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After
The Fall
The
“Liberation Honeymoon” Is Over
by
Doug Ireland
April
19, 2003
Chaos.
Anarchy. Looting. Armed vigilantes. Armed inter-ethnic rivalries. A country
whose people are desperate for water, desperate for food, desperate for medical
care, desperate for order and peace. A country that could slide into civil war.
This
is the reality of post-Saddam Iraq, reported by all the world's independent
press and television. These are the horrors which Donald Rumsfeld dismissed as
merely "untidy" on April 12 -- a display of arrogant insensitivity
that made the tour of the planet's TV screens. This is how the Bush
administration conducts its battle for the "hearts and minds" of the
Iraqis, the Arab and Muslim third of humanity and the rest of the world. But,
as the BBC's man in strife-torn Basra put it 12 hours after Rumsfeld's sniffy
locution, "The 'liberation honeymoon' is over."
There
could have been a more orderly way. The problem is that this administration --
which smugly used to condemn nation-building -- seems to have never really
thought there would be anything but a honeymoon. That's one of the reasons why
so many their post-war moves have seemed so naïve and so unnecessarily
inflamatory.
One
has heard little mention on U.S. television of the United States' obligations
as an occupier under the Geneva Convention, the violation of which makes
Washington an accomplice to the destruction in post-Saddam Iraq. If you were
watching the daily CENTCOM briefing at 7 a.m. EST on April 12, you might have
noticed that it took a Brit reporter to ask about the exigencies of the Geneva
Convention: Why did the U.S. war plan not prepare for these obvious
eventualities?
The
response from Gen. Vincent Brooks was predictable. Brooks is the Stepford
General, specifically screened and chosen by the White House's political image
makers for his ability to tell the most enormous whoppers without blinking an
eye. "We foresaw this happening," Brooks said of the chaos; everything
was under control, and "we will continue to fulfill our obligations"
under the Geneva Convention.
Rumsfeld
continued the lie about the state of stability in Iraq in his Meet the Press
appearance on April 12. Tim Russert asked about the destruction and looting of
the priceless artifacts in Baghdad's archaeological museum. These irreplaceable
treasures represented some 7,000 years of the history of Mesopotamia -- the
cradle of civilization, the birthplace of science and mathematics (algebra,
don't forget, is an Arabic word). The historical memory of an entire people, in
sum. (The April
14 edition of the Guardian reported -- that "U.S. army commanders have
rejected a new plea by desperate officials of the National Museum of
Antiquities in Baghdad to protect the country's archaeological treasures from
looters.")
One
soldier would have been enough to prevent the annihilation of this
irreplaceable cache of history -- but Rumsfeld claimed our boys were too busy,
suggesting that the soldier who might have been placed on guard duty "was
guarding hospitals instead." This was a sick joke piled on top of his lie:
49 of Baghdad's 50 hospitals had already been destroyed by pillage or combat
damage, and the International Committee of the Red Cross had just described the
medical situation in Baghdad -- indeed, in all of Iraq -- as
"catastrophic." But Article 18 of the Geneva Convention (unmentioned
by Russert) spells out that one of the duties of an occupying power is to
"protect and maintain" hospitals. It would have taken very little
manpower to stop the looters, who could be seen on the BBC, France2 and other
foreign TV nets sacking the hospitals right under the noses of heavily armed
U.S. troops, who stood by idly and let it happen.
Meanwhile,
the media savvy world sneers in disbelief at the Pentagon's mendacities, its
rosy picture of a post-conflict Iraq. As Patrick Cockburn, co-author of the
book Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, put it in an article
on inter-ethnic violence in the Independent on April 14:
The United States has a lot to answer for
in allowing the violence to continue for so long. In Baghdad, American troops
were notoriously inactive while shops and homes were being looted. In northern
Iraq, mobs of looters were able to take over Mosul because almost no American
soldiers were present. The reason for their absence was that the United States
had rushed 2,000 men, most of its slender forces in the north, to take over the
Kirkuk oilfields. Only a few hundred soldiers were available for Mosul. The
chants of anti-war protesters about how the conflict is all about control of
Iraqi oil do not seem as overstated today as they did a month ago.
