Into the Arms of Those Grateful People We Liberate

By: Lisa Walsh Thomas

The movies that show scenes of beautiful young women and children throwing flowers and kisses to the liberating Yankees are a guaranteed heartwarmer.

Maybe it happened at one time, but after twenty years of watching lie after lie build the foundation for the revisionist history this country so loves, I count only on what I see with my own eyes.

In 1989, shortly after the United States illegally mined the Nicaraguan harbor (and was fined heavily by the World Court for the crime), the pundit talk here was about the possible need to liberate our citizens who were living in the Sandinista-led country that had thrown off its U.S. puppet dictator only ten years earlier.

On the minds of many was the recent "liberation" of medical students on the Island of Grenada. As a result, being in Nicaragua at the time, I watched and photographed U.S. citizens marching around the U.S. embassy in Managua carrying signs that said: "Please don't rescue us!" Were it not for the long arm of John Ashcroft, I would claim to have carried such a sign myself. I, of course (this bit to JA), stood to the side singing The Star Spangled Banner in a shrill voice.

And as for the people of Nicaragua themselves, another object of "liberation" by the Yankees, in the event the contra terrorists didn't seize power from the elected government, the Sandinista government passed out guns with which the citizens of this "communist" (well, Reagan never was much better with words than Quayle or Bush) could defend themselves - not against their own government but against the U.S., who was very interested in such "liberation".

Ten years earlier, my Nicaraguan companion had sat atop a tank as the people's revolutionary army entered Managua shortly after the dictator's flight, and the women and children DID toss flowers at these young men who had freed them. He had photos. His mother had photos. European magazines had photos. That was as good as seeing it with my own eyes.

There are few good photos showing the Panamanian people expressing their gratitude for their 1989 "liberation" by the first George Bush. Too many of them were shoveled into mass graves. We Yankees didn't know about this, but the people of Managua did. So on and on it went, the vigils with signs saying: "Please don't rescue us!"

Today the people we "liberated" in Afghanistan, ungrateful for the brothels and other signs of Western culture we brought them, are miffed as hell. According to today's (January 28) Guardian the U.S. side is fighting about eighty rebels under Afghan Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, producing the largest-scale fighting in nine months.

The Guardian says that at least eighteen rebels (rebels?) have been killed since the fighting broke out yesterday. The U.S. group has suffered no casualties. You'd think that if "we" had been the victims of aggression, someone would have had a bad cut or something. Luck, I guess. But not for them.

The eighty Afghans, we know, will be dead by morning.

The stories are endless, and in my own history, the only ones of young women tossing flowers to soldiers have to do with a country being liberated by its OWN people FROM the U.S.

Now the Ashcroft people are talking about the "liberation of the people of Iraq". I've corresponded with two people in Iraq and dozens who have been there in the past year, and I have yet to to hear of Iraqis within the country trusting the United States.

Are we to believe that they will throw out their arms in welcome to the armies who have left their country glowing a sickly uranium green for a billion years while the pictures of premature, uranium-deformed babies are too grotesque for mainstream U.S. publication?

I looked at some of these photos this morning and tried to imagine one of the almost unrecognizable human creatures to be my own child. Few forms of anger equal the hate in a mother whose child has been killed or maimed. How many women in Baghdad knew the hundreds of children bombed in the civilian bomb shelter during the first invasion? If I'd blown these children apart, I think I would feel uneasy about riding atop a victory tank and pulling into the center of uranium-destroyed Basra after annihilating this starving country from the safety of the skies.

This genocide - and it IS genocide, both from precision bombs that pick wrong targets, and from sanctions that make children die before their mothers' eyes for lack of common medicines, and from massive dumps of depleted uranium that has taken the cradle of civilization from its people and the people of the world for over a billion years, may not endear the "liberators" to many over there.

But the young men will go. Cheney will speak to them from a safe, radiation-free country, and tell them how proud we are of them and how they are going to liberate the people of Iraq, and then there will be thundering, emotional music and flapping flags, and they will go, unopposed to the ignorance that feeds this machine daily.

They will go and their DNA, exposed to a greater amount of depleted uranium than last time, will be messed up, their progeny deformed, sometimes beyond recognition as human beings.

And they may come home with no stories of flowers, or open, welcoming arms.