SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq Affirmative
Critical Iraq Affirmative................................................................................................................................... 1
**Argument Notes** ....................................................................................................................................... 2
Critical Iraq IAC ............................................................................................................................................. 3
Critical Iraq 1AC ............................................................................................................................................ 4
Critical Iraq 1AC ............................................................................................................................................ 5
Critical Iraq 1AC ............................................................................................................................................ 6
Critical Iraq 1AC ............................................................................................................................................ 7
Critical Iraq 1AC ............................................................................................................................................ 8
Critical Iraq 1AC ............................................................................................................................................ 9
Critical Iraq 1AC .......................................................................................................................................... 10
Critical Iraq 1AC .......................................................................................................................................... 12
Iraq War=Imperialist .................................................................................................................................... 13
Iraq War= Imperialist ................................................................................................................................... 14
Iraq War=Imperialist .................................................................................................................................... 15
Iraq war = Imperialist ................................................................................................................................... 16
Iraq war = Imperialist ................................................................................................................................... 17
Iraq War= Imperialist ................................................................................................................................... 18
Iraq war= Imperialist .................................................................................................................................... 19
Impacts- Economic Oppression ................................................................................................................... 20
Impacts- Dehumanization ............................................................................................................................ 21
Impacts-Poverty/Disease ............................................................................................................................. 22
Impacts- Destruction of Iraq ......................................................................................................................... 23
Imperialism Impacts ..................................................................................................................................... 25
Solvency ...................................................................................................................................................... 26
Solvency ...................................................................................................................................................... 27
Don’t trust their authors ............................................................................................................................... 28
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
1
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
**Argument Notes**
This is not a complete affirmative- it is meant to be critical supplement to the big Iraq aff that has already
been put out. Use that file for most of your A/T evidence/inherency/ etc.
Best Regards,
Albert Qaeda
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
2
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq IAC
The War in Iraq began as a racist and aggressive form of American Imperialism. The
problems there have little to with the execution of the war, and more to do with
America’s militaristic quest for global domination.
Rule 2010 (James B, Of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley) “The Military State of America and the
Democratic Left” Dissent. Volume 57, Number 1, Winter 2010. MUSE. DJ
Yet the deeper, mostly unstated assumptions underlying these authors' proposals ought to strike a chill throughout the democratic Left. Their problems
with
the Iraq invasion—and implicitly, future American military exploits of the same kind—have to do with execution, not
the larger vision of American power that inspired the enterprise. Their words strike an eerie resonance with those of Thomas L. Friedman,
before the invasion occurred: he favored George W. Bush's "audacious" war plan as "a job worth doing," but only "if we can do it right." America's violent
remaking of Iraq would have been entirely acceptable, it seems, if only Friedman's sensibilities could have guided it. More important: the continuing
mission of the United States as maker and breaker of regimes around the world remained unquestioned. When any
country gets seriously in the way of American power, the global responsibilities of this country are apt to require
action like that taken in Iraq. We hear this kind of thinking in its most out-of-the-closet form from neoconservatives—
who gave us the Iraq invasion in the first place. But its roots in American history lie at least as far back as notions of
Manifest Destiny. Its key inspiration is a particularly aggressive form of American exceptionalism. Some higher power—fate,
Divine Providence, or special "moral clarity"—has created opportunities, indeed obligations, for America to set things straight on a global scale.
Versions of this idea are pervasive among thinkers—American foreign policy elites, and those who would guide them—who would disclaim identification with the
neocons. Often conveying the doctrine are code words referring to special "responsibilities" of the United States to guarantee world "stability." Or, as Madeleine
Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, stated, "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand
tall. We see further into the future. . ." To her credit, Albright's effusions in this direction stopped short of support for invading Iraq—something that cannot be said
for the so-called liberal hawks.
Accepting this view of America as the ultimate and rightful arbiter of global affairs—as master hegemon or world
superpower, to use less upbeat terms—triggers the weightiest implications and consequences. Nearly all of them, I hold, run in collision
course to the best aims and directions of the democratic Left. Yet even for thinkers who identify themselves as being on the Left, acceptance of a hypermilitarized America, and its concomitant role of global enforcer, often passes without question.
For those of us who challenge this view, the invasion of Iraq was wrong for fundamental political and—indeed—moral reasons.
Not [End Page 82] because it was mismanaged. Not because too few troops were dispatched; not because the Iraqi
Army was disbanded; not because the occupation was incompetent, corrupt, and often criminally negligent. It was
wrong because wars of this kind are always wrong—aggressive, opportunistic wars of choice, aimed at revamping
entire countries to fit the dictates of the invaders. These wars are wrong because of the destruction and distortions
that they spread both abroad and at home. Among nations, they countervail against one of the subtle but hopeful
tendencies in the world today—the movement away from sole reliance on brute state power to resolve international
conflict and toward supranational authorities, multilateral decision-making, and establishment of powers above the
level of states. At home, the effects are even more insidious. For in order to make itself the kind of country capable of
"projecting power" anywhere in the world, as America has done so unsuccessfully in Iraq, it has had to impose vast
demands and distortions upon its own domestic life.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
3
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
Troops in Iraq are not there to support Iraqis, rather Iraq has become a tool of US
imperialism and neoliberal agendas.
Brownlee in 07’ (Jason, an associate professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas,and teach about Middle East politics and
US foreign policy, World Politics, Volume 59, Number 2, January 2007, pp. 314-340, JRR)
In this article we argue that the
Iraqi state is in many ways not an instrument to represent the sovereign will of the people of
Iraq. Instead, the Iraqi state is being reconstituted from above and below to represent a variety of globalising agendas
and enforce them in Iraq. The Iraqi state is not representing Iraq in a globalising world: it is representing the
globalizing world in Iraq. To understand the process of how the Iraqi state is being reconstituted, we draw on literature which considers the relationships
between national, international and transnational capital; the institutions of global neoliberalism; and the role of the USA as empire. At
one end of the spectrum imperial globalisation is seen as being effectively a decentred form of global governance with the US as a state and US capital having
lost their leading role.1 The
forces of globalisation are thus arranged hierarchically with regard to the states, economies and
societies that they are reconstituting but not hierarchically in relation to each other. Decentred globalisation may be international
(involving multiple states as the dominant actors) or transnational (involving a deterritorialised class which rules by means of states and other institutions). At
the other end of the spectrum, globalization is seen as US-dominated.2 In both cases global governance is not
counterposed to imperialism as it is in liberal conceptions of world politics: global governance in its current form is an
expression of imperialism, defined in the contemporary period as the formal and informal practices which sustain rule
on behalf of capital. While higher living standards and liberal democracy can be functional for capital and can thus be
compatible with and encouraged by rule on behalf of capital, where these are perceived to challenge rule on behalf of
capital, higher living standards and liberal democracy will be sacrificed if politically feasible. We explore these issues in a
number of steps. First, we elaborate upon our critique of the sovereignty debate per se and as it relates to Iraq. Second, we assess the management of Iraq
reconstruction funds and Iraq's debt and compensation burdens in terms of decentred or US dominated imperial globalisation from above. Third, we consider the
ways in which the transborder informal economy produces effects which work for and against imperial globalisation. Finally, we conclude with a series of
observations about the current and highly contingent imperial globalization of the Iraqi state
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
4
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
Over 1.3 million Iraqi civilians have died in addition to ongoing material
consequences. The result is a deliberate attempt to destroy Iraqi culture, resistance
and national unity
Petras 09 (“The US War against Iraq: The Destruction of a Civilization” James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York,
,http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/the-us-war-against-iraq/)
The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7
years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This
enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and
Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and
encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity
and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in
pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and
encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness,
historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their longstanding personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The
physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers,
intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was
decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious
client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi
puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools,
cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds
of thousands of
Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national,
secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of
thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone
with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
5
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
Even though the Bush era is over, Obama is on the same war path. The expansion of
militarism and imperialism will continue.
Santos 08 (Juan Santos, writer from LA, 2/13/08, “Barak Obama and the ‘End” of Racism” Dissident Voice, http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/02/barackobama-and-the-%E2%80%9Cend%E2%80%9D-of-racism/)
The regime of Bush the Lesser was the pinnacle of this effort; he carried the agenda as far as it could go, before it
began to fracture and collapse under the weight of its own madness — before it met the determined resistance of society’s most
vulnerable, scapegoated and openly stigmatized targets, as they marched in their millions refusing to be victims. The combined force of the Christian fascist
juggernaut, the repressive powers of the State, and the US war machine looked unstoppable until it met this opposition at home, and until it met the mad and
fierce resistance of the people of Iraq who have, however chaotic and horrifying their tactics, refused to be conquered. With these events, the aura of invincibility
and unstoppable momentum was destroyed, the lid of repression began to crack, and what had been suppressed in us rose again to the surface. Literally, in
terms of time in office, and as a sweeping reactionary social agenda, the Bush regime is coming to an end. With its end, inevitably,
comes a wave of hope and euphoria. This is the wave Obama is riding, the ocean of energy he is trying to steer into
an acceptance of the same old deal, the same old wars, the same old systemic racism, packaged as if it were
something new. This wave of energy is not something he’s inspired, it’s something he’s riding and that he is uniquely qualified to channel toward his own
ends — which are not our ends. As we have seen, Obama doesn’t represent peace — he represents an expansion of war and the
power of Empire. He’s even more extreme on this than Bush himself, except in his public rhetoric. He doesn’t represent the
real and legitimate needs, desires and hopes of Black people — he refuses to speak openly of the most fundamental issues affecting Black
He doesn’t represent the “end of racism,” but the perpetuation of oppression in a new guise. Obama doesn’t
represent a new system or the new way of life we dreamed of and fought for and that has been suppressed; he represents the old one. He represents a
system that is fundamentally rooted in exploitation, oppression and destruction on a global scale, and he is living
proof that no fundamental change for the better can, or will, come about under the system he represents and
upholds. It doesn’t work that way. To tell the truth is to betray the system, and he can’t bring himself to do it, even though he is far too conscious not to know
it. Attaining authentic freedom requires, as its barest starting point, the naming of what keeps us subjugated. What
keeps us subjugated is the very system Obama wants to rule. The system, even with Barack Obama as its first Black
emperor, is not our hope. It’s our enemy, the enemy of the world, and, because this system is rapidly undermining
the ability of the planet to foster and sustain life, it is the enemy of all Life on Earth. This is exactly the understanding that the
people.
