Do Unto Others…
As You would have them do unto you
by Charles Coughlin
Imagine a young man, who has a pregnant sister who suddenly goes into labor. He hops in his car with her and a female cousin and races for the hospital. Imagine the police have put up a road block to try to catch a bank robber. The man with the pregnant sister doesn’t want to wait in line for an hour. He passes up the parked cars on the shoulder of the road. He hopes the police will look into his car and see that he has a pregnant woman inside along with another female relative and let him pass. Instead the police open fire killing the pregnant woman, the unborn baby and the man’s female cousin. Americans would never stand for this sort of outrageous police behavior.
But this is exactly the sort of burden we have imposed on the civilians of Iraq. A recent news article reports: “U.S. forces killed two Iraqi women — one of them about to give birth — when the troops shot at a car that failed to stop at an observation post in a city north of Baghdad, Iraqi officials and relatives said Wednesday. Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, 35, was being raced to the maternity hospital in Samarra by her brother when the shooting occurred Tuesday. Jassim, the mother of two children, and her 57-year-old cousin, Saliha Mohammed Hassan, were killed by the U.S. forces, according to police Capt. Laith Mohammed and witnesses. The U.S. military said coalition troops fired at a car… (which) failed to stop despite repeated visual and auditory warnings. Jassim’s brother, who was wounded by broken glass, said he did not see any warnings as he sped his sister to the hospital. Her husband was waiting for her there. ‘I was driving my car at full speed because I did not see any sign or warning from the Americans. It was not until they shot the two bullets that killed my sister and cousin that I stopped,’ he said. ‘God take revenge on the Americans and those who brought them here. They have no regard for our lives.’ He said doctors tried but failed to save the baby after his sister was brought to the hospital. The shooting deaths occurred in the wake of an investigation into allegations that U.S. Marines killed unarmed civilians in the western city of Haditha.”
In another incident, an Italian intelligence officer was killed while rescuing an Italian reporter in Iraq. He wasn’t killed by rebels. He was killed by US troops at a roadblock that was not clearly marked. Our soldiers claimed to have given warnings and fired warning shots, but the surviving Italians insisted that our troops opened fire on their car without warning. While many Americans will doubt eyewitness accounts from Iraqis, how do you explain the pointless massacre of our Italian allies?
Exactly what are we accomplishing in Iraq? We have had roadblocks in Iraq since the beginning of the occupation and we have shot innocent civilians again and again at these roadblocks. Iraqis must wait in long lines in one of the hottest nations in the world just so our troops can show them who’s in charge. Are the rebels stupid enough to crowd into a car with AK47s visible through the windows and drive through one of our roadblocks? Is that what our military thinks will happen? Have we ever caught anyone of value at a roadblock?
Winning the hearts and minds of ordinary civilians is vital in a guerilla war. We are not doing this. Our troops in Iraq are primarily concerned with surviving their latest tour. This leads to a paranoid, trigger-happy mentality. Road blocks don’t make us more popular. Kicking in doors in the middle of the night and searching for weapons also doesn’t help. The Iraq rebellion has grown considerably and our coalition has shrunk as one “partner” after another withdraws its last troops seeing the occupation as increasingly pointless. George Bush sees his legacy tied up with the Iraq fiasco and insists that we can still salvage something out of that mess. The truth is that every American death in Iraq is unnecessary. We have nothing to gain there and just more lives to lose. Only Halliburton and Dick Cheney’s corporate pals are profiting from the Iraq disaster while our soldiers pay for these profits with their blood.