On May 5, the Iraqi military killed Basim Mohammed and detained his brother. Mohammed was a member of the Sahwa, the 100,000-strong Sunni militia composed mostly of former resistance fighters that the US created in order to use them to battle al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as paying them off to draw down the number of attacks against occupation forces.

The Sahwa, who were supposed to be given government jobs either in security or in civil services, have been betrayed. Instead of being given the promised jobs, they have been consistently targeted by the Iraqi military, and at times the US military, which has left them vulnerable as well to attacks from al-Qaeda. As a result, they are walking off their security jobs for lack of pay, and have largely ceased their military operations against al-Qaeda. The predictable result is what we have been witnessing over the last months — a slow but steady increase in the number of attacks against Iraqi and US forces and a dramatic rise in the spectacular car bomb attacks in largely Shia areas that kill scores at a time.

The obvious solution would be for the Obama administration to pressure its client government in Baghdad to fulfill promises to incorporate the Sahwa into its ranks, as well as applying pressure to Prime Minister Maliki to lay off targeting the Sahwa and its leadership.

Instead, Sahwa members like Mohammed are being killed and their family members detained, and the attacks continue. On May 3, Iraqi forces arrested Nadhim al-Jubouri, a Sahwa leader in the volatile Salahadin province. In March, Iraqi forces detained Adil al-Mashadani, head of another Sahwa group in the Fadhil neighborhood of central Baghdad — which ignited clashes between US, Iraqi and Sahwa forces that left three men dead and set the stage for more bloodletting.

Let us be clear: the US military knew, when the Sahwa were formed back in mid-2006, that most of the members were either former resistance fighters or members of al-Qaeda. Promises were made to these men that if they took the $300 monthly paycheck and promised to stop their attacks against occupation forces, they would be granted amnesty from any Iraqi government reprisal. The latter was necessary because from the beginning of the Sahwa’s creation, the Maliki government has opposed them, and spoke in bellicose terms that there would be measures taken to exact revenge on Sahwa members who had been in the Ba’ath Party, or who were former resistance fighters, which describes the vast majority of its members.

Sahwa leaders are complaining about this, to little or no avail. After his arrest on May 3, Sahwa leader Nadhim al-Jubouri, a former al-Qaeda militia leader, told reporters that his arrest by Iraqi police violated the amnesty deal he’d signed with the US military last year. Shame on al-Jubouri for putting any faith in the occupiers of his country. Clearly, he believes he lives outside of history. Jubouri told AFP, “We signed a cease-fire agreement with American forces, just as we signed an agreement to grant us immunity from the courts, even if we killed half the American army or shot down a plane.”

Clearly, he believes the occupiers, and their client government in Baghdad, would hold true to their word. Jubouri must read about as much news as Sarah Palin, or he would have known better. In a classic good-cop/bad-cop routine, while the US military played good-cop and offered immunity and money to the Sahwa, the Maliki government promised there would be no immunity, and the attacks began. The US military issued a statement after Jubouri’s arrest by the Iraqi government, saying, “Coalition forces had a very minor role in this as the warrants originated from the Iraqis.” It’s clear who has held true to their word.

Violence across the country continues unabated. On the same day the Iraqi military killed Basim Mohammed, nearly 40 Iraqis were killed, 31 of them “suspected militants” (read Sahwa members) killed by the Iraqi military in Diyala province.

In the last 72 hours, most of the violence is due to Iraqi government operations that are in full swing to take out as many Sahwa members as possible.

On May 4, at least 15 Iraqis were killed and 24 wounded. Four of the dead were policemen (read Sahwa) in the Dora area of Baghdad (security in Dora is run by the Sahwa) who were killed when someone threw a grenade at their checkpoint.

The day before this, the Times of London reported that a leading member of the Political Council of Iraqi Resistance, which represents six Sunni militant groups, said, “The resistance has now returned to the field and is intensifying its attacks against the enemy. The number of coalition forces killed is on the rise.”