Another
example of the Pentagon's low nation-building IQ is embodied in Ahmad Chalabi,
the world-class crook whom the Pentagon has thrust forward as a putative leader
of Iraq. Chalabi, who faces 22 years in prison for embezzlement and fraud in
neighboring Jordan, heads the nepotistic Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its
greedy exiles. Chalabi has lately been calling himself a "secular
Shia." But, as a veteran reporter in the region, Frank Smyth -- who spent
time in one of Saddam' s prisons -- has pointed out, Chalabi's father was a
Sunni, the wealthiest man in Baghdad under the monarchy. Chalabi has only been
calling himself a Shia in the last six months, after criticism of the INC for
being unrepresentative (his mother was Shia).
The
wisdom of imposing a Sunni -- at the head of the so-called "Free Iraqi
Forces," armed, trained and airlifted into Iraq by the Pentagon -- on a
country that is three-quarters Shiite, might have suggested a question or two
for Chalabi and for his sponsor Rumsfeld. As The
Washington Post's Anthony Shadid -- an indefatigable
non-"embedded" journalist -- reported April 14 from Baghdad,
"the clergy of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority have moved to fill the void
left by the ouster of Saddam."
The
Pentagon's culture-bound blunders are much more than "untidy" -- they
have left a seething wreck. From Baghdad to Nasiriyah to Najraf, throngs of
demonstrators are chanting, "No to Saddam, no to Americans." The
face-off in the holy city of Najraf between armed supporters of the Grand
Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani -- an Iranian -- and those of the 22-year-old Mouktada
Al-Sadr, leader of a rival Shiite tradition with great appeal (described in the
April 14
edition of Le Monde -- and recounted more summarily in The Guardian),
underscores the way in which internecine struggles among the Shiites are
creating a skein of parallel power structures which will undermine the
U.S.-anointed "transitional administration." And, thanks to the war,
all these factions now have guns. This is what allegedly provoked the slaughter
of protesters in Mosul by U.S. soldiers on April 15.
Assassinations
by opposing power-and-vengeance seekers have already become a daily feature of
Iraqi life. Just as the Wild West gangs in post-Communist Russia led to
nostalgia for the peace and security of the old Stalinist order and the rise of
the autocratic kleptocrat Vladimir Putin, so the fever-pitch quarreling among
the armed power-seekers in Iraq is already producing the first expressions of
nostalgia for a strongman to restore order there.
The
administration's latest gaffe? By making a general, Jay Garner, the country's
"civil administrator," Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have again shown how
little they understand about the country they have despoiled and occupied. (He
is, to boot, a general with close political and financial ties to the Israeli
extreme right who has praised Ariel Sharon's most indefensible repressions of
the Palestinians.) The notion that a retread military-industrial complex brass
hat like Garner has the sophistication to untangle Iraq's Byzantine
inter-Shiite, inter-ethnic and political rivalries and keep the country from
full-blown civil war between multiple power centers, is laughable.
Want
proof? The Nasiriyah exile summit meeting -- even with the absence of the
largest, Iran-sponsored faction, which boycotted the meeting -- was adjourned
on April 15 for 10 days. These handsomely rewarded Pentagon clients, handpicked
by Garner to give a figleaf of legitimacy to the puppet government we are
installing, were so riven by rivalries that they could agree on nothing. And
the vague post-summit press communiqué was issued, not by the assembled Iraqis,
but by CENTCOM -- which, as the BBC pointed out, was a "curious" way
to signal the vaunted "independence" of the cobbled-together
assembly, which the rest of the world already believes is a sham.
The
honeymoon has long been over in Afghanistan -- where heroin-financed warlordism
has returned in force, assassinations are rife, where the U.S. puppet Hamid
Karzai is little more than "the president of Kabul" (in the pungent
phrase of The Los Angeles Times' Robin Wright), where Mullah Omar recently
issued an anti-American fatwa signed by 600 clerics, and where U.S.
"friendly fire" blew up another 11 Afghan civilians just last week.
One can get a pretty good idea of the coming months and years in Iraq by
looking at the state of Afghanistan today.
So,
was this war necessary? I think of the impoverished Alouite Christian woman
interviewed Sunday in an Iraqi hospital by a France2 TV crew. Blinded by an
American bomb, her head completely swathed in bandages except for her ruined
mouth, the woman wept through sightless eyes. Her shredded husband lay crippled
for life in the bed next to hers. The bomb that ruined them forever had also
taken the life of their 2-year old daughter. And over and over, the woman kept
sobbing, "It's always the poor people who suffer in war. It's always the
poor people who suffer in war."
Doug Ireland is a New
York-based media critic and commentator. This article first appeared in Tom
Paine.com (www.tompaine.com)