WRL Statement on the Occupation of Iraq
February 9, 2004
The U.S.-led occupation of Iraq is an ongoing crime against humanity. Like the U.S.-led invasion, it violates the U.N. Charter and international law. And as with all military occupations, the occupation of Iraq can only be maintained through violations of human rights on a massive scale, as the U.S. and its allies commit daily atrocities to enforce an illusory security and keep a fictitious peace. Routinely, coalition soldiers are invading homes, destroying farms and kidnapping families. The occupying forces disfigure the Iraqi’s human dignity – and their own – as they kill civilians, detain and torture individuals without charging them or affording them due process, seize personal and public treasure, rely on extortion to achieve their ends, use military force to suppress demonstrations and criminally neglect the civilian infrastructure. Occupiers and occupied alike face increasing danger as the situation descends into a vortex of violence. Nor can we assume that the U.S. and U.K. civilian populations and homelands will be exempt from this ongoing war.
The cruel ease with which the U.S.-led invasion seized a virtually defenseless Iraq demonstrated that Iraq could barely defend itself militarily, let alone be considered a threat to the region or to the world. Nearly a year of intense searching has not discovered the vast store of weapons of mass destruction the U.S. and U.K. government insisted were in Iraq, thus stripping the invasion of any pretense of necessity. Moreover, it grows more and more apparent that the U.S. and U.K. administrations knew beforehand that Iraq had no such weapons, and that the U.S. / U.K. description of the “WMD threat” was a ploy to evoke from their populations a fearful acquiescence to the invasion. Finally, occupation and its attendant atrocities cannot achieve the U.S.-U.K.’s stated end of liberating the Iraqi people or bringing them democracy.
Why then did the U.S. government decide to invade and occupy Iraq?
The War Resisters League recognizes that our increasingly militaristic government is using U.S. soldiers as the vanguard for corporate seizure of foreign resources. And so we pledge to expose and resist companies that in effect commandeer our soldiers to serve and protect corporate schemes of war profiteering.
The WRL further recognizes that many young U.S. men and women presently in Iraq have had their free choice severely curtailed by situations of economic deprivation and denial of personal dignity. As such they were readier targets for the military myths of recruiters and of the vast PR machine of warfare. The WRL through its ROOTS program will increase its counter-recruitment efforts. Through our GI Rights Hotline, we will foster and support, within the military, conscientious objection to war.
The WRL calls for an end to the occupation. We realize that the groundless and unconscionable decision to invade Iraq has created a desperate situation for which those who chose to invade must take full responsibility. Nevertheless, we advocate the introduction of unarmed, third-party neutral protective presences in Iraq, organized and funded through the United Nations. We anticipate that the funding for such nonviolent restorative presences would be considerably less than the stated one billion dollars a week that the U.S. now spends to enforce the military occupation. These protective presences should be maintained until such time that the Iraqis can establish a governance suitable for themselves.
We recommend that such a nonviolent force be well trained in Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish, cross-cultural relations, conflict resolution, and community development. The United Nations should be able to appoint, for this effort, an overall coordinator who is a respected figure within Iraq and among members of the Arab League. For example, overtures have been made to Lakhdar Brahimi, of Pakistan.
As the effectiveness of that nonviolent force in establishing true security becomes increasingly apparent, the foreign forces of violence can and must increasingly withdraw, along with corporations that do not fit the needs of the Iraqi people as expressed by their chosen governing body. Those withdrawals are necessary to embody the United States’ commitment to restore political and economic sovereignty to the Iraqi people.
Union organizing efforts have begun in the Southern Oil Company and among employees in various Iraqi electrical facilities. Workers have won wage increases and better working conditions. We respectfully urge the expansion of nonviolence in the crucial context of labor organizing.
Had the U.S. and U.K. governments listened to the voices of the antiwar movement, their populations would not now be suffering, together with Iraqi people, the afflictions of an ongoing war.
It is incumbent on the peace movements of all countries to insist that their voices, the voices of peace and reason, be heeded in the call to end this ongoing war against the Iraqi people.
February 9, 2004
