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"The most honest, the
most comprehensive
and most mobilizing
news
and analysis on the Middle East always comes from
MER.
It is
indispensable!" - Robert
Silverman - Salamanca,
Spain
If you don't
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"Nobody, nobody
should believe that somehow
we
can opt out of the
war against Islamic terrorism."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
"It was a massacre.
Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?...
I heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber
attacking US troops - during the invasion. It was a young
soldier, a
married man, who had driven his car bomb at the
Americans near
Nasseriyah. Never before had an Iraqi
committed suicide in battle like
this - not even in the
Somme-like eight-year Iran-Iraq war."
Journalist Robert
Fisk
Mid-East Realities - MER -
www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 3/16/2004:
We
say 'Year 1' because anyone
who thinks the Americans are really 'turning sovereignty
back to Iraq' on 30 June
and ending their occupation just doesn't get what's really going on
and how the American Empire really operates these days.
Just as with
the almost ludicrous statements from the British Foreign Minister about
the Madrid bombings (second article below), believing anything the
Americans
or Brits say these days continues to become still
more and more difficult. We refer again to former Chief
Weapons
Inspector David Kay, one of their own in fact,
who publicly now admits "the U.S. has suffered a generational lose in
credibility"; a
credibility which by the way wasn't all that considerable to
start with. But there still are vestiges of an independent
media
and intelligentsia left - more in the UK than in
the US unfortunately - and this 'birthday' article by Robert Fisk makes
that quite
evident. Add this one to the 'must reading' list.
Happy
first birthday, war on
Iraq
By Robert Fisk
03/13/04 'The Independent'
- It was almost year ago, on March 20,
when the first bombs struck 30km from Baghdad, orange glows that
wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad the next day, and the
Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the
presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer,
America's supposed 'expert' on terrorism, now works, resides and hides
as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war are
more awesome now than they were at the time. Saddam Hussein, the man we
loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (our
dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked) had
already degenerated into late middle-age senility, writing epic novels
in his many palaces while his crippled son Oudai drank and whored and
tortured his way around Baghdad; hardly the target for the world's only
superpower.
As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad, one of
the last editions of the Ba'athist newspapers carried a telling
photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Hussein stood in
the centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusai but on his right
Oudai, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above
his belt. Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of
the Arab world?
Yet Hussein thought he could win, that destiny - a dangerous ally
for all 'strongmen' - would somehow lay low the Americans. It was
always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information
minister, predicting America's doom. It was not just Iraqi patriots who
would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them,
the desert would consume them, the snakes and rabid dogs would eat
their bodies. Not since the Caliphate had such curses been called down
upon an invader. Was it not Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy prime
minister, who warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could
not be defeated by a computer? And then the computer won.
United States President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, of course, had a remarkably parallel set of nightmares and
dreams, encouraged all the while by the right-wing neo-conservative
pro-Israeli American Vulcans. Hussein was the all-powerful, evil state
terrorist whose non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally
non-existent connections to the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks on New
York and Washington must be laid low. Liberation, democracy, a New
Middle East. There was no end to the ambitions of the conquerors.
I remember how anyone who attempted to debunk this dangerous
nonsense would be set upon. Try to explain the crimes against humanity
of September 11, 2001 and we were anti-American. Warn readers about the
crazed alliance of right-wingers behind Bush, and we were anti-Semites.
Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi civilians during the
Anglo-American air bombardment, and we were anti-British, pro-Hussein,
sleeping with the enemy.
When Blair's first 'dossier' was published - most of it, anyway,
was tired old material on Hussein's human rights abuses, not weapons of
mass destruction - the beast's weapons capability was already hedged
around with 'mights' and 'coulds' and 'possiblys'. When a day
after
Baghdad's 'liberation' I wrote in The
Independent that
the 'war of
resistance' was about to begin, I could paper my bathroom wall with the
letters of abuse I received.
But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams. Hussein thought
he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and Blair played equally childish
games, dressing themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic
enemies as Chamberlains and fitting Hussein into Hitler's uniform. I
remember the sense of shock when I was watching Iraq's literally fading
television screen and heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber
attacking US troops - during the invasion. It was a young soldier, a
married man, who had driven his car bomb at the Americans near
Nasseriyah. Never before had an Iraqi committed suicide in battle like
this - not even in the Somme-like eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
Then two women drove their car into the Americans in southern Iraq.
