PDA

Bekijk Volledige Versie : Irak Occupation Watch



Siah
14-06-05, 11:08
Irak Occupation Watch (http://www.occupationwatch.org/av/archives/2005/05/saddam_husseins.html)
Saddam Hussein's Palaces:
Home to the U.S. Occupation Force in Iraq
by Enver Masud
May 2005

The contrast between the occupier and the occupied couldn't be more vivid - one resides in palaces, the other often reside in bombed out homes or as refugees within their own country.

In Saddam Hussein's birthplace - Tikrit, Iraq, the U.S. occupation force has commandeered the former dictator's palaces to use as homes and offices for the occupation force.

Local government's requesting to use these palaces as schools, libraries, museums, hotels, etc., are being denied, and are angry at the Americans.

Of-course, the generals get the best rooms and lavish bathrooms. The privates sleep on cots and use porta-potties.

The occupation force lives in air-conditioned comfort, enjoys $64 lunches with 22 flavors of ice cream - "better than those served at the University of California". The caterer, Kellog Brown & Root - a subsidiary of Halliburton (once run by Vice President Richard Cheney) - rakes in the taxpayer's dollars.

The occupation force has running water, electricity, and security - all of which were promised to the Iraqi people. All of which they mostly had under Saddam Hussein. All of which they have much less of under the U.S. occupation force.

The Iraqis, of course, resent this - except for the few who have made it into the inner circles of the occupation force.

Contracts are doled out to Iraqis in the inner circle. They get to lord it over more qualified firms and individuals, thereby, alienating more Iraqis.

Outside their relatively secure enclaves the occupiers are targets of the Iraqi resistance. For Americans killed or maimed, their palace quarters, $60,000 in pay and allowances for the lowest private, and the promise of $90,000 in loans for education become small compensation for them and their families, but it is what draws them into the military.

Iraqis struggle just to feed their families, and live in fear of a knock on the door late at night which may be the beginning of their disappearance into the American gulags in Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Diego Garcia, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.

And it isn't just in Tikrit, this vivid contrast between the occupier and the occupied exists virtually all over Iraq.

Since there is no draft, the elites of America are largely untouched by the mounting human tragedy: roughly 1600 Americans dead, 180 members of the "coalition" dead, 100,000 Iraqis dead, and countless more maimed or wounded.

Absent the American elite's personal stake in the war, mainstream media debate - which the elite control - has become largely divorced from this unnecessary human tragedy.

India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in a letter to his daughter, wrote about the British occupation of Iraq ("Iraq and the virtues of aerial bombing," June 7, 1933):

"The novel feature of the modern type of imperialism is its attempt to hide its terrorism and exploitation behind pious phrases about 'trusteeship' and the 'good of the masses' and 'the training of the backward peoples in self-government' and the like."

Nehru's letters to his daughter Indira Gandhi - who became India's prime minister in 1966 - were written from a British prison in India. Published as "Glimpses of World History", they should be required reading for the new imperialists occupying Iraq today.

As Yogi Berra might have said: "It's deja vu all over again."

Slide show (http://www.twf.org/Gallery/TikritPalaces/index.html)