survive suffer from injuries that are difficult to treat and lead to long-term physical and psychological injury.”

“Any time that white phosphorus is used in crowded civilian areas, it poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “White phosphorous is unlawfully indiscriminate when airburst in populated urban areas, where it can burn down houses and cause egregious harm to civilians.”

In November 2004, US forces spearheaded a military operation in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, located just west of Baghdad, with the objective of eliminating "Iraqi insurgents" from the area, with their choice of weapon being white phosphorous.

Entire neighbourhoods have been wiped out by Israel's blanket bombing 

[Getty Images]

The chemical bursts into flames when it hits oxygen, burning at up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit (816 degrees Celsius) until nothing is left or the oxygen supply is cut, producing an encompassing smoke screen. In an urban setting, the desired outcome is considerably more lethal.

The munitions can re-ignite weeks after they were first used, further harming those who inhabit the heavily populated areas where they have been deployed, in addition to the toxic chemicals having already covered everything in sight.

At the time, Professor Paul Rodgers from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford stated that the operation would have qualified as launching a chemical weapon if it had been "deliberately aimed at people to have a chemical effect.” This was the intended effect, and it worked.

Iraqi citizens evacuated the city in a desperate attempt to avoid impending doom. Their vision was obscured by thick grey clouds of smoke, petrifying everyone in fear of its deadly touch.

Only 30,000 to 50,000 people remained after the attack drove the majority of Fallujah’s 300,000 residents to flee.

Gaza fears 'Second Nakba'

https://www.newarab.com/features/gazas-population-seeks-shelter-blanket-israeli-attacks

'In the blink of an eye, we became homeless': Gaza's population seeks shelter from vindictive Israeli assault

 

https://www.newarab.com/opinion/breaking-out-gaza-why-7-october-not-israels-911

Breaking out of the Gaza cage: Why the 7 October attack is not Israel's 9/11

 

https://www.newarab.com/analysis/how-hamas-caught-israel-surprise-and-risked-its-future

How Hamas caught Israel by surprise and risked its future

In our current situation, some two decades later, Gazans would do anything to have the chance to escape such chemical weapons.

After telling the residents of Gaza to flee to Egypt to escape air raids, Israel shelled their only escape route, the Rafah border crossing. Where else are 2+ million people, confined to the world's largest open-air prison, supposed to go when they are surrounded on all sides?

Two years after the US operation in Fallujah, a doctor named Samira Alani began logging birth defect numbers in newborns, after she detected a surge in cases. She spent the following years doing meticulous research into these mutations, trying to understand their underlying cause.

"The use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas of Gaza violates the requirement under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian injury and loss of life"

What makes white phosphorus even more sinister is the fact that the chemicals persist in the environment and do not simply evaporate. As a result, cities remain contaminated with toxic substances for years, unbeknownst to the civilians who populate them.

170 infants were reported to have been delivered at Fallujah General Hospital in September 2009. The majority of newborns had the malformations that Dr Alani had been tracking since 2006, and by seven days, 24% had passed away.

Mothers facing toxic exposure had ended up giving birth to children who had been mutated from second-hand radiation exposure, with their children being sentenced to a lifetime of extreme health difficulties if they managed to make it out of the hospital alive.

What does the future hold in store for Gaza's next generation? They will likely be born under blockade, and run the risk of suffering from birth defects as a result of their occupier's use of chemical weapons.

Children under 15 years old constitute half of Gaza's population, and a staggering 91% of them suffer from PTSD.

For a 15-year-old Palestinian child today in Gaza, their entire existence has been shaped by the harrowing experience of five distinct wars with Israel (including the one we’re currently witnessing).

RELATED

Breaking out of Gaza: Why 7 October is not Israel's 9/11

Perspectives

Azmi Bishara

If these children survive to adulthood, will they see five more wars in the next fifteen years? Is there a likelihood that their own children will be born with the same proportion of deformities? What kind of future awaits a child with such defects in an environment where the occupying power can effortlessly shut off all fuel and energy sources, rendering hospitals inoperable at the click of a finger?

Let's not forget that Israel has previously used white phosphorus on Gaza, during the 22-day military assault in 2008-2009. The prior use of this weapon demonstrates with certainty that its deployment is deliberate and with malicious intent, with the effect of punishing Gazans collectively and in the long term in mind.




