Upcoming from MER:
THE
CRIPPLED, CONFUSED, CORRUPTED SAUDIS
"(Saudi Ambassador) Bandar has been a terrible disaster."
- Khaled
Al-Maeena; Editor-in-Chief,
Arab News
USA AT MOMENT OF NATIONAL CRISIS
"Over
the last three years, practicing a philosophy of deliberate
deception,
fear-mongering and abuse of authority, the Bush
administration has done
more to undermine the republic of
Lincoln and Jefferson than the cells
of al-Qaida. It has willfully
ignored our fundamental laws and
squandered the nation's
wealth in bloody, open-ended pursuits.... We have arrived
at a moment of national crisis."
MIDDLEEAST.ORG
- MER - Washington - 24 September: How
obscene that a guy like Iyad Allawi was given the highest national
honor in the United States yesterday -- addressing a joint session of
the U.S. Congress. Just weeks ago one of the top news organizations
in Australia reported not only about Allawi's brutal thugish past as
well as long-time CIA connections, but how he recently and
spontaneously personally took out his gun and shot in the head
execution-style six prisoners captured by the Americans to prove his
'toughness'. But in the United States that story was not reported by
any of the major news organizations -- not even the story about how it
was such a big story in Australia, whether completely verifiable or not.
But then earlier this year, for the Presidential State of the
Union Address also before a joint session of the Congress, who was the
personal guest of the President sitting right behind Mrs. Bush? Then
it was none other than Ahmed Chalabi -- and we all know what we've
learned about and what has happened to him since.
For this regime in the United States no lie is too big, no
occassion too sacred, no simplified distortion too crude. They pursue
their deceptive imperialist crusading agenda come what may at any cost
in blood, credibility, and future ramifications. George W. did so
once again in front of the whole world when he spoke at the United
Nations earlier this week -- to rather stony silence by the way. And
then he paraded Iyad Allawi around Washington yesterday pursuing crass
political gain at immense cost for the country whose flag pinned in his
lapel he cheapens daily.
This article from Salon.com helps correct all the distortions
and smoke screening that is going on from official Washington and much
of the mediocre corporate American media. Indeed, it was
embarrassing to read the front-page headline story in the Washington Post
the day before Allawi came to Washington that painted a rather rosy and
sugar-coated portrait of the situation in Iraq. This 'Hell' exposee is
far more telling, far more insightful, and far more important to read
and ponder:
Hell
By Phillip Robertson
Salon
correspondent Phillip Robertson has spent five months
covering the war
in Iraq. As the presidential campaign finally
focuses on the war,
Robertson offers this assessment of the
grim situation there.
Salon.com - 23 September 2004 -
Baghdad,
Iraq - Three years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, attacks
in which they played no part, the people of Iraq have been liberated
from one tyranny only to be remanded to another: continuous urban
warfare, religious extremism and a contagion of fear. The celebrated
hand of the free market in Iraq has brought not only cell phones and
satellite TV, it has also brought down prices for automatic weapons,
making them affordable to the average Iraqi. The last time I checked, a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher cost about $250.
In
his address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Bush told a
subdued General Assembly, "Today, the Iraqi and Afghan people are on
the path to democracy and freedom. The governments that are rising will
pose no threat to others. Instead of harboring terrorists, they're
fighting terrorist groups. And this progress is good for the long-term
security of us all." The words of the president ring hollow.
It
is words to this effect that Iraq interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi
will likely echo during his visit to the White House Thursday.
Reconstruction,
the most important step on the path to a sovereign and stable Iraq, has
all but stalled because of targeted acts of violence that reach all the
way south to Basra and north to Mosul. Successful countermoves by the
Sunni insurgents have prevented the United States and new Iraqi
government from gaining any real political support. In fact, billions
of dollars originally allocated for reconstruction are now headed for
security companies, which are quickly becoming private militias.
