The Bridge Over the Euphrates
by Doctress Neutopia
March 2006
The Monday Night Film/Lecture Series at the University of Arizona showed two films: Caught in the Crossfire-Documentary Film on Fallujah and a Frontline documentary on Halliburton.
Part of the documentary on Halliburton told the story of the four private military contractors who were working with the US military to protect trucks and other personnel as they moved around war-torn Iraq . Frontline focused on Scott Helvenston who was a Navy seal. After getting out of the military, he was unable to find a way to support his wife and two children with an exercise video company he started. To move beyond his financial problems, he signed up to work for two months with Blackwater, a private military corporation working in Iraq.
Scott's mother was interviewed on the film saying that after he got out of the Seals, there wasn't much opportunity for him to find a job. He had been trained to kill and there were not many jobs for that in the United States . Desperate for cash, he went to work for Blackwater. The company had a new contract with a catering company called ESS.
Helvenston was assigned to be part of the team to escort catering trucks for pick ups. Team members were uneasy because they had never worked as a team before the assignment and they were undermanned. Blackwater was under contract to supply two SUVs with three guards in each vehicle. But instead, each vehicle started its mission of sending three empty trucks to pick up kitchen equipment with two men in the SUVs missing the rear gunner. Katy Helvenson explained, "They were sent into an area none of them had been to. They took out their rear gunners. They didn't have their armored vehicle, didn't have a map, nothing."
In downtown Fallujah their SUV caravan was ambushed from the back. The four security guards were killed, their bodies mutilated and burned in the SUVs, and then their dismembered remains were hung from bridge over the Euphrates River . A crowd of around 1,000 people were present. The insurgents videotaped the event and it was broadcast around the world.
Marine Colonel John Toolan was the commander in charge of troops in Fallujah. For days after the deaths of the four private military contractors, he was ordered to "invade the city and find the killers" in an operation call "Operation Phantom Fury." It the military's major anti-insurgent sweeps to stop the motivated and resourceful resistance force. The film Crossfire shows the aftermath of this invasion.
According to US reports "more than half of Fallujah's 39,000 homes were damaged, and about 10,000 of those were destroyed." Local doctors reported that 600 people were killed and 200,000 became homeless refugees. Gen. Sanchez said civilian casualties were "absolutely regrettable," but were a fact on a "battlefield of this nature in an urban environment." Hospitals and ambulances and well as journals were targets of US forces during the siege. One report was that US forces killed a family of five as they were trying to escape the shooting by swimming across the Euphrates River . Fallujah was the American military's way of squashing the resistance and a way to punish those who dared to question American authority.
This past summer I was fortune to have traveled to Eastern Europe with tour group. Our first stop was Warsaw. Our tour guide took us to a historical museum in the Old Town square of Warsaw . The museum's director explained to us that the Old Town wasn't really old. It was completely rebuilt after World War II in the same way it was before the war. We were then lead into a theater where we saw a short film about the same length of the film we saw on the rubble of Fallujah, but this film was on the ruins of Warsaw. The reason the Nazis destroyed the city was in retaliation for the Polish uprising.
Warsaw was destroyed by the Nazis for the same reason the Americans gave for bombing of Fallujah. In the Old Town , there is a monument to the Polish resistance, the men and women who lived in the sewers of Warsaw who were resisting the Nazis for their independence. From Warsaw to Fallujah, the time has changed, but it is the same terrify story being told.
Listening to Polish history and then traveling to the death camp of Auschwitz later in the tour, one wonders how the Nazi's could have come to power and been able to set up camps with the purpose of annihilating millions of people. Americans didn't save the world from the Nazis; they became the Nazis. Or maybe they were the original Nazis. After all, Hilter learned his genocidal policies from looking at genocide of the Native Americans carried out by the United States government. The quest of the Third Reich of global domination has happened, only it wasn't the Nazis that became the ruling nation-state, it was the American Empire. In Bill Van Auken's article "America on a Killing Spree," he asks, " For all but the most facile "bad Hitler" theorists, the question arose: what were the deep contradictions within German society that gave rise to the murderous fury that Nazism unleashed against Europe?" It is time now to ask this same question about Americans, "What are the deep contradictions within American society that gave rise to the murderous fury that America unleashed against Iraq ?
Scott Helvenson life story of why he went to Iraq to work for Blackwater is revealing because he was a man who couldn't make his dream come true in America . So, because he couldn't succeed with his video exercise company, he resorted to working for a mercenary army. It wasn't something that he wanted to do. Like most people in America , he was trapped in an economic system that doesn't allow many people to live creative and socially meaningful lives. When Americans live in an economy where most of the tax money goes into military, most Americans in one way or another are employed with something that contributes to the war-machine. So, how can they have any reverance for life working for a culture of death? He went to Iraq for money because America had become dystopia.
The only difference now between Nazis Germany and Bush's America is that in the United States there is still room to speak out and resist the fascists. But if history repeats itself, then time is running out before free spirits, independent thinkers and doers, social organizers, filmmakers, artists, and concern citizens will be penned up and executed for trying to stop the brutal inhumanity of their countrymen. How much longer before Vice President Cheney turns from shooting pheasants and dusks to shooting doves?
Perhaps this pattern of history can be broken. We can evolve. The war criminals in the United States can be put on trial in the International Criminal Court and a new era of humanity can be born. Even though this is optimistic thinking, we know now that after all the bloodshed and bombs that exploded to stop the Nazis during World War Two that war didn't stop the negative and mean spirit of world conquest. Another war will not stop it because it strives on war. It makes war merchants rich. We need a global resistance movement-a lovolution-- to end all wars because the war to end all wars led us down the road to the New Nazis-the Americans-- terrorizing the world.
Falluhja was a turning point in the war in Iraq . Before the invasion, Iraqis were hopeful that Americans would make good on their promises to rebuild Iraq . But after they saw a city destroyed, its mosques and schools blown up, they knew for sure that America had no idea of how to restore a culture.
When I look at myself in the mirror, I don't like seeing an American. I don't want any part of this monstrous country. The only way I can cope with living in the New Third Reich is to think of myself as a universal human being, a Gaian sapien, a world liberatrix. According to Genesis, 2:14, the Euphrates River was one of the four rivers that flow from the Garden of Eden. The translation of the word Euphrates is "gush forth or break forth." Maybe the breaking forth is actually the breaking forth of a new consciousness, one that the world's great spiritual prophecies have been foretelling, the Golden Age of love, an age where we have the courage to conquer our inner demons so that we can begin to build a global culture of Lovolution. When the angels speak to me, this is the vision they whisper. They say that it isn't the battle of Armageddon that finally puts an end to history; it's the spirit of Lovolution that changes our perception on what it means to be human. Only in that spirit will we know how to rebuild Baghdad, Fallujah and New Orleans.
Eutopia or Oblivion?