This was astonishing. The Americans dismissed it all. They were
cowardly attacks which only showed the desperation of the regime. But
these three Iraqis were not working for the regime. Even the Ba'athists
were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and solely
instigated by the soldier and the two women.
What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask. Then we
created a new myth. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad,
changed into jeans and t-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace.
Baghdad was no Stalingrad.
Yet we have dangerously altered the narrative of Baghdad's last
days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of
the Tigris river in which Hussein's guerrillas fought off an American
tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a
motorway until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a
smouldering wreck. I walked the highway as the last shots were still
being fired by snipers, peering into cars packed with the blackened
corpses of men, women, children.
Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles of the
dead. In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect
features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the
steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees.
It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?
And cluster bombs are our creation. And I recall with a kind of raw
amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the Tigris, I
somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital and
had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one of
whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother. Upstairs was a
middle-aged man on a blood-soaked hospital trolley with a head wound
that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a
handkerchief that was streaming blood onto the floor.
For days we had seen the news tapes of Basra and Nasseriyah after
'liberation'. We had seen the looting and pillage there, benignly
watched over by the British and Americans.
We knew what would happen when the fighting stopped in Baghdad. And
sure enough, a medieval army of looters followed the Americans into the
city, burning offices, banks, archives, museums, Koranic libraries,
destroying not just the structure of government but the identity of
Iraq.
The looters were disorganised but thorough, venal but poor. The
arsonists came in buses with obvious pre-arranged targets and did not
touch the contents of that which they destroyed. They were paid. By
whom? If by Hussein, then why - once the Americans were in Baghdad -
did they not just pocket the money and go home? If they were paid
post-burning, who paid them?
Of course, we found the mass graves, the hecatombs of Hussein's
years of internal viciousness - for many of which he was backed by the
West - and we photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most of
whom he buried in the desert sand after we failed to support the
Kurdish and Shia uprisings.
Our 'liberation', as the grieving relatives never stopped telling
us, had come a little late. About 20 years late, to be precise. Into
this chaos and lawlessness, we arrived. Dissension was not to be
tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out that 'the 'liberators'
were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither
culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq', I
was denounced by one of the BBC's commentators.
See how the people love us, we cried - which is much the same as
Hussein used to say when he took his fawning acolytes on visits to the
people of Baghdad. There would be elections, constitutions, governing
councils, money - There was no end to the promises we made to this
tribal society called Iraq.
Then in came the big American contractors and the conglomerates and
the thousands of mercenaries, British, American, South African, Chilean
- many of the latter were soldiers under General Augusto Pinochet -
Nepalese and Filipino.
And when the inevitable war against the occupiers began, we - the
occupying powers and, alas, most of the journalists - invented a new
narrative to escape punishment for our invasion. Our enemies were
Hussein's 'diehards', Ba'athist 'remnants', regime 'dead-enders'. Then
we killed Oudai and Qusai and pulled Hussein from his hole in the
ground and the resistance grew more fierce. So our enemies were now
both 'remnants' and 'foreign fighters' - that is, al-Qaeda - since
ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance. We had to believe this.
For had Iraqis - religious or otherwise - joined the guerrillas, how we
could explain that they didn't love their 'liberators'? At first, we
were encouraged to explain that the insurgents came only from a few
Sunni cities, 'previously loyal to Hussein'.
Then the resistance was supposedly confined to Iraq's 'Sunni
triangle'. But as the attacks leached north and south to Nasseriyah,
Kerbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, the triangle turned into an octagon. Again,
we were told about 'foreign fighters', failing to grasp the fact that
120 000 of the foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American uniforms.
Still there was no end to the mendacity of our 'success'. True,
schools were rebuilt - and, shame upon the Iraqis involved, often
looted a second time - and hospitals restored and students returned to
college. But oil output figures were massaged and exaggerated and
attacks on the Americans falsified. At first, the occupying power
reported only guerrilla attacks in which soldiers were killed or
wounded. Then, when no one could hide the 60 or so assaults every
night, the troops themselves were ordered not to make formal reports on
bombings or attacks that caused no casualties. But by the war's first
anniversary, every foreigner was a target.