While the rhetoric is laden with hubris, there is a rising trend of US soldiers being killed in Iraq. At least 18 soldiers were killed last month — making it the deadliest month since September for US occupation forces. This, coupled with the large uptick in Iraqi deaths, prompted Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, who returned from a visit to Iraq last week, to state, “It is obvious there are still multiple fault-lines in society. In my view, Iraq and the United States are going to have to adjust the timelines and leave a residual force of tens of thousands beyond 2011.”

Sahwa groups around Baghdad and other areas of Iraq are now reporting that half their members are leaving their posts to rejoin the resistance. Others are reporting that 75 percent have already left.

On May 2 in Hilla, south of Baghdad, over 120 members of a Sahwa group abandoned their posts at dozens of checkpoints south of the capital city, on the grounds that they had not been paid their monthly salaries. “This strike is going to continue until we get our April salaries, and some of the Sahwas have not been paid for March either,” Nazar al-Janabi, one of the militiamen, told AFP. This is becoming common.

I suspect it will take some time for new resistance groups being formed of disenfranchised Sahwa members to reconstitute themselves. Sporadic, yet increasing, attacks against US forces will continue in the meantime, and the Iraqi people, who always bear the brunt of failed US policy in Iraq, continue to die in the hundreds with each passing week.

The US military has sent shock troops, which also donned helmets and flak jackets — anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists, with their own troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of 2007, American scholars in these fields were embedding with the military in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a Pentagon program called Human Terrain System (HTS), which evolved shortly thereafter into a $40 million program that embedded four or five person groups of scholars in the aforementioned fields in all 26 US combat brigades that were busily occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two years prior to this, the CIA had quietly started recruiting social scientists by advertising in academic journals, offering salaries of up to $400,000. The military’s goals for the HTS was to have them gather and disseminate information about Iraqi and Afghani cultures. These embedded scholars, contracted through companies like CACI International, work in the project that is described by CACI as “designed to improve the gathering, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge” among combat teams.

This new form of psychological warfare is deeply disturbing. Throughout my five years of reporting on the occupation of Iraq, when I’ve asked Iraqis what they feel the most damaging aspect of the occupation is, I have been told that the occupation is “shredding the fabric of Iraqi society and culture.”

Anthropology, in particular, has been referred to through history as the “handmaiden of colonialism,” thus putting anthropologists, at least those with a moral conscience, on guard against anything that smells like exploitation or oppression of their subjects. Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and leading member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, told Time magazine that the militarization of anthropology will cause the field to become “just another weapon … not a tool for building bridges between peoples.” Anthropology has core professional ethics standards that require voluntary, informed consent from subjects, and that anthropologists do no harm. How likely do you think these will be adhered to by the flack-jacket-wearing, gun-toting, embedded anthropologists working directly with regimental combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan?

In an article titled “When Anthropologists Become Counter-Insurgents,” published in September 2007, and co-authored with David Price, author of the book Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Abuse of American Anthropology in the Second World War, Gonzalez and Price wrote:

Although proponents of this form of applied anthropology claim that culturally informed counter-insurgency work will save lives and win ‘hearts and minds,’ they have thus far not attempted to provide any evidence of this. Instead, there has been a flurry of non-critical newspaper accounts in publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor that portray these HTS anthropologists as heroically serving their nation without bothering to report on the ethical complications of this work. Missing are discussions of anthropologists’ ethical responsibilities to disclose who they are and what they are doing, to gain informed consent, and to not harm those they study. Portraying counter-insurgency operations as social work is naive and historically inaccurate.

In fact, David Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas describes HTS teams as a ‘CORDS for the 21st Century’-a reference to the Pentagon’s Vietnam-era Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support project. The most infamous product of the CORDS counter-insurgency effort was the Phoenix Program, in which CIA agents collected intelligence information used to ‘neutralize’ (read assassinate) suspected Viet Cong members. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 26,000 suspected Viet Cong were killed as a result, including many civilians.

