By Joe Carr
16 May, 2005

This morning, a man who told us about his brother who’s been detained, without charges, by Americans for over six months now. He was arrested when a car bomb went off in front of the restaurant he worked in. We frequently hear that when car bombs go off near military convoys, soldiers shoot or arrest everyone around. Traumatized soldiers take out their anger and fear on the nearest targets. Does this practice deter the resistance or only create more fighters?

After the interview, we went by the residency office. The visa processes have changed repeatedly and usually takes multiple trips to get it finished. I’m told that this run-around is the new Iraqi government’s attempt to fight the resistance by keeping close track of foreigners. But all the “foreign fighters” have fake Iraqi Ids and would never go to a residency office, so all it does is make life harder for regular people, and thereby fuel hatred for the government.

Chatting with our landlord, he said the electricity is supposed to get better tomorrow because they’ve finished repairing one of the pipelines bombed by the resistance. The resistance targets the pipelines because they want to keep Iraq in chaos and encourage resistance to the occupation. Additionally, a lot of the power plants are being repaired by U.S. contractors profiting off of the destruction caused by bombs made by other U.S. contractors. We call this war profiteering, and I can see why they’re targets.

The resistance attacks are far from the only thing keeping the electricity marginal. In the first Bush War, the U.S. bombed every major electricity and water facility as well as many key bridges; people say the attacks on Iraq’s infrastructure were far worse in that war than this one. While under strict U.S. sanctions, Saddam managed to get the electricity back up after three months, but the most powerful nation in the world has made little progress in two years. Our landlord says that there’s no leadership now and people have no motivation to work. Plus, US contractors have been repeatedly caught cutting corners in order to maximize their profits, taking advantage of the absence of law and oversight. Ongoing bombing raids show that the U.S.’s priority is to further destroy Iraq rather than rebuild it. Many factories have shut down because they can’t get reliable electricity, putting people out of work, further in poverty, and easily recruited by resistance groups.

To sum it up, Iraqis are poor, thirsty and in the dark. They’re subject to indiscriminant detention and violence. They suffer intolerable delays on the roads and in government institutions. Is this how we build democracy? Is this how we end resistance and terrorism?

Occupation forces use terrorism to “fight terrorism” and only create more terrorists. We see this in both the Israeli and U.S. occupations. I don’t believe that this is an accident or an oversight of high-level military strategists, but an intentional strategy used to maintain chaos and justify ongoing occupation. Occupation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, using “security” to exploit, dominate, and colonize.