As reported by Human Rights Watch in regards to its use by Israel in 2008-2009, they stated, “when it wanted an obscurant for its forces, the IDF had a readily available and non-lethal alternative to white phosphorus-smoke shells produced by an Israeli company. The IDF could have used those shells to the same effect and dramatically reduced the harm to civilians.

“The consistent use of air-burst white phosphorus instead of smoke projectiles, especially where no Israeli forces were on the ground, strongly suggests that the IDF was not using the munition for its obscurant qualities, but rather for its incendiary effect,” HRW also stated.

Palestinian and foreign doctors who were attending to the patients saw that once their wounds had been treated, they began to burn once more. Serious burn victims had to be transferred to Egypt because Gazan hospitals lacked the resources to adequately treat patients, particularly the diagnostic equipment necessary to identify the cause of the burns. Some of them required skin grafts as a result of their injuries.

The Israeli military, in 2013, announced that it was “to stop using artillery shells with white phosphorus to create smokescreens on the battlefield.” Ten years later, has this happened?

RELATED

Gaza's population seeks shelter from blanket Israeli attacks

Society

Mahmoud Mushtaha

No matter the situation, it's essential to oppose the use of white phosphorus and similar munitions. The devastating and lasting consequences they inflict on future generations are inconceivable. We must hold responsible those who committed these war crimes, to uphold justice.

Iraqis all around the world stand side to side with our brothers and sisters in Gaza to denounce the unlawful use of chemical weapons as defined by international law, from Baghdad to Beit Hanoun, and Karbala to Khan Yunis.

Saoud Khalaf is a British-born Iraqi filmmaker and writer based in London. His videos, which have garnered millions of views across social media, focus on social justice for marginalised groups with specific attention on the Middle East. His latest documentary premiered at the Southbank Centre for Refugee Week.

Follow him on Twitter: @saoudkhalaf_

Remembering Siah Armajani, the late Iranian architect who made America beautiful again

Kourosh Ziabari
12 May, 2022

An understated giant of midwestern architecture, Iranian-born Siah Armajani has cemented his place in the design history of the United States. Profiling his achievements over a 60-year career, The New Arab looks back on his life and his legacy.

Many residents of Minneapolis, Minnesota, cross over the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge every day or move past it.

It offers a unique vantage point to the well-liked Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, epitomised by the iconic $500,000 Spoonbridge and Cherry sculptural design.

Most of the locals recognise Whitney, a Twin Cities philanthropist and civic leader who was married to the 1980 Independent-Republican gubernatorial candidate Wheelock Whitney and passed away in 1986.


"Siah Armajani is reputed to have kept a relatively low profile during his career, but that doesn’t mean his work was not noticed or did not earn plaudits"

But to many Minnesota denizens and visitors of the Garden who happen to walk over the bridge spanning an interstate highway, or at least catch a glimpse of it from afar, the story behind the structure is almost undisclosed, unless one is deeply involved with arts and history.

The passers-by appraise it as a commendable artefact boasting aesthetic perfections, but few of them are familiar with its designer, the late Siah Armajani, one of the countless Iranian artists who have chosen the United States as their home and worked to give a facelift to their quarters.

Siah ‘Siavash’ Armajani was an Iranian-American artist and architect who lived most of his life in Minneapolis and died in 2020 at the age of 81 because of heart failure.

He was born in 1939 in Tehran when Reza Shah Pahlavi, the first monarch of the House of Pahlavi was in power. When the throne was passed to his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, it was the fear of persecution by an undemocratic leader, whose grip on power was consolidated after the 1953 coup co-engineered by the United States and Britain, that compelled the young Siavash to bid farewell to a motherland he cherished and embark on a new journey.

Siah Armajani's: 'Bridge Over Tree' is displayed at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The Iranian-born artist's installation features a 91-foot-long walkway with a set of stairs that rise and fall over a single evergreen tree [Getty Images]

A Christian by upbringing, he was engrossed by Islamic arts and his artistic productions as a teenager included collages denouncing the coup, and critiquing, in a subtle and low-intensity mode, the authoritarian regime helmed by the shah, which could leave him in a vulnerable position and most probably see his liberty compromised.

In 1960, he relocated to the States, and enrolled at the St. Paul-based Macalester College, a premium liberal arts school of higher education, whose most noted alumnus is probably the former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

An inimitably prolific artist, the harvest of his six-decade career can be spotted all around the United States: from the Bridge Over Tree in Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York City, to the cauldron for the centennial edition of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and the exquisite Glass Bridge for Nashville pledged to the Cheekwood botanical garden.

