Falluja corpse

FALLUJA CORPSE

I will lie here,                                                                                                                                 buried below Falluja
for a long time.
Being dead,
I am in no hurry.
You can collect those other corpses,
rebuild the city above me
and proclaim victory.

I watched with amusement
as they used a grappling hook
to drag Ali away
because they were afraid
he was booby-trapped.
They don’t know the real meaning
of that word.
They don’t know how much explosive
I have packed inside me.

I am a patient man
with a long memory
and nothing else to do.
Even from this awkward position
I will conceive many children
who will honor their father.

Tom Greening

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part 3

By guest contributor Ian Hansen

Anwar al-Awlaki
Imam Anwar al-Awlaki. Photo by Muhammead ud-Deen, from Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

For those of us who are not financially invested in the expansion of war and the national security state, Fallujah’s siege by Al Qaeda does at least offer us a teaching moment.

The U.S. government, which says it is opposed to terrorism, is both manifesting terrorism in its policies and creating reactive terrorism among the people we pretend to be concerned with saving and protecting.

Reactive terrorism–often from groups with horrific oppression-supporting ideologies that are eerily reminiscent of the predominant militarism and dominionism in our own culture–allows our government to justify an even more extended campaign of terrorism that is both lucrative and sociopathically gratifying for a powerful subset of our ruling elite.

As we reflect on the fall of Fallujah to our enemies-like-us, we should reflect also on the violence-advocating and influential cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki was once widely known as a “moderate,” even Bush-supporting, Muslim U.S. citizen, and his turn to an ideology of violent hatred was also a product of U.S. ham-handedness and indiscriminate brutality in the name of fighting terrorism.

In assassinating the person al-Awlaki turned into, and doing so without charge or transparent evidence of his involvement in any crime (other than hateful and irresponsible free speech and friendly associations with Al Qaeda propagandists and other figures), the U.S. has set ominous legal precedents that cannot now be easily undone.

With his assassination, that of U.S. citizen Samir Khan, as well as of Awlaki’s clearly noncombatant and unaffiliated 16 year old son, the U.S. has symbolically tainted its War on Terror with the blood of Absalom.

When we fight wars, we believe are fighting against some Other, but there is no Other.  All acts of violence are ultimately carried out against oneself, because the chain is unbroken.

And since our government will not cry tears of remorse, we must be the ones to weep, “O my son Absalom–my son, my son Absalom…O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part 2

By guest author Ian Hansen

CIA leaflet for bounty hunters, offering $5-10K for Al Qaeda and Taliban members, or even foreigners.
CIA leaflet offering huge bounties for capture of Al Qaeda and Taliban members (even “foreigners”). Image in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons

There was a time when many U.S. and international experts on terrorism said that Al Qaeda as such “did not exist.” The claim was that Al Qaeda, especially after the post-9/11 worldwide manhunt for its leaders, was effectively little more than an internet ideology that could inspire independent groups of people who wanted to kill Americans under religious cover. For a long time, Al Qaeda had no core managing operation–no Al Qaeda central pulling the strings.

I imagine this is still the case to a large extent, but it seems that all the attempts to use civilian-indifferent, law-indifferent, truth-indifferent mass violence to stamp out a quasi-non-existent group have brought it more fully into existence. These means of fighting a phantom enemy have also brought into existence groups like Al-Shabab, and the latter is effectively aligned with the ideological goals of Al Qaeda, if not with Al Qaeda itself.

And the flowering of this ideological pathology is arguably in the interests of those who profit from violence in this country and “the West” more generally (which now effectively includes cooperative parts of “the East” as well). The willingness to use such backfiring tactics in the “War on Al Qaeda and Associated Forces” is increasingly reminiscent of the vacuum cleaner salesperson who throws dirt on your rug and then vacuums it up.

The more Al Qaeda can be increased in worldwide presence by U.S. global imperialism, the more justification there is for the continued existence of our bloated military-intelligence complex, the national security and surveillance state, the scraps of core Constitutional and human rights protections, and the concentrations of wealth in increasingly few hands.

So I see nothing positive about the people of Fallujah being taken down by the violence-loving dominionist sociopaths of Al Qaeda. I hope the people of Fallujah push them out as they did the U.S., ideally with a nonviolent movement, since nonviolent movements tend to work best according to all the existing empirical research on how to overthrow autocracy and oligarchy.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

Fallujah: Death and destruction again, Part I

By guest author Ian Hansen

As a supporter of human rights and locally-controlled democracy in Iraq, I am dismayed to see Fallujah fall to Al Qaeda.

Al-Qa'ida training manual
Al-Qa’ida training manual, CIA Virtual Museum. Image in public domain, from Wikimedia Commons

Some may see poetic justice for the U.S. in this development: the U.S. war of aggression has clearly backfired in Fallujah. But there’s no justice in it for the people of that historic city. I would have been happy to see Fallujah residents lead a nonviolent civil disobedience movement to regain control over their communities, but the ascendance of Al Qaeda there is a tragedy.

The people of Fallujah have already endured enough massacres, destruction of the city’s ancient buildings and mosques, and chemical weapons horrors from the U.S. siege in 2004. And although the draconian rule of the U.S.-aligned Iraqi Security Forces should be overthrown by local democratic rule, the siege by Al Qaeda is, if anything, a regression, not an improvement.

Al Qaeda is not a progressive organization, and there is nothing redeeming about it. It’s a violent oppressive scourge on Islam in much the same way that the Christian Coalition–and the U.S. military-industrial-ideological machine generally–is a violent and oppressive scourge on Christianity.

It is not a coincidence that Al Qaeda as a movement arises largely from the Arabian Peninsula, most of which is controlled by an oil-rich U.S.-Israeli ally (Saudi Arabia). Saudi Arabia–one of the most draconian autocracies in the Middle East–is playing a disgraceful role in the Syrian disaster right now; it just got around to abolishing slavery in 1962. Al Qaeda is at odds with the Saudi regime in obvious ways, but in other obvious ways Al Qaeda mirrors its core values.

And I don’t think that violent decision-makers in the U.S. actually want Al Qaeda to disappear (though until more evidence pours in, this is more of an accusation against our leadership’s unconscious intentions than their conscious ones).

Even at the time of 9/11, Al Qaeda was originally a pretty paltry and unpopular group. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the drone assassinations, and the other Joint Special Operation Command-CIA paramilitary killings all over the world seem to have only magnified Al Qaeda’s international presence.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at York College, City University of New York. His research focuses in part on how witness for human rights and peace can transcend explicit political ideology. He is also on the Steering Committee for Psychologists for Social Responsibility.