Unfortunately for optimistic planners in the Bush administration, the
coalition is up against not one single group but a constellation of
allied militias. It's as if the United States had gone to war against
the tribal system itself. There are so many new fighter cells that they
are at a loss to distinguish themselves, and so use kidnapping and
videotapes as branding strategies. In this market, Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi's Tawhid wa al Jihad, with its monstrous beheading
trademark, is the undisputed brand king. Some of the groups are crazier
than others. It is a free market of demons.
In
the past year, al-Qaida operatives have found in Iraq a fertile
recruiting ground, the best possible training camp for jihad against
the West, a destination any angry young man can reach if he has the
will and pocket money. Iraq's borders, which stretch across hundreds of
miles of empty desert, are perfect for smugglers and men seeking
martyrdom. No one really knows how many people are coming into Iraq to
fight the U.S. But the fighters who do make it across are changing the
character of the resistance, internationalizing it, injecting religious
extremism into the politics of a once-secular Iraq. Young men coming in
from other countries don't fight for Iraq, they fight for Islam.
One
of the unutterable truths for the administration is that the U.S.
occupation is breeding and fueling insurgent groups. Iraqi government
officials rightly fear for their lives, but Iraqi forces, which are
supposed to be fighting alongside U.S. troops in the cause of a free
and democratic Iraq, are often undisciplined, dangerous and in some
places infiltrated by insurgent groups. The Mahdi Army in Sadr City has
a number of police officers in its ranks, and in a little remarked upon
event that took place during one of the large demonstrations in Baghdad
at the time of the siege, the Iraqi police helped Sadr officials
address a crowd of Muqtada al-Sadr supporters outside the neutral Green
Zone.
On
Aug. 13, with U.S. troops looking on, a Mahdi Army sheik urged the
followers of Muqtada al-Sadr to go to Najaf to support the men
occupying the shrine. He used a public address system in the back of a
police pickup to get his message across. The fighters were yelling and
grabbing at journalists, proud that the police were on their side, and
they wanted us to take note. Above us, in their watchtowers, Iraqi
police hung pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr and waved to the crowd. The
organizers of the rally were overjoyed.
Fringe
groups, extreme groups, associations with the most vocal opposition to
the U.S. occupation, steadily acquire more legitimacy in Iraq because
they tend to express the true feelings of many Iraqis. Not everyone
takes part in the fighting, but many people understand why the groups
choose to fight. Jobs in the Iraqi National Guard and the Iraqi police
tend to attract poor men who desperately need the money, while the
insurgents attract believers, men who feel wronged and humiliated by
the U.S. occupation, and who will work for nothing. They are
volunteers. Which emotion is stronger?
Iraq
is a place where there is no civil debate and interest groups mediate
their conflicts with weapons. The U.S. has the most powerful armed
presence, its own military, but as an interest group, it represents the
smallest number of Iraqis, possibly only those it directly supports.
Political legitimacy, we have long known, comes directly from the
people; it is not something that can be dictated by a foreign power, no
matter how noble its stated intentions. The Allawi government, the
result of American occupation, is what many Iraqis scornfully call a
U.S. puppet government. In the months following the "transfer of
sovereignty," I never heard a single Iraqi offer up praise for it. Not
one.
The
Sunni insurgents, a creepy hodgepodge of extremist imams, tribal
sheiks, former Iraqi government officials and al-Qaida types, have not
only scuttled the plans to rebuild the country, they have also cornered
the political debate. Relying on abundant examples of victimization and
prejudice against Iraqis and Muslims, the fighters present themselves
as defenders of the faith. Kidnapping, execution and death threats have
become acceptable practices in the eyes of some ordinary Iraqis who may
have been horrified by it only a few months before.
When
a well-educated Sunni shop owner named Abu Mustapha heard about the
kidnapping of French journalists Georges Malbrunot and Christian
Chesnot, he wanted to express his sympathy. It sounded like this:
"Phillip, it is very bad that they were kidnapped. You should be
careful." I pointed out that the people who were abducting
noncombatants and threatening to kill them were behaving like animals.
