The Splendid Failure of Occupation
Part 34: Iraq, another chapter of American fascism, colonialism, and extermination
By B. J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jul 13, 2005, 23:16

The Iraqi resistance is only growing stronger . . . The insurgents are mostly Iraqi citizens who are taking up arms, determined to drive us out. I don�t blame them. We are occupying their country.��Iraq veteran, Charlie Anderson, website: Iraq Veterans Against the War [Italics added]

Is Iraq another chapter in the long history of the American policy of international fascism, colonialism, and extermination against non-white peoples and developing nations? Considering the evidence accumulated against the United States in over 200 years, the answer is a firm yes.

The rise of the United States to the rank of a coercitive superpower is a synthesis of supremacist ideologies and practices. Slavery, settler colonialism, imperialist diktats, military interventionism, organized military coupes in developing countries, mass destruction, financial piracy of foreign funds deposited in American banks, blackmail and blatant robberies of the wealth of nations as in Iraq, Libya, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, are just a few articles of indictment against the United States.

From the Original Peoples, to Africans, Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, Palestinians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotians, Salvadorans, Congolese, Guatemalans, Chileans, Peruvians, Indonesians, Lebanese, Iranians, Afghanis, Panamanians, Iraqis, Libyans, Bosnians, Serbians, Colombians, Grenadians, Haitians, Cubans, the list of nations that the US attacked, brutalized, and violated their natural human rights in the name of imperialist privileges is only partial and requires more detailing.

While the passing of time dimmed some of the violent crimes committed by the United States, the violence against Afghanis and Iraqis is still ongoing. Inevitably, George Bush�s imperialist wars on Arab and Muslim states powerfully re-open the entire unedited chapters of the criminal conduct of the United States abroad. Other forms of U.S. violence are psychological such as the constant threat to intervene against any nation that opposes either U.S. policies or Israeli imperialism.

Now that all conspiracies and maneuvers that led to Iraq�s occupation are exposed, Iraq is not only another chapter in the annals of U.S. atrocities, but also one among the most deliberate acts of violence ever perpetrated against a nation. While initially George Bush camouflaged his colonialist expedition under the pretext of searching for �illegal� Iraqi WMD (Downing Street memos and Charles Duelfer�s report proved beyond any speculation that Iraq�s so-called WMD did not exist and were just a pretext to invade Iraq), he continues to pursue the slaughtering of Iraqis under new rationales and frivolous pretensions.

At this stage of Iraq�s occupation, it is redundant to reiterate that Bush�s basic motivation for invading and occupying that country does not deviate from the primitive motivations that accompanied the development of early civilizations: essential barbarity to possess or control land and wealth owned by others.

Moreover, the charge of Nazi-fascism leveled against the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, willful wars, willingness to murder tens of thousands of defenseless people, and ultimately its colonialist ideology would definitely acquire more strength by noting the recent "re-election" of George Bush. However, the phenomenon whereby a majority of the population of an imperialist state endorses their leaders� policies no matter what, is not limited to the United States but also to the other two English-speaking countries with heinous records of fascism and colonialism: Britain and Australia.

This could eventually confirm previous statements I made in relation to the British culture of racism, territorial expansions, and imperialism. That is, British imperialist culture and the supremacist beliefs in the uniqueness of the �British Idea� have played a historical role in the promotion of U.S. international violence. In 1886 Charles Wentworth Dilke, a British politician summarized that idea as follows:

The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my guide�is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race, already girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread.

In America, the peoples of the world are being fused together, but they are run into an English mould. . . . There are men who say that Britain in her age will claim the glory of having planted greater Englands across the seas. They fail to perceive that she has done more than plantations of her own�that she has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world.

In New Zealand, we found the stronger and more energetic race pushing from the earth the shrewd and laborious descendents of the Asian Malays; In Australia, the English triumphant, and the cheaper races excluded from the soil not by distance merely, but by arbitrary legislations; In India, we saw the solution of the problem of officering of the cheaper by the dearer race.

Everywhere we have found that the difficulties which impede the progress of universal dominion of the English people lie in the conflict with the cheaper races. The result of our survey is such that as to give us reason for the belief that race distinction will long continue, that miscegenation will go but little way towards blending races; that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxendom will rise triumphant from the doubtful struggle.