Kipp’s comparison of HTS and CORDS begs a series of ethical questions which have gone unanswered. If anthropologists on HTS teams interview Afghans or Iraqis about the intimate details of their lives, what is to prevent combat teams from using the same data to one day ‘neutralize’ suspected insurgents? What would impede the transfer of data collected by social scientists to commanders planning offensive military campaigns? Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician? Although the answers to these questions are not clear, the history of anthropology should give us pause. During World War II and the Cold War, US military and intelligence agencies tended to use anthropologists’ work to help accomplish immediate goals, and discarded all other information that was counter to their beliefs or institutional models.

Adding credence to the points made by Price and Gonzalez is the fact that one of the top ten US defense contractors, Science Applications International Corporation, which has been operating in Iraq since the beginning of the occupation, describes anthropology in its job advertisements as a “counter-insurgency related field.”

Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor, while preparing to deploy to Iraq at part of an HTS team, boasted on his blog, “I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant … I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range … Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon.”

Nevertheless, proponents of the program attempt to dismiss any ethical dilemma encountered by the embedded scholars. Montgomery McFate, a Navy anthropologist, described HTS as an effort to anthropologize the military, not militarizing anthropology, told Time, “The more unconventional the adversary, and the further from Western cultural norms, the more we need to understand the society and underlying cultural dynamics.”

The program is nothing new, neither for the US empire nor other empires throughout history. As far as the US empire project is concerned, there were two programs from the Vietnam era that involved anthropologists.

Project Camelot, in 1965, organized by US Army intelligence, recruited anthropologists to assess the cultural causes of war and violence. Despite the misleadingly benign sounding name, the project used Chile as a trial run while the CIA was engineering the election of Eduardo Frei as president in 1964 to prevent the election of Socialist leader Salvador Allende.

The second program from that era, known as CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support), was formed to coordinate the US civil and military pacification programs in Vietnam. CORDS used anthropological data to map human terrain and identify individuals and groups that the military believed were sympathizers of the Vietcong, who were then targeted for assassination.

It is easy to imagine HTS teams in Iraq being used to exploit existing fault lines between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, and even differences within each group, in order to invoke the classic divide-to-conquer strategy. For example, the Sahwa (US-created and -backed Sunni militia) clashing with the US-backed Maliki government in Iraq is a classic example of Iraqis being effectively turned against one another so as not to unite against the occupier.

Another example would be the effective creation and exploitation of the myth of sectarianism in Iraq, which has lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and threatens to do so once again.

Documentary filmmaker Jason Coppola is directing and producing a film titled Justify My War. In the film, an introspective Coppola explores the question of rationalization of the wars being waged by our government, from Wounded Knee to Fallujah. I asked Coppola for his perspective about the ongoing use of anthropologists by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This seems to be the most powerful weapon against indigenous cultures today. Much more powerful than F-16s and M-1 tanks. We see how well it worked against our own indigenous culture. You need to know a people before you decide what can corrupt them, what can be used to confuse, divide and conquer them. The strongest defense against occupation is an undivided, culturally rooted people, but empires don’t like that.”

Commenting on experiences from his recent trip to Iraq, Coppola adds, “A country can rebuild itself after an invasion, but it is much more difficult to rebuild a culture after it has been invaded. I realized this seeing young girls walking the streets of Sadr City, on their way to school in their traditional hijab carrying their books in a backpack with a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie design on it. Confusion is sewn throughout the Iraq occupation, nobody trusts anybody. And as I looked up in Baghdad or Fallujah or Sadr City, and stared at ‘Apache’ helicopters flying overhead … I couldn’t help but to think — mission accomplished — certainly for the Apache people. But what about the Iraqis? We still don’t know.”

Price and Gonzalez, along with several other scholars, felt the problem serious enough to have formed the Network of Concerned Anthropologists and drafted a “Pledge of Non-Participation in Counter-Insurgency” to boycott anthropological work in counterinsurgency and direct combat support operations. They took their stand against “work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another.”

Similarly, in October 2007, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement that warned its members that activities such as involvement in the HTS program are likely to violate the code of ethics. As it should have, for it is impossible to imagine the lethality of a massive conventional military coupled with unconventional scholarship made into a weapon for use in combat, as it is in the ongoing US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Women in America were first allowed into the military during the Revolutionary War in 1775, and their travails are as old.