The hostage-takers were demanding that the French government repeal a
law prohibiting religious symbols from being worn in schools. Abu
Mustapha agreed with the insurgents. "You know, the French should
change their law," he said. "It is a bad law. Muslim girls should be
able to wear the hejab in school."
Contrary
to the administration's hopeful statements, we are not seeing the
establishment of a stable Iraq, the mopping up of unreformed Baath
Party apparatchiks and dead-enders. We are seeing the beginning of a
larger conflict that is busily giving birth to monsters.
Since
April, the coalition has lost ground in central and western Iraq and
will be forced in the coming months to gain it back at great cost.
Fallujah and Ramadi, two sizable Iraqi cities, are no longer under
Iraqi government control. Sadr City, with several million people,
remains a stronghold for the Mahdi Army and the site of a continuing
series of battles. Najaf and Karbala, cities the military has taken
back from the Mahdi Army, were never strongholds of the Shia
resistance. In Najaf, citizens paid a high price for emancipation. They
experienced the destruction of their city and must now set about
rebuilding it, a process that will take years. It is hard to imagine
that the U.S. is loved in Najaf. While the siege may have been a
military victory, it was a political defeat. I left Najaf just as men
were beginning to dig out bodies.
But
Najaf did not serve as the headstone for the Mahdi Army; at best, the
military defeat set them back a few months, driving them deeper
underground. The first cavalry division and the Marines successfully
routed the Muqtada fighters, pushing them to other cities, scattering
them but not destroying them. In my second to last day in Najaf, at the
end of the siege, journalists in the old city watched militiamen load
wooden carts full of weapons and take them to new hiding places. When
we asked where they were going, one fighter said to a comrade in an
alley just off Rasul Street, "Don't talk to these people, some of them
are spies." That was a perfectly normal response and we didn't take it
personally. But it was clear that they weren't taking their
anti-aircraft weapons and rockets to U.S. collection points for cash
payouts. The skittish Mahdi Army fighters were busy smuggling their
weapons out of town to other cities and a number of them were almost
certainly headed for Baghdad. We watched them trundle the carts over
the streets, trying to keep the weapons from spilling out onto the
cobblestones.
Here
is something everyone in Iraq knows: The U.S. is now fighting a holding
action against a growing uprising, and the more it fights the worse it
gets. At the other end of the spectrum, if the U.S. military were to
suddenly withdraw, the largest armed factions in Iraq would immediately
begin to compete for the capital in a bloody civil war. Recently, a
National Intelligence Estimate, a document prepared for President Bush
by senior intelligence officials, warned of exactly that outcome. It is
the kind of analysis that Secretary of State Colin Powell might write
off as defeatist if it had come from the press.
How
much control does the U.S. military have over the country? Not as much
as it would like. Large sections of the capital are in the hands of
insurgents, and organized attacks on convoys, U.S. interests and Iraqi
targets are on the rise. The administration can say things are getting
better, that a newly democratic Iraq is facing its enemies, but last
week Baghdadis woke up at 5 in the morning to the sound of a large
volley of rockets slamming into the Green Zone. The explosions sounded
like they were coming from more than one direction, the sign of a
carefully coordinated attack.
This
summer, it wasn't unusual to wake up to the sound of roadside bombs
going off near Humvees on their early morning U.S. patrols. Month by
month, attacks became more severe, bombs more powerful. In the sky
above the Duleimi hotel, medevac helicopters would shudder through the
air on their way to combat support hospitals. When something truly ugly
was going on, we could hear the rush of the medevac Black Hawks in a
steady progression.
What
the war's champions prefer to ignore is that in large parts of Iraq,
broad support exists for anyone willing to pick up a gun and fight the
United States. Fighters become local stars and when they die, their
friends hold their photographs as treasured objects, pass them around
at parties, and later try to emulate their fallen buddies. Paradise
awaits, full of virgins who have bodies made of light. Many young Iraqi
men believe this. A young fighter guarding the bottom of Rasul Street
in Najaf said, just before the collapse of the truce on Aug. 4,
"Paradise is a place without corruption. It's not like this place, it
smells sweet." Thousands of Iraqis, not all of them poor and
unemployed, have checked into the resistance, not only because it's
honorable but because it's fun. Spreading through family and
neighborhoods, the insurgency can be anywhere, anytime.
