Friends and comrades from around the world:
I cannot thank you enough for all the love on this special day. However, I would like to bring your attention to another, decidedly less joyeous, anniversary. Today marks the 10 year anniversary of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. I do not reflect on this other, darker significance out of personal amusement; the imperative to remember, reflect, and resist is innate to my being, and alas President Bush did not consult me before deciding to make the anniversary of my birth a day of infamy. A warning: this is not a moderate or objective account of what has transpired, for as Arundhati Roy suggested, to embrace the facade of reasonableness and seeming “objectivity” in the face of savage injustice is in itself a symptom of the loss of human feeling (http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/18/arundhati_roy_on_iraq_wars_10th)

Beginning 10 years ago today, the US destroyed the nation of Iraq for the third time in three decades. I will not waste my time deconstructing the pathetic lies and mystifications concocted by the government and unquestionably broadcast by the corporate media: WMDs, “democracy”, “women’s rights”. Oil, Power, and Empire: the maimed, tortured, and murdered, whether foreigner or Iraqi, gave their blood in order to baptize a new Middle East more hospitable to US geopolitical interests.

And the blood forms canals out of streets:190,000 killed, including at least 112,000 Iraqi civilians and 4488 US soldiers. These are gross underestimates: true Iraqi civilian casualties may be anywhere between 300,000 and 1 million. This orgy of death and destruction followed on the heels of the first US invasion and the subsequent decade of US-imposed sanctions, which reportedly resulted in the death of half a million Iraqi children, a price Secretary of State Albright apparently thought was “worth it”. Of course, this was hardly the first instance of US involvement in Iraq: two decades after assisting Saddam Hussein in coming to power (the CIA provided the list of leftist dissidents to be murdered by the new regime), Reagan administration supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons to war with Iran in an ensuing bloodbath that lasted 8 years.

In short, the US government and its leaders savagely decimated Iraq and bear total responsibility for the barbaric carnage they have wrought: the US is legally and ethically bound to decades of reparations and its leaders, from Cheney and Bush I to Clinton and Albright to Cheney and Bush “the lesser”, must stand trial for their crimes.

On a personal note, I have always felt intimately connected to Iraq, its people, and this criminal atrocity euphemistically termed a “war”. Politicized by my sixth grade study of the Vietnam War (another genocide concealed under the reciprocal title of “war”), solidarity with the Iraqi people in opposition to US occupation became my first political cause. In fact, six years ago today, on my 15th birthday, I attended my first protest march, in D.C., against the US occupation, then in its fourth year. The following year, on my 16th birthday, I returned to express my repudiation of that criminal occupation. At that time, Norman Koerner, my father and political mentor, would not let me engage in direct action. I suppose I would have to wait several years for that, until my journey to Palestine as part of my solidary commitment to the Palestinian people in their struggle for justice and equality.

In conclusion, WE WILL NOT BE SILENT: JUSTICE FOR THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