Maricela Guzman served in the Navy from 1998 to 2002 as a computer technician on the island of Diego Garcia, and later in Naples, Italy. She was raped while in boot camp, but was too scared to talk about the assault for the rest of her time in the military.

In her own words she, “survived by becoming a workaholic. Fortunately or unfortunately the military took advantage of this, and I was much awarded as a soldier for my work ethic.”

Guzman decided to dissociate from the military on witnessing the way it treated the native population in Diego Garcia. Post discharge, her life became unmanageable. The effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from her rape had taken a heavy toll.

After undergoing a divorce, a failed suicide attempt and homelessness, she moved in with her parents. A chance encounter with a female veteran at a political event in Los Angeles prompted her to contact the veteran’s administration (VA) for help. She began seeing a therapist there who diagnosed her with PTSD from her rape.

She told IPS that the VA denied her claim nevertheless, “Because they said I couldn’t prove it … since I had not brought it up when it happened and also because I had not shown any deviant behaviour while in the service. I was outraged and felt compelled to talk about what happened.”

Like countless others, Guzman learned early that the culture of the military promoted silence about sexual assault. Her experience over the years has convinced her that sexual violence is a systemic problem in the military.

“It has been happening since women were allowed into the service and will continue to happen after Iraq and Afghanistan,” Guzman told IPS, “Through the gossip mill we would hear of women who had reported being raped. No confidentiality was maintained nor any protection given to them making them susceptible to fresh attacks.”

“The boys’ club culture is strong and the competition exclusive,” Guzman added, “To get ahead women have to be better than men. That forces many not to report rape, because it is a blemish and can ruin your career.”

She is not hopeful of any radical change in policy anytime soon, but, “One good thing that has come out of this war is that people want to talk about this now.”

More than 190,000 female soldiers have served thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan on the front lines, often having to confront sexual assault and harassment from their own comrades in arms.

The VA’s PTSD centre claims that the incidence of rape, assault, and harassment were higher in wartime during the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq than during peacetime. Thus far, the numbers from Iraq show a continuance, and increase, of this disturbing trend.

The military is notorious for its sexist and misogynistic culture. Drill instructors indoctrinate new recruits by routinely calling them “girl,” “pussy,” “bitch,” and “dyke.” Pornography is prevalent, and misogynistic rhymes have existed for decades.

Understandably, Department of Defense (DoD) numbers for sexual assaults in the military are far lower than numbers provided by other sources, primarily because the Pentagon only counts rapes that soldiers have officially reported. Even according to the Pentagon, 80 percent of assaults go unreported.

Pentagon spokesperson Cynthia Smith told IPS, “We understand this is very important for everyone to get involved in preventing sexual assault, and are calling on everyone to get involved, step in, and watch each others’ backs.”

According to the DoD Report on Sexual Assault in the Military for Fiscal Year 2007, “There were 2,688 total reports of sexual assault involving Military Service Members,” of which “The Military Services completed a total of 1,955 criminal investigations on reports made during or prior to FY07.”

The criminal investigations yielded the shockingly low number of only 181 courts martial. “We understand that one sex assault is too many in the DoD,” Smith told IPS, “We have an office working on prevention and response.”

A 1995 study published in the Archives of Family Medicine found that 90 percent of female veterans from the 1991 U.S. attack on Iraq and earlier wars had been sexually harassed. A 2003 survey of women veterans from the period encompassing Vietnam and the 1991 Iraq attack, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, found that 30 percent of the women soldiers said they were raped.

In 2004, a study of veterans from Vietnam and all wars since, published in the journal of Military Medicine, found that 71 percent of the women were sexually assaulted or raped while serving.

At the 2006 National Convention of Veterans for Peace in Seattle, April Fitzsimmons, who early in her career was raped by a soldier, met with 45 other female vets, and began compiling information.

“I asked for a show of hands of women veterans who had been assaulted while on duty, and half the women raised their hands,” Fitzsimmons told IPS, “So I knew we had to do something.”

She, along with other women veterans like Guzman, founded the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) to help military women who have been victims of sexual violence.

It is an uphill battle for women in the U.S. military to take on the system that clearly represses attempts to change it.

