A recent official audit by the U.S. government of American financial practices in Iraq revealed that Americans of all stripes continue to pocket Iraqi treasury funds and U.S. tax dollars earmarked for reconstruction, according to a Jan. 25 New York Times article. Then, on Feb. 2, the Times reported that court papers from a separate but related case against seven Americans in Iraq revealed "a maelstrom of greed, sex and gun-running at the heart of the American occupation of a conservative Muslim country."
The details of the audit are astonish-ing. Literally no records were kept as money entered and left the main vault at Hilla, a large southern city that served as a kind of "regional capital" for "a vast swath of southern Iraq," according to the Jan. 25 Times article. Without record-keeping, one might have cynically expected the rampant pinching of Iraqi funds within the vault. Yet outside of the vault, U.S. auditors found corruption equally rampant; the most striking instances include one official with $2 million stuffed in a safe in his bathroom, another with an unlocked footlocker under his desk containing $678,000 and the story of $60,000 intended for Iraqi reconstruction gambled away by a single soldier in the Philippines.
In fact, it is at moments like these - as when news of Abu Ghraib broke, or even the earlier revelations about Guantan-amo Bay - that I recall my conversations with Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History Engin Akarli. He is a deeply principled, Muslim man. It is my understanding that he actually went to prison protesting a forced curricular change by the Turkish government many years ago. Yet, during the push for war and during the beginning of the war itself, he argued that the removal of Hussein was necessary because he was such a terrible man. I never protested his view of Hussein. Rather, I asked Akarli what he thought motivated the Bush administration, given its distinct history. In light of that history, how could he believe that freedom and democracy were possible results of our invasion?
Akarli shrugged his shoulders and, in a voice filled with hope and wisdom, said that we had to hope for the best. He wasn't "giving up," he was sincerely trying to believe that finally, after centuries of colonial oppression, brutal exploitation and, most recently, after 10 years of absurd and deadly neoliberal sanctions on Iraq, there could finally be peace, democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people. Akarli had every right to want better . With all due respect, though, I am baffled at the blind eye people were willing to turn on the specific histories of Bush administration members in advocating the invasion.
It is illuminating to consider the British public's more realistic approach to the lies and terrors lying just beneath the surface of our "allied" occupation. A crucial difference between the British and American publics is that the British have been through this before. Our so-called coalition partners wrote the rules of the circular games of invasion, detention, torture, massacre and exploitation of labor as well as the exploitation of public opinion at home for nearly two centuries. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, the colonial occupation of Ireland, begun in the late 1500s, posed a threat to British "national security" that threatened to turn Britain into a police state. Eventually, the British had to sit down with anti-colonial radicals and compromise to ensure the safety of their own people.
While the apparently rampant corruption of individuals in Iraq demands our attention this month, I urge you to refrain from placing blame solely on the individuals in Iraq. Ultimately the disaster of Iraq is our collective responsibility; it is, after all, national policy, and our leaders must be held responsible for enabling the structural exploitation of a fellow people - the Iraqi people. (Remember, Iraqis had no connection to al-Qaida when we "shocked and awed" their country to bits.) Despite its sleek corporate aesthetic, the Bush administration's model for secretive, authoritarian exceptionalism mirrors the paradigms of countless imperial rulers of the past.
It is time for everyone who does not want their lives merged with this history of inhumanity, greed and destruction of American and Iraqi bodies, minds and resources to stand up and oppose the neocolonial war machine. Bush's repetition of the words "decline" and "isolationism" throughout his State of the Union Address register his patently colonial anxiety. Let us "save our pessimism for better times." Act now.
Elizabeth Sperber '06 loves Jane Fonda.
