Kepada: Semua Personil Militer Amerika Serikat yang Bertugas Aktif

 

Dari: Warga Negara AS yang Peduli

 

       

KAMI TELAH GAGAL ANDA

 

The ongoing United States invasion of Iraq has cost the lives of more than 4,000   American soldiers and 1.2 million Iraqis. The Democratic-majority U.S. Senate has just (20 minutes ago as I write this essay on the afternoon of May 22, 2008) passed $165 billion “to fund the war in Iraq until President Bush’s successor takes over.”  Congress will provide another seven month’s funding to sustain the bloody, miserable, and prolonged occupation of Mesopotamia.

 

With money provided by Democratic and Republican legislators, the Pentagon is building a gigantic hyper-militarized Baghdad embassy that will be the largest “diplomatic” outpost in world history.  Ini akan mempekerjakan 1,000 personel pemerintah USUS, termasuk ratusan agen CIA.

 

Meanwhile the U.S. maintains a number of huge military bases across Iraq, all permanent by design.

 

None of the remaining corporate-sponsored presidential candidates – John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton – is going to end the occupation between now and the next election cycle. Beneath the Democratic Party’s rhetoric of withdrawal, a president Obama or Clinton and a Democratic Congress could be expected to maintain a high level of U.S. presence in Iraq indefinitely – unless forced to do otherwise by an aroused citizenry.

 

Saat ini, tidak ada gerakan anti-perang warga yang mampu memaksa otoritas politik “tanah air” untuk melepaskan diri dari status quo berupa pendudukan yang bertahan lama.

 

A majority of Americans have long supported a rapid withdrawal from Iraq but are unwilling and/or unable to do anything serious to bring it about.  For various reasons relating to the poverty of America’s ever-more dangerously post-democratic political culture, there is no relief coming for troops from the civilian side. This is a nation where citizens are politically divided, distracted, uninterested, and submissive, and where "elites" are happy to keep them that way.

 

The Washington war planners enjoy lives of luxury and opulence.  So do the leading owners and managers of America’s so-called “defense” companies, who have made a profit-killing off all the human killing in Iraq.

 

Meanwhile, untold thousands of U.S. soldiers struggle with lives altered by injuries received in the execution of illegitimate orders. Despite majority public antiwar opinion at home and abroad, hundreds and perhaps thousands more U.S troops are slated to die and receive terrible injuries in Iraq in coming months and years.

 

 

TANPA PARTISIPASI PASUKAN, TANPA PERANG.

        

Ini semua adalah berita buruk.  The good news is that you don’t actually need a functioning democracy, a powerful antiwar movement, or an antiwar president to end the horrendous nightmare in Iraq.

 

You can finish it by declining to participate. You can refuse to deploy to Iraq.

 

You can refuse to carry out actions related to sending others in Iraq. If you are already there, you can refuse to carry out your orders. You can refuse to turn your guns on people who reasonably (see below) see you and your commanders as illegitimate colonial occupiers, since the United States does not own Iraq (or the Middle East or the world) and the Iraqis do not want you there. 

 

Anda dapat mengakhiri pendudukan. Tidak ada partisipasi sukarela dari pasukan, tidak ada pendudukan. Sesederhana itu.

 

What are Bush, Cheney, McCain, Rice, Gates, Pelosi, Clinton, Obama and the rest of the American power elite and political class going to do? Go to the Hell they have made in Iraq to fly the attack helicopters and man the tanks and machine guns and walk the patrols themselves? Send their children and/or other loves ones to dodge IEDs and sniper fire? Never!

 

Serahkan semuanya ke Blackwater, DynCorp, dan Triple Canopy? Tidak mungkin – tidak seluruh pekerjaan. 

 

ILEGAL DAN TIDAK PERLU

 

Tapi ideku bukan hanya agar kamu BISA mengakhiri perang ini.  Anda sudah mengetahuinya.  Poin terbesar saya adalah Anda HARUS mengakhirinya.  Anda HARUS segera mengakhirinya, karena alasan yang melampaui tujuan yang masuk akal yaitu menyelamatkan nyawa, anggota tubuh, dan kewarasan Anda sendiri. 

