…by Jonas E. Alexis, VT Editor

“In numerous ways, the contradictions of the democratic revolution from above were clear for all to see: while the victors preached democracy, they ruled by fiat; while they espoused equality, they themselves constituted an inviolate privileged caste.” John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 211

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. In response to the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan, Liz Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, has recently declared: “What we’re watching right now in Afghanistan is what happens when America withdraws from the world.”

Who’s responsible for this? Well, it is both Trump and Biden. In other words, Dick Cheney has nothing to do with this at all. He is innocent of apparently what is currently happening in the Middle East. How stupid can we be?

But let us play Liz’s game here. Let us assume that she is right. What happened when America gets involved in conducting covert operations in virtually around the world? To be more specific, what happened when Liz’s own father began lie to the American people?

It pains me to bring this issue here again, but let’s talk about Iraq, precisely because Liz’s father was largely in charge when that happened. Dick (an appropriate name for this monster, by the way) was following the Israeli script. What did take place in Iraq?

Now consider this: the estimate of lives lost in the war in Iraq alone is between 100,000 to 600,000, including thousands of civilians. In 2003, at least 12,000 civilians lost their lives.[1] The first three years of the war produced between 104,000 and 223,000 civilian deaths.

When it was over, 2.3 million Iraqis had been forced to flee their homes and towns; by 2008, another 2.7 million Iraqis were displaced, and nearly half a million civilians ended up losing their lives.[2] Thousands upon thousands of other people went missing by 2008.[3] This is out of a total Iraqi population of about 30 million people![4]

When the war was over, sectarian violence and car bombings were rampant—almost every day. When Mark Kukis went to Iraq to report on what happened, he said he heard two to five car bombs every day.[5] The Iraq war, says Kukis, shook the entire nation and created havoc even by 2006.[6] Factions of society that once coexisted were dismantled.
In a nutshell, Iraq was in exponential decay. Buildings and farmlands were destroyed.[7] And the fringe benefits of the war? Between 300,000 and 360,000 veterans returned home with brain injuries,[8] some of which went untreated.[9]

In 2005, more than 6,000 suicides took place among our soldiers serving in Iraq.[10] By 2012, more soldiers committed suicide than died in combat,[11] making it the year with the highest suicide rate since 2001.[12]

The Iraq war sent the American taxpayers a bill of $6 trillion,[13] combined with a debt ceiling keeps rising every six months or so.[14] The U.S. national debt had reached $16 trillion by the end of 2012.[15] Because of that wrecked economy, suicides in America’s civilian population was increased during that period at an alarming rate as well.[16]

Homelessness among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was more than doubled, and by the fall of 2012, it was reported that at least “26,531 were living on the streets, at risk of losing their homes, staying in temporary housing or receiving federal vouchers to pay rent.” In addition, about 307,000 soldiers want to leave the military.[17] About 360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are also dealing with injuries, many of them severe.[18]

We all remembered what happened in Abu Ghraib, don’t we? By spring of 2013, the Guardian released a report detailing other torture camps such as Nama in Iraq. A British witness who was at that particular camp testified, “Everyone’s seen the Abu Ghraib pictures. But I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”[19]

He continued, “I remember talking to one British army officer about what I had seen, and he replied: ‘You didn’t see that—do you understand?’ There was a great deal of nervousness about the place. I had the impression that the British were scared we would be kicked off the operation if we made a fuss.”[20]

It is reported that

“when the military finally was permitted to investigate Nama, its agents received threats from personnel at the camp, while DIA interrogators had their vehicle keys confiscated and were ‘ordered’ not to discuss what they had seen with anyone…

“One interrogator had his photos confiscated after taking pictures of injured detainees, and others complained that task force commandos forbade them from leaving the camp without permission, even for a haircut, and from talking to outsiders; they threatened them and screened their emails.”[21]

Despite all of this, the truth got out, but the U.S. denied all the claims. Military intelligence officers released a report saying that “between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.”[22] By mistake? Was Abu Ghraib a mistake as well?

