Kelly the Context of the Iraq Genocide 1 the CONTEXT of the IRAQ
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Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 1 THE CONTEXT OF THE IRAQ GENOCIDE A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. \ Kieran Robert Kelly 2012 Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 2 Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 3 CONTENTS: Abbreviations 5 Preface 7 Introduction 11 Chapter 1 – US Militarism, Exceptionalism, and Academic Propaganda 18 An Academic Propaganda Model 23 A Militaristic Empire 26 Chapter 2 – War, Genocide and Empire 30 Genocide 43 A Note on the Holocaust/Shoah 49 Terminology 50 Economic Genocide 53 Intentionality 56 Dissimulation, Deception and Secrecy 67 The US Empire and Genocide 74 Chapter 3 – The Academic and Political Discourse of 'Genocide' 93 The Distortions 97 Chapter 4 – Race and the US at War in Asia 109 The Philippines War 109 The War Against Japan 113 Chapter 5 – Korean War or Korean Genocide? 121 The US Occupation and its Imperial Context 125 Who Started It? 141 War or Genocide? 154 Conclusion – From Then Till Now 171 Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 4 APPENDIX A – Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; December 9, 1948 185 APPENDIX B – The 'Jack Bauer Candidates' 188 APPENDIX C – Exceptionalism and Torture 190 APPENDIX D – The 'Tonkin Gulf Incidents' 195 APPENDIX E – Creating Future Génocidaires in the Great War 200 APPENDIX F – The Argentine Genocide 204 APPENDIX G - Deception, Dissimulation and Secrecy 206 APPENDIX H – Rwanda 209 APPENDIX I – Iraqi Nationalism 220 APPENDIX J – The Petrodollar Recycling System 225 REFERENCES 232 Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 5 Abbreviations: 2nd IW – Second Indochina War. CentCom – Central Command. CFR – Council on Foreign Relations. CIA – Central Intelligence Agency. CPD – Committee on the Present Danger. CPV - Chinese People's Volunteers. DCI – Director of Central Intelligence; head of the CIA. DK – Democratic Kampuchea (the name of the former Cambodia during the reign of the 'Khmer Rouge', 1975-1979). DPRK – Democratic People's Republic of Korea. DRV – Democratic Republic of Vietnam. FAR – Forces Armées Rwandaise. GDP – Gross Domestic Product. GMD – Guomindang. GVN – Government of [The Republic of] Vietnam. GWOT – Global War on Terror (herein taken to include US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan). ICBM – Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. ICTR – Interntional Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. ICTY – Interntional Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia. IMF – International Monetary Fund. ISI – Import Substitution Industrialisation. JCS – Joint Chiefs of Staff. KCIA – Korean Central Intelligence Agency. KMT – Kuomintang (alternate spelling of Guomindang). KPA – Korean People's Army. KPR – Korean People's Republic. KR – Khmer Rouge. NIE – National Intelligence Estimate; a comprehensive multi-agency intelligence report. NLF – National Liberation Front. OSS – Office of Strategic Services; a comparatively small World War II fore-runner to the CIA. PR – Public Relations. ROE – Rules Of Engagement; the rules governing the use of force by armed personnel. ROKA – Army of the Republic of Korea. RPF – Rwandan Patriotic Front. Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 6 RVN – Republic of Vietnam. RVNAF – Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam. UAV – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or 'drone'. UK – The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. UNCG – United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. US – The United States of America. USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. VNAF – [Republic of] Vietnam Air Force. Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 7 Preface I had a story to tell about Iraq. About suffering, deprivation, want, death, grief. About the horror of white phosphorous, the slow agony of depleted uranium, and the terror of air strikes, street shootings and night raids; a population afflicted by everything from disease and hunger to social and cultural disintegration to deaths squads and unprecendented sectarian strife. Though journalistic and scholarly commentators like to forget the fact as frequently as possible, the root causes of all of this are clearly and patently exogenous and equally patently can be attributed to the US and UK. There is a word for this, a word specifically coined to describe the 'manifold' combination of physical, cultural, social, economic and/or biological destruction of a population. That word is genocide. For over two decades the US has put a large amount of its energies into systematically commiting genocide in Iraq with whichever means were most expedient at the time – bombing, sanctions, invasion, occupation. Using everything from depleted uranium to fraud to neoliberal 'ideology', the US has dismantled the economic and social fabric of Iraq, immiserated most of its people, and killed in massive numbers, probably well in excess of 2 million, a very large