I was asked by our local peace group, Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice, to write a brief piece on what is going on in Iraq and why we should leave.
Here is what I wrote:
The invasion of Iraq was justified as an attempt to protect our country by removing weapons of mass destruction. As former government officials have spoken out and secret documents have been leaked, we now know that this justification was but an excuse for a war desired for other reasons. Despite what we were publicly told, the policy decision to launch a war was decided upon in advance and, as the famous Downing Street Minutes of secret meetings between US and British officials stated, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” As a response, over 20 members of Congress have called for an impeachment investigation in response to this war based on lies.
Meanwhile in Iraq after three years of occupation life is in many ways worse than it was before the invasion. Residents have less hours of electricity, less clean water, and worse medical care than they had before the invasion. In this oil-rich country, oil production is lower than it was three years ago and people queue for hours just to get gasoline for their cars or oil for cooking and heating. Everyday security is lacking for many. Bombs explode, militias fight, and criminals kidnap and murder. Millions of women and children are afraid to leave their homes unaccompanied due to fear of crime. Epidemiologists have estimated that over 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the invasion and occupation [see also my 100,000 Iraqis Dead: Should We Believe It?]. Many have died from political violence, others from increased crime and disease.
Iraq is on the knife’s edge of civil war. Insurgents kill civilians as part of their strategy against the occupation and against the current government. The government army and police are infiltrated by sectarian militias loyal to particular political parties and not to Iraq as a whole. These Iraqi institutions have created new torture facilities and death squads to kill suspected opponents. Every day, dozens of bodies are received by the Baghdad morgue, many with signs of torture at official hands. As the November 29, 2005 Los Angeles Times quoted a morgue official:
“‘Among them, we see many signs of torture,’ said the official, who requested anonymity for security reasons. ‘Most of them have blunt trauma, cigarette burns. They have been hit with sticks, cables, kicking. Some have had drill holes into them.’ He said that nearly all of the mass victims arrive bound by handcuffs - plastic flexicuffs, but also ’stainless steel ones, good ones,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we keep them. Sometimes we unlock them and return them to the police.’”
Polls have shown that Iraqis at least partly blame the American-led occupation for their woes. Thus, a secret poll conducted for the British Ministry of Defense and seen by the London Sunday Telegraph in October 2005 found that “82 per cent are ’strongly opposed’ to the presence of coalition troops,” and “forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified.” As American officials claim that US troops must remain in Iraq to enhance security, this poll found that “less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security.”
President Bush is fond of saying that we have to stay in Iraq in order to support our troops serving there. Many families of serving, wounded, or killed soldiers, including Cindy Sheehan, have demolished the ridiculous argument that we should continue with a disastrous policy out of respect for those sacrificing their comfort, and sometimes their lives, in carrying out that policy. Now we receive news that US troops serving in Iraq do not agree with President Bush. A poll of these troops just released by the Zogby International polling firm finds that “an overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately.”
The United States invaded Iraq based on lies, in defiance of the United Nations Charter. This war is an illegal action that, while removing a brutal dictator, has brought incredible suffering and death to Iraqis. The Iraqi people want us to leave, our troops serving there want us to leave. A majority of Americans want us to leave. It is now up to us, the American people, to force our leaders to respect the wishes of the Iraqi and American people and end this occupation and bring the troops home now.
March 5th, 2006
The premiere radical student organization of the 1960’s, Students for a Democratic Society [SDS], is making a comeback. See the Press Release SDS–Making a Comeback? and the National SDS website. It remains to be seen if SDS will get traction among the crowded radical scene, with numerous small organizations. But, heaven knows, we need a much larger radical student movement to complement us ’60’s old timers.
March 5th, 2006
A new CounterPunch article takes on one of those verities of our increasingly repressive society, our brutal treatment of sexual offenders, real and imagined [Sexual Fascism in Progressive America: Scapegoats and Shunning]. The topic is so loaded that the author writes anonymously for fear of having his opinions on this topic reflect negatively on his other progressive activities. I call attention because we cannot afford to allow any area to be beyond discussion, especially an area like sexuality which is both an essential component of human existence and a continuous source of shame and guilt. At present, anyone questioning the magnitude of sexual abuse as a major social threat is, as the anonymous author notes, shunned. Just ask psychologist Bruce Rind [see below] who dared to publish his research showing that not all so-called “childhood sexual abuse” has negative effects on the children when grown up.
[ADDED: I am not saying that serious sexual abuse is not a real problem. Indeed it is. In fact, many cases of severe abuse are never reported. However, at the same time, society's obsession with sexual threat has led to the lumping of many types of activities -- some serious, others often not -- into a catchall category of "sexual abuse" that obscures the distinctions between, say, consensual sexual activity between individuals a few years apart in age, and rape, incest, and other nonconsensual and oten violent acts. Further, the severity of abuse does not justify the brutality and inhumanity with which many "abusers" are treated once entered into the criminal justice system.]