A
young Apache helicopter gunner who has fought in many of Iraq's major
battles wrote me a few days ago and said: "I have a feeling that with
every one member of the resistance that we kill, we give birth to ten
more." At a distance of hundreds of feet in the air, a perceptive man
can say this. Here is what the situation looks like from the ground.
Iraq
seems modern only at first glance. The highways, factories and cities
are familiar enough but they hide a deep tribal sensibility. Insults to
family honor in Iraq are usually repaid in blood or money depending on
the severity, and this system of revenge and honor fuels the war
instead of slowing it down. The United States military, unable to
relate to a tribal society, finds itself the player in a nationwide
blood feud. To understand the intensity of these feelings of honor and
kinship, read "Othello" or watch "The Godfather." This is how many
tribal Iraqis perceive the world. It is not necessarily a lack of
sophistication but a mark of being outside the West. Tribal culture in
Iraq goes back thousands of years. When an Iraqi man loses a family
member to an American missile, he must take another American life to
even the score. He may not subscribe to the notion that some Americans
are noncombatants, viewing them instead as the members of a supertribe
that has come to invade his land.
The
war, illegal and founded on a vast lie, has produced two tragedies of
equal magnitude: an embryonic civil war in the world's oldest country,
and a triumph for those in the Bush administration who, without a trace
of shame, act as if the truth does not matter. Lying until the lie
became true, the administration pursued a course of action that
guaranteed large sections of Iraq would become havens for jihadis and
radical Islamists. That is the logic promoted by people who take for
themselves divine infallibility - a righteousness that blinds and
destroys. Like credulous Weimar Germans who were so delighted by rigged
wrestling matches, millions of Americans have accepted Bush's
assertions that the war in Iraq has made the United States and the rest
of the world a safer place to live. Of course, this is false.
But
it is a useful fiction because it is a happy one. All we need to know,
according to the administration, is that America is a good country,
full of good people and therefore cannot make bloody mistakes when it
comes to its own security. The bitter consequence of succumbing to such
happy talk is that the government of the most powerful nation in the
world now operates unchecked and unmoored from reality; leaving us
teetering on the brink of another presidential term where abuse of
authority has been recast as virtue.
The
logic the administration uses to promote its actions - preemptive war,
indefinite detention, torture of prisoners, the abandonment of the
Geneva Convention abroad and the Bill of Rights at home - is simple,
faith-based and therefore empty of reason. The worsening war is the
creation of the Bush administration, which is simultaneously holding
Americans and Iraqis hostage to a bloody conflict that cannot be won,
only stalemated.
Over
the last three years, practicing a philosophy of deliberate deception,
fear-mongering and abuse of authority, the Bush administration has done
more to undermine the republic of Lincoln and Jefferson than the cells
of al-Qaida. It has willfully ignored our fundamental laws and
squandered the nation's wealth in bloody, open-ended pursuits.
Corporations like Halliburton, with close ties to government officials,
are profiting greatly from the war while thousands of American soldiers
undertake the dangerous work of patrolling the streets of Iraqi cities.
We have arrived at a moment of national crisis.
At
home, the United States, under the Bush administration, is rapidly
drifting toward a security state whose principal currency is fear.
Abroad, it has used fear to justify the invasion of Iraq - fear of
weapons of mass destruction, of terrorist attacks, of Iraq itself. The
administration, under false premises, invaded a country that it barely
understood. We entered a country in shambles, a population divided
against itself. The U.S. invasion was a catalyst of violence and
religious hatred, and the continuing presence of American troops has
only made matters worse. Iraq today bears no resemblance to the
president's vision of a fledgling democracy. On its way to national
elections in January, Iraq has already slipped into chaos.
|