Christian fascists like Weyrich and Heubeck wanted to crush out of our awareness, and the lack of such awareness is exactly what Barack Obama depends on if
he is to remain a symbol of the impossible dream that the system can be something other than what it is.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
6
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
The war in Iraq not only colonizes the Iraqis, it also justifies endless war making and
crushes the rule of law in the U.S.
Rule 2010 (James B, Of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley) “The Military State of America and the
Democratic Left” Dissent. Volume 57, Number 1, Winter 2010. MUSE. DJ
Meanwhile, America's
chronic war footing in the twenty-first century has fueled grave degradation in protections for civil
liberties and public dissent. Along with conflicts in Iraq and elsewhere, the open-ended "War on Terror" has undermined invaluable
restraints on executive power. In the courts, doctrines of the "inherent power" of the president during wartime have
undone vital checks on executive power. Prisoners captured in U.S. operations—many believed to have only the most dubious
involvement in action against this country—have been held for many years without trial. Torture and extra-legal imprisonment are
now acknowledged as routine instruments of U.S. policy—and a supposedly liberal administration is seeking to block full disclosure on these
matters. Government has grown more closed. Federal agencies reflexively—and successfully—invoke national security as a
pretext for blocking investigation of a shocking array of authoritarian measures, including government surveillance
over U.S. civilians. Here, too, the Obama administration has declined to make a clear break from the authoritarian doctrines of its predecessor. We
have entered an era of national political life dominated by a garrison mentality. Who can say when we will emerge?
Contra Madeleine Albright, the United States is not "the indispensable country." It is not even an indispensable country.
Often it plays the role of loose cannon in international affairs, if not that of a swaggering, ignorant, neighborhood
bully. To acknowledge this much hardly requires adopting the mirror-image caricature of the United States as the
Great Satan, source of all the world's troubles. In all things, it seems, the United States goes to extremes. It condemns human rights violations,
where doing so threatens no pressing foreign policy goals—just as it commits and condones such violations when deemed necessary for raisons d'état. It
supports democracy in many corners of the world—South Korea today, for example—and suppresses it elsewhere, as in Chile in the 1970s.
It is capable of
doing noteworthy good, such as supporting campaigns against HIV/AIDS in Africa. At other moments it blocks meaningful efforts to fight climate change,
opposes restrictions on land-mine use, and supports twenty-first-century Zionism in the form of present-day Israeli appropriation of Palestinian territories. It
exports surplus foodstuffs to hungry parts of the world while also exporting financial calamity and (even under the Obama administration) torture.
The problem is not that America only uses its power perniciously. It is that no country should exercise such
disproportionate, unilateral sway. As long as it remains in place, that overweening power will combine with
exceptionalist fantasies to fuel messianic enterprises like the Iraq War.
The quotable Madeleine Albright once again gave quintessential expression to this mindset: "What's the point of having this
superb military that you're always talking about," she chided Colin Powell in 1993, "if we can't use it?" The shocking logic at
work here asserts itself over and over among apologists for American military dominance. By these lights, American
failure to crush retrograde regimes anywhere amounts to appeasement. This is a prescription for American warmaking all over the globe, into the indefinite future—and for predictable collateral damage to justice, well-being, and
the rule of law at home.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
7
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
Plan: The United States federal government should withdraw all of its military and
police presence from Iraq.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
8
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
Iraq is the first step. We must withdraw in order to stop a deathly spiral of war and
escalation
Everest 04 (Larry Everest, Common Courage Press, 2004, “Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda”)
For over 60 years, U.S. actions in Iraq and the Persian Gulf have been guided by calculations of global empire, regional
domination, and overall control of Persian Gulf oil. As a result, they have never brought liberation, but have instead inflicted
enormous suffering and perpetuated oppression. There are deep national, social and class divisions running through the societies
of the Middle East, but foreign domination—by the U.S. in particular—remains the main obstacle to a more just social order.
Second, U.S. actions have brought neither peace nor stability, but spawned a deepening spiral of resistance, instability,
intervention and war. There are connections here, and a trajectory to events which we will explore, from the 1953 coup that installed
the Shah in Iran to the 1979 revolution that overthrew him, to the subsequent Iran-Iraq war, to the first U.S. Gulf War in 1991, and then
the second in 2003. The new U.S. National Security Strategy and its offspring—the “war on terror”—are efforts to forcibly resolve these
growing impediments. Third, this war represents a further, horrific escalation of that deadly spiral of U.S. intervention and
it is only the beginning. Washington has dispatched its military to conquer and occupy a country in the heart of the
Arab world, perhaps for years to come, and use it as a springboard for further maneuvers and aggressions in the
region. Finally, the history of foreign intervention in the Persian Gulf demonstrates that grand ambitions of conquest and control are
one thing, but realizing them can be quite another. Oppression breeds resistance, actions provoke reactions, and events often careen
beyond the control of their initiators in unexpected ways.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
9
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
Justifying the occupation of Iraq because of “stability” is based on racial binaries
and neoliberalism which reinforces American superiority and culminate in global war
and genocide
Pinar Batur 07, PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Scociology @ Vassar, [“The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,” in Handbook of the The
Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 446-7]
the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman
Empire, stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of
this imagery in American foreign policy
exhibited how capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999).
Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” other—Eastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational,
savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is
as an elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic
expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination for exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment
Europe and later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic
dominance globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the “Terrible Turk”
to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion. It
racialized exclusion to define the
terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, orientalism recreated the superior race, even though there was no “race.” It
equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the “right ideological and cultural framework.” It segued into war
and annihilation and genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the
collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other.”
Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades, but the elasticity and reframing
of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the West, one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United
States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of
Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14th-century
Byzantine emperor who said, “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command
to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in
the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims
found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to
demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When
Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope
apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, “I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages of my address at
the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims” (Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that Muslims are
intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justification for his speech—he was not apologizing for
being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point. Through orientalist and the
white racial frame,
those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like Huntington,
Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic
calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoicing and celebration. But for
Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world” (Lewis
2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be wise to
bear the possibility in mind.” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven faster. For Lewis, Muslims in this mindset
don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement” (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington pleaded that “in a world of
different civilizations, each . . .will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington 1993:49). Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam as the apocalyptic
destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions such as his actually prove the validity of his position. Lewis’s assertions run
parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed, “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will
use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation” (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the fight against terrorism is
the ideological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the 20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though “Islamofascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of the United States it
drew reactions worldwide. Muslim Americans found this phrase “contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community” (Raum
2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this
new rhetoric equates ideology with religion
the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush said, “ . . .we still aren’t completely safe, because there are
people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in” (CNN 2006). Exclusion in physical space is only
matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of
the excluded. Annihilation, in this sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is
institutionalized with the vocabulary of self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete,
genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the
and reinforces
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
10
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
(Batur Continues)
exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant
efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur.
Staying in Iraq because “there is no alternative” is the same neoliberal assumption
that is the root of genocide and totalitarianism
Santos 03 (Boaventura de Sousa, Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) “Collective suicide or globalization
from below?” http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-03-26-santos-en.html
According to the German philosopher Franz Hinkelammert, living in Costa Rica, the
West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it
should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the
name of the need to fulfill radically all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is
supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the
African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world
wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the holocaust.
And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is
fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is
above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the
western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it.
Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to
the present-day reality and that the problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of
development to its ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not
the result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If there is
terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total
violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists.
This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of
alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of
the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of
history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable
efficiency of the market. The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors
sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political
democracy and social fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is
found to be incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
11
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Critical Iraq 1AC
We must take up the fight against imperialism. Academics have retreated, and it is up
to us to resist instances of abusive military action
Giroux 2005 (Henry Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies @ McMaster University.) “Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public
Pedagogy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism” Fast Capitalism 1.2 2005. http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/DarkTimes.htm
As the Right wages a frontal assault against all remnants of the democratic state and its welfare provisions, the progressive Left is in disarray. Theoretical and
political impoverishment feed off each other as hope of a revolutionary project capable of challenging the existing forces of domination appears remote.
Militarism increasingly engulfs the entire social order as matters of "war and national security" become "consuming
anxieties" that provide the "memories, models, and metaphors that shape broad areas of national life" as well as
drive American foreign policy (Sherry 1995:xi). As U.S. military action expands its reach into Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Iran
and Syria, under the guise of an unlimited war against terrorism, public spaces on the domestic front are increasingly being organized around values supporting a
bellicose, patriarchal, and jingoistic culture that is undermining "centuries of democratic gains" (Buck-Morss 2003:33). As politics is separated from
economic power, the state surrenders its obligation to contain the power of corporations and financial capital,
reducing its role to matters of surveillance, disciplinary control, and order. Market fundamentalism and the
militarization of public life mutually reinforce each other to displace the promise, if not the very idea, of the Great
Society—with its emphasis on the common good, basic social provisions for all, social justice, and economic mobility.
