Noam Chomsky

Washington is teaching the world a very ugly and dangerous lesson: If you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible military threat. Otherwise we will demolish you.

The invasion was brutal, some of the incidents—such as during the second attack on Fallujah in November 2004—truly shocking. Women and children were allowed to leave, but men had to remain in the city. Then came a major attack by the U.S. Marines, which was lauded in the press. I remember the first day of the attack, when the U.S. forces took over the general hospital, which is a major war crime. The soldiers threw patients on the floor, threw doctors on the floor, and tied them up. The press was euphoric; the New York Times had a picture of the general hospital, talking about how wonderful it was and blaming the attack on the “terrorists.”4 The press described how the U.S. Marines found the “packrats” in their “warrens” and killed them. Nobody knows how many people were killed, since we don’t count our atrocities. Dangerous weapons were used, including lots of depleted uranium, lots of radioactivity, which increased the rates of cancer. Studies from Iraqi doctors followed, and from Iraqi human rights groups; both showed the scale of the atrocity

In Iraq, the United States could not establish a government pliable enough to run it for them. That became a problem when the United States was forced to withdraw under Iraqi pressure in 2007. The Bush administration produced a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in November 2007, which they wanted the Iraqi government to accept. For the first time, this SOFA stated explicitly the U.S. motives for their war. Anybody with their eyes open knew it already, but this was an explicit statement. The agreement provided special privileges to U.S. corporations, meaning U.S. energy corporations, to exploit Iraqi resources. That was one point. The second was that the United States had to have permanent military bases in Iraq. These are the two essential points of the SOFA. To make sure that everyone understood that the U.S. government was not going to budge from these points, in January 2008, when the U.S. president presented the budget, he put out signing statements to say that he would ignore anything that interfered with the proposals in the SOFA agreement. This was really serious, which meant that the United States was going to insist on giving special privileges to U.S. corporations and to the existence of permanent military bases. The press cooperated by never reporting it, and commentators and scholars did not report it. It was the most important statement about the war.