A total of 38 artworks by Armajani are kept by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the most monumental of which is Fallujah.

Fallujah by Siah Armajani [courtesy of the Met Museum]

Named after the Iraqi city of Fallujah – which was besieged during the US invasion of Iraq and witnessed the bloodiest chapter of the war when 82 US troops, six Iraqi troops and nearly 2,000 “insurgents” were killed after the Second Battle of Fallujah broke out – the model is a courageous expression of dissent against the US militarism.

Some arts connoisseurs assert it is evocative of the 1937 oil painting Guernica by the Spanish legendary artist Pablo Picasso, created to challenge Hitler’s callousness after his aerial bombing of the village of Guernica in the Basque County during the Spanish Civil War.

An emigre fascinated by the vision of American democracy, there are frequent references to the works and quotations of pro-democracy intellectuals Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emma Goldman and John Dewey in Armajani’s constructions.

Yet, the invasion of Iraq was a moment of rupture and disillusionment, not only for him, but for many of those who were convinced the United States would be the first to practice what it preaches and stand up for the rule of law and accountability, and were proven wrong.



The radicalising effect of that military campaign was what gave birth to Fallujah, and from that point onward, Armajani embraced a new artistic trajectory.

He announced that he would no longer create habitable forms but would start enclosing, or rather caging them, in glass; an encirclement that mirrored his suppressed frustration with how the American democracy had failed its devotees.

Frank Jossi, a journalist in St. Paul and contributor to Midwest Energy News who also studies culture and history in Minnesota believes Armajani has been able to carve a name for himself as one of America’s finest sculptors: “I can say Armajani is thought-provoking, drawing you into his pieces not with a sledgehammer but instead through the enthralling beauty of work that slyly invites to enjoy the view before delivering an uncomfortable understanding of the world.”

"Siah Armajani was a Midwestern who stayed, and an Iranian who exercised his talent in a country that would appreciate it, in a region that would celebrate it. And oddly enough, his recognition was far above many of his contemporaries who exercised their ambitions on the coasts"

Armajani belongs to a generation of Iranian immigrants whose transition to the United States didn’t coincide with the insolvency in bilateral relations that is playing out today.

Before 1979, Iran and the United States were stalwart allies. President Jimmy Carter famously referred to Iran as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world” at a 1977 state dinner in Tehran.

But however unlikely it seemed at the outset, the Islamic Revolution plunged the erstwhile genial bilateral ties into an apparently irreversible blackout from which the two countries haven’t recovered yet, and tensions have even metastasized over time.

All the same, Iranian immigrants, mostly questing for their “American dream,” kept flowing in post-1979, and many of them went on to become leading authorities in sciences, academia, arts, culture, media and politics.

The absence of diplomatic ties means even getting to the US soil is a daunting task for people of Iranian origin holding a tenuous passport. Against the odds, many of them have surmounted the adversities, worked hard and made contributions that are appreciated by the broader public.The United States, carrying the accolade of the land of opportunity, empowers almost anyone who aspires to succeed to find their right place and make headway. For Iranians, however, things are slightly different.

From the uniquely witty stand-up comedian Maz Jobrani to the Crystal Award-winning visual artist Shirin Neshat and the Primetime Emmy Award-winning star of the House of Sand and Fog Shohreh Aghdashloo, household names in arts and culture hailing from the community of Iranian-Americans are not scarce.

Siah Armajani is reputed to have kept a relatively low profile during his career, but that doesn’t mean his work was not noticed or did not earn plaudits.

RELATED

The German-Iranian encouraging cultural dialogue through art

Culture

Sahar Esfandiari

In March 1990, The New Yorker did a profile of him, and he took his installations to national and international exhibitions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Storm King Art Center to Nelson Atkins Museum of Arts and Museo Reina Sofia.

“I think his work is celebrated because he was an immigrant who came not to the art capital of the country, New York, but instead to Minneapolis, an arts-rich metropolis a long way from the coasts. He made his life in the Twin Cities as other artists decamped to California and New York, the nation’s two art centres, to seek fame,” Jossi said.

“In that sense, he was a Midwestern who stayed, and an Iranian who exercised his talent in a country that would appreciate it, in a region that would celebrate it. And oddly enough, his recognition was far above many of his contemporaries who exercised their ambitions on the coasts,” he told The New Arab.

Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist and reporter. He is the Iran correspondent of Fair Observer and Asia Times. He is the recipient of a Chevening Award from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office and an American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford Fellowship.

Follow him on Twitter @KZiabari

Alleged al-Qaeda Leader Arrested In Phoenix On Murder Charges

WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT? WHERE?

BY KATABELLA ROBERTS February 2, 2020
An alleged leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist group was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, this week, on charges of murder, the Department of Justice said in a statement on Jan 31.

Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri, 42, was apprehended by officials on Jan. 29 and faces extradition to Iraq after a judge issued a warrant for his arrest following two charges of premeditated murder committed in 2006 in Al-Fallujah, in the Al Anbar province.

“According to the information provided by the Government of Iraq in support of its extradition request, Ahmed served as the leader of a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists in Al-Fallujah, Iraq, which planned operations targeting Iraqi police,” the department said.

“Ahmed and other members of the Al-Qaeda group allegedly shot and killed a first lieutenant in the Fallujah Police Directorate and a police officer in the Fallujah Police Directorate, on or about June 1, 2006, and October 3, 2006, respectively.”

The DOJ added that if Al-Nouri’s extradition is granted by the court, the decision of whether to surrender him to Iraq will be made by the U.S. Secretary of State and the case will be handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona and the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs.

Al-Nouri’s arrest comes after the United States reportedly conducted a strike targeting Qassim al-Rimi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate in Yemen that has repeatedly threatened attacks targeting the United States.

The New York Times reported that three current or former American officials expressed confidence that Rimi had been killed in a January airstrike in Yemen.

However, the Pentagon would not elaborate on the reports, and a U.S. Defense Official told CNN: “While we are aware of the reports alleging the death of AQAP leader Qassim al-Rimi, the Department of Defense has nothing to offer on this matter.”

President Donald Trump also shared a number of reports on Twitter regarding al-Rimi’s alleged death, but did not comment further.

Rimi reportedly became head of the Al-Qaeda affiliate group following a 2015 drone strike that killed former leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi. The U.S. government, through its Rewards for Justice program, had offered up to a $10 million reward for information on him.

His death, if confirmed would be the latest in a string of successes for U.S. counterterrorism operations, after Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian general who had planned and orchestrated attacks on American troops in Iraq, was also killed by a U.S airstrike on Jan. 2.

---30---

War! What's it Good For? Profit

IRAQ
THIS WAR IS ABOUT PRIVATIZATION
Ok enough of this crap, about contractors. Lets call a spade a spade, these so called contractors are hired guns; mercenaries attached to the US military. So why isn't the media calling them that? Cause the news would read different. Lets take Fallujah for instance if you heard or read or watched a news broadcast that said four heavily armed mercenaries were ambushed and killed by residents of Fallujah, well that would have a different spin than calling them contractors.
Contractors imply some guys in coveralls working driving a truck or building something or serving food to someone. It does not imply a guy in military khakis carrying weapons. Mercenaries are hired killers however, and calling them contractors as if they were another truck driver, is clever and disingenuous and the media has played right into this rhetorical slight of hand.
Iraq is Bush and the Republicans first full scale Privatized war. Sure mercenaries have been used in other recent conflicts but not on this scale. Bremers role in Iraq is to privatize all existing state owned industries and civil infrastructure.
The military is being supported by 10,000 mercenaries from companies in the US and UK. The UK is the largest supplier of mercenaries, it has several of the largest companies, made up of former SAS, special ops personnel.
The US has recently seen a boom in private security/mercenary companies all headquartered in Virginia around the CIA and Pentagon. These companies are made up of ex US military personnel and ex CIA.
To say that these folks don't understand the military code they once served is ridiculous. The reality is they are outside the Uniform Code of Justice because the US Congress did NOT declare War in Iraq. However in 2000 the US Congress passed a law that would put these 'civilian' mercenaries under Military oversight, they just haven't applied it.
Mercenaries (Military Contractors sic) are part of the overall effort of the US to contract out all the support services in its operations in Iraq. Troop suppliers are contracted out, field operations contain military personnel supported by contracted out food, medical and material supply personnel. Infrastructure is being built by private contractors such as Bechtel and Halliburton. Much of this is not just oil pipelines, but the schools and hospitals, electrical generating stations, etc.
Sure the US says its building hospitals and schools, but lets look at what they are building, private hospitals and private schools. The ideology of privatization and contracting out, so called free enterprise is behind the destruction and reconstruction of Iraq. Saddam was the excuse. The reasons for the war are many, oil security, Israel’s security, most importantly what Bush and his Republicans bring to Iraq is in the words of Senator Elizabeth Dole: "a free market." So privateers are running the country under the protection of mercenaries and US troops.
What about the workers in Iraq? They are not allowed to organize unions under a 1987 law passed by Saddam. Since the state controlled all enterprises all workers were made government employees under the law.
Bremer has continued to use this law to disallow free collective bargaining in Iraq. Independent unions have arisen and workers have gone on strike only to be told by the Coalition Government and its Finance ministry they have no right to strike or unionize. US military forces have attacked union offices in Baghdad.
There are no union or worker representatives present in the Governing Council nor has the UN made any effort to include the workers and their unions in the new government coming into effect in July.Yet the ILO is part of the UN and has not been called in to review the conditions of the working class in Iraq.
This is reality of the war in Iraq, it is to take over the infrastructure of the country, remove it from state control and sell it off to the highest bidder, which is exactly what Bremer and Company are currently doing. State run industries are being sold off at fire sale prices with no concern for the workers in those industries.
Lets look at where all the billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq are going
Mercenaries cost $100,000 a year
Contracted Truck Drivers (like James Halwell) $1000 a week
Average Iraqi Oil worker- $160 a month
This is the real outrage of Bush's Privatization war.
Until the media ends its complicity with the US government by calling mercenaries "contractors" the people of Canada, the US and the UK will continue to be hoodwinked as badly as the Iraqi prisoners.