Forcing prisoners to have sex with one another and sodomizing teenagers was fair game at Abu Ghraib. One prisoner testified that he saw one officer
“fucking a kid, his age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [name blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass. I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”[23]

What’s more even interesting, “150 inmates were crammed into cells designed for 24.”[24] Abu Ghraib, as one writer put it, was “a hell-hole.”[25]

Torture was also routine in Afghanistan, where adolescents were beaten with hoses “and pipes and threats of sodomy.”[26] These acts were not done in the dark. Cambridge University published similar reports in a book that is more than 1200 pages long.[27] These acts were also testified to by psychiatrists such as Terry Kupers.[28]

When the war in Iraq was over, Iraqi women began to engage in prostitution. Since thousands upon thousands of Iraqis suffered after the war, many of them began to abandon their children and even sold them to sex slavery. One sixteen-year-old girl by the name of Nada who got caught in this dilemma told BBC News in 2007,
“I have no one there and in my case I am afraid for my life. My family has abandoned me.”[29] The girl was forced into the sex business in Syria “after her father dumped her at the border, and was facing deportation when the story aired.”[30]

Other women who found themselves in the dilemma were former nurses, sales clerks, students, etc. Once the war was over, that was the end of their economic lives. A thirty-four-year-old whose home was bombed and who also lost her mother during the same event lamented,
“I have no home anymore, no family, no piece of land.” The report declared of her,
“She was shot twice while working for the U.S. military in the Green Zone. When she fled to Jordan penniless and couldn’t find a job, she turned to prostitution.”[31]
Other stories are simply heart-breaking:
“An Iraqi interviewed by the Associated Press in July said she doused herself and her 14-year-old daughter in gasoline in an attempt to end it all after she gave a smuggler her life savings—$18,000—to take them over the border from Turkey to Greece.
“The smuggler vanished. She said she would have killed herself rather than sell her body, which seemed her only option. But her daughter’s tearful pleas prevented her from lightening the match. ‘She was in my arms, soaked with gasoline, and shivering from fright,’ she said. ‘I was so desperate, and there was no way out.’”[32]

Carole Laleve, who worked for UNHCR in Damascus, declared, “The situation is getting out of hand. We see a lot of women who haven’t necessarily become prostitutes, but they were kidnapped, raped repeatedly, and they are in Syria all alone. That’s quite clear. We did a survey of trauma and we found incredible rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Among children, among women, and the population in general.”[33]

Yanar Mohammed, founder of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, added,
“In Syria, we hear that some women reach the point where they are begging strangers passing by to exploit them sexually so they can feed their children. You know, women of Iraq were not in this situation, I would say, six years ago. We did not have to do this. We did not have to go through humiliation. Through prostitution.”[34]

Other parents who could not cope with the post-war situation sold their children to countries as far away as India, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.[35]

The same sex business was still vivid in 2009 in the same regions. Yanar Mohammed said that many of the traffickers have “very good ties with the police. It turns out [the cops] were loyal customers.”[36]

The girls in those places were as young as 11 and 12, and once a girl reached 20 years old, she was considered too old.[37]

The sex business once again cropped up in 2010 and 2011.[38] Fast forward to 2013, Iraq was still facing trouble with the sex trafficking business.[39] The brothels in some of those regions
“have been established purely to meet the demand created by United States service personnel…While sexual exploitation existed in Iraq, as anywhere, long before the war began in 2003, ‘the invasion and instability that followed led to an environment where young women and girls became much more vulnerable to trafficking,’” one study found out.[40]

Arab society traditionally values female virginity,[41] but the Israeli war forced them into sexual slavery. Just seven years after the war, “about 4,000 women, one fifth of them aged under 18, disappeared.”[42]

Atoor married her 19-year-old sweetheart, a policeman called Bilal, when she was 15. Three months later he was dead, killed during one of the many bloody episodes in Iraq’s brutal war.

After the obligatory four-month mourning period dictated by Islamic Shari’a law, Atoor’s mother and two brothers made it clear that they intended to sell her to a brothel close to their home in western Baghdad, just as they had sold her older twin sisters.

