The month of April was very expensive (casualty-wise) for the U.S. occupation forces in Iraq. The world has seen a glimpse of the treatment Iraqis are receiving after the shocking photographs of Iraqi prisoners were published in the American and international press. No one knows how many millions more such pictures are waiting to see the light of day or to be buried forever. Such cruelties happen whenever a country tries to enslave another.
Genghis Khan and Halagou Khan were similarly smeared, because all conquerors do what the British and American forces are doing. The Pakistan Army didn’t give much better treatment to their brothers in then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Therefore, a conqueror is a conqueror. His beliefs and religion are secondary things. The only difference was that before there were no cameras to record this behavior. But the publicity of these pictures has laid bare to the American people those assumptions and theories through which the proponents of war were painting a rosy picture of the Iraq invasion.
It was known to all and sundry that Iraq neither had weapons of mass destruction, nor was it linked to Al-Qaeda or religious extremists. Iraqi women had the greatest freedom in the Arab world. Women were the equal partners of men in all walks of Iraqi life. This is important because whenever and wherever oppressive religious systems of governance are enforced, women are their first victims. Not only Saudi Arabia and the Taliban’s Afghanistan are witness to this reality but [former military ruler] Ziaul Haq’s Pakistan also had a taste of it. Therefore, it would not be correct to say that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was the most oppressed country in the Arab world. There was no justification for the invasion from this angle. The reason for the Iraq war lies somewhere else.
Circumstances and political developments show that America’s expansionist policy has been shaped by two factors. On the one hand there were those who considered expansionism as America’s right after the end of Cold War. On the other hand there were those Zionist elements who saw Israel’s future security guaranteed in America’s expansion in the Arab world. They knew that a small country such as Israel, despite its military might, could not keep bigger countries such as Iran and Iraq under its occupation. Therefore, only a superpower like the United States could do this job. The alliance of American expansionists and Zionists was because of their common interests. The Zionists wanted perpetual security to the state of Israel, while the “expansionists” wanted America’s perpetual dominance in world affairs.
Their scholarly representative, Irving Kristol, says that if the United States does not dominate the world with its massive power, then what is the use of that power? Similarly, another scholar of such thinking, William Buckley, says that world dominance just because of a strong economy is boring. If Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld represent the “expansionist” forces in the United States, Wolfowitz and Richard Perle represent the Zionists. After this explanation, it would not be wrong to say that Zionists used the “expansionists” or vice a versa. However, the truth is that it all happened thus because both shared a common interest.
The alliance between the “expansionists” and the Zionists had started shaping in the United States long ago, but their core thinking was of two types. One was that “it is easy to establish a democratic and secular society in Iraq that supports Israel, because the Iraqis already are living in such conditions.” They also thought that if countries like Japan and Germany accepted the U.S. occupation and hegemony after their defeat in war, then a weak and a backward country like Iraq was a piece of cake. So, if the Iraqis were helped to get rid of Saddam Hussein, then they would start following the United States and Israel.
A few Zionists espouse the thinking that there is no need to make the Muslims happy or win them over because dominance and hegemony can be maintained by conquering them and by scaring them. Probably, the despicable treatment meted out to the Iraqi prisoners is a manifestation of this very thinking. One recalls Genghis Khan’s tower of human skulls after seeing American soldiers atop the pile of naked Iraqi prisoners.
The assumption of the Zionists and the “expansionists” about the level of resistance in Iraq has proved to be absolutely wrong. The level of resistance is clear more from the number of Iraqi prisoners than the U.S. casualties of war. The additional information coming out about the Iraqi prisoners shows that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are under U.S. imprisonment. It would follow that if hundreds of thousands are in U.S. custody, then many millions more would be in the ranks of resistance. This makes it clear that the Iraqis are not accepting the American brand of democracy and that probably the propaganda of democracy in Iraq is just to deceive the people of the United States. Actually, average Iraqis are receiving the same kind of treatment as is shown in the picture of the pile of naked prisoners. Now the question arises: Can the United States and Britain keep the Iraqis under occupation just as Israel is keeping the Palestinians? It’s a moment of some soul searching for the conquerors of Iraq.