Printed online at Indymedia, Resist.ca, Rabble.ca, and excerpted in Alberta Views, September 2004



Don't Call them Contractors
Dear Editor
Lets call a spade a spade, these so called military 'contractors' are hired guns; mercenaries, attached to the US military. So why isn't the media calling them that? Cause the news would read different.
Lets take Fallujah for instance if you heard or read or watched a news broadcast that said four heavily armed mercenaries were ambushed and killed by residents of Fallujah, well that would have a different spin than calling them contractors.
Contractors imply some guy in coveralls working driving a truck or building something or serving food to someone. It does not imply a guy in military kahkis carrying weapons. Mercenaries are hired killers however, and calling them contractors as if they were another truck driver is clever and disingenuous, and the media has played right into this rhetorical slight of hand.
The military is being supported by 10,000 mercenaries from companies in the US and UK. The UK is the largest supplier of mercenaries, it has several of the largest companies, made up of former SAS, special ops personnel.
The US has recently seen a boom in private security/mercenary companies all headquartered in Virginia around the CIA and Pentagon. These companies are made up of ex US military personnel and ex CIA.
To say that these folks don't understand the military code they once served is ridiculous. The reality is they are outside the Uniform Code of Justice because the US Congress did NOT declare War in Iraq. However in 2000 the US Congress passed a law that would put these 'civilian' mercenaries under Military oversite, they just haven't applied it.
Until the media ends its complicity with the US government by calling mercenaries "contractors" the people of Canada, the US and the UK will continue to be hoodwinked as badly as the Iraqi prisoners.


Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afganistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)