Frightened, she told a friend in the police force to raid her home and the nearby brothel. His unit did, and Atoor spent the next two years in prison. She was not charged with anything, but that’s how long it took for her to come before a judge and be released.  She said,
“I wanted to go to prison—I didn’t want to be sold. I didn’t think it would happen to me. My mother used to spoil me. Yes, she sold my sisters, but she regretted that. I thought that she loved me.”[43]

The perpetual wars also produce a form of sexual calculus in the military—the likes of which we have never seen before. The Washington Post declared that three rapes happen every hour in the military now.[44] This issue has been going on since 2003,[45] the year in which the Iraq war started.

The Washington Post broke another story saying that an Air Force recruiter was facing charges of forcibly performing sodomy on eighteen young women, whom he had tried to recruit, over a three year period.[46]

People in charge of programs designed to stop sexual harassment were arrested for involvement in sexual harassment.[47] Moreover, at least one Army sergeant ran a prostitution ring on the military base,[48] and even forced others into prostitution.[49] The sergeant was later identified as Sergeant First Class Gregory McQueen.[50]

It is estimated that 26,000 people were sexually assaulted in 2012. 19,000 were assaulted in 2010.[51] These figures could be higher, since many victims fail to report that they were assaulted.[52] Moreover, when thousands of those women got back home, they had to face the horror of living with guilt and some began to deteriorate into a life of drugs and homelessness.[53] Those women excelled in the army, but going home was not always a pleasant thing because there were fewer jobs.[54]

Jennifer Cortez, then 26 years old, provided excellent service as an Army sergeant and received 12 medals within eight years. When her time was up, she got back home only to be offered a job at minimum wage—sweeping floors. The only home Cortez had was her own car.

At least 53 percent of those who had been sexually assaulted were homeless when they went back home.[55] And when those same people could no longer work, they got their pension funds looted by “predators,” to use the New York Times’ own words.[56]

In addition, people who have been disabled due to the war are finding that it is very hard to get their disability benefits. There were at least 600,000 of those cases in spring 2013.[57]

In other words, those people who gave their all in the military and who were sexually abused were trapped in a Zionist/Israeli matrix which gives them no chance.

Neoconservatives such as Heather MacDonald know that there is a problem here,[58] but MacDonald could not bring herself to the point of admitting that the war in Iraq in particular brought about these sexual assaults. In fact, Augusto Ruiz of the Center for Deployment Psychology asked the same provocative questions, implying that the war in Iraq may have escalated the massive rape and suicides that are rampant among our precious men and women in the military.[59]

Scholars Judith A. Reisman (who was kind enough to send me a number of valuable charts about Kinsey’s sexual activities) and Thomas R. Hampson document that 5,200 employees brought pornography into the U.S. military.[60]

I can go on and on, but this is enough. So, if Liz wants to be fair, then she has to take responsibility for the moral and political chaos that her father had in the Middle East. There is no doubt that these people have created hell on earth, particularly in the Middle East. Back in 2005, Dick Cheney asserted that the invasion of Iraq would turn out to be “a success story.” He elaborated:

“We will succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan. We will stand up a new government under an Iraqi-drafted constitution. We will defeat that insurgency, and, in fact, it will be an enormous success story.”[61]

Well, there is no way for Liz and Cheney to wiggle out of the fact that Iraq was a complete disaster. If they think they can, then let us summon Military historian and former Colonel Andrew Bacevich, whose son died in Iraq. Bacevich writes:

“Apart from a handful of deluded neoconservatives, no one believes that the United States accomplished its objectives in Iraq, unless the main objective was to commit mayhem, apply a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding, and then declare the patient stable while hastily leaving the scene of the crime.

“The fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacted a huge price from the U.S. military—especially the army and the Marines.

“More than 6,700 soldiers have been killed so far in those two conflicts, and over fifty thousand have been wounded in action, about 22 percent with traumatic brain injuries.

“Furthermore, as always happens in war, many of the combatants are psychological casualties, as they return home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs reported in the fall of 2012 that more than 247,000 veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have been diagnosed with PTSD. Many of those soldiers have served multiple combat tours.

“It is hardly surprising that the suicide rate in the U.S. military increased by 80 percent from 2002 to 2009, while the civilian rate increased only 15 percent. And in 2009, veterans of Iraq were twice as likely to be unemployed as the typical American.

“On top of all that, returning war veterans are roughly four times more likely to face family-related problems like divorce, domestic violence and child abuse than those who stayed out of harm’s way.

