US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

to train legislators, or to help build democracy. Despite this, there is still a clear bipartisanconsensus to keep robbing the treasury to support President Bush's desperate effort to controlthat oil-rich country. Not a single senator voted against the president's most recent request tokeep funding the war, and there were only 71 negative votes in the 435-member House ofRepresentatives. Democrats, like Republicans, appear determined to force American taxpayers tokeep paying for the death and destruction being wrought upon Iraq.The Nature of the Iraqi GovernmentIn recent months, Washington has begun to realize that several ruling officials retrieved fromexile by U.S. forces including Iraq's prime minister are incompetent religious fanaticsclosely allied with hard-line Iranian clerics. The Iraqi government is isolated within the U.S.-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad and is so weak and divided that it can barely be consideredfunctional. Corruption is rampant.Three years after the invasion, the Pentagon acknowledges that Iraqi forces are still “largelydependent” on American combat troops for logistics, supplies, and support. Indeed, not a singleIraqi unit is yet capable of fully independent operations.Washington's goal may be reasonable, but U.S. pressure on Iraqi leaders to form a moreinclusive government and to replace Ibrahim al-Jaafari has created enormous resentment and iswidely viewed as arrogant neocolonial interference. Furthermore, there is little to suggest thatany of Jaafari's likely replacements would be any better.Human rights abuses are increasing, as hundreds of civilians, mostly Sunni Arab males, arekilled every month by government death squads. Murders from these death squads rival even theviolence perpetrated by terrorist insurgents, who have primarily targeted Shiite Arab civilians.Last month, Amnesty International reported that “not only has the Iraqi government failed toprovide minimal protection for its citizens, it has pursued a policy of rounding up and torturinginnocent men and women. Its failure to punish those who have committed torture has added tothe breakdown of the rule of law.”In the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, the ruling U.S.-backed coalition of twonationalist parties with sizable armed militias is not much better. Corruption is widespread, andopposition activists are routinely beaten, tortured, and killed. Kurdish-born Austrian lawyer andprofessor Kamal Sayid Qadir has reported that “Kurdish parties transformed Iraqi Kurdistan intoa fortress for oppression, theft of public funds, and serious abuses of human rights like murder,torture, amputation of ears and noses, and rape.” These “privileges and gains achieved since1991 by the Kurdish parties were impossible without direct American backing and support,” headded. For his efforts to alert the international community about abuses by the U.S.-backedKurdish government, he was sentence to a year and a half in prison.Given the dismal post-Saddam record of human rights abuses, it is questionable whetherAmericans should be dying to prop up either the central government in Baghdad or the Kurdishgovernment in the North. Continued U.S. training and funding of Iraqi police and military forceswill likely encourage even more anti-Americanism both in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.144