 

Pendudukan ini bersifat kriminal, tidak diperlukan, salah, bersifat pembunuhan massal, dan sangat bodoh.  “The mission” in Iraq lacks basic moral and legal legitimacy.       

 

Mari kita mulai dengan aspek hukum. Invasi tersebut tidak mendapat dukungan Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa (PBB).  None of the other UN Security Council members shared the U.S. and English government’s position that UN resolutions going back to 1990 were adequate to legitimize an invasion in 2003. 

 

Berdasarkan prinsip perang “pencegahan” sepihak, invasi tersebut menolak ketentuan Piagam PBB bahwa (i) keamanan internasional adalah masalah kolektif dan (ii) pertahanan diri adalah satu-satunya pembenaran perang.  Both the UN Charter and the war crime principles laid out by the U.S. and other Allied powers in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War Two forbid aggressive, unprovoked, and so-called preemptive war.  Faktanya, perang agresif adalah “kejahatan tertinggi” yang menyebabkan para petinggi Nazi diadili dan digantung di Nuremburg.

 

Any doubt that the Bush administration acted illegally and with criminal intent in invading Iraq can be dispelled by reading the London Times of May 1, 2005. Exactly two years after aggressive war-perpetrator George W. Bush jumped out of a fighter jet to ridiculously proclaim “Mission Accomplished,” the Times published sections of a leaked memorandum summarizing an internal meeting that took place between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top ministers on July 23, 2002. During the meeting, the July 23rd “Downing Street Memo” (DSM) reveals, Sir Richard Dearlove, Chief of the British Intelligence Service (M16), related an important piece of information he received during a meeting earlier that year with U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet.  As far as the Bush-Cheney administration was concerned, Dearlove learned, “military action [against Iraq] was now seen as inevitable [by top U.S. policymakers]. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).  Namun intelijen dan fakta seputar kebijakan tersebut sedang diperbaiki.” 

 

At the same meeting, the DSM shows, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw noted that the legal case for invasion “was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran.”

 

Additionally, Dearlove noted that the Bush administration and Pentagon had given little thought to how to deal with Iraq “after military action.”

 

We have long known that the case for (one-sided colonial) war made by the Bush administration – with no small help from dominant U.S. media – was deliberately deceptive. The White House and Pentagon charges that Saddam possessed significant stocks of WMD, that he posed a threat to the U.S. and the West, and that he was linked to 9/11 and al Qaeda were all bogus by design.  

 

Perlu dicatat bahwa sangat ilegal bagi pejabat pemerintah AS untuk membuat pernyataan palsu kepada rakyat Amerika dan mengajukan alasan perang (atau kebijakan lainnya) berdasarkan klaim palsu terhadap warga negaranya (Kode Undang-Undang Amerika Serikat, Judul 18, Bagian 1, bab 47, bagian 1001).

 

Sekalipun pemerintahan Bush mempunyai kekhawatiran yang nyata mengenai senjata pemusnah massal di Irak dan bukannya tuduhan palsu yang dibuat untuk membenarkan serangan tersebut, invasi tersebut masih terlalu dini.  UN weapons inspectors had hardly started their work before the U.S. invasion began.

 

ASUSILA

 

As “Iraq” has been replaced by “the economy” as the leading U.S. election issue, the Iraqi people have continued to suffer under a U.S.-imposed Holocaust. According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen in the December 2007 edition of Current History, “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again.  The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.  Hanya orang bodoh yang membicarakan solusi sekarang.  Tidak ada solusi.  Satu-satunya harapan adalah mungkin kerusakannya dapat diatasi.”

 

As veteran journalist and author Jonathan Steele notes in his important book “DEFEAT: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq” (2008), the latest reliable mortality estimates from the leading British medical journal The Lancet “suggest that more people have been killed in Iraq during the occupation than during the 32 years of Saddam [Hussein]’s rule.  Bahkan [kelompok penelitian] Iraq Body Count, yang menggunakan metodologi statistik yang lebih konservatif dan membuat tabulasi kematian yang dikonfirmasi oleh setidaknya dua sumber,” Steele mencatat, “menghasilkan jumlah korban tewas warga sipil yang terbunuh akibat kekerasan rata-rata sekitar 16,000 setiap tahun selama empat tahun pertama. tahun pendudukan.  Tingkat pembunuhan tahunan melebihi angka Saddam.”  (Steele 2006, hal. 250).