The current undeclared war being conducted by NATO against Yugoslavia on behalf of the Kosovo Albanians has been seen as a political act. Both left and right wing commentators those in favour of the war and those opposed have posed their arguments in political and humanitarian terms.
The fact that this war is a direct result of the current crisis of global capitalism, has been overlooked if not out right ignored by those debating on either side of the war.
That politics should be divorced from economics as well as their military implications reveals the short comings of current left wing analysis and critique.
One reason is that this war is happening in our time, at this moment in history.
It is hard to stand back and look at the larger picture, when an immediate
response is demanded by the situation.
But this war is just one more low intensity conflict that has occurred since the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in fact more of them will occur as the contradictions of capitalism expand exponentially through the process of global neo-liberalization and the creation of international trading blocs.
A political-economic interpretation of this war is needed to put this moment in its historical context, free of the prejudices of the current power politics at play but by no means ignoring them or their influence.
The current war in Yugoslavia has stabilized the global financial capital market.
The justifications for the war are irrelevant propaganda, the real reason is fourfold:
The launch of the Euro Dollar and the development of the European Union as a perceived threat to American geo-political and military hegemony, and the subsequent need to expand that hegemony in Europe via NATO.
The collapse of the Russian and Asian economies which created a deflationary economic cycle (stagflation).
The increasing exponential boom bust cycle on Wall Street, where the market breaks 10,000 crashes and booms again to 11,000 points all occurring during the war.
The need to destroy excess production in order to stabilize the world market and expand the neo-liberal trade accords and trading blocs, which had been stalled by a mass movement world wide in opposition to those accords. This is a ‘bombing’ war, aimed at the destruction of production capabilities in Yugoslavia weaking it for a Marshall like reconstruction plan via the European Union, and the need for the United States to rid itself of large amounts of costly armaments.
The old adage that when capitalism reaches a crisis it uses war as a way of stabilizing itself should not surprise us at the end of the 20th Century. The fact that capitalism as a global market no longer needs to create ‘World Wars’ but can function with low intensity wars, to do this, is what is new.
Hard on the heals of a year long market depression in Asia, and the complete collapse of the Russian economy in the spring of this year, the world capitalist system now faced a deflationary cycle, mass overproduction and stagflation, economic terms not used since the 1930’s.
The launch of the Eurodollar and the creation of the European Union, added a new trading bloc challenge to American Economic and Political hegemony. The subsequent expansion of euro-capitalists like the Dahlmer-Benz/Chrysler merger are symptomatic of trading bloc hegemonic struggles in this period of global expansion of the capitalist world system.
Both the crash of the Asian trading blocs and the expansion of the EU trading bloc produced a bust on Wall Street.
Since the war began Wall Street has subsequently broken the 10,000 and 11,000 point mark. War is the health of capital and its state.
Most commentators have focused on the political/humanitarian issues around this war. These are not the prime factors for this war, they are the propaganda issues that are used to arouse the support of the various publics.
Like the war against Iraq, which was a low intensity conflict a test ground for the latest in American weapons technology, this war is more about global financial capitalism than about geo-politics or territorial acquisition. The war against Iraq, and the subsequent war in the Sudan, were about maintaining American corporate hegemony over oil. In Iraq’s case the war was to curtail the pending dumping of billions of gallons of oil onto the market which would have disastrous economic consequences for the Transnational Oil Companies and their OPEC client states.
It was a war to maintain market share.

The international intervention in the Sudan, was also an oil war, in order to secure
a stable political and economic situation for predominately American Trans-National Oil companies in the region.
The fact that limited intervention was conducted by the United Nations in Rwanda, was due to the lack of support French Imperialism garnered for its geo-political and economic interests in the region. Destabilization of this region , which is rich in oil, heavy metals and other mineral resources, was in the vested interests not of French Imperialism but its competitors in the European Union and of course the United States.
Yugoslavia is the current victim of the neo-liberal agenda.
Mass mobilizations against the third world debt, the MAI and other trade accords as well as calls for capital controls (such as the Tobin Tax) had been garnering strength and legitimacy when the war was declared.
The war immediately resulted in a boom on Wall Street thus thwarting the very real danger of a deflationary drive towards stagflation in the United States. It allowed the U.S. to reassert its hegemony via NATO over the European Union. And it allowed Russia to be a player in European geo-politics providing a momentary stabilization in its economic and political spiral towards chaos.
The war now allows the United States a greater say in the power politics of dividing up the Balkans, which had been until now dominated by the EU and its most powerful member; Germany.
Conversely it has worked in favour of stabilizing the Euro, as well as cementing the EU as a political as well as economic alliance, with Britain acting as the voice of Europe backing it’s American allies.
Canada’s role in supporting NATO’s war, reveals the depth and dangers of the corporate trade agreements and economic blocs like APEC, NAFTA, the WTO.
These accords, as well as our membership in NATO, compelled the Liberal Government to act as a comprador nation to American Imperialism, completely negating our ability to act independently as a member of the UN Security Council with the right to veto.
This is a market driven war, it is about trade agreements and the expansion of neo-liberal globalization and economic stabilization. National sovereignty, ethnic cleansing and the creation of Balkan democracy are so much propaganda masking the real reason for this war; to remedy the contradictions of an overheated global capitalist world system facing a pending global depression.

