Page 119 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

Railing Iraqi Resistance 109

purification plants, "the United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly
children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway." The documents describe in
great detail the predicted effects of the bombing on Iraq's water quality, and the
anticipated increase in "incidences, if not epidemics of disease" such as "chol-
era, hepatitis, and typhoid." Nagy's attempt to counter the "humanitarian frame"
created in the American mass media is perhaps most evident when he states:

As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capac-
ity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the conse-
quences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mor-
tality. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for
Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent
Iraqis. The Geneva Convention is absolutely clear. In a 1979 protocol relating
to the "protection of victims of international armed conflicts," Article fifty-
four, it states: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless ob-
jects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs,
crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works,
for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civil-
ian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to
starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."45

Resistance or Insurgency in Iraq?

Shortly after the end of the Iraq invasion, the U.S. government and the media
began referring to growing resistance against the U.S. as an "insurgency." Just
as it did in the Vietnam War era, the word carries with it negative implications
for anti-occupation fighters. An "insurgency" has traditionally been defined as a
group of rebels who revolt against a civil authority or already-existing govem-
ment, usually a national government. In this sense, the Iraqi "insurgency" is
considered to be rebelling against the Iraqi government and the U.S. occupying
forces. The use of the word insurgency to describe the rebellion goes back to
well before the 2005 election and before the alleged handover of sovereignty in
June of 2004, as the term was used to describe those attacking the occupation
forces during and before the period of the interim Iraqi government. Throughout
this work I refer to Iraqi guerillas primarily as "resistance" groups, because the
term does not carry with it the conditioned negative implications that come
along with the term "insurgency." Honest and open intellectual discussion and
analysis of the motives of Iraq's resistance forces (and their legitimacy, or lack
there of) require the shedding of loaded terms like "insurgency," in favor of
more accurate descriptions. In this sense, the resistance classification seems
more appropriate in that it more accurately describes the motives of those in-
volved in attacks on the U.S.
In its descriptions of the Iraq war, the establishment press has laid out a few
overarching characteristics intended to define the nature of Iraqi resistance. The
standard practice within mass media is to discount resistance groups as Saddam
loyalists, "Shia extremists," "terrorists" and "foreign Jihadists."