 

The supposed “antiwar” candidate Obama said the following about Iraq when talking to General Motors workers in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13th 2008: “It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together.”

 

Yes, we are "putting Iraq back together" with an illegal occupation that has killed 1.2 million Iraqis so far. This after an earlier devastating assault (the absurdly one-sided Persian Gulf “War” of 1991) and a decade plus of deadly, mass-murderous U.S.-led "economic sanctions,” generally conceded to have killed well more than half a million Iraqi children.  

 

It is no wonder that most Iraqis have long seen the U.S. and British troops in their midst as oppressive imperial occupiers, not liberators.  They have long wanted those “foreign invaders” to leave their country. A survey commissioned by the U.S. State Department and leaked to the Washington Post in the summer of 2006 determined that the large majority of Iraqis wanted US troops out immediately and believed that an American departure would decrease sectarian violence and make their country safer. Three-fourths of Baghdad’s residents said a U.S. exit would make them feel more secure

 

American troops in Iraq or ready to deploy there, listen: the Iraqi people, who your president and commanders claim to be liberating, want you out of their illegally occupied country immediately. Honor their wishes.

 

 

IMPERIAL: AN INDEPENDENT IRAQ AS A U.S. “GEOSTRATEGIC NIGHTMARE”

 

American military personnel, please ask yourself a question: why are U.S. troops really in, or going/going back (yet again?) to Iraq in the first place?

 

No more than 2 percent of the Iraqi population has ever believed that America overran Iraq with the intent of promoting democracy and freedom (things that cannot in any event be exported through the barrel of a gun). 

 

Most Iraqis have long figured that the U.S invaded to deepen American control over Iraqi oil and to send a message of American dominance across the petroleum-rich Middle East. 

 

Ini tentu saja merupakan keyakinan yang akurat.  Iraq would not have been invaded and occupied if it lacked oil and was located outside the world’s energy heartland – the Middle East.  The notion that the U.S. came to “export democracy” is something of a joke given: (i) the stifling authoritarianism of its own corporate-dominated political system (where majority opinion is close to irrelevant on numerous key policy issues); (ii) U.S. insistence on staying long after most Iraqis wanted us out; and (iii) the United States’ oil-based sponsorship of the Saudi Arabian regime – one of the most (if not the most) anti-democratic governments on earth. As the leading U.S. intellectual Noam Chomsky recently noted:

 

“It is sheer jingoist sentimentality to believe that the US has any interest in allowing Iraq to govern itself.  There is nothing in history or logic to suggest that, nor in current planning, with bipartisan support: the construction of the huge ‘Embassy,’ a city within a city, and the enormous military bases around the country, all designed to be permanent, surely.  History, logic, and what is going on before our eyes indicate clearly enough that Washington has always intended to establish an obedient client regime in Iraq, and still does, and will do what it can to achieve that, whatever the further cost to Iraqis.  An independent Iraq could be a nightmare for US geostrategic objectives in the region.” 

 

The notion of an oil-stocked Persian Gulf nation like Iraq being free to do whatever it wants is completely contrary to longstanding bipartisan U.S. foreign policy doctrine holding that U.S. control of Middle Eastern energy resources is critical to the maintenance of American global dominance

 

 

BODOH: “PEKERJAAN SENDIRI ADALAH KESALAHAN”

 

British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove’s observation that Washington was heading into Iraq with “little discussion” of the aftermath of “military action” is both revealing and damning.  As Steele shows, “Washington’s war planners took no account of the nature of Iraqi society or Iraq’s history, or indeed the deep well of Arab resentment throughout the region that would doom a Western occupation.” 

