'I Was an Occupier & All That Entails'

In a time of accelerating US regime-change criminality - first Iraq, then Libya, then Syria, and now Iran and Venezuela - it's timely that we be reminded of just what the Anglo-American invasion and occupation (dressed up by president George W. Bush and his neocon operatives as Operation Iraqi Freedom) was really all about.

Nico Walker, a former US army medic in Iraq, now doing time for armed robbery, has just produced his first book, Cherry, a novel, of which he says in interview: "The military parts are the ones that most closely mirror my experience." (Nico Walker: 'I needed to show how bad Iraq was', Killian Fox, theguardian.com, 17/2/19). Here's an excerpt from that interview:

"It was something I didn't want to lie about. I needed to show it for how it really was and dispel any myths. It was a pretty bad experience. We had been told there was this existential threat [to the Iraqis] we were supposed to prevent and it turned out not to be the case. Going there, you find out you're the problem. It seemed like we were trying to provoke as much fighting as we could... I don't want to give this wrong idea that I was some kind of pacifist or observer - I was an active participant. Maybe not to extremes, but I certainly didn't try to ever stop anything and I endorsed whatever was going on just by being there. I look back on it and think, wow, I was an occupier and all that entails."

Walker goes on to say: "Compared with what I'd been doing in Iraq, robbing banks seemed like kids' stuff. Obviously it was wrong; I realise this now."

There you have it - an army of jackboots, sent to Iraq on a pack of lies, which turned the place upside down and inside out. Remember this when you read your next installment of recycled regime-change propaganda from the Washington Post and New York Times in the Sydney Morning Herald, or from the Times and Wall Street Journal in the Australian.

[See also my 18/7/08 post Enlist Now! for an extract from that wonderful Iraq War expose (The Deserter's Tale) by another US soldier, Joshua Key.]