"From Mass Graves to Massacres"

I can’t claim credit for this title that summarises the Iraqi tragedy. It belongs to "Umm Faisal"  a lady from the Arabian Gulf area who coined it during a TV phone-in show on an Arab satellite network a few days ago. The Americans have substituted Saddam’s mass graves with their own massacres of Iraqi civilians.

As far as I am concerned, the war in Iraq has just begun. Until this past week, it was an invasion and its aftermath. When one country invades another, it moves on the assumption that its forces are superior enough to overwhelm the opposition. In the immediate aftermath of a successful invasion, the invading army usually hastens to install a puppet regime; a fig leaf that attempts to cover the real intent of the invader and the ugliness of occupation. It provides a "legal"  rubber stamp to a slew of "legislations"  designed to rob the occupied country of its sovereignty and resources.

An invader always needs a noble cause to hide behind and convince its population of the worthiness of its action; a noble cause such as "Liberating the oppressed,"  "Security,"  "Democracy, and Freedom."  The fact that almost every invasion ends with atrocities and massacres against the local population points to a major discrepancy between the declared reasons for an invasion and the real intent of the invader. History books are full of illustrations; the French in Algeria, the Nazis in Europe, the Israelis in Lebanon, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and now, the Americans in Iraq.

Inevitably, two forces always work against the occupier. One is the mass irritability of the occupied population with the instruments of occupation; the second is the nervousness of neighbouring countries. The neighbouring foes will quietly work to dislodge the occupying forces through agitation and support for opposition. The neighbouring friends watch nervously as their new champion undergoes the inevitable transformation from a welcomed liberator to a despised aggressor. They are damned if they don’t support their champion and damned if they do. They know that one day he will not be there to protect them.

The Americans are starting to face a popular uprising crossing most sectors of the Iraqi population. They are trying to shoot their way out of it, but this will only sink them deeper into the quagmire of bloody massacres and crimes against humanity.

The majority of the six hundred people killed and more than three thousand wounded in Fallujah in one week alone were civilians, neither combatants nor terrorists. The citizens of Fallujah are demanding that the Americans hand over the pilots who bombed residential areas in exchange for those who mutilated the bodies of four American private security experts, all employees of "Blackwater,"  an American mercenary company [1]. This is indicative of the level of destruction the Americans have done there.

It was only a few months ago that the Iraqis unearthed the remains of their loved ones from Saddam’s mass graves. Now they are burying the victims of American massacres in a soccer field.

The war against the Americans has just begun. The Americans can’t win it. The sooner they leave the better.

Note:

[1]. http://www.blackwaterusa.com