Quantum Note

Hope Against A Final Descent

Nothing seems to have survived; even the rules of war have been completely destroyed. In the past, this most barbaric act of one nation against another used to have certain rules: children were considered to be outside the killing arena; hospitals, shrines, places of worship, schools and heritage sites used to have immunity. The sick, the old and non-combatants had certain rights. News from the battlefronts used to have a certain degree of reliability. The reasons for going to war used to have a certain degree of real justification. But all of this has been wiped out and all that is left is a sickening descent into a much lower level of killing.

One cannot trust anything anymore. Before the invasion of Iraq, we were forced to believe in those mythical weapons of mass destruction which were supposedly threatening the whole world. In February 2003, Mr. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, made his historic speech before the Security Council, presenting “solid” evidence for American claims in that regard. Now he says that when he made that presentation, “it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading… the CIA was wrong about the presence of mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq before the war last spring… It appears not to be the case that it was that solid.”

But now it does not matter whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction; a fait accompli has a brute logic of its own. Yet the occupying army needs a justification to stay in Iraq. So they fabricate one: we are in Iraq to bring freedom and democracy. They go through the motions and establish a provisional authority, a sort of legal cover. They appoint ministers and set up offices for so many ministries that one cannot even remember their names. They even set dates and schedules for handing over sovereignty. But all of this is fake; mere words, bleeding the last remnants of meaning in English language. All of this is meaningless because the draconian orders issued by proconsel Paul Bremer have already kidnapped sovereignty and all that is left in Iraq is an apparatus of oppression, based on the worst American values amplified several times: an Iraqi prisoner in a dog collar, a body hanging horizontally from a forklift; naked men in a heap. Lynndie England with a cigarette in her mouth is not merely a single American women gone mad; she is the true personification of the evil forced upon Iraq by a state gone mad. The apologies that dribble out of the White House looking for a few “bad apples” mean nothing because the evil being wrought in Iraq is not the deed of a few; it is the outcome of a considered policy set in action by a state through the deliberate and well thought-out opinions of elected representatives of a public whose consent to this crime was secured through manipulation of information.

The fact that these crimes against humanity are not limited to a few individuals can be established from the 24-page report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which does not limit the abuse to the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad; it mentions many other facilities where mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is a routine. These include al-Baghdadi air base, Hubbania camp, Tikrit holding area, the defence ministry, and a presidential palace in Baghdad. The report tells the world of prisoners held naked for prolonged solitary confinements in cells without light; it provides details of midnight arrests by coalition forces; it states that there have been serious violations of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war.  But all of this is of no consequence, because there is no one left to take to task those who violate the Geneva Convention which provides a certain degree of restrain. With the breakdown of international laws nothing remains safe now. That all of this is premeditated can be established by the fact America refuses to join the International Court of Justice because it knows it will be charged for its crimes against humanity.

The lexicon of the worst American horror shows has now entered everyday vocabulary; news has become so unreal that a shocked populace can now believe in nothing that comes out of that dreadfulness theatre. True, those pictures from Abu Ghraib did produce public outrage in America and Europe, but it is an outrage that did little to change the course of events. There has been no massive American remorse pouring out on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Chicago; life in Paris and London is business as usual. Of course there is the mute agony of individuals, but this has failed to find a collective path of action.

Headlines continue to depict this war of terror as war against terror; the adjectives being used for the Iraqi resistance continue to demean a most noble and courageous fight against an occupation army; the American military and civil authorities keep talking about plans to install a puppet regime; and  the death toll keeps rising. There is no end in sight. Men, women and children keep suffering untold misery in overcrowded pens at  Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, and Camp Bucca; night raids round up more individuals, destroying the fabric of a society already tortured for decades. Thousands of lives disappear into black holes, leaving behind nothing but memories to torture the loved ones.

These crimes and the continuous occupation of Iraq poses a serious dilemma for the whole Western world. Given the massive and unprecedented public outrage against invasion of Iraq and an equally strong opposition to continuity of occupation, do the governments of the United States of America and Britain still represent the will of their people? If yes, then not only the few individuals running these governments, but these two nations as a whole must carry the burden of these crimes; if not, what kind of political system is this which allows unrepresentative governments to continue their rule in such a barbaric manner?

Each and every citizen of these two nations must ask this question over and over until they find a way out of this dilemma. This is not a theoretical question that can be pondered in the safety and comfort of their drawing rooms; they must consider this urgently and with a seriousness that is cognizant of the destruction being wrought in Iraq.

It should also be clear that regardless of their response, thousands of Iraqi  men, women and children, held in limbo, incommunicado, and tortured out of existence, will simply not disappear into some black hole. Their voices from the nether world will keep on calling for justice until the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity stand trial for their heinous crimes. These men, women and children are today the most courageous human beings on this planet; they are not only enduring the hellish rage of two states gone mad, they are also the harbingers of hope, of an ultimate victory of humanity against this descent.