“When victims come forward, they are ostracised, doubted, and isolated from their communities,” Fitzsimmons told IPS, “Many of the perpetrators are officers who use their ranks to coerce women to sleep with them. It’s a closely interwoven community, so the perpetrators are safe within the system and can fearlessly move free amongst their victims.”

Fitzsimmons shared with IPS a view that underscores the gravity of the problem.

“The crisis is so severe that I’m telling women to simply not join the military because it’s completely unsafe and puts them at risk. Until something changes at the top, no woman should join the military.”

Sidebar: Two Testimonies

April Fitzsimmons served in the Air Force from 1985 to 1989, as an intelligence analyst and intelligence briefer for a two-star general. Early in her military career, another solider sexually assaulted her.

Nineteen years old at the time of her rape, Fitzsimmons reported the assault, and named her perpetrator, who was removed from the base. However, she declined the offer of counselling “because there was a stigma attached to it,” she told IPS.

“Those who seek counselling are perceived to be at risk, as being too weak and vulnerable and it would have meant forfeiting my top-secret clearance to keep military intelligence classified,” she explained.

Another reason for maintaining silence on the matter was that Fitzsimmons was declared “airman (sic) of the year,” in the European command.

“I didn’t want to lose that,” she says, “I wanted the whole thing to go away.”

Fitzsimmons created a one-woman play, Need to Know, which has been running for six years. In the play, she addresses her own sexual assault in the military. When news of rapes and sexual assaults by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, against both other soldiers and Iraqis began to surface, Fitzsimmons became more active.

“After reading about the 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, who was raped by several soldiers, and about Suzanne Swift, a soldier who after being raped by another U.S. soldier went AWOL (absent without leave) rather than redeploy with the command that was responsible for allowing the rape to occur, I was convinced that there was a cycle of sexual violence in the military that was neither being seen nor addressed,” she says.

It is not difficult to ascertain the reason for so few sexual assaults being reported in the military. Jen Hogg of the New York Army National Guard told IPS, “I helped a woman report a sexual assault while she was in basic training. She was grabbed between the legs from behind while going up stairs. She was not able to pinpoint the person who did it.”

Hogg explained that her friend was afraid to report the incident to her drill sergeant, and went on to explain why, which also sheds light on why so many women opt not to report being sexually assaulted.

“During training, the position of authority the drill sergeant holds makes any and all reporting a daunting task, and most people are scared to even approach him or her,” Hogg told IPS, “In this case, the drill sergeant’s response was swift but caused resentment towards the female that made the report, because her identity was not hidden from males who were punished as a whole for the one.”

The incident displays another tactic used in the military to suppress women’s reportage of being sexually assaulted – that of not respecting their anonymity, which opens them up to further assaults.

“After this incident many of the males said harassing things to her as they passed her during training, so much so that she regretted having addressed the issue,” Hogg continued, “You can be ostracised as the woman who had dared to speak up. Women willing to speak up are trained to shut up, which results in an atmosphere of silence. After my experiences in basic and advanced individual training I never reported an incident again.”

Hogg herself faced verbal sexual harassment.

“When I removed my protective top in the heat I would often hear comments such as ‘where you been hiding them puppies’ in reference to my breasts.”

Based on her friends’ experience, Hogg did not even consider reporting.

To make matters worse, according to Department of Defense statistics, 84-85 percent of soldiers convicted of rape or sexual assault leave the military with honourable discharges. Not only are they not penalised, they are honoured.

The US policy that has led to this recent violence has been long in the making, as it has only been a matter of time before the tenuous truce between the groups came unglued. For it has been a truce built on a deeply corrupt US policy of backing the predominantly Shia Iraqi government forces while paying the Sunni resistance not to fight both government and occupation forces.

Most of us remember all too well the praise from the Bush administration lavished on the Awakening Groups, a Sunni militia comprised of former resistance fighters and al-Qaeda members (according to the US military), each member paid $300 per month of US taxpayer money. They grew in strength to 100,000 men.

US aid to the Councils was cut off last October on the understanding that the members would be absorbed into Iraqi government forces. To date, less than a third have been given government jobs.

