In The Name of Democracy, American War Crimes In Iraq And Beyond is an anti-war book edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith. It’s an anthology of articles which starts off fine but then gets farther and farther away from Iraq. It also becomes more and more of a diatribe where at first it was more about presenting evidence against how the U.S. occupied Iraq.
The point of the book was to accuse the United States of war crimes in Iraq. This was based upon two major points. First, the war was an act of aggression which is not authorized by international law. The second was that the Americans committed crimes against humanity when it occupied Iraq by indiscriminately killing civilians, failed to provide basic necessities, and tortured and abused prisoners. There are several articles laying out this argument in legal terms.
The first third of the book on how badly the U.S. ran Iraq isn’t that bad. There’s several pieces about how the U.S. killed civilians in the country. For instance one documents how a missile hit a house killing the inhabitants, a helicopter shot up a truck with a family inside and soldiers killing people at a checkpoint. These were all common occurrences in Iraq. U.S. troops didn’t speak Arabic, didn’t understand the population and were trained to protect themselves. That led to countless deaths of innocents.
There is a section on prisoner abuse. Abu Ghraib was of course the cause celeb of this. The Bush administration tried to blame a few bad apples but the book points out it was widespread. In May 2003 for instance the Red Cross sent a memo to U.S. forces about 200 allegations of abuse. That same month the U.N. representative to Iraq Sergio de Mello brought up the treatment of detainees with Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer. Then in July the Red Cross presented a paper on 50 allegations of abuse at Camp Cropper at Baghdad Airport. The U.S. never responded to any of these.
After that there is little worthwhile about the book. It increasingly focuses upon the War on Terror blaming it for the torture in Iraq. There are several articles that go over the memos written within the Bush administration for instance saying that the U.S. didn’t have to follow the Geneva Conventions and designating detainees as enemy combatants rather than prisoners of war. One article would’ve been enough but it goes over the same material over and over and over again.
It keeps getting worse. There’s a whole section about how U.S. troops could be conscientious objectors to going absent without leave. There’s pieces on the anti-war movement and references to the Anti-Vietnam War movement. It’s like the editors wanted to throw in anything that was against the war. In the process it completely forgets its purpose of making a legal case against the U.S. invasion and occupation.
There is no real reason to read In The Name Of Democracy. It’s just a hodgepodge of articles that losses any focus.
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