THINKING FOR OURSELVES

From War to Occupation

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, April 27-May 3, 2008

On September 12, 2001, Bernard Brock, Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University, insisted that it was a mistake to call the attacks of the previous day an act of war on the United States. Until his death in the spring of 2006, Brock argued that we should consider the attacks a crime against humanity. His articles making this argument were published in the Michigan Citizen

For Brock this was more than a question of semantics. A scholar concerned with the relationship between language and action, Bernie believed that language shapes reality. How we name things dictates the strategies we will use to respond. That’s why he argued the 911 attacks should be framed as a crime, not a war. If we understood the attacks as a crime, there would be legal processes to guide how we pursued those who committed these acts. If we called it a war, the kinds of actions we would take would be far more aggressive, undirected, open-ended and violent. Framing a “war on terror” meant there would be no single defined enemy. It would be a war without end, requiring ever-expanding force and violence.

Bernie was furious with Bush’s effort to create a workable strategy for war. He said that incremental changes to a policy that is flawed at its foundation cannot make the policy right. Instead, he argued, the U.S. should pull out and allow the Iraqi government to invite in multinational support to restore peace and rebuild their country. That’s the only way to set this right.

I have been thinking a lot about Brock's insights these last few weeks.

With the attack on Basra, and now the assault on Sadr City and the construction of a giant concrete wall to seal off the southern districts of Tharwa and Jamilla, I am convinced we need to abandon the language of war altogether. Naming this a war obscures what is really going on in Iraq. The United States is not at war with a government or enemy. We are carrying out an illegal occupation. Our soldiers are an unwelcome army that can never establish a stable peace.

Moktada al Sadr, for all his limitations, has opposed this occupation from the beginning. He is a more legitimate and respected leader than those propped up by the U.S. The current effort to destroy him is bound to fail. For, in the end, this is not about al Sadr, but about the ideas he represents. Chiefly, Sadr has stood for the idea that the U.S. invaded Iraq illegally. We are occupying Iraq for our own ends. Sadr, and the Iraqis he represents, want the U. S. out of their country.

Because of these beliefs, the U. S. government and its Iraqi puppets have tried to destroy Sadr since shortly after the invasion. But he has proven more capable than we anticipated. The U.S. had to abandon its foolish effort to arrest him in 2004. He has fought U.S and Iraqi forces to a standstill in direct confrontations in Najaf, Karbala and twice in Fallujah. He has shown remarkable skill and courage in using his militia to provide basic services and security to the Iraqi people when the government failed them.

Now, to stop his forces from lobbing missiles into the Green Zone, the U.S. is erecting a series of concrete walls. Modeling this strategy after the Israelis, the U.S. is trying to control the daily, minute movements of people as a way to establish security. Such efforts can only be sustained with the most horrific acts of repression and violence. And as Israel has clearly demonstrated, occupation never brings peace.

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