Fuelled by dreams of empire as well as the desire to mask the shape political power is taking in a period of economic
and social decline, militarism and neoliberalism cloak themselves in the discourse of democracy in order to hide the
barbarism being reproduced in the torture prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the spread of wage slavery in the interest of
capital accumulation, and in the carceral surveillance and disciplinary measures being imposed on the nation's public
schools. Democratic political projects appear remote and give rise to either cynicism, solipsism, or reductionistic
ideologies on the part of many progressives within and outside of the academy. The crucial task of theorizing a
politics suitable for the twenty-first century has fallen on hard times. Economistic theories return to dominate much of the Left, reducing
politics to a reflection of economic forces, interests, and measures. Within the university, critically engaged intellectuals appear in short supply as most
academics, especially in the humanities and social sciences, bid a hasty retreat to arcane discourses, retrograde notions of professionalism, or irrelevant
academic specialities (Agger 1989; Said 2004). Rather than reinventing and rethinking the challenge of an oppositional politics
within a global public sphere, the academic Left appears to be withdrawing from the demands of civic engagement by
retreating into what Susan Buck-Morss (2003) calls "theory-world," a space where the "academic freedom of critical theorists coincides with our lack of
influence in public and political debate"(p. 68). Hope, once embodied in the politics of persuasion, the drive for instituting critical education in a diverse number of
public spheres, collective efforts to organize struggles within major institutions, and the attempt to build international social movements seems, at best, a
nostalgic remnant of the 1960s. The naturalness and commonsense appeal of the neoliberal economic order produces a crisis of political and historical
imagination, on the one hand, and an educational crisis on the other. It is in opposition to the current turn away from matters of history, culture, and politics that I
begin with a quote from Susan George, a powerful critic of neoliberalism and a leading voice in the anti-globalization movement. She writes:
In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neoliberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage or
sent to the insane asylum. At least in the Western countries, at that time, everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat, or a social Christian democrat or some
shade of Marxist. The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions, the idea that the state should voluntarily reduce its role
in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social
protection-such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such
a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience (George 1999, para 2).
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
12
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq War=Imperialist
The U.S. invasion happened under the guise that America is “helping” Iraqis, but was
a symptom of imperialist politics
Stam & Shohat 2005 (robert, University Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, and Ella, Professor of Art & Public Policy and Middle
Eastern Studies at New York University,) 2005 (Robert and Ella, Spring, “Variations on an Anti-American Theme,’ CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 5,
Number 1,2005, (Article) pp 147-148, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v005/5.1stam.pdf) KM
United States and France deployed their claims of universality for imperialist purposes, but they did so deploying
distinct (though related) discourses. While the United States argued the universal applicability of its “democracy” and the
“American Way of Life,” France spoke of its “civilizing mission.” France’s colonized “assimiles” were seen as “lucky” to be granted the privileges of
French civilization, even as they lost their lands and their rights. The United States spoke of “wars for democracy,” which usually
turned out to be wars on behalf of strategic military or economic advantage. The quarrel in the United Nations over
the second Gulf War can be seen as a conflict between an arrogant imperialism in ascension and a subaltern
imperialism in decline, whence Donald Rumsfeld’s cutting insult about France as “old Europe” even as he himself mimicked France’s old imperialism in a
Both the
region, the Levant, where France had always been an important player. But while France is now no longer imperialist—although occasionally neo-colonialist in
Africa—the
United States is embarked on a new imperial binge led by “democratic Bolsheviks” eager to impose
democracy (aka militant neo-liberalism) on third world peoples, especially in the Arab/Muslim world. Yet even the
hawks have enough historical consciousness to feel obliged to explain that American invasions and
domination do not really constitute imperialism or colonialism, since the real aim is to give “Iraq back to the
Iraqis.” But most imperialisms claimed to be helping the imperialized, and some journalists, such as Robert Kaplan, have blown
the administration’s cover by explicitly calling for a new “stealth” imperialism, a Pax Americana.
Historically, U.S. imperialism and French imperialism were sometimes allied and sometimes in conflict. While FDR had made anti-colonialist gestures— certainly
also in the name of U.S. interests—the post-war United States supported the French in Indochina until the Dien Bien Phu defeat in 1954 and then took over from
the French in the calamitous Vietnam War that ended only in 1975. Some in U.S. administrations expressed support for Algerian independence from France, yet
it is fascinating that the Pentagon recently had its members see The Battle of Algiers, a classic denunciation of French colonialism in North Africa, for what could
be learned about dealing with a guerilla insurrection. Despite the proclaimed Francophobia of Donald Rumsfield and Richard Perle and others, when it comes to
colonialism the assumption is that “we Americans” are with the French. Although the war in Iraq is theoretically designed to give Iraq back to the Iraqis, and
despite the Francophobia of the hawks, when the Pentagon screens The Battle of Algiers it clearly empathizes with the French. And here we find a tacit
admission that what is happening in Iraq, despite administration pretensions, is not totally disconnected with what
happened 50 years earlier in Algeria. But each power is convinced that its form of colonialism or imperialism is/was
superior: Spanish colonialism was about saving souls; British imperialism was only about trade and the “white man’s burden”; French imperialism was about
the “civilizing mission”; American imperialism was about democracy and self-determination. Much of the tension between France and
the United States bears on this usually undiscussed issue: the United States looks at French history and says, We will do imperialism better. France looks at the
United States and says, We tried it and it didn’t work. Thus, much of the emotion generated by right-wing Francophobia in the United States and antiAmericanism in France has to do with an intra-white narcissism of minor differences—our imperialism is better than your imperialism! What goes unrecognized is
the common substratum of European/American economic/political/mediatic domination of the world.
Iraq colonized by the U.S.
Rene L. Gonzalez
Berrios (M.A. Political Science / Univ. of Massachusetts Gonzalez is a Doctoral Candidate in Comparative Politics at the University
of Massachusetts He may be contacted by email at: renegonzalez7@hotmail.com)Information Clearing House 22 January, 20 04 “Dilemmas Of Colonialism: The
Democracy Problem” http://www.countercurrents.org/us-gonzalez220104.htm
For courageous Leftists like I, the
American occupation has been blatant colonization from the beginning. This is also the
majority opinion in the world, if not the U.S. However, whatever shred of legitimacy that has stayed the wrath of a shocked American public is
beginning to unravel. The colonization of Iraq depended greatly on the assumed support of the American "nation-building"
project by the Kurds and Shiite Muslims of Iraq. These two groups, strongly repressed by Saddam Hussein's Sunni minority, were assumed to
rally automatically to the American side, in support of everything Washington was to do in Iraq. The worst scenario (which has occurred) was that these groups
would not violently oppose the colonization of Iraq, under the misguided hope that the Americans' plans included genuine, popular democracy. The Kurds to the
north have remained supportive of the coalition and its long-term stated goals, but not of the current colonization. Their pre-eminent concerns have been with
Kurdish autonomy and protection from central control in Baghdad. The Shiites have been wary of American plans as well, constantly qualifying their "passive"
support of the Coalition's efforts to an eventual development of a genuinely elected democracy. Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the highest Shiite Muslim figure in Iraq, has
led this "passive" support (or resistance, choose your preference).
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
13
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq War= Imperialist
US imperialism was the justification for invading Iraq
Preble April 26, 2004 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2627, Christopher Preble is a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy
(www.realisticforeignpolicy.org) and the director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.
Arguing that the United States was "an empire in all but name," Garten urged the president to convince the American people not that an
empire is unwise, but rather that Americans must send "their sons and daughters" abroad to rebuild countries damaged by American military intervention.
Specifically, Garten called for the creation of a "colonial service" akin to the former British Colonial Service. This seems unlikely, at least in the near term. In his
prime time press conference last week, President Bush went out of his way to disavow any imperial intentions. Discussing the ongoing military operations in Iraq,
and talk of a long-term occupation there, Bush affirmed that the Iraqi people "do not support an indefinite occupation -- and neither does
America. We are not an imperial power, as nations such as Japan and Germany can attest." But while the president may shy away from the term empire, the
conduct of our foreign policy is clearly guided by a presumption that the United States is, and should be, the world's
only superpower. The National Security Strategy declares that the United States shall maintain its predominant
position in the world at all costs, even acting preemptively if and when would-be rivals emerge, or appear likely to
emerge. But while the possession of a military force that is second-to-none might appear on the surface to be a
manifestation of imperial domination, the proponents of empire claim that the United States is not really an empire because it has noble intentions.
The Bush National Security Strategy pledges to reshape the world according to our image, and establishes as a core object of U.S. policy the creation of a world
that is "not just safer but better." Left unsaid, but implicitly understood, is that the United States will determine what is better. So much for the rhetoric from the
2000 campaign when candidate George Bush questioned America's right to "go around the world and say, `This is the way it's got to be.'" While citizens of Rome
reveled in their glorious empire, and the British "hailed Britannia," Americans have yet to embrace the term, or the concept behind it. And they are unlikely to do
so. Most Americans, even those who did not pay attention during their high school history classes, will remember that America seceded from the British Empire.
This is the part of our history that many modern-day imperialists would prefer to forget. For most of our country's history, Americans resisted the imperial impulse.