Two months ago I visited the al-Dora area of Baghdad, a sprawling area controlled by Awakening forces. One of their commanders told me he was concerned about the fact that most of his men were not being given government jobs. “They are lacking pay, and most of them are becoming more angry by the day, since they have had more broken promises than they can handle,” he explained as we drank tea, “Many of my men have not been paid since October. This cannot continue.”

Meanwhile, the US-backed Iraqi government led by US-appointed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki continues to target the leadership of the Awakening Groups. Maliki perceives the Awakening groups as both a political and military threat, and since October has been targeting their leadership in parts of Baghdad, as well as in Iraq’s volatile Diyala Province.

In the wake of the spasm of violence in Baghdad last weekend, the Washington Post reported “As Apache helicopter gunships cruised above Baghdad’s Fadhil neighborhood, former Sunni insurgents fought from rooftops and street corners against American and Iraqi forces, according to witnesses, the Iraqi military and police. At least 15 people were wounded in the gunfights, which lasted several hours. By nightfall, the street fighters had taken five Iraqi soldiers hostage. The battles, the most ferocious in nearly a year in Baghdad, erupted minutes after the arrest of Adil Mashadani, the leader of the Fadhil Awakening Council, which is composed mostly of former Sunni insurgents who allied themselves with the US military in exchange for monthly salaries that are now paid by Iraq’s government.”

Of course, the reason given to justify government’s detention of the Awakening leader of the area, the incident that triggered the bloodshed, were “terrorist acts” by the group, according to Iraq’s chief military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta. Predictably, the Awakening group spokesman for the area, Abu Mirna, told the Post, “We will fight them till the end if they don’t release him.”

It was convenient policy to have set up the Awakening groups to temporarily quell overall violence in Iraq. Resistance fighters rushed to join the ranks for the paycheck, as well as US military protection from Shia militias, which now largely comprise the government security apparatus. Now, however, clearly the US has lost some of their interest in continuing to support the Awakening groups, and the Maliki government is ratcheting up its efforts to dismantle them. Predictably, members of the Awakening are fighting back – for without a paycheck, and with yet another broken promise by the occupation forces to spur them on, why should they sit back and allow themselves to be detained, killed or further betrayed?

However, let us not martyr the Awakening Groups. Most of the leadership of the Awakening Groups are thugs, as are many of the members. Within weeks of the formation of the groups back in 2006, Iraqis living in areas that began to come under the control of Awakening groups began complaining of the brutality of the fighters in their area. Extortion and bribery became rampant, and many Iraqis view Awakening forces as collaborators with the occupiers of their country.

For example, I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with the president of the Fallujah Awakening Council, Sheikh Aifan Sadun, who, like other Awakening leaders, has hundreds of security personnel under his control. It was just before the January 30 elections in Iraq, and he was vying for political power against a rival Sunni group in the city — the Iraqi Islamic Party. Sheikh Aifan, who spoke with me while driving his $420,000 custom-built heavily armored BMW through the city that was destroyed by two US sieges in 2004, was accusing his rivals of rigging the upcoming elections.

He told me he would use “any means necessary” to fight them if they stole the elections. It was and is all about power for these Awakening leaders. And money. Shiekh Aifan, like most of the Awakening leaders, quickly got into the “construction business” when the US military stopped direct payments to them last October. Now those payments come in the form of “construction contracts.” Sheikh Aifan himself has been awarded “contracts” worth $250 million; keep that in mind during this tax season, because it is your money that is paying for things like his own private militia, his BMW and his mansion on the outskirts of Fallujah.

In nearby Ramadi, the capital city of Al-Anbar, Sheikh Ahmad Abo Risha is president of the Awakening Council for the entire province. Just before the election, he, like Sheikh Aifan, was making moves to ensure he maintained his grip on power. His rival in the elections was Sheikh Hamid Al-Hayis, also an Awakening Council leader in the city, and from the same tribe. Abo Risha did not have kind words for Al-Hayis. “Al-Hayis has relations with government people and oil contracts, and he gets money from this by using his position which we helped him acquire,” Abo Risha told me at the Awakening Council of Ramadi headquarters. “I’m from a long line of sheikhs, but Al-Hayis has only been a sheikh since 2006 when we started the Awakening,” Abo Risha said. If Al-Hayis were to win the elections, “there will be a revolution.”