“In 2011, the year the Iraq War ended, one out of every five active duty soldiers was on antidepressants, sedatives, or other prescription drugs.

“The incidence of spousal abuse spiked, as did the divorce rate among military couples. Debilitating combat stress reached epidemic proportions. So did brain injuries. Soldier suicides skyrocketed.”[62] 

Perhaps Liz and her father need to put that in their pipes and smoke it. Their relentless, pathetic and ultimately worthless attempt to absolve themselves of any responsibility in the Middle East is a disgrace to any decent American. If they are not willing to listen to common sense, then perhaps we should kindly ask our readers: Did anyone remember to bring two ropes?

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War.
• [2] Mark Kukis, Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003-2009 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), xvii.
• [3] Iibid.
• [4] Ibid.
• [5] Ibid., xiii.
• [6] Ibid., xiv.
• [7] Ibid.
• [8] Gregg Zoroya, “360,000 Veterans May Have Brain Injuries,” USA Today, March 5, 3009; Denise Grady, “Brain Injuries Are Seen in New Scans of Veterans,” NY Times, June 1, 2011; “Mental Health Injuries Scar 300,000 U.S. Troops,” MSNBC, April 17, 2008.
• [9] Lizette Alvarez, “War Veterans’ Concussions Are Often Overlooked,” NY Times, August 25, 2008.
• [10] Armen Keteyian, “VA Hid Suicide Risk, Internal Emails Show,” CBC News, July 30, 2010.
• [11] Allison Churchill, “The Military Is Losing More Troops to Suicide than Combat,” Business Insider, October 25, 2012; Helen Pow, “More U.S. Troops Committing Suicide Than Being Killed Fighting in Afghanistan in ‘Tough Year’ for Armed Services,” Daily Mail, October 24, 2012.
• [12] Kelley Vlahos, “Surviving War, Falling to Suicide,” American Conservative, January 1, 2012; for other similar stories, see also James Dao and Andrew W. Lehren, “Baffling Rise in Suicides Plagues the U.S. Military,” NY Times, May 15, 2013.
• [13] https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2013/11/12/welcome-to-zionism-now-bend-over/.
• [14] See for example “A threat to Cost Taxpayers Money,” The Economist, April 12, 20111; Kathleen Hennessey, “Obama Tries to Shoot Down GOP Talk of Debt-Limit Threat,” L.A. Times, December 5, 2012; Mary Williams Walsh, “Debt Ceiling Rises Again as Threat for the U.S.,” NY Times, December 21, 2012; Moran Zhang, “U.S. Economy 2013: If ‘Fiscal Cliff’ is Avoided, What About the Debt Ceiling?,” International Business Times, December 21, 2012.
• [15] Simon Rogers, “U.S. Debt: How Big Is It and Who Owns It?,” Guardian, October 2, 2012.
• [16] Deborah Kotz, “Suicides Surge During Tough Economic Times,” Boston Globe, April 14, 2011.
• [17] “Obama Student Loan Policy Reaping $51 Billion Profit,” Huffington Post, May 14, 2013.
• [18] Annie Lowrey, “Student Debt Slows Growth as Young Spend Less,” NY Times, May 10, 2013.
• [19] See for example David Alexander, “House Approves Bill Authorizing $633 Billion in Defense Spending,” Chicago Tribune, December 20, 2012; Dave Boyer, “Obama Signs Defense Measure he Once Vowed to Veto,” Washington Time, January 3, 2013.
• [20] Gregg Zoroya, “Homeless, At-Risk Veterans Double,” USA Today, December 27, 2012.
• [21] Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: Nation Books, 2013), 158.
• [22] Ibid.
• [23] Cited in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 243.
• [24] Susan Taylor Martin, “Her Job: Lock Up Iraq’s Bad Guys,” St. Petersburg Times, December 14, 2003.
• [25] Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Owl Books, 2006), 132.
• [26] See for example Alissa J. Rubin, “Anti-Torture Efforts in Afghanistan Failed, U.N. Says,” NY Times, January 20, 2013.
• [27] Karen J. Geenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• [28] See for example Lila Rajiva, The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), 167.