They were guided by the Founders oft-stated warnings that a republican form of government was incompatible with an imperial foreign policy. The Founders
feared empire because it subverts the freedoms and liberties of citizens at home while simultaneously thwarting the
will of sovereign people abroad. The general public is right to be skeptical of empire. On balance, the objections to an
imperial foreign policy can be summed up in a single sentence: empire is problematic because it threatens our liberty
and economic security at home, and it is counterproductive abroad. Knowing of Americans' long-standing opposition to the concept of
empire, the imperialists are unlikely to put this question before the public for a vote. Instead of admitting that the costs of empire are great -- and
growing -- the Bush administration and its ideological allies dismiss the costs of empire with a wave. The most common
refrain -- that the cost of whatever we are doing is far less than the costs of another terrorist attack -- is deceptively
simple because it is impossible to disprove a negative. In the highly unlikely event that there is never another terrorist
attack, we will never know how much such an attack might have cost. Whatever was spent to prevent such an attack,
therefore, will be deemed to have been worth it. In the more likely event that another terrorist attack does occur, the
defenders of the strategy of empire will declare that the attack would certainly have had far graver effects, or that
there would have been far more attacks, if the money hadn't been spent -- and then call for still more money to solve
the problem. There is an alternative to empire, however -- one that is in keeping with America's traditions and values. Beginning last summer, a group of
scholars, policy makers, and concerned citizens formed the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Spanning the ideological spectrum from left to right, and
attracting supporters from across the country, the Coalition is united by our opposition to an American empire. We are dedicated to promoting an alternative
vision for an American national security strategy that is consistent with American traditions and values. This continues to be the organizing principle on which we
operate. (See our Statement of Principles.) To counter the arguments of those who favor empire, the coalition holds conferences, and media events, promotes
research, and communicates a vision of the alternatives to empire, including a restrained foreign policy that protects American interests.For the advocates and
opponents of empire, the key question revolves around the opinions of our fellow Americans. Will open advocacy for empire in this political season be an asset,
or a liability? If history is any guide, and it often is, the American people will favor prudent, responsible foreign policies that defend
U.S. national security interests while rejecting imperialist fantasies.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
14
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq War=Imperialist
The war in Iraq was started as a quest for American Dominance
Falk 2003 (Richard, Distinguished Professor, Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara and Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus,
Princeton University) http://www.transnational.org/SAJT/forum/meet/2003/Falk_GlobalizationImagine.html Reimagining the Governance
of Globalization
September 11 gave an opening to the most ardent advocates of imperial globalization. It converted the undertaking from one of
indirection to that of the most vital security imperative in the history of the country. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks it provided the
most effective rationale for US global leadership since the cold war era, and it did so in a setting where the absence
of strategic and ideological statist rivalry allowed the US Government to project a future world order at peace, and
enjoying the benefits of a reinvigorated corporate globalization. [See Bush forward to NSS] As suggested earlier, the anti-terrorist
consensus loomed large at first, giving rise to widespread support for the US decision to wage war against Afghanistan, and to dislodge the Taliban regime from
control. The move toward war with Iraq disclosed the limits of this consensus as well as the diplomatic limits of
American power to induce political support for its project of global dominance. As with Afghanistan, the Iraqi regime was
widely deplored as oppressive and militarist, but unlike Afghanistan, Washington's claims of preemption as directed toward Iraq
seemed much more connected with geopolitical expansion, especially in the Middle East, than with a response to the
continuing threat of the al Qaeda network. The perception of imperial globalization is a matter of interpretation, as are its probable effects on the
governance of political behavior in the world. The advocates of the new imperialism emphasize its benevolent potentialities, with reference to the spread of
constitutional democracy and human rights, and the provision of peacekeeping capabilities that could act far more effectively than what could be achieved by the
United Nations. [See Robert Kagan, "Benevolent Empire," Michael Ignatieff, "Burden"] The critics are concerned with arousing a geopolitical backlash in the form
of a new strategic rivalry, possibly involving a Sino-European alliance, and about the prospect for a further abandonment of American republicanism at home and
abroad under the pretext of responding to the security threats that are present. In this setting, it seems prudent to worry about the emergence of some new
oppressive political order that might be most accurately described as "global fascism," a political fix that has no historical precedent. [See Falk, "Will the Empire
be Fascist?"; Sheldon Wolin] Of course, the proponents of imperial globalization resent the frictions associated with civic globalization, and despite the claims of
support for "democracy" prefer compliant governmental elites and passive citizenries. Bush "rewarded" and lavishly praised governments that ignored and
overrode the clearly evidenced anti-war sentiments of their citizens, especially Britain, but also Italy and Spain, while "punishing" those that refused to support
fully recourse to aggressive war against Iraq, including France, Turkey, and Germany.
Iraq is a key part of US imperial strategy.
Foster, editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, Holleman, research assistant, and McChesney,
Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008 (Robert Bellamy, Hannah, and
Robert W., October, “The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending,” Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/081001foster-holleman-mcchesney.php) KM
To be sure, if a Democratic administration under Al Gore had come into power in 2000 it is not at all certain that the United States would have gone to war with
Iraq, in addition to Afghanistan, though an attempt would have been made to uphold U.S. imperial interests. The Bush administration from the first was
distinguished by the particularly bellicose group of neoconservatives at its helm. But in pursuing their belligerent ends they hardly lacked solid backing within the
circles of power. Strong support was extended by both political parties, Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the
corporations generally. Disagreements were largely about troop levels, the amount of force to be applied, relations to
allies, dates of withdrawal (partial or whole), distribution of forces between the major “theaters,” etc. More
fundamental questions, even the use of torture, were avoided. Major dissent has mainly come from the bottom of the society.
All of this suggests that expanded militarism and imperialism is deeply entrenched at present, at least within the top echelons of U.S.
society. It reflects a general concern to expand U.S. hegemony as part of an imperial grand strategy, including rolling
back insurgent forces and “rogue states” around the world, and keeping junior partners in line. The war in Iraq is
best viewed as an attempt to assert U.S. geopolitical control over the entire Persian Gulf and its oil—an
objective that both political wings of the establishment support, and which is part of the larger aim of the
restoration of a grand U.S. hegemony.27 The vast scale of U.S. military spending—encompassing more than 50 percent of the federal budget
(excluding social security, medicare, and other transfer payments) and constituting 7 percent of the entire GDP—is thus externally rooted in the needs of the U.S.
imperial grand strategy, which continually strains the U.S. system to its limits (as measured by the budget and trade deficits).
U.S. imperialism has been transformed in recent decades by the absence of the Soviet Union, giving the United States more immediate power (particularly in the
military realm), coupled, paradoxically, with signs of a secular decline in U.S. economic hegemony. It is this dual reality of a temporary increase in U.S. power
along with indications of its long-term decline that has led to urgent calls throughout the power elite for a “New American Century,” and to attempts by
Washington to leverage its enormous military power to regain economic and geopolitical strength, for example, in the Persian Gulf oil region. In
recent
years, the United States has enormously expanded its military bases and operations around the world with bases
now in around seventy countries and U.S. troops present in various capacities (including joint exercises) in perhaps twice
that number. Washington is thus not just spending money on the military and producing destructive weapons, or
engaging in wars and interventions. It is also building a lasting physical presence around the world that allows for
control/subversion/rapid deployment.28
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
15
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq war = Imperialist
Iraq War atrocities are part of the imperialist ideology that fuels the Iraq occupationAbu Ghraib is just one example of the horrific actions that are legitimized in the name
of “disciplining local colonials”
Tucker, Professor of History at University of Windsor, and Triantafyllos, research assistant, 2008 (Bruce and Sia, “Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, and the
New Imperialism,” Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, 2008 (Article), pp 96-97,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_review_of_american_studies/v038/38.1.tucker.pdf) KM
Having reviewed the consequences of the lack of contextual analysis of the photographs, the silencing of race as a category of analysis, and the essential
‘‘Americanness’’ of the metanarrative, we are now in a position to review the stated reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the particular convergence of orders,
events, and ideologies that better explain Abu Ghraib. The crusade to disarm Iraq of its WMD rested on a view of the Iraqi
government and military as out of control, uncivilized, and fully ready to decimate Western populations, and therefore
in need of a thorough disciplining by the arbiters of international decency and stability. As the rationale for war moved on to the
link between Iraq and the events in New York of 11 September 2001, the rhetoric of the ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ heated up, implying that
any country involved in such a heinous crime against humanity needed to be controlled and brought into line by the
civilized powers. Finally, the most blatant assertion of Western hegemony took shape in the argument that war was necessary to rescue this desperate
country from its tyrannical past and to bring it into line with western democratic practice.
As the rationale for invasion and war changed, commentators were so focused on the truth or falsity of the US administration’s reasons that they may
have missed the larger ideological framework underlying all three of the stated reasons. This is not to say that the matter of truth versus
falsehood is a trivial one, but to argue instead that a racialized imperialism lay at the heart of this venture. From this perspective, the
metanarrative of ‘‘the few undisciplined soldiers who have now been rooted out’’ lacks explanatory power. The official discourse, as it emerged from press
releases and the mainstream media, left little room for a critical understanding either of the behaviour of soldiers at Abu Ghraib or, indeed, anywhere where
Americans held prisoners of war. Interpreted this way, the violence at Abu Ghraib is not exceptional, or the behaviour of a few
renegade, poorly trained soldiers. Rather it is best understood as colonial violence similar to the behavior of the French in Algeria,
the Belgians in the Congo, and the British during their occupation of India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Clearly such activity is an
instrument of policy in the disciplining of local colonials.4
Similarly, the discourse around the photographs at Abu Ghraib was carefully framed, from the presidential revulsion at the
photographs to the efforts made to contain the release of new photographs, because it was feared that enraged and embittered Iraqis would retaliate even more
violently if more was seen or known. We were left with a narrative that centered on the actions of a few soldiers, most of whom would be dealt with in military
tribunals. As for the victims of torture, they remain unnamed, unexamined— non-persons who seemingly have no role in the larger story. This had the effect of
distancing Americans from the behavior in the photographs, as if it had nothing to do with them, their culture or the economic and imperial framework that makes
the lifestyles of modern Americans possible. In the end the metanarrative exempted Americans from confronting race and the
racialized violence that structures both the discourse and practice of the so called ‘‘war on terror.’’
The U.S. government’s insistence that Iraq was a threat to U.S. security created a
commitment to violence and a detachment from the consequences of war.