 

Pemerintahan Bush, seperti yang ditunjukkan oleh Steele, mengirim personel militer AS ke Irak dengan pola sejarah yang sangat cacat – keberhasilan pendudukan Jerman dan Jepang pasca-Perang Dunia II, “yang tidak menemui perlawanan dan berlangsung dengan damai selama bertahun-tahun.” Menurut penjelasan Steele yang sangat berpengetahuan:

 

“The fact that Iraq was in the Middle East seemed to escape Washington’s notice.  Pemerintahan Bush tidak memahami bahwa orang-orang Arab sangat sensitif terhadap serangan terhadap kehormatan, martabat, dan kemerdekaan mereka, terutama yang dilakukan oleh orang-orang Barat.  Kebanyakan pekerjaan gagal.  In the Middle East, they fail absolutely.  If analogies were relevant when Washington’s war planners prepared their attack on Iraq, it was Israel and Palestine that should have been the template, not Germany or Japan. Sending U.S. and British troops to occupy an Arab county in the twenty-first century was bound to be as difficult as it has been for Israeli troops to occupy the West Bank for the last 40 years…In both cases the struggle is perceived in the Muslim world as a Western army assault on Arabs” (Steele, DEFEAT, pp. 245-46).

 

If Washington’s planners had taken an honest and serious look at Iraqi and Arab society history and the record of Western invasions and occupations in the Middle East, they would have left Iraq within a year (or less) of their easy victory over Saddam. 

 

The current bipartisan U.S. political consensus on “what went wrong” in Iraq is childish nonsense.  Mereka berpendapat bahwa pendudukan bisa dan seharusnya “berhasil” jika saja Cheney dan Bush menggunakan strategi militer dan politik yang lebih canggih setelah jatuhnya Saddam. Selain mengabaikan sifat kriminal dan tidak bermoral dari sebuah invasi yang “seharusnya” “berhasil”, penilaian ini – yang dianut oleh banyak pemimpin Partai Demokrat – sepenuhnya salah jika dilihat dari sudut pandang strategis yang sederhana. Seperti yang ditunjukkan oleh Steele, pendudukan pada dasarnya memiliki kelemahan sejak awal. “Tidak peduli seberapa efisien, sensitif, murah hati, dan cerdasnya otoritas pendudukan yang dipimpin AS, mereka “tidak akan berhasil.  Masalah utamanya bukanlah Amerika melakukan kesalahan.  Pendudukan itu sendiri adalah kesalahannya” (Steele, DEFEAT, hal. 1-2).

 

Once the U.S. stayed past a year, the invasion was destined to be seen by the preponderant majority of the Iraqi people as a colonial oil occupation and to become an ignominious debacle.

        

Thanks in part to their possession of an embassy in Baghdad, French officials understood that a Western invasion of Iraq would create deep resistance and provoke what French President Jacques Chirac called “a strong reaction from Arab and Islamic public opinion.” This was an elementary observation. 

 

American military personnel: it was unforgivably foolhardy for Washington to send U.S. troops to be killed and maimed en masse in the execution of an imperial invasion certain to provoke prolonged and powerful defiance. There is no excuse for such sheer stupidity on the part of the United States’ foreign policy “elite.” 

 

More then four thousand American troops have paid the ultimate price for the abject idiocy of Washington’s criminal war planners.  Puluhan ribu tentara AS saat ini dan mantan tentara menghadapi masalah mengerikan akibat ikut serta dalam bencana Irak yang berlumuran darah: cedera otak parah, kehilangan penglihatan, kehilangan pendengaran, kehilangan anggota tubuh, kehilangan ingatan,  keluarga yang hilang, saraf yang hancur, jiwa yang hancur, tulang punggung dan jiwa yang hancur, dan… daftarnya terus bertambah.

         

 

PERANG KELAS DARI ATAS KE BAWAH

 

Harap dicatat bahwa orang-orang istimewa yang memesan dan mengambil keuntungan dari pendudukan kolonial di Irak tidak mempertaruhkan nyawa mereka atau putra dan putri mereka yang beruntung di negara tersebut. Mereka bisa memakai semua pin kerah bendera yang mereka inginkan.  Mereka dapat bergabung dengan Presiden untuk tidak lagi bermain golf – sebuah pengorbanan yang besar! – selama perang. Apakah mereka akan berhenti menggunakan lengan dan/atau kaki dan mata mereka selama sisa hidup mereka? 