When I asked Abo Risha about the Islamic Party, which Sheikh Aifan was accusing of trying to steal the elections, he told me if the Islamic Party took the elections by fraud, “It will be like Darfur.”

None of these threats came to pass, as both men were victorious over their rivals. But their bellicose rhetoric is indicative of the kind of people they are, and the lengths they are willing to go to in order to maintain and/or seize power.

Despite the corruption and inherent infighting with the Awakening Group leaders, most of them, and the tens of thousands of men under their control, will certainly fight when attacked or provoked, as evidenced by this past weekend in Baghdad.

Broadening the frame of reference, keep in mind that government detentions, killings and threats towards Awakening Group leaders and members are ongoing in neighborhoods of Baghdad, as well as across Diyala province. We should expect violence in the areas of Baghdad they control as the Iraqi government continues to make moves towards taking them out in advance of the national elections scheduled for later this year. Thus, keep your eyes on the following areas of Baghdad in the coming weeks and months: Adhamiyah, Amiriyah, Gazaliyah and al-Dora, to name just a few. More broadly, also watch Baquba and surrounding areas where Awakening Groups are largely in control.

And keep Al-Anbar in mind. The province, which is one-third the geographic area of Iraq, is largely controlled by Awakening groups. This is the area where the fiercest resistance to the occupation has occurred, and if US occupation forces or the US-backed Iraqi government begins to move on men like Sheikh Aifan or Abo Risha, it will bring predictable results.

As Awakening Group member Abu Ayad, 58, told the Post, “We will all become suicide bombers” if his leader, Mashadani, is not released by the Iraqi government.

“Why would I want to go to government-run hospitals where there is no care, no functioning instruments, long lines, and in the end the same doctor who treats you there can treat you at a private hospital,” says Mohammed Abbas, 35, an employee at Iraq’s Ministry of Oil.

Abbas, speaking at the private Saint Raphael Hospital in the Karrada area of Baghdad, wanted treatment on time, and was prepared to pay for it. Like him, many are coughing up money for private treatment. When they have money, that is, in an economy with more than 50 percent unemployment.

For medical care, many scramble to find money somehow. “It is a catastrophe at the government-run hospitals,” says Hayder Abud, 30, at the private hospital for a check-up. “When you finally get a doctor to see you there, they are so rushed and sleep deprived, you can’t be sure you are getting proper treatment.”

Most treatment at government hospitals is free. Getting an x-ray at a private hospital may cost 40 dollars. But at a private hospital the job can get done on time.

“Iraq’s Ministry of Health is struggling,” said Khaled, administrative manager at the Saint Raphael Hospital, requesting that his last name not be used. “We have had problems with the Ministry of Health because they are angry at us for treating so many more people nowadays.”

The state medical system is on its knees. It was one of the best in the region before the U.N.-backed economic sanctions for more than 12 years, followed by the U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

Government hospitals are short of doctors. A small increase in pay over the last three years has lured some doctors back, but what they pay cannot match income in the private sector.

On average, a general practitioner in a government hospital earns about 300 dollars a month; a private hospital pays twice or three times that much. More and more doctors are shifting away from government hospitals.

“I and my family were unable to live on the pay I earned at a government hospital,” says Dr. Kubayir Abbas, 34, an anaesthetist. “So I decided to come over to the private sector instead, and now it is much better.”

Dr. Shakir Mahmood Al-Robaei, another anaesthetist, said “it’s better for us to work here than in the public sector. We earn more money, it is safer, and we don’t have to worry about having the right equipment and supplies. When I worked in the public sector, we were short of everything most of the time.”

And so government hospitals continue to run short of doctors, while some private hospitals have a surplus. What has improved since 2007 is that violence against doctors, and even against patients who attend certain hospitals, has dropped notably.