Collins 2002, John Assis. Prof of Global Studies at St. Lawrence, and Ross Glover, Visiting Professor of Sociology at St. Lawrence University, Collateral
Language, p. 7-8
The link between language and violence works in at least two ways which combine to create an endless cycle of justification. First, language helps to create a
climate in which the need for military action appears to be self-evident. Almost immediately after September 11, supposedly “objective”
journalists were echoing politicians and pundits by saying, “The United States has no choice but to respond,” thereby
giving the subsequent war an aura of inevitability. Administration officials and sympathetic commentators fueled the
same process with similar remarks: “We must respond forcefully to terrorism,” or “If we do nothing, we will encourage
more terrorism.” By the time the U.S. military began raining bombs down on Afghanistan in early October, the use of language had already prepared the
groundwork, and little public opposition was heard. In terms of media coverage, the new war has made the highly managed Gulf War of 1991 look like an
unrestricted festival of investigative reporting. Yet even in such a controlled information environment, the existence of violence has the potential
to generate revulsion on the part of the reading and viewing public, and this is where language plays a second,
related role. The military language that is so widely repeated in the media softens the visceral impact of the violence
on ordinary citizens. To speak of “collateral damage” is a far cry from acknowledging the blown-off limbs, the punctured eardrums, the shrapnel wounds,
and the psychological horror that are caused by heavy bombardment; even speaking of “civilian casualties” deflects at¬tention from the real effects of the bombs.
Such euphemisms (“aerial sorties,” “Taliban positions,” “smart bombs”) work
in two directions, both making the already committed
violence more palatable and softening up the public so that future military actions will seem more like video games
and less like
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
16
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq war = Imperialist
Iraq War atrocities are only symptoms of the imperialist ideology that fuels the Iraq
occupation- Abu Ghraib is just one example of the horrific actions that are legitimized
in the name of “disciplining local colonials”
Tucker, Professor of History at University of Windsor, and Triantafyllos, research assistant, 2008 (Bruce and Sia, “Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, and the
New Imperialism,” Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 38, Number 1, 2008 (Article), pp 96-97,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/canadian_review_of_american_studies/v038/38.1.tucker.pdf) KM
Having reviewed the consequences of the lack of contextual analysis of the photographs, the silencing of race as a category of analysis, and the essential
‘‘Americanness’’ of the metanarrative, we are now in a position to review the stated reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the particular convergence of orders,
events, and ideologies that better explain Abu Ghraib. The crusade to disarm Iraq of its WMD rested on a view of the Iraqi
government and military as out of control, uncivilized, and fully ready to decimate Western populations, and therefore
in need of a thorough disciplining by the arbiters of international decency and stability. As the rationale for war moved on to the
link between Iraq and the events in New York of 11 September 2001, the rhetoric of the ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ heated up, implying that
any country involved in such a heinous crime against humanity needed to be controlled and brought into line by the
civilized powers. Finally, the most blatant assertion of Western hegemony took shape in the argument that war was necessary to rescue this desperate
country from its tyrannical past and to bring it into line with western democratic practice.
As the rationale for invasion and war changed, commentators were so focused on the truth or falsity of the US administration’s reasons that they may
have missed the larger ideological framework underlying all three of the stated reasons. This is not to say that the matter of truth versus
falsehood is a trivial one, but to argue instead that a racialized imperialism lay at the heart of this venture. From this perspective, the
metanarrative of ‘‘the few undisciplined soldiers who have now been rooted out’’ lacks explanatory power. The official discourse, as it emerged from press
releases and the mainstream media, left little room for a critical understanding either of the behaviour of soldiers at Abu Ghraib or, indeed, anywhere where
Americans held prisoners of war. Interpreted this way, the violence at Abu Ghraib is not exceptional, or the behaviour of a few
renegade, poorly trained soldiers. Rather it is best understood as colonial violence similar to the behavior of the French in Algeria,
the Belgians in the Congo, and the British during their occupation of India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Clearly such activity is an
instrument of policy in the disciplining of local colonials.4
Similarly, the discourse around the photographs at Abu Ghraib was carefully framed, from the presidential revulsion at the
photographs to the efforts made to contain the release of new photographs, because it was feared that enraged and embittered Iraqis would retaliate even more
violently if more was seen or known. We were left with a narrative that centered on the actions of a few soldiers, most of whom would be dealt with in military
tribunals. As for the victims of torture, they remain unnamed, unexamined— non-persons who seemingly have no role in the larger story. This had the effect of
distancing Americans from the behavior in the photographs, as if it had nothing to do with them, their culture or the economic and imperial framework that makes
the lifestyles of modern Americans possible. In the end the metanarrative exempted Americans from confronting race and the
racialized violence that structures both the discourse and practice of the so called ‘‘war on terror.’’
Iraq is a symptom of US imperialism
Hassan 08 (Salan D. PhD, English Prof @ MSU, associate editor of The New Centennial Review.) “Never-Ending Occupations” Volume 8, Number 1,
Spring. The New Centennial Review. MUSE. DJ
The U.S. occupation of Iraq is only the most recent in a long history of violent interventions. Despite developments in the
international laws of war over the last 100 years, the rhetoric and modalities of the U.S. occupation of Iraq reproduce the features
of previous never-ending occupations. One can see a repeating pattern from the 1890s occupation of Puerto Rico
and the Philippines to the mid-twentieth-century occupation of Germany and Japan to the early twenty-first-century
occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. In every one of these cases, the U.S. presence was ostensibly temporary, aimed at
overthrowing an unjust dictatorship, yet quickly took the form of a permanent military presence. In each case, the occupation
resulted from a formal declaration of war and was, therefore, subject to the laws of war, such as they are. These U.S. military occupations were
initially explained as an administrative necessity; the end of hostilities witnessed a change of regime and created a
political vacuum that was first filled by the U.S. military and its allies and then by some form of civilian administration
operating always under the umbrella of the U.S. armed forces. It is precisely the convergence of these circumstances
that produce the possibilities for an occupation without end.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
17
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq War= Imperialist
U.S. has colonized Iraq
Peter N. Kirstein (Mr. Kirstein is professor of history at St. Xavier University. He debated David Horowitz on his campus in Chicago on March 29 on "The
Iraq War: In the Classroom and Beyond." These were his remarks on the Iraq war. Kirstein's blog is http://english.sxu.edu/sites/kirstein.) “Iraq: The Logic of
Withdrawal” History News Network. 4-03-06 http://hnn.us/articles/23421.html
This was not a war of last resort, with just cause, with right intentions or with proportionality that are requirements of Just War Doctrine. This
was an
elective war to project American geostrategic dominance in the Persian Gulf, to encircle Iran, to control Iraqi oil and
to reestablish western colonialism in Iraq. The British colonized Iraq under a League of Nations mandate following the demise of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I, but withdrew its forces in 1927 due to its failure to overcome a sectarian insurgency. The US must never preemptively invade a nation
that is not an imminent threat. John Quincy Adams, one of America’s greatest secretaries of state, warned about going “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”
particularly if the monster is more bluster than bite. Saddam Hussein did not possess chemical, biological or, unlike Israel, nuclear weapons. After no weapons of
mass destruction were found the war aim shifted to spreading liberty and democracy: a convenient ruse to convert a crime into an alleged crusade for democracy
over autocracy. Had Mr. Bush asked the Congress for force authorization to export democracy to Iraq, he never would have received it. Yes democracy is
desirable but, except for World War II, no foreign invader has been able to impose it. Democracy must develop from indigenous forces and usually results from
modernization as opposed to being a catalyst for modernization. A nation must not wage war to spread democracy in a neo-Wilsonian manner unless the
international community supports it. The world opposed this monstrous war with unprecedented prewar protests with millions marching for peace from Hyde Park
in London, to Sydney, Rome, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco. While the Silverman-Robb Commission did not conclude the Bush administration
deliberately falsified intelligence, it was prohibited from investigating whether it distorted or, as Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV charged, “twisted” the
intelligence. Recently Paul Pillar, a former senior C.I.A. intelligence officer on Iraq, concluded “official intelligence analysis” was ignored, “politicized” and
“misused publicly to justify decisions already made.” Melvin Laird, secretary of defense under Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, charged the war “was
launched on intelligence failures and possibly outright deception.” This is an egregious breach of the firewall between intelligence gathering and policymaking.
The former is supposed to emanate from independent analysis; then foreign-policy officials decide whether the results require direct action. The Bush
administration thirsted for war, cherry-picked intelligence they liked and ignored the rest. The New York Times revealed Mr Bush told Prime Minister Tony Blair at
a meeting at the White House on January 31, 2003, that war was “penciled in for March 10” and that an assassination of Saddam Hussein should be considered.
Five days later they even recruited the C.I.A., whose director, George Tenet, sat behind Secretary of State Colin Powell when he lied to the world in his infamous
February 5, 2003 U.N. speech about Saddam’s W.M.D. The
Iraq war, with its torture and killings of defenseless detainees, has
disgraced the reputation of the U.S. and created an intense global anti-Americanism that is unprecedented. The U.N.
Convention Against Torture condemns, “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” The Uniform Code of Military Justice makes “maltreatment” of prisoners a crime.