 

Mungkin mereka harus menambang lapangan golf mereka dengan IED dan menempatkan hutan dan bukit di sekitar lapangan golf mereka dengan penembak jitu – mungkin para veteran Perang Irak yang sedang mencari pekerjaan di negara mereka – untuk mengubah olahraga aristokrat mereka menjadi kencan sehari-hari dengan kemungkinan kematian atau kelumpuhan. 

 

Tidak, mereka dan orang-orang yang mereka cintai dikecualikan oleh hak istimewa kelas dari “pelayanan” di rumah jagal Empire. Mereka:

 

Kencangkan pemicu agar yang lain dapat menembak

Dan duduk dan menonton

Sementara jumlah kematian semakin tinggi

Mereka bersembunyi di rumah besar mereka

Sedangkan anak muda [kelas pekerja] adalah darah rakyat

Mengalir keluar dari tubuh mereka

Dan terkubur di dalam lumpur

(Bob Dylan, “Ahli Perang,” 1962)

 

 

KETIKA PESANAN TIDAK BERMORAL…

 

American military personnel, I ask you to consider that the occupation of Iraq is illegal under both national and international law. Besides being stupid beyond words, it is unnecessary, immoral, and monumentally mass-murderous. 

 

Hal ini ditentang oleh mayoritas warga Irak dan secara tidak masuk akal (George Orwell akan terkesan) mengklaim “membebaskan.”

 

It is opposed by the majority of Americans, who need to liberate themselves from a false “homeland” “democracy’ that renders public opinion irrelevant on Iraq and numerous other policy issues both foreign and domestic.

 

The Iraq War is contrary to the interests of your own nation. The United States’ global stature and its ability to take care of pressing and growing “homeland” problems like poverty, homelessness, inadequate health coverage, and joblessness have been immeasurably harmed by the criminal Iraq Fiasco. 

       

Berdasarkan hukum internasional dan kode etik yang sudah lama berlaku, bukan hanya hak Anda tetapi juga kewajiban Anda untuk tidak mematuhi perintah kriminal dan tidak bermoral.

 

U.S. National Security specialists: please recall that federal officers take an oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and not to blindly follow the orders of the president.  

 

The president’s occupation, enabled and supported by Congress and both leading U.S. political parties, is a grave legal and moral transgression.  Ini juga merupakan kesalahan strategis yang sangat besar. 

 

American troops: many of you have served in Iraq in the names of “freedom” and “democracy.” Please keep your democratic sentiments alive and apply them to places where they are sorely needed – in the streets, workplaces, schools, culture, media, politics and daily life of the United States itself.  Terdapat defisit demokrasi dan kebebasan yang sangat parah di sini, di “demokrasi terbesar di dunia” yaitu Amerika Serikat, negara dengan penahanan massal terbesar di dunia, dimana kelompok 1 persen teratas memiliki hampir 40 persen kekayaan dan mungkin bagian yang lebih besar dari para politisi dan pembuat kebijakan. .  Ini adalah negara di mana puluhan juta anak-anak hidup tanpa makanan, pakaian, dan tempat tinggal yang memadai, dan 47 juta orang tidak memiliki jaminan kesehatan dasar, sementara investor dan manajer perusahaan terkemuka sering menikmati kemewahan pribadi yang mengejutkan. 

 

Para tuan kaya tertawa dan berbohong sementara Anda dan/atau rekan Anda berdarah dan mati. Mereka mendapatkan keuntungan sementara tentara kelas pekerja berharap untuk selamat dari perang pendudukan kolonial yang konyol yang diperintahkan oleh penjahat bodoh yang tidak mau repot-repot memeriksa fakta-fakta mendasar tentang negara-negara di mana mereka mengirim pasukan Amerika untuk membunuh dan dibunuh.    

 

Kita membutuhkan perubahan rezim yang demokratis di dalam negeri.  We need soldiers for freedom and democracy inside America. We need to bring the war home. Fight the rich and powerful, not their wicked wars.

 

 

Jalan Paulus

(paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004). His next book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008)

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