The Black Commentator - Radio BC: Iraq - Who The Let Dogs Loose?

The trial attorneys for Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants are being moved into the Green Zone of Baghdad, Iraq. That is, apparently, the only place that one has a reasonable expectation of not being killed, by someone or other. Who are those someones, the people who do the killing? Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark is one of Saddam's lawyers. Two of Saddam's other lawyers have already been killed. It is a great irony, a testimony to the utter peril to life and limb that is Iraq, that the lawyers for the man who George Bush has made the great villain of the Middle East have to rush into the same safe haven as the perpetrators of the invasion that toppled Hussein from power.

The Green Zone is the only space that the Americans have succeeded in "liberating" – a few square miles of Baghdad. What kind of "liberation" is that? When the Americans went into Iraq, they were bent on erasing every element of civil society. In Iraq that society was dominated by Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. The military was also an extension of the Baath Party, so the Americans decreed that it must also be extinguished.

The Iraqi Baath Party numbered two million people. Unless the Americans were capable of killing two million of them, their decree that these millions of people were now outlaws was an invitation to rebellion. A sufficient number of them took up the invitation, and surrounded the Green Zone. The rest of Iraq is contested – by Iraqis.

The Americans think they can rule by decree. Apparently, that works here, in the United States. They say ridiculous things in the White House, and a slavish media treats their insane statements as if they make sense. Iraqis have no such obligation. They have their own society, and work by their own rules. What the United States has done is empower the Dawa and Sciri parties of Shi'ite Iraqis, and to arm them. These parties now control the Interior Ministry, which is the home of the Iraqi armed forces that President Bush constantly brags about. The Americans have also spent billions of dollars in training the Pesh Merga of Kurdish Iraq – the armed forces of the two major Kurdish political parties. Two parties that went to war with each other, and will again. Therefore, the Iraqi armed forces are, in fact, an amalgamation of Iraqi political parties. This is what the United States has wrought: they have armed the factions that will fight the civil war. It is not a war that will end in corporate America's favor.

The U.S. project in Iraq has been an absolute failure. Failure was foreordained, because the objective was based on a racist premise. It did not recognize that Ira qis – or Arabs of any kind – were people, who form themselves into parties. The U.S arrived in Iraq with a few hundred exiles: the guys who tore down Saddam's statue. But there were other, indigenous forces at work in Iraq, that the stupid Americans did not understand. Now, they are the masters of government. The Americans put them there, and armed them. They are now killing lawyers, and forcing the survivors to camp in the Green Zone. The rule of law does not exist in Iraq, because the United States violated it in the first instance, with its illegal invasion, and then let the Dogs Of War loose. Iraqi dogs, that they will never harness. For Radio BC, I'm Glen Ford.

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