The War Crimes Act of 1986 prohibits any American from inflicting torture, death or inhuman treatment upon a prisoner. The Geneva Conventions also have the
force of law in the United States and have been violated. Torture of non-resistant detainees is the reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Camp Nama . The
images of beatings, of humans tied to dog leashes, of smiling American soldiers inflicting pain and suffering on nude
prisoners piled on pyramids and chained to ceilings and cell doors, has erased the image of imperial benevolence
and revealed a hypocritical nation that emulated the same tactics that Saddam used against his own people. Iraq is
worse off than under Saddam. The country is in chaos, civil war between Shi’a and Sunni is beyond the point of reconciliation; the Kurds in the north will never
accept a unified Iraq unless given de facto independence with its Pesh Merga militia. The Sunni, in the oil barren center, will resist a Shi’a government that is
allied with Iran. There is no unitary government but only a periphery with armed sectarian militias such as the 1,000-strong Mahdi Army. Fewer Iraqis, than before
the invasion, have safe drinking water and have electricity about four hours a day. Iraq oil exports have plummeted due to sabotage and war, and citizens wait up
to two days to get gasoline. The United States did not calculate the war’s impact on the civilian population—other than Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertion
that Americans would be greeted as liberators. So where do we go from here? Toward an immediate disengagement with no more
American deaths, no more American wounded, no more Americans kidnapped, no more colonization of Iraq, and no
more unconscionable wasting of our nation’s resources with $350 billion already spent on this crusade. The architects of
war against Islam maintain if troops are precipitously withdrawn, the insurgency will intensify. Our presence caused the insurgency and helps
recruit new resistance fighters. How would Americans react if it were invaded for no legitimate reason, occupied by a military that did not speak
English or Spanish and tortured its citizens? Iraq has become the new Afghanistan, and withdrawal might lessen the intensity of the insurgency. The architects of
illusion claim withdrawal will damage America’s credibility to defeat so-called “global terrorism.” Withdrawal might restore America’s reputation as a constructive
force within the international community and improve our relations with the Muslim world that believes America is a racist, anti-Islamic
colonizer. Furthermore, Europe might construe disengagement from Iraq as an American acknowledgement that empire has its limits.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
18
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Iraq war= Imperialist
9/11 opened the floodgates for a new American imperialism, specifically focused on
Iraq
Kramer and Michalowski 05 (Ronal C. Kramer, professor university of western Michigan, and Raymond J. Michalowski, professor northern
Arizona university. “War, Aggression and State Crime” April 05, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies)
O
n the evening of 11 September 2001 and in the days following, unipolarists in the Bush administration advocated attacking Iraq immediately, even though there
was no evidence linking Iraq to the events of the day (Clarke 2004; Woodward 2004). After an internal struggle between the ‘pragmatic realists’ led by Secretary
of State Powell and the unipolarists led by Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the decision was eventually made to launch a general
‘war on terrorism’, and to begin it by attacking Al Queda’s home-base in Afghanistan and removing that country’s Taliban government (Mann 2004). The
unipolarists were only temporarily delayed in so far as they had achieved agreement that as soon as the Afghanistan war was under way, the United States
would begin planning an invasion of Iraq (Clarke 2004; Fallows 2004). By November, barely one month after the invasion of
Afghanistan, Bush and Rumsfeld ordered the Department of Defense to formulate a war plan for Iraq (Woodward 2004).
Throughout 2002, as plans for the war on Iraq were being formulated, the Bush administration made a number of formal pronouncements that demonstrated that
the goals of the unipolarists were now the official goals of the US government. In the 29 January State of the Union address, Bush honed the focus of
the ‘war on terrorism’ by associating terrorism with specific rogue states, such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea (the ‘axis of evil’),
who were presented as legitimate targets for military action (Callinicos 2003). In a speech to the graduating cadets at West Point on 1 June, the President
unveiled a doctrine of preventative war—a policy that many judged as ‘the most open statement yet made of imperial
globalization’ (Falk 2004: 189), soon to be followed by the new National Security Strategy. This document not only claimed the right to
wage preventative war as previously discussed, it also claimed that the United States would use its military power to
spread ‘democracy’ and American-style laissez-faire capitalism around the world as the ‘single sustainable model for
national success’ (Callinicos 2003: 29). As Roy (2004: 56) notes: ‘Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.’ In the
campaign to build public support for the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration skilfully exploited the political opportunities
provided by the fear and anger over the 9/11 attacks. By linking Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the wider war on
terrorism, the government was able to establish the idea that security required the ability to attack any nation
believed to be supporting terror, no mater how weak the evidence. This strategy obscured the more specific
geopolitical and economic goals of creating a neoconservative Pax Americana behind the smokescreen of fighting
terrorism. In Falk’s (2004: 195) words: ‘the Iraq debate was colored by the dogs that didn’t bark: oil, geopolitical goals in the
region and beyond, and the security of Israel.’
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
19
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Impacts- Economic Oppression
U.S. military power is used to exploit local economies
Rowe, Humanities Associates' Professor of the Humanities, English, and the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern
California, 2004 (John Carlos, “Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization,” American Literary History, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2004, (Article), pp 580581, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v016/16.4rowe.pdf) KM
But there is
an important relationship between the emergence of US military power, along with the complementary
threats of inequitable and repressive policies toward peoples (especially but not exclusively non-US citizens) at home and abroad, and the
capitalization of “cultural exports” ranging from Hollywood entertainment and television programming to digital technologies and their protocols for communication
and work. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s theory of “free-trade imperialism” is now half a century old and was formulated long
before the postmodern economy came to dominate global relations by restructuring other forms of economic production and trade (especially devastating for the
“industrialized” developing nations, now cast in the shadow of new, privileged forms of capitalization) (1–25). The thesis of free-trade imperialism still explains
a good deal about how traditional imperial military power should emerge with such prominence and frequency as a
“foreign policy” at the very moment when globalization seems the nearly inevitable consequence of US economic
triumphalism. Contemporary critics of US foreign policy like Johnson have also recognized that “free trade” is often used as a
rationalization for the conduct of multinational corporations and for the US government’s development of “client
states,” like Israel and, until recently, South Korea (Johnson 31).Gallagher and Robinson refute traditional theories that imperialism— their principal example
was British imperialism in Africa— proceeded historically from military conquest to consolidation of economic development. Gallagher and Robinson
argue that “freetrade” policies generally preceded historically the militarization of colonies and that such military force
was required only by the failure to negotiate trade agreements between metropolitan and colonial centers. Military
force is thus held in reserve, not out of humane considerations but primarily for reasons of practicality and economy,
while the imperial power promotes trade agreements—either for raw materials or finished products—with the
appearance of favorable and equitable terms to colonizer and colonized. It is only when this illusion of “free trade” is
shattered that military force is required to reimpose imperial “order”; then the appearance of free trade can be
resumed, under whose guise what in fact usually occurs is demonstrably inequitable exploitation of natural or human
resources of the colony. As Gallagher and Robinson write, “The usual summing up of the policy of the free trade empire as ‘trade, not rule’ should read
‘trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary’” (qtd. in Rowe, Literary Culture 132).
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
20
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Impacts- Dehumanization
Imperialism is the root cause of dehumanization
Jeff D. BassVolume 13, Number 2, Summer 2010 E-ISSN: 1534-5238 Print ISSN: 1094-8392 DOI: 10.1353/rap.0.0150
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rhetoric_and_public_affairs/v013/13.2.bass.html
The idea of alterity and its use in imperial discourses of power has long been a focus of postcolonial critique. In common
usage, the term "alterity" denotes a "state of being other or different" in the Sartreian sense of the self constructing its own identity in relation to "the construction
of its others."1 To this original meaning, the practice of postcolonial critique appends an additional understanding of alterity as a "form of 'epistemic violence,' a
violence against the other produced by the inevitably dominatory systems of knowledge which constitute that figure of the other."2
This idea of alterity as the racialized construction of the colonized other is largely attributed to Edward Said's discussion of its function as
a form of Western power in Orientalism.3 However, the idea is of older vintage, as evidenced by Frantz Fanon's impassioned declaration that the
"colonized world is a world divided in two"4 between the virtuous and civilized European and the native as a
"corrosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a corrupting element, distorting everything which involves
aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces."5
Such images enabled colonial oppressors to exploit racial difference in the manner noted by Homi Bhaba:
The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of
racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction. Despite the play of power
within colonial discourse and the shifting positionalities of its subjects (for example, effects of class, gender, ideology, different social formations, varied systems
of colonization and so on), I am referring to a
form of governmentality that in marking out a "subject nation," appropriates, directs
and dominates its various spheres of activity.By the same token, racially based constructions of non-Europeans as others creates
the imperial sense of self. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note: In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized
other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate…. Precisely because the difference of the
Other is absolute, it can be inverted in a second [End Page 282] moment as the foundation of the Self. In other words, the evil, barbarity, and licentiousness of
the colonized Other are what make possible the goodness, civility, and propriety of the European Self. What first appears strange, foreign, and distant thus turns
out to be very close and intimate.7 According to Robert J. C. Young, at the most basic level, "a structure that can be called imperialism" entails "an empire that
[is] bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre, and which [is] developed for ideological [End Page 284] as well as financial reasons." In a
political sense, imperialism
is "a policy of state, driven by the grandiose projects of power" in the form of an ideology
"concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power."15 This ideology, even in its most benevolent
pronouncements, is based upon a belief in the racial difference between colonizer and colonized: "The idea of
imperialism, and the notion of a civilizing mission, presupposed racial superiority, for the fundamental difference
between civilization and savagery that justified and required the civilizing mission assumed a basic differentiation
between white and non-white races."16 The ideology of modern imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries borrowed heavily from (and was arguably a direct outgrowth of) certain key tenets of classic political liberalism. According to
Uday Singh Mehta, the liberal article of faith most commonly pressed into the service of empire was the teleology of progress, the conviction that life "is ascent,
and it has as its opposite any form of stasis."17 Only those nations that continued to progress toward the fulfillment of their potential were acting in an
authentically human manner. From this perspective, imperialism was liberalism writ large. Empire was an "impulse to better the world"18 by developing its
"static" regions both materially and spiritually.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
21
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Impacts-Poverty/Disease
US imperialism and the Iraqi War have devastated the Iraqi people
James Cogan 30 June 2009, VP Global Supply Chain & Operations Planning at Suntron Corporation Consultant at Sanmina VP & GM San Jose, CA
Facility at Pemstar Corp. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/pers-j30.shtml MZ
It is fitting that today’s deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s cities coincides with a meeting in Baghdad
to auction off some of the country’s largest oil fields to companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and British
Petroleum. It is a reminder of the real motives for the 2003 invasion and in whose interests over one million Iraqis and
4,634 American and other Western troops have been killed. The Iraq war was, and continues to be, an imperialist war
waged by the American ruling elite for control of oil and geo-strategic advantage. The contracts will facilitate the first large-scale
exploitation of Iraq’s energy resources by US and other transnationals since the country’s oil industry was nationalised in 1972. On offer are 20-year rights over
six fields that hold more than five billion barrels of easily and cheaply extractable oil. In the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where foreign companies
