Ross Caputi published this piece in the guardian.co.uk, on Thursday Dec. 22:
“It has been 7 years since the end of the second siege of Fallujah – the US assault that left the city in ruins, killed thousands of civilians, and displaced hundreds of thousands more; the assault that poisoned a generation, plaguing the people who live there with cancers and their children with birth defects.
It has been 7 years and the lies that justified the assault still perpetuate false beliefs about what we did.
The US veterans who fought there still do not understand who they fought against, or what they were fighting for.
I know, because I am one of those American veterans.
In the eyes of many of the people I “served” with, (they want to believe) that the people of Fallujah are terrorists, and not fighters resisting for their survival. But unlike most of my counterparts, I understand that I was the aggressor, and that the resistance fighters in Fallujah were defending their city.
It is also the 7th anniversary of the deaths of two close friends of mine, Travis Desiato and Bradley Faircloth, who were killed in the siege. Their deaths were not heroic or glorious. Their deaths were tragic, but not unjust.
How can I begrudge the resistance in Fallujah for killing my friends, when I know that I would have done the same thing if I were in their place? How can I blame them when we were the aggressors?
It could have been me instead of Travis or Brad. I carried a radio on my back that dropped the bombs (of the fighter jets and helicopters?) that killed civilians and reduced Fallujah to rubble.
If I were a Fallujan, I would have killed anyone like me. I would have had no choice. The fate of my city and my family would have depended on it. I would have killed the foreign invaders.
Travis and Brad are both victims and perpetrators. They were killed and they killed others because of a political agenda in which they were just pawns. They were the iron fist of American empire, and an expendable loss in the eyes of their leaders.
I do not see any contradiction in feeling sympathy for the dead US Marines and soldiers and at the same time feeling sympathy for the Fallujans who fell to their guns.
The contradiction lies in believing that we were liberators, when in fact we oppressed the freedoms and wishes of Fallujans. The contradiction lies in believing that we were heroes, when the definition of “hero” bares no relation to our actions in Fallujah.
What we did to Fallujah cannot be undone, and I see no point in attacking the people in my former unit.
What I want to attack are the lies and false beliefs. I want to destroy the prejudices that prevented us from putting ourselves in the other’s shoes and asking ourselves what we would have done if a foreign army invaded our country and laid siege to our city.
I understand the psychology that causes the aggressors to blame their victims.
I understand the justifications and defense mechanisms.
I understand the emotional urge to want to hate the people who killed someone dear to you. But to describe the psychology that preserves such false beliefs is not to ignore the objective moral truth that no attacker can ever justly blame their victims for defending themselves.
The same distorted morality has been used to justify attacks against the native Americans, the Vietnamese, El Salvadorans, and the Afghans. It is the same story over and over again.
These people have been dehumanized, their God-given right to self-defense has been delegitimized, their resistance has been re-framed as terrorism, and US soldiers have been sent to kill them.
History has preserved these lies, normalized them, and socialized them into our culture: so much so that legitimate resistance against US aggression is incomprehensible to most, and to even raise this question is seen as un-American.
History has defined the US veteran as a hero, and in doing so it has automatically defined anyone who fights against him as the bad guy. It has reversed the roles of aggressor and defender, moralized the immoral, and shaped our societies’ present understanding of war.
I cannot imagine a more necessary step towards justice than to put an end to these lies, and achieve some moral clarity on this issue.
I see no issue more important than to clearly understand the difference between aggression and self-defence, and to support legitimate struggles.
I cannot hate, blame, begrudge, or resent Fallujans for fighting back against us. I am sincerely sorry for the role I played in the second siege of Fallujah, and I hope that some day not just Fallujans but all Iraqis will win their struggle.” End of quote
Note 1: This piece was originally run on stopwar.org.uk
Note 2: From this account, it appears that the US dropped toxic and highly poisonous bombs and “depleted uranium”, internationally prohibited like burning phosphorous bombs and biological bombs, that the civilians died for days, months, and years later…
A cousin of mine in Canada was attending mass, and the Falluja story was fresh and the preacher got it all wrong about Falluja. My cousin burst out of church shouting: “Falluja! Why don’t you dare saying what really happened in Falluja? Thousands of civilians slaughtered in Falluja…”
Note 3: This update on Jan. 16, 2014: Falluja is now under siege by the Iraqi army. The city has surrendered to the extremist Islamist Da3esh faction and the Iraqi government is demanding from the tribal clans to quick out of the city these “intruders” who were actually welcomed by the city. The Iraqi army is trying to recapture its authority in the Anbar province, to close the passages for the volunteered Islamists going to fight in Syria.
Adonis Diaries 