• [29] See Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, “Innocents Lost: For Many Iraqi Women, Political Liberation Has Meant Sexual Enslavement,” American Conservative, August 25, 2008.
• [30] Ibid.
• [31] Ibid.
• [32] Ibid.
• [33] Ibid.
• [34] Ibid.
• [35] Laura Smith-Park, “Silent Victims: Iraqi Women Trafficked for Sex, Report Says,” CNN, November 10, 2011; “Iraq-Syria: Sex Traffickers Target Women in War-Torn Iraq,” http://www.irinnews.org/Report/61903/IRAQ-SYRIA-Sex-traffickers-target-women-in-war-torn-Iraq.
• [36] Rania Abouzeid, “Will Iraq Crack Down on Sex Trafficking?,” Time, April 13, 2009.
• [37] Rania Abouzeid, “Iraq’s Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters,” Time, March 7, 2009.
• [38] Mohammed Jamjoon, “Sex Slave Girls Face Cruel Justice in Iraq,” CNN, May 5, 2010; Laura Smith-Park, “Silent Victims: Iraqi Women Trafficked for Sex, Report Says,” CNN, November 10, 2011.
• [39] http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.kr/2013/04/iraq-unwilling-to-confront-forced-labor.html.
• [40] Laura Smith-Park, “Silent Victims: Iraqi Women Trafficked for Sex, Report Says,” CNN, November 10, 2011.
• [41] Abouzeid, “Iraq’s Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters,” Time, March 7, 2009.
• [42] Smith-Park, “Silent Victims: Iraqi Women Trafficked for Sex, Report Says,” CNN, November 10, 2011.
• [43] Abouzeid, “Iraq’s Unspeakable Crime: Mothers Pimping Daughters,” Time, March 7, 2009.
• [44] Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, “Because They Can: Three Rapes Every Hour in the Military,” Washington Post, May 7, 2013.
• [45] Walter Pincus, “Military Sexual Assault Crisis Cuts Deep,” Washington Post, May 15, 2013; Craig Whitlock, “Some in Congress Want Changes in Military Law As A Result of Sex Scandals,” Washington Post, May 15, 2013.
• [46] Craig Whitlock, “Pentagon Grapples with Sex Crimes by Military Recruiters,” Washington Post, May 12, 2013.
• [47] Elpseth Reeve, “Third Military Man in Charge of Stopping Harassment Arrested for Doing Just That,” Atlantic, May 17, 2013.
• [48] Richard Sisk, “Assault Prevention NCO Investigated for Sex Crimes,” Military.com, May 15, 2013.
• [49] Dan de Luce, “Pentagon Pledges Action After Sex Assault,” Herald Sun, May 16, 2013.
• [50] Tom Vanden Brook, “Suspect in Fort Hood Prostitution Ring Identified,” Detroit Free Press, May 15, 2013.
• [51] Nick Schwellenbach, “Fear of Reprisal: The Quiet Accomplice in the Military’s Sexual-Assault Epidemic,” Time, May 9, 2013; Elspeth Reeve, “The Military’s Rape Problem Is a Lot Like Everyone’s Rape Problem,” Atlantic, May 7, 2013.
• [52] Schwellenbach, “Fear of Reprisal: The Quiet Accomplice in the Military’s Sexual-Assault Epidemic,” Time, May 9, 2013.
• [53] See Patricia Leigh Brown, “Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home,” NY Times, February 27, 2013.
• [54] Ibid.
• [55] Brown, “Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home,” NY Times, February 27, 2013.
• [56] Ibid.
• [57] James Dao, “Criticism of Veterans Affairs Secretary Mounts Over Backlog in Claims,” NY Times, May 18, 2013.
• [58] Heather MacDonald, “Military-Sexual-Drama Syndrome,” National Review, February 28, 2013.
• [59] Augusto Ruiz, “Suicide in the Military,” Center for Deployment Psychology, http://deploymentpsych.org/topics-disorders/suicide.
• [60] Judith A. Reisman and Thomas R. Hampson, “Shock Report: 10,700 men Raped in the U.S. Military,” http://watchdogwire.com/florida/2013/05/15/shock-report-10700-men-raped-in-the-us-military/.
• [61] “Cheney: Iraq will be ‘enormous success story,’” CNN, June 24, 2005.
• [62] Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 94, 105.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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