Just to see the pernicious effects that sexual fears can have, consider that we live in a society where children are routinely told to beware of and fear strangers. As a father I know that we need accurate information on the actual risks posed to children in order to teach them to exercise a reasonable amount of caution without giving them the sense that every person they don’t know is a mortal danger to their existence. [ADDED: After all, most serious abuse of children occurs within families or by those well known to the child, not by these supposed predator-starngers.] What kind of a society are we creating here when Arabs, gays, black, and strangers are all sources of mortal fear? If we tolerate draconian approaches [e.g., lifelong monitoring and public shunning] for accused sexual abusers, can similar treatments for others deemed a threat [the hundreds of thousands on terrorist watch lists, for example] be far behind? In a world where our government openly proclaims its right to torture whomever it deems a threat, we had better learn to doubt and rationally examine all claims of potential danger. Surely, the danger of creeping American fascism trumps all other dangers.
I can’t vouch for every factual claim in this article.Neither do I agree with all the arguments. But the issues it raises need open debate if this countries rapid slide into authoritarianism in all aspects of life are to be reversed. Remember: “First they cam for the perverts….”
Excerpts:
Of course among these sex offenders are indeed some criminals who have caused extreme harm: violent rapists of adult women as well as children. A few of them have kidnapped, tortured or murdered their victims. Dr. Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins University Sex Disorders Clinic in Baltimore estimates that such crimes account for less than 1/10th of 1% of all sex offenses in America. His studies also show that fewer than 10% of child sex offenders re-offend–though recidivism is usually given as a reason for draconian measures against them. As child abuse experts point out, about 50 children are reported kidnapped and raped or murdered by strangers annually, compared to more than 3,000 children murdered by parents and other family members in non-sexual cases. Most sex offenders, says one therapist who works with sex offenders in a state prison system, are “Gentle grandfathers who made one mistake in judgment years ago and fondled their grandchild. Or lonely, geeky gay men–teenagers some of them–who sought mutual sexual release with adolescent boys. Or young female teachers who succumbed to the wiles of handsome adolescent boys or girls. Or young men who got drunk and pushed their girlfriends over a line that is now called date rape.” Yet the media, police, prosecutors and politicians continue to insist that children are in dire need of protection from serial rapists and murderers. Two-thirds of parents surveyed said they feared their children would be kidnapped and or murdered by strangers. Facts simply do not matter when hysteria is involved….
The key ingredients of this scapegoating campaign are of course sex and children. “Nowhere,” wrote Linda Williams in Children and Sex (1993), “is sexuality more feared in America than in the lives of children.” (Williams has spent her professional career assuring that these ingredients produce repression.) The core demon in the campaign is the recently created category of “pedophile” (which does not predate the 1960s as a so-called scientific construct). Although defined by the American Psychiatric Association as persons with a dominant sexual desire for pre-pubescent children, the pedophile tag now applies to any person who every entertained a sexual desire or had a sexual incident, however minor, with anyone under 18. In some circles, the term pedophile is now used to put down any older person who has an affair or shows interest in younger persons– 35-year-olds, for instance, who “prey on” 20-year olds. By the early 2000s, pedophile had become morphed with the still broader “sex offender,” with even mainstream media free to refer to the feared and hated class as “pervs” and “perps” and “deviants….”
Journalists and scientific researchers who challenge this construct–or who defend some relationships between adults and minors as not being abusive–face severe consequences. In the only instance of a U.S. Congressional resolution against a scientific paper, the House of Representatives, with only minimal opposition, denounced a study by Dr. Bruce Rind & others, published in the scholarly review, Psychological Bulletin, in 1998. This “meta-analysis” reviewed several research protocols about adult-child sexuality, and summarized them as showing that relationships in which force was not used did not appear to cause harm, and sometimes might be beneficial. Rind and his co-authors have been systematically ostracized and excluded from many scholarly journals. In 2005, a book by a major publisher, which contained another scholarly article by Rind, was withdrawn by that publisher (Hayworth) because of protests from fundamentalist Christians. Other gay writers like William Herdt and John DeCecco who researched sexual outlaw behavior in the U.S. (DeCecco) or intergenerational sexuality in non-western cultures (Herdt) simply moved on to other topics. This did not keep DeCecco from experiencing extreme persecution–while a Professor in San Francisco he had to hire bodyguards to protect him from right-wing attackers….
Even before Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex was published in 2002, a massive campaign by fundamentalist Christian groups, including Concerned Women for America, attacked the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press. While the book was published, the Press created a new process for reviewing its books before publication. Levine spoke publicly about how she was humiliated time and again in public. She said the manuscript for her book had been turned down by many publishers, treated as if it were “radioactive.” Among other insights, Levine wrote that “obsession with pedophiles stems for the reluctance to confront incest and the rampant sexualization of children” in American culture. “Adults project the eroticized desire outwards, creating a monster to hate, hunt down and destroy.” Of the outcry against her book she added, “What happened to me is a perfect example of the hysteria my book is about.”
March 5th, 2006