Resistance to Foreign Ocupation
While the ostensible savagery of targeting of civilians
does help the US government label
the freedom fighters of the present as terrorists,
the simultaneous media censorship omnipresent
throughout the war in Iraq blinds us to the equally
if not more savage violence perpetrated
by our state against the Iraqi civilians
While I do not offer political support to all groups involved in the anti-imperial struggle in Iraq, I work to support its collective purpose: forcing the troops out now. Forcing because the United States won't leave any other way.
On a good day, the US corporate media would have its audience believe that a kinder, gentler imperialism is the only way forward for Iraq.
This is, of course, not the case. Nor does it seem plausible, after three long years of occupation, that any kind of imperialism will be tolerated by the Iraqi people.
The mythology of 'war on terror'
Instead, the War on Terror has as its goal the elimination of so-called terrorists. We don't hear about a possible defeat or surrender of the insurgents in Iraq.
Rather, we read insurgency casualty counts as if they were mounting a staircase to an imaginary final destination: the magic number that will signal elimination of all terrorist threats.
Accordingly, our first question becomes, what is it that the US government means by the word "terrorism"? And how does this relate to our installing a democratic apparatus in Iraq?
Historically, terrorism has been defined as illegitimate violence, violence outside of a state's monopoly on the use of force.
Yet I would like to complicate this use of the term 'illegitimate' with a contemporaneous, other kind of illegitimacy: that which characterized colonial regimes throughout the 20th century.
In British, French, Portuguese and even South African colonies, governments were often illegitimate in the sense that only a minority of people inside the nation were enfranchised, or represented by the group in power.
The United States enlisted this logic to indict Saddam Hussein, whose elections were a joke and who represented only a minority of his population.
Yet, history reveals in no uncertain terms that opposition movements, which over time emancipated colonies from often brutal rule, were time and time again branded terrorists.
The FLA in Algeria, the ANC in South Africa, ZAPO and ZANU in Zimbabwe, and the IRA in Ireland were not deemed terrorists because of their tactics, which at least initially did not target civilians-rather, they were deemed terrorists because they threatened to overthrow illegitimate colonial rule.
While a bomb in Birmingham or London was never a good thing because the IRA initially only targeted British soldiers in Ulster, this kind of terrorism is necessarily complex.
History is equally clear on the fact that the media of occupying governments are essentially prohibited from accurate representation of the occupation itself.
Ideologically, the fact that a group of people in this country supported the war enough to enable it to happen indicates that the media will represent the view that Iraq does in fact need to be occupied, for various reasons.
This prohibits them from portraying the evils of occupation as necessarily evil; rather, they portray the occupation as unfortunate but necessary.
In this war in particular, however, there is the added factor of intense government censorship and the unprecedented embedding of reporters.
Thus, while the ostensible savagery of targeting of civilians does help the US government label the freedom fighters of the present as terrorists, the simultaneous media censorship omnipresent throughout the war in Iraq blinds us to the equally if not more savage violence perpetrated by our state against the Iraqi civilians.
In Fallujah, for instance, where reporters were prohibited for several months beginning in November 2004, 65 percent of buildings were leveled to the ground and anywhere between 600 to 3,000 civilians were murdered, mostly by carpet-bombing, the increasingly favored technique employed in Iraq as manpower begins to dwindle.
All of these conditions must be recognized when we consider our relation to the Iraqi resistance.
Liz Sperber/College Hill Independent