Also see:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/REGIONAL/ECE/flaws.pdf
The fatal flaws underlying NATO'S intervention in Yugoslavia
By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)
USI, New Delhi April 6, 1999



Iraq

oil

socialism

labour

anarchism

anti-war

political

Politics

Top 3 Ways America Has Been Deeply Wounded By Supporting Israel Lobbyists Like Jared Kushner

The ongoing human rights catastrophe provokes rage and provides grounds for political mobilization in the region.

by

Juan Cole

Embassy dedication ceremony. (Photo: CC)

Jared Kushner is essentially an Israeli squatter on Palestinian land in the West Bank, and so it is little wonder that his plan for Palestinians is that they should continue under the Israeli jackboot and that a third of their territory in the West Bank should be given to Israel. The arrogance of this filthy rich privileged Jewish American dismissing dispossessed and disprivileged Palestinians as dumb as rocks for not bending over for him on command is breathtaking.

The United States is a big, powerful, wealthy country and Kushner’s conviction that he can screw over with impunity the poor, surrounded, disorganized Palestinians seems logical.

The fact is, however, that even Great Powers pay a price for doing profound injustices, even if it isn’t immediately obvious how.

Because the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is a subject attended with a great deal of noise and propaganda, it is easy to be misunderstood and smeared. So let me state straightforwardly that I am not saying that US support for Israel per se has harmed our nation. I am saying that US support for the Israeli Apartheid policies toward the Occupied Territories since 1967 has been injurious. Here are some of the ways this backing for naked injustice has injured us:

1. Terrorism: The US support for the Israeli ownership of all of Jerusalem injures the religious feelings of 1.8 billion Muslims and it breeds terrorism against the US. It helped get Washington and New York blown up in 2001. I wrote 15 years ago,

“Because al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers do not speak in the language of Palestinian nationalism, it has been possible for certain quarters to obscure to the US public that they are absolutely manically fixated on the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.

This is what Bin Laden meant way back in the 1990s when he denounced the foreign military occupation of “the three holy cities.” Here is what Bin Laden wrote in 1998 when he declared war on the US:

"Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."

How obsessed Bin Laden & company are with what goes on in Palestine is obvious… in the 9/11 commission report:

"According to KSM [Khalid Shaikh Muhammad], Bin Ladin had been urging him to advance the date of the attacks. In 2000, for instance, KSM remembers Bin Ladin pushing him to launch the attacks amid the controversy after then-Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. KSM claims Bin Ladin told him it would be enough for the hijackers simply to down planes rather than crash them into specific targets. KSM says he resisted the pressure.

KSM claims to have faced similar pressure twice more in 2001.According to him, Bin Ladin wanted the operation carried out on May 12, 2001, seven months to the day after the Cole bombing. KSM adds that the 9/11 attacks had originally been envisioned for May 2001. The second time he was urged to launch the attacks early was in June or July 2001, supposedly after Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House. On both occasions KSM resisted, asserting that the hijacking teams were not ready. Bin Ladin pressed particularly strongly for the latter date in two letters stressing the need to attack early.The second letter reportedly was delivered by Bin Ladin’s son-in-law,Aws al Madani."

It wasn’t just that the 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 Americans, it was that they launched the US on two wars (both still going on) and vastly securitized and miltarized American society, paving the way for Trumpian fascism. How deeply America has been harmed, and how many liberties and economic opportunities it has lost for the sake of millenarian dreams of Jerusalem by Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists are incalculable.

2. Opposition: When two people meet, they can hit it off or they can get off on a wrong foot. It is the same with countries. The United States has gotten off on a wrong foot with many of the 1.8 billion Muslims because it supports treating the Palestinians the way white people in the Old South used to treat Black people.

The degree to which Iraqis were influenced to oppose the US presence in their country in the Bush era by US policy of screwing over the Palestinians has usually been overlooked. I wrote at Salon in 2004,

“Sharon wanted to permanently annex about half of the West Bank, and appears to have decided that this action might be made palatable to the U.S. and some European states if he, at the same time, withdrew from Gaza altogether . . .At their joint news conference on April 14, Bush blessed Sharon’s plot. Of the “existing major Israeli population centers,” (i.e. settlements) on the West Bank, Bush said it is “unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final-status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” Bush also hailed Sharon’s plan to withdraw from Gaza and move its settlers to the West Bank as “historic.”

Translated, what Bush really said was that there would be no return to the 1967 borders and that Israel’s policy of annexing occupied territory and planting large settlements on it — actions forbidden by the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbid permanently acquiring territory by war — had now received the stamp of approval from Washington. Moreover, Sharon was authorized to take further steps unilaterally, without negotiating with the Palestinians.

