Doesn't McCain Know That "Never Again" Only Applies to White People

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 7:39 AM on July 24, 2008.

So, I'm sure you've caught McCain's latest sleazy shot at Obama. If not, here's Steve Benen with the recap:

Speaking today at Yad Vashem, Obama said, "Let our children come here and know this history so they can add their voices to proclaim 'never again.' And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us and who have become symbols of the human spirit."

Soon after, the hopelessly tasteless McCain campaign alerted reporters to a news item from a year ago.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now -- where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife -- which we haven't done," Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

In other words, the McCain campaign wants Americans to believe that Obama is weak on genocide. Asked for clarification, McCain aide Michael Goldfarb told the Huffington Post, "Today he says 'never again.' A year ago stopping genocide wasn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. Doesn't that strike you as inconsistent?"

A couple of points. First, the point of keeping troops in Iraq is to keep troops in Iraq -- to have a military footprint in the region (bordering Iran), protect our investments and keep our foot in the door of all that oil. We're also there to avoid "losing" Iraq (to the Iraqis), which would expose the rather obvious fact that we're a declining superpower with much less ability to influence events than we believe we have.

While we can have a serious discussion about the possibility that Iraq's various (and overlapping) civil conflicts might become worse if our troops were to depart -- an idea that Iraqis find crazy -- McCain's suggestion that we're there to prevent genocide is a brazen piece of propaganda that's perfectly divorced from reality. It's just one of the ever-shifting rationales for an indefinite occupation, and one that's designed to appeal to good liberals as well as war supporters.

Iraq is as much at risk of genocide -- I'm talking about genocide, not an intensified civil war -- as Canada.

None of the conditions that experts agree place a country at risk for genocide are present.

By and large, Iraqis view themselves as Iraqis -- not Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomen, etc. In fact, Iraqis have more of a sense of nationalism than any other country in the region. As I wrote a while back:

Sociologist Mansoor Moaddel, with the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR), was part of a team that conducted a series of surveys of Iraqi attitudes between 2004 and 2007, and concluded: "Iraqis have a strong sense of national identity that transcends religious and political lines." The survey found that Iraqi nationalism is on the rise, with twice as many Iraqis identifying themselves as such than the number who see themselves as Muslims first and foremost. "This is a much higher proportion than we found in other Middle Eastern capitals," said Moaddel. He concluded that it's a mistake to believe that the sectarian street-fighting of recent years "represents widespread sentiment among Iraqis as a whole... the Iraqi public is increasingly drawn toward a vision of a democratic, non-sectarian government for the country."

At the local level, there has been ethnic and sectarian violence, yes, but that does not approach a genocide. It's the predictable consequence of dismantling a state -- lacking security, people turn to their own "in-group" for protection.

A precondition of genocide is a strong and bifurcated identity -- a people split along ethnic (or similar) lines. At the national level, the divisions in Iraq don't conform. Iraq's factions are divided by political interests rather than sectarian identity. Sunnis have fought Sunnis, Shiites have fought Shiites. The Maliki regime is built on a governing coalition that includes two Shiite parties, one Sunni party and two Kurdish parties. Similarly, their political opposition includes representatives of all of Iraq's major ethnic and sectarian groups (more here).

Those identity groups are anything but unified -- another precondition for genocide. After the bloody fighting in Basra this past March -- Maliki's governing coalition (led by two Shiite parties) duking it out with Shiite fighters loyal to Muqtada al Sadr (and to the Shiite Fadhila Party that controls Basra) -- can anyone seriously see Maliki and his allies joining forces with Sadr to eliminate the Sunnis? It doesn't pass the laugh test.

What about power? Genocide can only occur where there is a massive power imbalance between a majority and minority group, and that doesn't exist in Iraq. After the U.S, arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq are the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters. Sadr controls something like 100,000 armed men, the Badr Brigade -- fellow Shiites but deadly enemies with the Sadrists -- control tens of thousands of troops, and the Sunnis have fearsome fighters who were well-armed and well-trained when they made up the elite of Saddam's military. In Iraq, political power comes from the barrel of a gun, and all of its factions have heavily-armed militias.

What about neighboring countries? Does anyone think the Sunni-led governments that dominate the region would let the Shiites wipe out Iraq's Sunnis (even if they had some inclination to do so, or the means)?

It's propaganda, plain and simple. As the Washington Post reported in late 2006, "a strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers" (emphasis mine). Those findings cut across identity-lines; would Iraqis feel that way if their country were teetering on the brink of genocide?

As for "never again," I think we need to stop fooling ourselves. A look at the post-World War II era makes it perfectly clear that when we say we'll never tolerate genocide again, we -- and I mean the international community led by the major powers -- are really saying that we'll never again tolerate genocide against white people.

The international community was slow to react to the Cambodian genocide, and most of its perpetrators continue to live free in what human righs watch-dogs call "a culture of impunity".

John McCain has said "I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?" The answer is that "we" could have stopped that slaughter with a few thousand troops.

In the documentary, Ghosts of Rwanda, General Romeo Daillaire and Major Brent Beardsley, the two chiefs of the UN Mission to Rwanda were pretty clear on that point. Beardsley:

The 450 [UN troops] who remained on the ground saved the lives of 25,000 people directly, then indirectly through providing humanitarian aid, most likely tens of thousands more than that. General Dallaire stated quite frequently that if 5,500 troops could have come in, we could have arrested it. Well, if you do the mathematics, we could have saved over a half million people. If the troops had stayed on the ground, if they came in on the evacuation or more troops had come in, we could have stopped it.