(Quoted in The Imperialism Reader by Louis L. Snyder, published by D. Van Nostrand, 1962, page: 112�113) [Italics added]

A simple comparison of the above with the opening paragraph of the introduction to the National Security Strategy of the United States 2002 as prepared by the National Security Council, reads:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom�and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. . . . [Italics added]

Of course, the phrase �single sustainable model� is the key phrase for imposing the imperialist order of English America (Anglicized and naturalized ethnic groups makes part of the Dilke�s concept of the English mould) on the world, coincides with Dilke�s theme: �she [English Britain] has imposed her institutions upon the offshoots of Germany, of Ireland, of Scandinavia, and of Spain. Through America, England is speaking to the world.�

No doubt, Dilke�s beliefs in the supremacy of the English Idea, thus the right to colonize and exterminate had unified Britain and its progenies, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, predominantly English Canada, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during white rule, and South Africa (Afrikaner-British alliance) after the end of British-Boer War and during Apartheid. After the demise of the British colonialist empire and America becoming a nuclear superpower, those same racist cultural and imperialist bonds have survived, amplified, and still rule and unify the official attitudes of the U.S., Britain, and Australia.

Seen from this perspective, the re-elections of George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard is a confirmation that the mentality, rationales, and the lure of colonialism that once destroyed countless non-white peoples around the world, are the same that are now obliterating Iraq so the economic, ideological, and religious causes of the United States can prevail. If we�and we must�add the Zionist factor to American politics, the cauldron of colonialist ambitions and imperialist emotions that animates the foreign policy of the United States toward Arabs, Muslims, and the rest of the world would begin to bubble.

The revival of the gruesome principle of violent territorial conquest under George Bush, however, deserves special treatment in view of the special ideological merging of convenience between Christian Zionists, Jewish Zionists, traditional imperialists, and in a subaltern role, Zionists from all extractions: Iraqi, Muslim, Arab, Afghani, Indian, etc. (I shall discuss those in the upcoming parts.)

If Zionism and by extension Israel were not involved in the war against Iraq, how was it possible then that the so-called war on terror has effectively become the highway to post 9/11 colonialism in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the Arab and Islamic worlds that have enormous problems with Israeli colonialism via the Palestinian issue? More importantly, and in relation to Iraq: Is post 9/11 U.S. colonialism a sudden phenomenon in the American way of thinking, or a product of long-term planning?

No. The brazen reemergence of U.S. colonialist �passions� in its Bushian clothes was not a sudden blooming of attitudes, mentalities, philosophies, or inclination for imperialism. In fact, U.S. fondness to colonize and to exercise military control over rich or strategic lands was never dormant and continued unabated since the foundation of the United States. The American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ever-expanding network of military bases in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central and Southeast Asia, as well as in the Horn of Africa are just the latest endeavors of a United States controlled by fascist cliques, ideologues of imperialism, and colonialist adventurers from all origins.

Yet, despite known facts of U.S. history, multitudes of U.S. apologists from all backgrounds consider the United States, euphemistically, a country made by war, but without specifying what kind of war, against whom, and why. This is a deliberate strategy aimed at obfuscating the true nature of the American state.

In fact, America�s wars (with the debatable exception of WW II) have nothing in common with the classical concept of war. That is, in self-defense or when two countries resort to military means to resolve outstanding political, financial, or territorial claims. While Iran�s counter war against invading Iraq is the classical example of self-defense, the war between Britain and Argentina for the repossession of the Malvinas Islands was the product of territorial dispute. To conclude, in the reported example, and at the end of military hostilities, none of the belligerents changed the adversary�s political or economic order.

In contrast, American wars (in both, pre- and post-impendence eras) be they in the Americas, Asia including the Middle East, the Balkans, Latin America, and Africa were always offensive and shared one specific agenda: colonialist expansion and world domination.

As a result, the United States was not a country made by classical wars or just any war, but by unilateral wars of settler colonialism, aggression, and imperialism. Pre-independent America expressed this type of war through colonialist policies, territorial expansions and annexations, and deportation, as well as by the extermination of the Original Peoples of the United States. Independent America, instead, developed its wars to include both, colonialism and imperialism. Wars to establish this form of power over foreign lands have one aim: reordering the social, economic, cultural, and military systems of the invaded land in order to exploit, colonize, or control it. Iraq, of course, makes part of this American pattern. Non-American examples of war of colonialism include the French colonization of Algeria and the Soviet entrenchment in Eastern Europe.