Combined with the American military assault on Fallujah, Bush’s embrace of Sharon’s position succeeded in making America, in Arab eyes, virtually indistinguishable from Israel. The Egyptian daily al-Jumhuriyyah spoke for many Arabs when it observed in the wake of the Bush-Sharon accord, “the victims being killed daily in Palestine and Iraq are due to the continuation of the occupation … Violence and extremism have increased as a natural response to the brutality of the occupation.”

Before Bush endorsed Sharon’s plan, much of the Arab press and popular opinion had stopped short of such an equation. Many, even those opposed to the U.S. invasion and critical of the occupation, were prepared to acknowledge that not all of those fighting the Americans were noble freedom fighters. Now, the rhetoric and sentiment are swinging the other way.

Sharon’s plan for West Bank annexation and withdrawal from Gaza had held one danger. Hamas, strong in Gaza, might take advantage of an Israeli withdrawal to use the territory as a base for even more suicide bombings. Sharon was determined to wipe out the Hamas leadership so as to cripple its organizational capacity and render it unable or fearful to benefit from a unilateral Israeli pull-back. Thus he launched the rocket attack on Sheikh Yassin on March 22, which was a piece of political theater. A half-blind man in a wheelchair could simply have been arrested (in fact, Yassin served time in an Israeli prison in the 1990s). The point was to inspire fear among his successors.

Hamas is a Sunni Muslim fundamentalist party, deriving from the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. Sheikh Yassin’s extremist writings are widely read among fundamentalists, including those in Iraq. His murder provoked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis. Some of them determined to take revenge on the closest ally of the Israelis, the Americans who were occupying them.

The fuse ran from Gaza to Iraq, and ignited in Fallujah. Sunni Arab fundamentalists and Arab nationalists are particularly strong in al-Anbar Province, the site of the notorious centers of opposition to American rule such as Fallujah, Ramadi, and Habbaniyah. Fallujah in particular has many Islamists close in their thinking to Hamas. The group that killed the four American civilian security guards in Sunni Arab Fallujah on March 31 identified itself as “Phalanges of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,” calling the grisly killings a “gift to the Palestinian people.”

American military forces immediately began closing on the city, seeking revenge. Although the link was virtually unreported in the Western press, the ghost of the man in the wheelchair had cast a long shadow over the American occupation of Iraq — one that would grow longer.

Then, on April 2, the radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced in his Friday prayer sermon in the southern Shiite city of Kufa that he should be considered the “striking arm” of Hamas “because the fate of Iraq and Palestine is the same.” On April 3, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued 28 arrest warrants for associates of al-Sadr, and took 13 of them into custody, including Sheikh Mustafa Yaqubi, his representative in Najaf. The pretext for the arrests was a year-old murder, and the warrants were themselves several months old. It is probable that the decision to act was taken in the light of al-Sadr’s April 2 sermon, by Bush administration officials who feared his movement posed a threat to Israel.”

The Americans in Iraq never understood themselves as Occupiers, but almost all Iraqis saw them that way, and moreover they saw them that way in part because they saw them as neo-Israelis or as the origin and font of Israeli Occupation policy.

3. War footing:  Had the United States held Israel’s feet to the fire and insisted on implementing the Oslo Accords, there would have been a small Palestinian state in 1997 and the entire Israel-Palestinian issue would have been defused. Instead, the wound has gotten redder and deeper and inflamed passions. The Steadfastness Front of countries opposed to the United States mostly had nothing against the US per se, they were angered by the ongoing ethnic cleansing and Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians. Those apologists for the fascist Likud Party who say that Arab support for the Palestinians is insincere have never met an Arab. But ironically they are also admitting that Israeli policies have given cynical politicians pretexts for anti-Americanism.

The US problem with Hizbullah in Lebanon grew out of the Israeli Occupation not only of the Palestinians but also of 10 percent of Lebanon.

The US problem with Iran is driven in part by the Palestine issue. It could turn into a big war.

The US is in Syria still mostly to try to block Iran.

The West Bank colonization project of right wing Jewish nationalism brings in its train conflicts for the United States. Trump’s recent whacking of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani and of the leader of the Iraqi militia, Kata’ib Hizbullah, was in part for the protection of the Likud Party from the backlash its West Bank policies have created in the region.

If there had been an Oslo-style Palestine, its president could just come out and tell Iran and Hizbullah and the Iraqi Shiite militias to stay out of Palestinians’ business. But the ongoing human rights catastrophe, which Kushner attempts to paper over and tries to blame on what he alleges is the stupidity of the Palestinians, provokes rage and provides grounds for political mobilization in the region.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.