U.S. finds Iraqi deaths have come back to haunt them

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Socialist Action november 2010 7 T a very embarrassing time he end of October has been for the U.S. war makers both in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first place, a new flood of internal documents from the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq disclosed by Wikileaks confirms the atrocities committed by the U.S. military that have earned the enduring hatred of most of the Iraqi people and the Muslim world.

The New York Times reported Oct. 23: “But it [the Wikileaks archive] does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq BodyCount, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures.”

However, an AP dispatch updated on Oct. 24 reported: “Iraq BodyCount, a private British-based group that has tracked the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began, said it had analyzed the information and found 15,000 previously unreported deaths, which would raise its total from as many as 107,369 civilians to more than 122,000 civilians.”

The New York Times commented: “The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians—at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence Karim Kadim / AP for duty, or ceased picking up paychecks. “During the past four months, the atmosphere has become particularly charged as the Awakening members find themselves squeezed between Iraqi security forces, who have arrested hundreds of current and former members accused of acts of recent terrorism, and Al Qaeda’s brutal recruitment techniques.”

Even top U.S. military and civilian authorities acknowledged that the evidence of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib did immense political harm to the U.S. in the Muslim world. But the new Wikileaks archive demonstrates that such abuses were not an exception, as the U.S. authorities claimed, but a general pattern that continued at least until last year.

The New York Times reported Oct. 23: “The archive contains extensive, often rambling accounts of American abuse from Iraqi prisoners, but few were substantiated [how could they be?]. The most serious came during arrests, which were often violent when people resisted. In those cases, investigations were opened. In a case reminiscent of Abu Ghraib, in which guards photographed themselves with Iraqis whom they had posed in humiliating positions, a soldier was censured for writing a mocking slur with a marker on the forehead of a crying detainee.

“The United States took steps to improve its detention system after the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison erupted in 2004, tightening rules governing the treatment of prisoners and separating the hardened radicals of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from other prisoners.

“But the documents show that Americans did sometimes use the threat of abuse by Iraqi authorities to get information out of prisoners. One report said an American threatened to send a detainee to the notorious Wolf Brigade, a particularly violent Iraqi police unit, if he did not supply information.”

The U.S. press reports stress that most of the abuse was carried out by Iraqi se(Left) Women find body of a relative among victims of a bombing, Dec. 8, 2006. Wikileaks suggests that more Iraqis have died than U.S. admits.

curity forces, and thus the responsibility of the U.S. was only that they tolerated it. Actually the above case suggests a sort of “hard cop, soft cop” collaboration, rather than simply tolerance: “The six years of reports include references to the deaths of at least six prisoners in Iraqi custody, most of them in recent years. Beatings, burnings and lashings surfaced in hundreds of reports, giving the impression that such treatment was not an exception. In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi Army officers of cutting off a detainee’s fingers and burning him with acid. Two other cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees.

“And while some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers told their officers and asked the Iraqis to investigate.”

Of course, the Iraqis were trained by the U.S. military. And the U.S. has a record of creating ruthless local forces to defend its interests, such as Somoza’s National Guard in Nicaragua, or Trujillo’s security forces in the Dominican Republic.

Media plays up ties to Iran Curiously enough, on The New York Times front page, top billing did not go to the atrocities that the U.S. was directly or indirectly responsible for but to revelations about support for Shiite insurgents from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But the incidents of Iranian aid to insurgents seemed generally pretty minor, except for helping them with shaped explosive charges that could penetrate U.S. armored vehicles.

Why this should be such a big story is hard to understand. What is surprising is that in general the Iranian government, which suffers U.S. support for insurgents on its territory and is threatened with a major military assault by the U.S., has been so tolerant of U.S. occupation of countries with which it shares long common borders. Iran has the capacity to give the U.S. really big problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has not.

Moreover, since Iran is being threatened militarily by the U.S., it would hardly be surprising if it wanted to probe the possibilities for fighting the U.S. in a neighboring country where the majority shares its religion and culture. The Shiite organization closest to the Iranian leadership, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq has been one of the main allies of the United States.

The Shiite faction headed by Muqtada al-Sadr is hostile to the occupation and led a major insurrection against it. Al-Sadr has his friends in Iran, but his group has been quiet, and apparently fading since it opted for participation in the Iraqi government.

On the other hand, the former Iraqi premier, Maliki, is courting al-Sadr’s support in order to form another government. He has just been on a political visit to Iran. That arouses U.S. nightmares of seeing Iraq fall into the arms of its Shiite neighbor. Such fears have been expressed for years. And there is a basis for them. At some point, some sort of rapprochement between Iran and Shiite-ruled Iraq seems inevitable, (continued on page 11, in “Crime Pays — Big Time”)