Friday, June 20, 2008

“Women and children first” (21st century edition)

by James Benjamin

The image below was found over at The Fanonite (another blog worthy of regular readership). I’d say the picture speaks for itself. But for those needing a translation, let me offer you a sampler of items that will be of assistance.

Given the news that the major oil conglomerates are now finally poised to profit off the carnage that has been wrought, maybe a few lines from my essay, The Iraq War Debacle Was Truly a Debacle For Some, would be a good place to begin:

The narrative we usually receive from center-left (as narrowly defined in the US) is of a war that was poorly executed. Get some competent folks in the White House, and Iraq will be put back together again.

The far less feel-good narrative is that those who pushed for and executed the war knew exactly what they were doing, and are quite comfortable with the massive human displacement that has resulted. In other contexts, it gets referred to as ”shock therapy,” and indeed Naomi Klein refers to Iraq as just one more test case for Friedmanesque neoliberalism in her recent book, The Shock Doctrine (here’s a video that gives you some idea of what to expect from the book - not a substitute for reading the book of course!!). Heck, RickB of Ten Percent makes something of a reference to Klein’s book in his post The Surge Doctrine - which is what turned me on to the article I just excerpted (a tip o’ the hat to you RickB!). The complete drain of qualified scholars and technicians has guaranteed that Iraq - or whatever it eventually becomes - will be stuck with US and UK firms running the country (for a hefty fee, of course), while the rest of the government is little more than a hollowed-out shell. For some corporate executives, it’s quite a racket they’re running. The masses of now-disposable humanity, kept largely out of sight and out of mind is by design. Those few Iraqis who manage to make any semblance of a living there will accept ridiculously low wages without complaint for fear of losing even that pittance. As long as the chaos remains contained outside of The Green Zone, everything is just hunky-dory.

In another context, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas referred to the mass-displacement caused by NAFTA as genocidal. That would seem quite an apt summary of what’s going on in Iraq.

In the follow-up to that essay I strongly recommended Naomi Klein’s writing on the topic. Although estimates of the death toll in Iraq vary, the ballpark figure of one million seems to be fairly reasonable. The vast majority of these folks were civilians (often women and children) who’ve been killed from 40,000 pound bombs, cluster bombs, depleted uranium bombs, and white phosphorous dropped from US war planes. The term ”urbicide” has been used to characterize that war, and although the genocidal nature of urbicide should be obvious enough (Fallujah, like Guernica nearly seven decades before it), our elites seem to find its effects ”reassuring”. In addition to those killed directly from the US occupation, there are some 4.2 million displaced as a result of the US invasion and occupation. As I discussed in Structural Violence and the Iraqi Death Toll:

Continue Reading “Women and children first” (21st century edition)

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