NOVANEWS
BRUTAL OCCUPATION TROOPS OR SAVIORS, YOU CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
“Yes, even without Wikileaks we always knew that such things were happening and now we know that altered versions of some of our reports and additional forgeries have been mixed in with documents meant to incriminate Iran.”
For nearly a decade, America has been, in the eyes of the world, the successor to Nazi Germany. Last week, nearly 77% of Australians polled (over 10,000 respondents) considered the 9/11 terror attacks an American “false flag” and that nation has troops in Afghanistan fighting alongside Americans. Imagine what nations that oppose American involvement think?
Whatever the percentage blaming America or Israel or both for 9/11, 30% or 90%, the numbers don’t matter. The justification for war, seen as blatantly illegitimate, aggression, invasion and bullying, doesn’t stand, not among the people of the world, certainly not any more. It also doesn’t stand well with America’s troops as well. “Volunteer” doesn’t mean “stupid.”
American troops, raring to go, punish the terrorists, find the weapons of mass destruction, root Al Qaeda out of Iraq are older now, wiser, many are dead, hundreds of thousands damaged, many beyond repair and most of all, they feel exploited, misused and abused.
American troops didn’t sign up to be part of a force of occupation, there is no honor in that.
A key component, in fact the primary component of these “wars” has been “counter-insurgency” or “irregular warfare” or whatever buzzword the Pentagon is using today to describe people fighting against Americans exactly the same way Americans fought against the British at Lexington and Concord. If the Minutemen had IEDs and RPGs, they would have used them and been seen as heroes for it. Anyone who thinks our own troops aren’t faced by this irony on a daily basis are underestimating their intellect.
Troops and civilians have never mixed. Civilians are quickly reclassified as “suspected terrorists” or even “hostiles” at the drop of a hat. No army in the history of warfare has successfully occupied any conquered nation without resorting to both brutality and a “Quisling/Vichy” regime as a partner.
Seldom are there military operations among a population unless the force is an invader, an occupier, propping up a puppet government using brutality and intimidation. We have many examples without going very far, two wars with Germany. Nations seldom need saviors to come in, blow everything up, convert people to Christianity at gunpoint and spread venereal disease. The Spanish tried this 500 years ago and they are now a debt ridden backwater.
You can’t walk across a street in Europe without seeing a memorial to someone executed by the Nazi’s or even the Kaiser’s troops. The conquest of the America West was an occupation combined with an ethnic cleansing, deeply parallel to the “restoration” of Israel to the Jews. A “people” exist, live and build, become a nation, if even only in a spiritual sense, these are the Palestinians. Their land is coveted, nice beaches, good location.
G-d gave Judea to people of the Jewish religion, a group that is 95% converts from a continent away, it was “given” and it was taken and held by force. We call this “occupation.” Similarly, god gave America the west through “manifest destiny.” The story is always the same. Even Americans are occupiers but, as is convenient after an ethnic cleansing, as with Palestine or America, when nobody is left to complain, the problem goes away.
When American troops gave blankets to the Cherokees being forcibly “removed”, blankets known to be infected with small pox, was this a holocaust? It is known as the “Trail of Tears.” It is history, so much history that it is even taught in schools in America, and that’s saying a lot.
Today, the culture with the guns and the German trained military wins. We all learned from the experts. Might makes right and the survivors are put into concentration camps, or reservations or “Gaza” or whatever is popular. When they resist, when they even speak up, they are exterminated. They had become “terrorists” or “renegades.”
This kind of war of conquest is simple. If you win, the label sticks, “terrorist” or “insurgent” or “Taliban.” If you lose, they become freedom fighters, patriotic resistance, heroes or martyrs.
If you lose, you become war criminals, murderers and barbarians. War criminals, losers, face “Nuremberg” or hanging as with Saddam. In America, they retire to Dallas and write a book.
The most powerful military force known to man has a new direction today, not dominance of space, the air or the seas nor protection of the United States and its interests. America babysits poppy fields, oil pipelines and stands guard over corrupt dictators and druglords. We train our soldiers to kick in doors, throw in a grenade and hope the dead aren’t all small children. 400,000 recent veterans who have filed for disability due to stress related illnesses brought on from such duties tell the tale.
There are shades of Vietnam in this, not just My Lai. When helicopter crews reported,
“We were told, whenever we saw a unarmed male between 12 and 60, open up near them. If they move, kill them, they are VC.”
WIKILEAKS
Imperfect as Wikileaks are, the video showing the helicopter attack in Iraq actually went further than this. Two American Apache helicopters with advanced optics and in full radio contact with base, not only wiped out local militia working for the Americans as part of the “Sunni Awakening” but destroyed a vehicle with unarmed civilians including children. Reports from Fallujah now indicate that what we were told about that “great battle” is almost entirely false.
One of the staff writers at Veterans Today reviewed the recent Wikileaks output and made the following comments:
“I wrote countless SIGACT reports. The ones I found on Wikileaks are not as I wrote them. Due to the previous statement(s) it is unknown just how much of that data is altered or changed or can even be believed. When one views the Wikileaks Iraq War Diaries I want the civilian population to be proud that our very small Army was capable of holding that vast territory, with an insurgency everywhere; and when the average reader can now see that children were regularly used as weapons against the troops, that bombs were everywhere (literally), no place was ever safe, the Police and Iraqi Army were untrustworthy if not criminal, and the ROE itself complicated matters by placing troops between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps that may place a better perspective on allegations of mistreatment and violation of the ROE and using the Wikileaks documents to make political statements”.
I viewed the Guardian UK’s Iraq War Logs interactive piece and was amazed at how crazy that one day was. I was there that day, and I had my tail handed to me that month, along with the rest of the forces. The sad part is, that I feel the Wikileaks release is missing most of what actually happened that day, and based upon my personal recollection I would say that only about 1/3 of the events of October 17, 2006 actually made it into the Wikileaks release. I suppose I am rambling here, and now I think you can see the dilemma in my head. How the heck do you deliver this story? From what perspective? And worst of all, how do you make the troops look good (because they were and are) and try and convince a public that only cares about shopping, that these reports are not glass half empty, they are quite the opposite, they are glass half full? Do I just say it? Hey America, the troops are the shit because we should all feel lucky that any Iraqi’s lived at all. That is just presumptuous and arrogant but very true. These kids do need to feel proud that they didn’t waste every single person they saw. Or do we stay out of this mess altogether?”
Of course, there are no lessons from Wikileaks as the receipt of altered and forged documents, can add nothing positive toward a realistic analysis of anything other than the motive of those responsible and their agenda. Thus we can easily say,
“Yes, we always knew that such things were happening and now we know that altered versions of some of our reports and additional forgeries can be mixed in with documents meant to incriminate Iran.”