are already operating, the Norwegian firm DNO is now producing so-called “sweet oil” from a relatively small field at Tawke, at a cost of less than $2 a barrel. In
an apt analogy, Larry Goldstein of the US-based Energy Policy Research Foundation told the New York Times last week: “Asking why oil companies are
interested in Iraq is like asking why robbers rob banks—because that’s where the money is.” Iraq’s total oil reserves are estimated to be at least 115 billion
barrels. Its reserves of natural gas are at least 3.36 billion cubic metres. Millions of people around the world understood in 2003 that the claims of the Bush
administration and its international allies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism were threadbare lies promulgated to justify the plunder of
the country’s oil wealth. The claim by the Obama White House that it is continuing the occupation to consolidate “Iraqi democracy” is also a lie. The war was
driven by the decline of US global power and growing class tensions within the United States itself. The
American capitalist elite believed that
military domination in the Persian Gulf would give them access to lucrative resources, as well as a powerful lever
against their main European and Asian rivals, who depend upon the region for critical supplies of energy. The militarist
agitation surrounding the war was used to smother public disquiet and divert discontent away from the economic inequality that wracks American society.It has
taken more than six years of carnage—far longer than any pro-war analyst would have predicted—to establish the conditions where major corporations feel
sufficiently confident to begin making substantial investments in Iraq’s oil industry. Iraqi resistance to the US invasion had first to be drowned in blood and the
population reduced to a state of terror and insecurity. The war has produced a litany of crimes, from the torture policy at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, to the
destruction of cities such as Fallujah and the attack on densely populated suburbs like Sadr City; to the unleashing of Shiite death squads to depopulate the
centres of Sunni resistance in Baghdad. The
country has been economically ruined. Unemployment and underemployment
stand at between 30 and 50 percent. At least seven million people live on less than $2 a day, and malnutrition and
disease are rampant. The Shiite fundamentalist-dominated Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki presides over the misery of the population
in exchange for US backing. It now has a bloated US-equipped military and police apparatus of over 630,000 armed men.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
22
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Impacts- Destruction of Iraq
US imperialism literally destroyed the infrastructure and values of Iraqi society
James Petras / August 21st, 2009 Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, SUNY, New York, U.S., and adjunct professor at
Saint Mary's University, issues.http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/the-us-war-against-iraq/
The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in
the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial
occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a
sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the
growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA
and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the
former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and
promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the
secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the
rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It
originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the
stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians. The result
of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of
internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated .
The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new
mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and
functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under
the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected
of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an
independent secular republic. The
Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues
with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as
the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their
imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the
un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests,
the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of
the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and
massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack
against Iran. The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia
believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total
control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed
on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to
permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and
contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society
movements. The
US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia
gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known
result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual
destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals,
academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic
development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation
was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and
movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’
in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching
platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).The sustained bloody purge of
Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion
and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial
strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and
encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics
and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified,
advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional
loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking
ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among
diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers,
lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation.
To establish long-term dominance and
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
23
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
(Petros Continues)
sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent
secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the
libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories,
schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class
of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal
and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads
engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the
least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
24
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Imperialism Impacts
U.S. Imperialism is unsustainable- causes asymmetrical warfare and global war
Foster 2003 (John Bellamy,editor of the monthly review) Monthly Review, July/August, “The new age of imperialism”)
This new age of U.S. imperialism will generate its own contradictions, amongst them attempts by other major
powers to assert their influence, resorting to similar belligerent means, and all sorts of strategies by weaker
states and non-state actors to engage in "asymmetric" forms of warfare. Given the unprecedented
destructiveness of contemporary weapons, which are diffused ever more widely, the consequences for the
population of the world could well be devastating beyond anything ever before witnessed. Rather than
generating a new "Pax Americana" the United States may be paving the way to new global holocausts.
The greatest hope in these dire circumstances lies in a rising tide of revolt from below, both in the United States and
globally. The growth of the antiglobalization movement, which dominated the world stage for nearly two years following the events in Seattle in November
1999, was succeeded in February 2003 by the largest global wave of antiwar protests in human history. Never before has the world's population risen up so
quickly and in such massive numbers in the attempt to stop an imperialist war. The new age of imperialism is also a new age of revolt. The Vietnam Syndrome,
which has so worried the strategic planners of the imperial order for decades, now seems not only to have left a deep legacy within the United States but also to
have been coupled this time around with an Empire Syndrome on a much more global scale-something that no one really expected. This more than anything else
makes it clear that the strategy of the American ruling class to expand the
will prove to be its own-we hope not the world's-undoing.
American Empire cannot possibly succeed in the long run, and
U.S Imperialism causes wars, violence and the loss of civil rights
Bandow 2006 (Doug, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute “A Foreign Policy of Fools,” http://www.antiwar.com/bandow/?articleid=8954 Accessed: July 01
5 – 19 – 06)
Today, however, this
policy of global empire is madness. It is dangerous and foolish. It is inexcusable and unforgivable.
The costs of America’s policy of empire have become obvious to everyone except those charged with selling and implementing it. The
most obvious is cash. Military spending is the price of one’s foreign policy.
And the bill is high: Next year
America will officially devote some $440 billion to the military. Toss in the costs of the Iraq
war (routinely funded by “supplemental” appropriations), nuclear programs installed in the Energy Department, health care provided by the Department of
Veterans Affairs, and aid payments to various foreign clients and dependents, and the total climbs inexorably past the half-trillion mark.
The policy of promiscuous interference and intervention makes war, at least war with America, more likely. If China attacks
Taiwan, if Russia battles a former dependent, if Middle Eastern neighbors tangle, Washington promises to be there.
Threatening war with America might discourage the parties from risking a fight, but if conflict comes the U.S. will be in
the middle.Moreover, America makes often ancient quarrels harder to solve by encouraging friendly parties to be more
recalcitrant. After all, Washington always inserts itself as an ally of one of the parties, never as a disinterested observer. And why deal if you have
a superpower at your side?Although America would be unlikely to lose any such war, the consequences nevertheless would be
horrendous. And as 9/11 demonstrated, the U.S. homeland no longer is sacrosanct. Americans once presumed that they could
bomb without consequence. In the cases of Serbia, Iraq, Haiti, Panama, Somalia, Grenada, North Korea, Iraq again, Vietnam – and even Germany and Japan
(other than Pearl Harbor, the Aleutians, and a few balloon bombs) – the U.S. did the bombing. Other nations got bombed. Such a world made empire seemingly
easy, if not cheap.But no longer. Which is
what makes the prospect of an Iranian bomb so frightening. Not that even the
mullahs are stupid, crazy, or addled enough to believe they could attack America without being destroyed. They
could pass off their technology to groups more than willing to marry terrorism with WMD, however, groups that are angry
enough to use such weapons because of U.S. policy.
For despite the nonsense emanating from President George W. Bush, his neocon acolytes, and what passes for Democratic foreign policy experts, terrorists
seek to kill because they believe that America is at war with them. They didn’t fell the World Trade Center because they disliked the Bill of Rights, attack the
Pentagon because they detested Disneyland, or plot the destruction of the Capitol because they abhorred free elections in America. Rather, they
sent the
simple message: you want to be an empire? You’ll pay the price for attempting to enforce your edicts on the rest of
us.Finally, and perhaps most ironically, attempting to be a democratic empire ensures that we will be less democratic – or certainly
less free, to be more accurate – at home. The Bush administration’s nomination as CIA head of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former director of the National
Security Agency and responsible for the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless spying program, is emblematic.
Empire abroad can be sustained only by empire at home. The national security state must grow, individual liberties
must diminish. We spy on you, search your bodies and cars, restrict what the media can tell you, and, of course,
mislead you and lie to you. But it’s in the cause of making the world democratic, so don’t worry, be happy.
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
25
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Solvency
We must critically examine western imperialism and the binaries it creates
Rowe, Humanities Associates' Professor of the Humanities, English, and the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern
California, 2004 (John Carlos, “Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization,” American Literary History, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2004, (Article), pp 593,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v016/16.4rowe.pdf) KM
General William Westmoreland, would disagree that the Vietnam War marked a historic moment in which the US needed to change its foreign and domestic
policies, its ties between government and corporation, its neglect of public opinion, and the changing political economies affecting these historical crises. If we
are to learn the lesson of the Vietnam era, then we must learn to recognize, rather than repress, the complex, intertwined histories
of Islam, its influence on the development of US and other Western societies, and our dependence on the economic
means the US has provided to “modernize” and thus “Westernize,” often at its own peril, the world. Before we can even
begin to learn this lesson, however, we will have to read critically that other narrative of Western historicity Asad has so cogently interpreted as dependent on a
constant “assumption”: “To make history, the agent must create the future, remake herself, and help others to do so, where
the criteria of successful remaking are seen to be universal. Old universes must be subverted and a new universe
created. To that extent, history can be made only on the back of a universal teleology. Actions seeking to maintain the ‘local’ status quo, or to follow local
models of social life, do not qualify as history making. From the Cargo Cults of Melanesia to the Islamic Revolution in Iran, they merely attempt (hopelessly) ‘to
resist the future’ or ‘to turn back the clock of history’” (Asad 19). It is time for us to think differently about how history is and has been
made, to count the local as well as the global, and to develop new institutions, not simply interpretive methods, to
negotiate the inevitable conflicts of such histories. Without such critical knowledge, there is likely to be unending
terror from all sides in a new era of global warfare only one stage of which is being enacted in the US occupation of
Iraq.
