OCCUPATION  (CONT)

One soldier told a story about seeing a four-year-old boy playing in the sand in his front yard during a curfew in Rafah. The soldier says his officer "grabbed the boy. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock…the next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing."

A few hours with the works of Goya will give one an idea of how the French army behaved in Spain.

An occupation is not a war against an army, it is a war against all. There are no front lines and no distinguishing uniforms, only an ambush or a roadside bomb that strikes without warning.

And when one does, a veteran told Hedges, "people just open up." A roadside bomb in 2005 set off a massacre by U.S. Marines in Haditha that killed 24 civilians. On March 4, 2007, following a suicide bomb, Marines in Afghanistan went on a rampage that killed 12 civilians. Occupation is only possible if the occupied are reduced to a category that places them outside the boundaries of a shared humanity So the Iraqis becomes "Hajji," just as two generations ago the Vietnamese became "Slopes." The Israeli right routinely refers to the Palestinians as "cockroaches."

Soon, everyone becomes an enemy.

When U.S. helicopter gun ships killed 16 people October 23 in a small northern Iraqi village near Tikrit, military officials said the dead were insurgents, because many of them were "military-age males," a category that embraces about one-third of the population.
Not many "hearts and minds" were won this past October near Tikrit.

But "winning over the population," continues to be the illusion of every occupier. Testifying before Congress, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure, and promoting good government."

And then there is the real world.

A survey conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army Medical Command found that only 38% of Marines and 47% of Army soldiers thought civilians should be treated with dignity. Some 45% Army solders and 60% said they would report the killing of innocent civilians.

A recent ABC/BBC poll found that 78% of Iraqis say things are going badly for the country as a whole, 47% support immediate U.S. troop withdrawal while 79% oppose the presence of coalition forces, and 57% support violence against coalition forces.

Those are the "algebraical factors" of occupation, and as Lawrence concludes, "against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

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