Speaking of US marines stationed in and around Rwanda, he added:

There's this myth that has come out of Rwanda that it was impossible to intervene and stop this genocide. The facts go in the face of it. Within three days, there was 2,000 troops on the ground, and that could have been the start of a bigger operation and bring in even more. They had a decisive impact from the moment they hit the ground. If they'd only have stayed, I still believe that we could have prevented what happened, and I'll take that to my grave.

We didn't give a damn.

When Saddam Hussein committed a genocidal act against the Kurds, we went so far as to protect him from international sanctions. There was plenty of lead-time in which we might have prevented that one; five years before the Hajabja gas attack, U.S. intelligence already knew that Saddam was using WMD against "Kurdish insurgents." According to a National Security Archive briefing:

What was the Reagan administration's response? A State Department account indicates that the administration had decided to limit its "efforts against the Iraqi CW program to close monitoring because of our strict neutrality in the Gulf war, the sensitivity of sources, and the low probability of achieving desired results.

Following further high-level policy review, Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 114, dated November 26, 1983, concerned specifically with U.S. policy toward the Iran-Iraq war. The directive reflects the administration's priorities: it calls for heightened regional military cooperation to defend oil facilities, and measures to improve U.S. military capabilities in the Persian Gulf, and directs the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take appropriate measures to respond to tensions in the area. It states, "Because of the real and psychological impact of a curtailment in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf on the international economic system, we must assure our readiness to deal promptly with actions aimed at disrupting that traffic." It does not mention chemical weapons.

Soon thereafter, Donald Rumsfeld (who had served in various positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including as President Ford's defense secretary, and at this time headed the multinational pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Co.) was dispatched to the Middle East as a presidential envoy. His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish "direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein," while emphasizing "his close relationship" with the president [Document 28]. Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.'s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq's oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting.

Darfur? Just read my piece, "Empty promises Can't Stop Genocides" -- we don't give a damn.

Of course, we bombed the shit out of Kosovo and we justified it as preventing genocide -- even though, by some estimates "only" 2,500 Kosovar Albanians had been killed before the bombing campaign began. They were white. Meanwhile, 3.9 million Congolese have been killed in that country's ongoing conflict(s) -- "Africa's World War" -- the greatest death toll in any conflict since World War II. It doesn't fit neatly into the category of "genocide", but we're playing whack-a-mole with horrific massacres there right now (the war officially ended in 2003, but not everyone got the memo). A short-staffed U.N. peacekeeping force in a region the size of Western Europe is running from district to district putting out deadly fires. It partially contained the killing in Ituri province, then massacres were reported in the Kivus. Now there are blue helmets in the Kivus and the killing's shifted to the Katanga region. Mole pops up, whack that mole. As many people have died in the Congo every eight months as in the Indian Ocean tsunami. Oxfam called the $94 million the world forked over in response to an urgent request for aid in early 2006 "miniscule."

One final point. Although genocide is not part of the equation in Iraq, the death toll has rivaled that of the Cambodian genocide and significantly exceeded that of Rwanda. Thanks to our wonderful media, when Americans were asked in early 2007 how many Iraqi civilians had died, their answer, on average, was around 10,000. What's more, many Americans believe that "they" -- those blood-thirsty Iraqis who blew up the World Trade Center -- are killing each other, while we sit back and try to prevent the slaughter.

But Michael Schwartz did an analysis of the findings in the Lancet study of Iraqi "excess deaths," and came up with a chilling estimate of how many Iraqis our forces had killed:

Among the 600,000 or so victims of Iraqi war violence, the largest portion have been killed by the American military, not by carbombings or death squads, or violent criminals -- or even all these groups combined.

The Lancet interviewers asked their Iraqi respondents how their loved ones died and who was responsible. The families were very good at the cause of death, telling the reporters that over half (56%) were due to gunshots, with an eighth due each to car bombs (13%), air strikes (13%) and other ordinance (14%). Only 4% were due to unknown causes.

The families were not as good at identifying who was responsible. Although they knew, for example, that air strike victims were killed by the occupation, and that carbomb victims were killed by insurgents, the gunshot and ordinance fatalities often occurred in firefights or in circumstances with no witnesses. Many times, therefore, they could not tell for sure who was responsible. Only were certain, and the interviewers did not record the responsible party if "households had any uncertainly" as to who fired the death shot.

The results are nevertheless staggering for those of us who read the American press: for the deaths that the victims families knew for sure who the perpetrator was, U.S. forces (or their "Coalition of the Willing" allies) were responsible for 56%. That is, we can be very confident that the Coalition had killed at least 180,000 Iraqis by the middle of 2006. Moreover, we have every reason to believe that the U.S. is responsible for its pro rata share (or more) of the unattributed deaths. That means that the U.S. and its allies may well have killed upwards of 330,000 Iraqis by the middle of 2006.

The average American's ignorance of what has transpired in Iraq is McCain's greatest asset. And while those Iraqis weren't victims of genocide -- we weren't trying to wipe out any one particular ethnic group -- it nonetheless makes McCain's shot at Obama all the more sickening.

This, after all, is the guy who wants our forces to stay in Iraq and continue killing Iraqis in staggering numbers. He shouldn't be running for president -- he should be on trial in The Hague with all the rest.

Tagged as: iraq, genocide, obama, mccain

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.