The suicide bomber came into his own. The Turkish embassy, the
Jordanian embassy, the United Nations, police stations across the land
- 600 of our new Iraqi policemen slaughtered in less than four months -
and then the great shrines of Najaf and Kerbala.
The Americans and British warned of the dangers of civil war - so
did the journalists, of course - although no Iraqi had ever been heard
to utter any demand for conflict with their fellow citizens. Who
actually wanted this 'civil war'? Why would the Sunnis - a minority in
the country - allow 'al-Qaeda' to bring this about when they could not
defeat the occupying power without at least passive Shia support?
While I was writing this report, my phone rang and a voice asked me
if I would meet a man downstairs, a middle-aged Iraqi and a teacher at
Cardiff College who had recently returned to Iraq, only to realise the
state of fear and pain in which his country now existed. His mother, he
said, had just raised 1 million Iraqi dinars to pay a ransom for a
local woman whose daughter and daughter-in-law were kidnapped by armed
men in Baghdad in January. The two girls had just called from Yemen
where they had been sold into slavery. Another neighbour had just
received back her 17-year-old son after paying $5 000 (about R32 500)
to gunmen in the Karada area of Baghdad. Two days ago - it is Friday as
I am writing this - kidnappers grabbed another child, this time in
Mansour, and are now demanding $200 000 for his life.
A close relative - and remember this is just one man's experience
out of a current population of 26 million Iraqis - had also just
survived a bloody attack on his car outside Kerbala. Driving south
after winning a contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11
companions in their vehicle were last week overtaken by men firing
machine pistols at the car. One man died - he had 30 bullets in his
body - and the relative, swamped in his friends' blood, was the only
man not wounded.
Unsurprisingly, the occupation authorities decline to keep
statistics on the number of Iraqis who have died since the 'liberation'
- or during the invasion, for that matter - and prefer to talk about
the 'handover of sovereignty' from one American-appointed group of
Iraqis to another, and to the constitution that is only temporary and
may well fall apart before real elections are held - if they are held -
next year.
If we could have foreseen all this - if we could have been patient
and waited for the UN arms inspectors to finish their job rather than
go to war and plead for patience later, when our own inspectors
couldn't find those weapons - would we have gone so blithely to war a
year ago?
For that war has not ended. There has been no 'end of major combat
operations', just an invasion and an occupation that merged seamlessly
into a long and ferocious war for liberation from the 'liberators'.
Just as the British invaded Iraq in 1917, proclaiming their
determination to bring Iraqis liberation from their tyrants - General
Maude used those very words - so we have repeated this grim narrative
today.
The British who died in the subsequent Iraqi war of resistance lie
now in the North Gate Cemetery on the edge of Baghdad, an enduring if
largely neglected symbol of the folly of occupation.
British FM: Madrid
bombings not result of Iraq invasion
British
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said in comments published Monday that
Britain and Spain have not put themselves at risk from revenge attacks
because of their involvement in the Iraq war.
"If al-Qaeda is proved to be behind the Madrid bombings there will be
some who rush to that conclusion," Straw told The Financial Times
newspaper, referring to the bomb attacks on the Spanish capital last
week that killed 200 people. "But they will be completely wrong."
"There are some people who have convinced themselves that the
attacks of Sept.11 , 2001 took place after the Iraq invasion in2003 ,"
Straw stated.
"And they have forgotten, too, how al-Qaeda was involved in the
first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 or the attacks on U.S
embassies in 1998 in which hundreds of people died.
"One thing I am clear about is that al-Qaeda will go on and would
have gone on irrespective of the war in Iraq, until they are firmly
stopped."
Straw warned that countries that did not back the war in Iraq
should not feel that they are immune from any attacks by al-Qaeda or
other "Muslim extremists."
"Nobody, nobody should believe that somehow we can opt out of the
war against Islamic terrorism," the Britain's top diplomat said.
Straw also backed the military action against Iraq. "Faced with the
information that we had 18 months ago about Saddam, we judged that the
only sensible and safe course for the British people was the course
that we embarked on ... we did that for the best of motives and I
believe that history will have proved us to be correct," he
said. Albawaba,
15 March
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