portion of whom were killed directly by US munitions and personnel. Isn't this obviously a case of genocide? Apparently not. For a start, in what Gore Vidal describes as the 'United States of Amnesia', the past really doesn't exist and it sometimes seems that the whole world views the US through that same amnesiac lens. Thus not only is there no continuity between different phases of the Iraq Genocide, there is no admissable strategic similarity between the Iraq genocide and previous US genocides. The amnesia works in conjunction with accepted academic and journalistic practices to create an interminable unconsolidated and entangled 'discourse' on motives, policy and intent. Some seek to understand policy by taking official pronouncements at face value, others are more 'discerning' looking for the 'real' policy in words from inside sources, in declassified or leaked documents, and in those memoirs which US officials churn out lucratively in such large numbers. Few refer to, let alone give primacy to, the nature of US deeds themselves as a way of understanding what US policy actually is. What the US actually does is always incidental. All of the dead people are, more or less, collateral damage. I did not want to further the amnesia and atomisation of knowledge by treating the Iraq Genocide as an isolated incident, dismissable as an aberration. I thought it would also be valuable to demonstrate the intentionality of US actions by showing the precedents – other examples of complex and systematic behaviours often employing identical methods to achieve the same genocidal ends. I additionally thought that I should demonstrate the motive, the strategic logic which has impelled the US to commit a number of massive genocides. The available theories in the scholarly fields of international relations, genocide studies and the literature of imperialism gave no help. To be frank, they are all ideologically rigged fields which preclude any serious analysis of Western liberal polities except on levels almost so abstract as to be meaningless. They certainly don't provide any insight into US actions in Iraq and, as will be seen, scholars may quite blatantly refuse to apply the same criteria to Western behaviours as they do to those whom it is more polite and acceptable to critique. I consider that using historical examples to demonstrate patterns of repeated behaviour is the only possible means of proceeding in this work. Often the behaviours of interest are those which would never be admitted to in documentary form. This, in turn, is part of the reason why they are neglected in orthodox scholarship. Inevitably this results in verbosity. This becomes acute when dealing with matters which are irreducibly complex. The origins of wars, for example, are often the subject of much complicated debate and possess many levels of significance. I detail herein the origins of wars which were to provide the opportunity and means of genocide in Indochina, Kelly The Context of the Iraq Genocide 8 Rwanda, Japan, Korea and Iraq. In each case some actors were undeniably covert in bringing about these conflicts, which adds considerable complexity. Through comparison of repetitions of behaviour I can demonstrate with certainty that the US engaged in foreplanning for some or all of the resultant genocides, but each individual case in isolation leaves some room for doubt, not so much doubt about US responsibility as doubt about the unstated motives and expectations of the US, hence the need for repetition. The crucial thing here is to demonstrate the intentionality behind US genocides. It should be remembered that apologists for every genocide claim that there was no intent to commit genocide, that the perpetrators were fighting a war (usually a counterinsurgency) and that civilian deaths were incidental byproducts. Thus for reasons of both wordage and time I have not actually reached the intended topic of this work, the Iraq Genocide. Consequently this has become a survey used to construct a thesis on the context of the Iraq Genocide. Once I had detailed events in Korea, I realised that I had reached a point with a workable beginning, middle and end. The one aspect of context which has been omitted is the humanisation of the victims of US genocides and a proper and proportionate accounting of their suffering. Ultimately it is in the suffering of the victims that we find the most important historical context, not in the strategic approaches which impel the use of genocide. That strategic level, however, cannot even be understood without accounting for the suffering brought about. These are not incidental victims, but rather the victims of careful calculation. The planners and instigators of genocide may attempt to sanitise even their own thoughts, but to truly understand their logic and processes one cannot hide from the fact that they carefully and meticulously plan for mass death and all of the pain, grief and terror entailed. It is also important to counter the well reinforced imagery and sense that the US, and other developed states, commit violence in a manner that is more clinical and surgical.