Collins shameless on Iraq and Afghanistan

Her oped published today shows why most of the US public knows nothing about and cares little for civilian catastrophes wrought by US bombing and killing


A stuffed animal has more conscience concerning the US policy choice of depopulation and widespread aerial bombardment of Iraqi cities than US Senator Susan Collins (R-ME).



Results of the US bombing campaign in Fallujah that Senator Collins failed to mention. [Update 4/21/2005: I replaced the image that was originally displayed here, as links into Crisis Pictures or Fallujah in Pictures are now missing or unreliable.]

There has been a lot of noise recently in the news in America about how Iraqis are angry about loss of life caused by ``insurgent'' attacks. Of course the war-torn people of Iraq are angry at the terrible toll the violent opposition to the US occupation causes. Unfortunately, people seeking jobs as security personnel for the occupation are perceived as collaborators, no matter that the desperate economic situation is what leads Iraqis to seek these jobs -- not a belief in American goals for their country.

But missing from the discussion of ``insurgent'' violence is any like discussion of massive-scale US violence and war crimes applied to whole cities over the last few months. (Some of my previous entries on the US flattening of Fallujah are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Senator Collins in her piece today refers to a recent junket to Afghanistan and Iraq she took with her colleagues John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Russ Feingold and Hillary Clinton. I blogged on the remarks of Hillary Clinton two weeks ago, calling the senator's rosy picture of Iraq a mythology. The true picture of the city is more like a scene from Warsaw after the Nazis were through with it in 1943.

I find it ironic beyond belief that Senator Collins in her piece admits while trying to talk up potential US ``success'' and its ``tipping point'', that the real picture of the US occupation are conditions (well after the January election) where

our Senate delegation could not drive along the streets of Baghdad. We were transported in armed Black Hawk helicopters to the heavily fortified "Green Zone," where American and British headquarters as well as the Iraqi government offices are located. We wore 45-pound armored vests and heavy helmets much of the time and had to return to Kuwait each night.

But this is the paragraph from the oped Collins wrote that struck me hardest:

The most encouraging part of my visit to Iraq was our trip to Fallujah, a city once synonymous with danger and firmly in the insurgents' control. Once a sanctuary for insurgents, Fallujah is now what one Marine described as the ``safest city in Iraq" due to a fierce battle in which the Marines rooted out the insurgents and destroyed scores of weapons caches. This success has also encouraged more than a thousand Iraqis in the Fallujah area to have the confidence to come forward to fill police and army positions.

That's all the US did to achieve ``success''? Root out some weapons caches? What sickness ignores the overall leveling of a city once with a population of about 300,000, creating a massive refugee problem and thousands of deaths? War crimes committed in the process included destroying hospitals, shooting fleeing civilians, and prohibiting relief from entering the city -- actions all specifically condemned by the Geneva Conventions.

The rest of the story, gathered by independent journalists, and told by Dahr Jamail in a recent interview goes like this...

Basically Fallujah today closely resembles a concentration camp. The military maintains that strict cordon; any of the people who live there who want to go back into the city have to get a retina scan and get finger-printed, and then get an I.D. card made. Then they go through a very strict checkpoint with full body searches, very intrusive searches. Then they're allowed into the city, where at least 60 per cent of the city's been bombed to the ground. There's no electricity, no water, and of course no jobs. So, of the 350,000 people who lived there, roughly 25,000 have returned to try to sort out what's left of their homes. It closely resembles a wasteland at this point.

So I have prepared a letter today for my esteemed senator, asking her to

please explain to me your motivation for leaving out news of the complete shattering of this city and its mostly innocent people. Do you not understand what has happened there, or are you intentionally keeping the truth from the American people? Your gall in calling this ``success" should at least be an issue for your conscience.

For now, I won't take on Collin's mellow picture of Afghanistan, except to say that the recent reports suggest it has evolved into a failed narcotics state. I am ashamed to have as my senator the shameless propagandist Susan Collins.