Is the US Army Institutionally Racist in Iraq?
You betcha.
You betcha.
At least that's what a senior British military officer has said in a blistering new article critiquing the conduct of the US military in Iraq.
In it Brig Aylwin-Foster says American officers displayed such cultural insensitivities that it "arguably amounted to institutional racism" and may have helped spur the insurgency.
Full BBC Report.
And how does a US officer respond?
Col Kevin Benson, commander of the US Army's elite School of Advanced Military Studies, said his first reaction was that Brig Aylwin-Foster was "an insufferable British snob".
How intelligent. Respond to an accusation of racism by ... calling the accuser a racist slur.
I wish I could laugh, but I can't because these murderers and thieves masquerading as a disciplined military outfit are running rampant in my country.
And this is not the first time the US military has been scolded by its British brothers in arms.
The British should know. They enslaved most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East for centuries. As I have mentioned here, it was only after the Sepoy Mutiny in India (I am loathe to use the term sepoy as some Indians I have talk to have taken offense at its denotation) that the British started to accomodate cultural sensitivities.
And even then it was lacking.
On this blog, I have complained about the incessant labelling of Iraqis as Hajjis. This is akin to Viet Cong, Japs, Jerry (used by British soldiers).
However, Iraq is an occupied country and Hajjis is used to refer to all Iraqis in a derogatory fashion.
Like the use of the words nigger, kike, chink, spic, Paki, and so on.
Can you imagine a Jew being referred to as a kike? Oy vey, the whole world would go meshuggah over such blatant anti-Semitism.
Or an African-American referred to as a nigger? Yes, it may be okay to saturate US popular culture with hiphoppisms, but this isn't a music video. It's not Nintendo, either.
What I can't figure out is how African-American soldiers can stand there and either allow or engage in such slurs when it was just 40 years ago that they were complaining about civil rights.
Hajjis, indeed. Yes, the way it is used is nothing but racist.
For the uninformed, Hajji is a term often annointed to those returning from the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca - the Hajj (if you were watching television lately you would have seen this ended a mere two days ago).
A woman who returns from the Hajj rites is called a Hajiyah.
This is the religious reference.
However, in Iraq, as well as in some Arab countries, the word can also be applied in reverence to the elders. For example, I used to call our gardner in Baghdad Hajji, out of respect for his age and the fact I was far younger than him.
It is applied to elderly people because somewhere along the line, it was assumed that by such a late age they would have already undertaken the Hajj.
So, a term that is borne of societal reverence is used loosely now by the invading Hun - the US army.
On April 10, after the sacking, looting, pillaging and robbing of Baghdad, George Bush had this to say:
“You deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers. You deserve to live as free people. And I assure every citizen of Iraq: your nation will soon be free.”
But how can we be free, George, when your soldiers have enslaved us. They shoot at us at checkpoints. They take pictures of our dead kin and post them on websites as war trophies. The tyranny of one you speak of has been replaced - thanks to your policies - by the tyranny of thousands, and many of them not even Iraqis (See: Iranian diaperheads in Qum).
Corruption? How many former post-Saddam Iraqi ministers have been charged with corruption?
Torture chambers? You mean the more than a dozen maintained by the villainous Shia taskmasters from Badr and Sciri? The ones where they drill holes into the skulls of Sunnis ONLY because they are Sunnis?
Is that your idea of free?
Writing in the Daily Telegraph (Australia) Sharon Churcher interviewed good ol Yankees.
Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker's daughter, comes from a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call "a backwoods world".
She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero.
At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think she has done nothing wrong.
"A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq," Colleen Kesner said.
"To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised.
"Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting Iraqis."
Pathetic. Uncultured. Uncivilized. Uncouth. AND Evil.
These are our liberators. These are the people who comprise the US army, the US soldier pointing a gun at Iraqis day in and day out.
No wonder more than 100,000 Iraqis have died in this illegal invasion and occupation.
To the apologists calling me anti-American, try harder. If someone questions the status quo, he is called anti this and anti that.
If you question Israel's Nazi policies against the Palestinians you are either a terrorist or anti-Semitic, or both.
If you question the policies of the US by revealing the unbearable truths about how it loves and begs to wage war on innocent nations, you are called anti-American.
I am sad to say, many have no idea, no inkling what a democracy means. What it demands of its free peoples it serves.
No. Democracy is voting or soiling your middle finger at the ballot.
Democracy is a terrible burden. It is magnificient in its promise and terrible in its abuse. It demands responsibility, it demands accountability.
Freedom's price is not waving a gun in some far off country you could never locate on a map. Freedom's price is that you are at once responsible and accountable for each and every action undertaken for, by, and of that democracy.
Democracy is education - learning the mistakes of the past, learning how democracy developed, learning of the free will of peoples to ensure their government serves them. And not vice versa.
Perhaps, CS Lewis said it best:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
But perhaps, as applied to the US, economist/priest Edward Dowling's is more telling:
The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