Curiously, if the conquest of half of North America (United States) did not come about through premeditated extermination and colonialism, then how did it come about otherwise? We know that the United States bought Louisiana and Alaska, but did it buy the American West? Regarding this issue, it is instructive to note that many analysts and historians in ideological alliance with imperialism revise history to present the U.S. under a benign light. These revisionists of American history move along five strategic routes:

  1. By the assertion that the U.S. ended its colonialist experience after reaching the shores of the Pacific Rim in the West, the Rio Grande in the South, and by renouncing the annexation of Canada in the North. This assertion, of course, implies that the United States permanently renounced colonialism.
  2. By rebaptizing the United States as an �anti-colonialist� state simply because Woodrow Wilson at the end of WW I, announced his 14-point program, for a new world, which while it paid lip service to imperialist idealism, was actually a subtle proclamation for the continuation of colonialism.
  3. By: (a) Declaring the US as an anti-imperialist state based on the tireless mentioning of the diatribes between F.D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on the question of the British colonies, and (b) jumping over the distinction between colonialism and imperialism of which, both men were ideological believers despite imperceptible subtleties.
  4. By intentionally gliding over the annexation of Hawaii, the 52-year colonization of the Philippines, the still active possession of Puerto Rico, opposition to European decolonization in the Third World, as well as the installation of myriad military bases around the globe that are the physical appendixes of colonialism. Did I forget to mention the active US support for the Zionist occupation of Palestine? Dialectically, any one who supports any type of colonization is necessarily a believer in its causes and economic advantages.
  5. By presenting the Cold War confrontation between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, but in the process, they deleted all references to imperialism and colonialism that characterized the essence of both, Soviet Communism and American so-called democracy.

Within this frame of thinking, did the US invade Iraq to colonize it? Of course, that was one among many other fundamental motivations and to execute it, Bush followed a historical precedent: the America frontier outpost or fort. The modern version of this precedent is the following modality: subvert current international laws that prohibit it, invade, occupy, install permanent military bases (forts), and then consolidate the status quo despite objections.

Permanent bases, therefore, are the clue to Bush�s colonialism in Iraq. In fact, Bush�s undeclared rationale to persist with his war rests on two principles: (1) to force the Iraqi people through systematic destruction and mass killing to accept the occupation regime, hence the conquest of their country, and (2) to extract concessions from an American-appointed Iraqi �leadership� to install military bases on Iraqi soil.

Generally, wherever there is an American military base, the country where that base exists is dialectically in a strict subaltern colonialist or imperialist relationship with the United States. For example, while Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Japan, Panama, Saudi Arabia, etc. maintain a semblance of independence, the U.S., largely, is the undeclared ruling power of their foreign policy and international commitments. If the relationship between those countries and the United States rests on reciprocal acknowledgment of sovereignty or state-to-state equality, and not that of imperialist subordination, then why do we not see any of their military bases in the United States?

More crucial than the presence of U.S. military bases are U.S. military interventions and wars. Functionally, these are a symbiotic combination between indirect colonialism and direct imperialism. For instance, since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman had, de facto, become American protectorates and virtual colonies (indirect colonialism) while maintaining nominal sovereignty under American military coercion (direct imperialism.)

Regardless of how the US implements these relationships, its colonialist and imperialist expeditions in the world share three repetitive traits: (1) supremacist fascist ideology based on the given right of the United States; (2) deliberate mass destruction or extermination of adversaries as in the case of the Original Peoples of the United States; and (3) massive violence with deliberate intent to inflict mass destruction with connotations of genocide as in the case of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.

Does the U.S. takeover of Iraq fit in this pattern? And if it does, is Iraq then another chapter in the US voluminous book of murderous colonialism and fascism? If we compare the U.S. conquest of Indian and Mexican territories, as well as that of the Philippines to the onslaught on Iraq, the modalities are similar. All of these wars were wars of conquest and shared the same common denominators that I mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

In the case of Iraq, after 15 years of U.S. blockade, wars, economic sanctions, invasion, and ongoing occupation, overwhelming signs point in the direction of colonization. In fact, despite the splendid failure of the U.S. occupation, and considering that U.S. imperialists may never win Iraq, practical norms dictate that Iraq is now a full-fledged American occupied colony.

I said colony and not country because the concept of an occupied country is not applicable here. France, for example, was an occupied country during WW II, but Hitler did not aim at changing France�s religion, domestic and national structures, or partition it into cantons. On the other hand, the U.S. is restructuring Iraq in all sectors in order to conquer it�this is colonization.

In the meanwhile, how do U.S. fascism, colonialism, and extermination apply in occupied Iraq, and what are the steps the U.S. has taken to transform it into a colony? Finally, how does all this relate to my postponed discussions on John Endicott, Alexander Hamilton, and the Iroquois Confederacy as an example of Indian issues?

Next: Part 35: When an American Hulagu invades Mesopotamia

B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist. Email: bjsabri@yahoo.com.

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