Retaining Critical awareness of the ideas and effects of Imperialism are key to ending
the cycle it constructs
Elteren 03 (Mel van, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, SAIS Review vol. XXIII no. 2 Summer–Fall 2003, “U.S.
Cultural Imperialism Today: Only a Chimera?” JR)
The notion of “traveling cultures” has a particularly powerful impact on current approaches to the global influence of
U.S. culture.7 The “traveling cultures” idea focuses on how cultural languages travel to new areas and are appropriated by
people of other cultures to tell their own story, a process that transcends stable, unified national cultures. This
approach looks almost exclusively at the receiving end of these encounters, and as a result tends to overemphasize
the active appropriation of cultural forms and to neglect cultural imposition through behavioral and structural forms of
power. The first dimension corresponds with the sociological concept of agency, the second with the concept of structure that refers to all kinds of social
constraints on human behavior.8 Although intercultural contact zones are “inherently dialogical,”9 this does not mean that the exchanges always take place on a
level playing field. A more complete transcultural perspective should also encompass the study of the economic, technological, political, and social structures of
such exchanges that tend to “force” them into certain forms and “steer” them toward certain results. We
must maintain a critical awareness of
the transnational movements of people, capital, and commodities and the conditions of inequity, disempowerment,
and exploitation that drive these movements. Acknowledging that the dynamics of “imperialism” have become more
complex and internally contradictory in the latter part of the twentieth century does not mean that we should abandon
the exploration of underlying power differences and forms of inequality. A second flaw in the “traveling cultures”
theory of cultural globalization is its neglect of the nation-state. Despite the growing importance of transnational
corporations and other nongovernmental organizations, the state has not declined to the extent assumed by
proponents of transculturation. Instead, states are undergoing a transformation: transnational forces are reshaping
their institutions and policies toward the intensified adoption of neoliberal concepts and practices.10
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
26
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Solvency
US imperialism can be resisted by immediately withdrawing of all US troops from Iraq
Joanne Landy, 2008 co-director of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and a member of the New Politics editorial board.
http://ww3.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue39/Landy39.htm
THE PEACE MOVEMENT SHOULD call
for the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and the closing
of all military bases there: no temporizing, no negotiations, no timetables -- just bring the troops home, now. Peace
activists should say to the American people that the occupation is part and parcel of an imperial U.S. foreign policy that shores up
undemocratic regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, gives one-sided support to Israel against the Palestinians, and promotes unjust,
inequitable economic policies throughout the world. Not only in Iraq, but throughout the Middle East and globally, U.S. foreign and
military policy either directly or indirectly subverts freedom and democracy. The true interests of the American people
are not served by this policy. Some who opposed the war argue now that the United States can't just "cut and run." In response to such arguments, the
peace movement can point out that inside Iraq the occupation has caused terrible suffering, including an estimated 100,000
civilian deaths, massive unemployment, corruption and imposed privatization, horrific torture, a continuing
infrastructure disaster, and brutal destruction in Fallujah and elsewhere. Moreover, the U.S. military and political
presence has not strengthened secular and democratic elements in Iraq; to the contrary, it has served to undermine
them. And far from effectively combating terror, U.S. actions in Iraq have only served to recruit more terrorists both
inside the country and globally. The Iraqi people have the right to resist the U.S. occupation, and they should have our support; at the same time the peace
movement should give no support to the victory of those elements of the resistance, whether Baathist or theocratic fundamentalist, that are organized to impose an extreme
authoritarian regime on the Iraqi people. Such elements, if they came to power, would not open up the road to democracy, social justice or social progress for the people of
Iraq: they would simply substitute systematic and brutal domestic repression for U.S. rule. A foretaste of this repression was glimpsed in the terrible March 15, 2005 events
in Basra, Iraq, where, as the Washington Post reported, "Celia Garabet thought students were roughhousing. Sinan Saeed was sure a fight had erupted. Within a few
minutes, on a sunny day at a riverside park, they realized something different was afoot. A group of Shiite Muslim militiamen with rifles, pistols, thick wire cables and sticks
had charged into crowds of hundreds at a college picnic. They fired shots, beat students, and hauled some of them away in pickup trucks. The transgressions: men dancing
and singing, music playing and couples mixing. . . . ‘They focused on the women,' said Saeed's friend, Osama Adnan. ‘They were beating them viciously.'" (Anthony Shadid,
"Picnic Is No Party In the New Basra: Uproar Over Armed Attack on Student Event Redraws Debate on Islam's Role and Reach," Washington Post Foreign Service,
3/29/05) This is not to say that one should only support "ideal" democratic resistance forces: the victory of even undemocratic forces against imperialism can still serve to
open up pathways toward future democratic and radical struggles. However, there is a threshold of authoritarianism and historical momentum beyond which this is not the
case: for example, the victory of resistance forces controlled by fascists, Pol Pot, Taliban-like fundamentalists, Stalinists, or unreconstructed Baathists intercepts the normal
liberatory dynamic of national movements against imperialism.*\ In Iraq, then, the character of the different elements of the resistance matters. Those who say that Western
peace activists should support anyone and everyone in the Iraqi resistance, no matter how capable of and committed to imposing hyperauthoritarian rule they may be
("Anybody But the U.S.") are giving misadvice. This is not a question of the peace movement seeking respectability by pandering to the prejudices of the American people.
People in the U.S. are quite rightly horrified by repression and authoritarianism. If we peace activists ever hope to disentangle that horror from the support for imperialism
with which it has become entwined, we need to make clear our own deep commitment to democracy and freedom. Those of us who advocate immediate withdrawal of the
United States and its dwindling number of allies from Iraq make a mistake, however, if we try to assure people that withdrawal will necessarily produce a positive outcome.
It may be that the grotesque polarization fostered by the U.S. war and occupation has already succeeded in legitimizing and strengthening reactionary elements in the
resistance to the point where they will be able to impose their retrograde agenda on the Iraqi people. But one thing is for sure: the longer the U.S. stays in Iraq the less likely
a democratic, secular outcome for Iraq becomes. The
only hope for democrats in Iraq is a speedy end to the brutal occupation of the
country. And the only hope for democrats internationally is to break out of the terrible symbiotic relationship between the
U.S. empire and the reactionary forces that feed off of its brutality, by opposing both of them.
America must resist being the master military enforcer
Rule 2010 (James B, Of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley) “The Military State of America and the
Democratic Left” Dissent. Volume 57, Number 1, Winter 2010. MUSE. DJ
America has to get over the fantastical fixation on its status as the world's master military enforcer, both the
obsession with maintaining that status and the frightening conviction of moral superiority that seems to go along with
it. Most dangerous of all is the view of America as some sort of avenging angel of global righteousness, such that
American failure to rain down military destruction on retrograde regimes becomes tantamount to supporting them.
Such logic can never be applied systematically. There are just too many unappealing regimes and movements
around the world for them all to be targeted. But the availability of that idea in the language of American politics
enables whoever holds sway in Washington to demonize any regime that gets in America's way as the Evil du jour,
hence a legitimate target for made-in-America mayhem. And it appears, alas, that there will always be intellectuals
ready to supply high-minded rationales for such efforts. Such justifications must never come from the democratic Left.
Above all,
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
27
SCFI 2010
Iraq K aff
Albert Qaeda
___ of ___
Don’t trust their authors
Mainstream Journalists and Conservative think tanks have sided with the Imperialist
Regime, be skeptical of their evidence
Elteren 03 (Mel van, Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, SAIS Review vol. XXIII no. 2 Summer–Fall 2003, “U.S.
Cultural Imperialism Today: Only a Chimera?” JR)
The concept of “cultural imperialism” has generally been discredited. Today, it is primarily European intellectuals and politicians warning against the purported
threat of the “Americanization” of some part of European culture who employ the term. The French have been leading critics in this regard for a long time.1 The
latest large-scale manifestation of opposition to U.S. cultural imperialism occurred ten years ago, during the fierce debates
over an exemption clause for “cultural works” in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations of 1993. More recently, members of the
so-called anti-globalization movement have expressed similar concerns about the United States’s cultural impact
abroad, focusing on U.S.-based transnational corporations, but they usually do not speak explicitly of “U.S. cultural
imperialism.”Intriguingly, interest in cultural imperialism has surfaced in quite a different way lately. Some influential U.S. journalists and 170 SAIS
Review SUMMER–FALL 2003 international relations experts affiliated with neoconservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise
Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Heritage Foundation have suggested that U.S. imperialism benefits the rest of the world.
Rather than the rebuke originally implied by the term “imperialism,” they imbue it with higher moral authority, boldly
calling for a “new, proud, American imperialism.”2 These new proponents of empire advocate a national moral
renaissance and a self-conscious, interventionist role for the United States abroad based on a belief in the country’s
unique mission to spread freedom and democracy around the world, refurbishing a long-standing tradition of U.S.
missionary universalism. The notion of empire is gaining a degree of mainstream acceptability because these rightwing unilateralists (concentratedaround the Project for the New American Century, founded in 1997) have recently been joined by relative
moderates, like human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff, who also see the exercise of unbridled U.S. power as the best hope for
building a more stable world.3
Carol’s glock outweighs Turkey Prolif.
28