Paying the price for a crazy war

It is no longer necessary to wish for the defeat of the US and its allies in Iraq; circumstances have seen to that. The question remains how we can rescue the country from the clutches of political leaders with no sense of history or cultural understanding. According to a senior British officer published in Military Review, the US military in Iraq is young and clueless:

The US Army in Iraq has been accused of cultural ignorance, moralistic self-righteousness, unproductive micro-management and unwarranted optimism in a magazine published by the army.

… Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who was deputy commander of a program to train the Iraqi military, said American officers in Iraq displayed such “cultural insensitivity” that it “arguably amounted to institutional racism” and may have spurred the growth of the insurgency.

We are now discovering the way in which this "liberating" army has fought the war. Spc.Tony Lagouranis (Ret) was a US Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005, and served a tour of duty in Iraq from January 2004 to January 2005. He was stationed at Abu Ghraib, then joined a task force roaming the country looking for intelligence. He recently told PBS Frontline of the “culture of abuse” throughout Iraq. He said the Geneva Conventions were regarded as a joke. It was acceptable, condoned or ignored to treat Iraqi detainees however a soldier wished:

The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like … burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff ... I remember one guy who was forced to sit on an exhaust pipe on a humvee, and he had a pretty huge blister on his leg. Another guy, I don't know what they used to burn him, his legs. He was blindfolded so he didn't know either, but it looked like it might have been a lighter. He had some pretty big, [some] smaller blisters, but a lot of them.

This is the true face of the Iraqi occupation.

This year will see the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It is therefore time for the mainstream media to resume its questioning and challenging stance, a position long forgotten. More disturbingly, in the light of the New York Times releasing information about the Bush administration illegally spying on US citizens, a number of conservative commentators have questioned the paper’s right to even report the story. (The fact the Times delayed the story for a year, after government objections, is equally concerning.) Journalists are not supposed to be mere ciphers for a political party or position, though you’d be hard pressed to find many leading commentators in Australia who don’t seem to be in the pockets of the Liberal or Labor parties.

May 2006 be the year that imperial stenography ceases to be called journalism. And a time when state terror is regarded as a greater threat than a bunch of radical Islamists.