Government hospitals also lack basic supplies such as gauze, rubber gloves, clean needles, surgical instruments and drugs for anaesthesia. Non-medical basics such as clean bedding, disinfectants and air-conditioning are often lacking, even in the largest medical complex in the country, the Baghdad Medical City. Iraqis have for years had to buy their own medicines and even oxygen supplies on the expensive black market.

Corruption within the Ministry of Health, and the near total lack of reconstruction that was promised by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in the first year of the occupation have left Iraq’s healthcare system depleted of resources.

A report ‘Rehabilitation Under Fire’ released last year by the health organisation Medcat said Iraq has only around 9,000 doctors, after most fled the country. That gives a ratio of six doctors for every 10,000 people. The ratio in Britain is 23 to 10,000.

Given the crisis in government medical care, the business of private hospitals is booming. Raphael hospital, which currently has 35 beds and sees on average over 1,000 patients a day, will soon expand to 90 beds and increase its staff.

Dr. Rhamis Mukhtar, the only surgeon for morbid obesity in Iraq, has been working at this private hospital since 2000, while also working at a state hospital. “I’m thinking of moving here full time,” he said. “There are much better supplies, services, and overall care for the patient. This centre is the best for laproscopic surgery in the country.”

For complicated emergency cases, government hospitals are still the best, Dr. Mukhtar said. They have special equipment most smaller private hospitals lack. It has to get very bad for someone before they can hope to get the best out of a government hospital.

“I’ve been working here four years,” a gravedigger who gave his name as Ali told IPS at the largest cemetery in Baghdad, a sprawling expanse in the Abu Ghraib section of the capital city. “In 2006 and some of 2007, we buried 40- 50 people daily. This went on for one-and-a-half years.

“Twenty-five percent of these were from violence, and another 70 percent were killed by the Mehdi Army (the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr).” Only a few appeared to have died from natural causes.

“Most of the dead were never logged by anyone,” Ali said, “because we didn’t check death certificates, we just tried to get the bodies into the ground as quickly as possible.”

An Iraqi Army checkpoint was set up outside the vast cemetery a year ago.

“We opened this checkpoint because people were burying the dead and no information was being given to anyone,” a soldier, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told IPS.

“Most of this (lack of reporting the dead), we found, happened during 2006,” the soldier added. “Anyone could be buried here, and nobody would know about it.”

Not far, in the Al-Adhamiya area of Baghdad, what used to be a park is now a cemetery with more than 5,000 graves. According to the manager, most of the dead are never counted.

“Most of the bodies buried here are never reported in the media,” Abu Ayad Nasir Walid, 45, manager of the cemetery told IPS. He has been the manager here since the park was converted into a cemetery amidst the bloodletting from sectarian violence in early 2006.

“I have the name here of the first martyr buried,” Walid said, pointing to a tombstone. “Gaith Al-Samarai, buried on 21 May 2006, he was the sheikh of the Al-Hurria mosque.”

Latif produced the cemetery logbook. “As of this hour, exactly, there are 5,500 bodies in this place. I log their names in my book, but we’ve never had anyone come from the government to ask how many people are here. Nobody in the media nor the Ministry of Health seems to be interested.”

Such graveyards, and there are many, raise questions about the real death toll in Iraq.

The last serious study, by a group of doctors in the U.S. and Iraq, was published in the British peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on Oct. 11, 2006.

The study said about 655,000 Iraqis (2.5 percent of the population) had been killed as a direct result of the invasion and occupation. The research was carried out on the ground by doctors moving from house to house, questioning families, and examining death certificates.

Homes were surveyed in 47 separated clusters across Iraq. The Lancet says the study, carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in the U.S., has been validated by four independent experts.

The worst of the violence followed the Feb. 22, 2006 bombing of the Al- Askari shrine in Samarra. The bombing of one of the most sacred Shia mosques in the world sparked sectarian violence that lasted months, with sometimes more than 300 killed in a day.

“During that time we buried 30-40 bodies daily,” Sehel Abud Al-Latif, a gravedigger at the Al-Adhamiya cemetery told IPS. “Often we had to work through the night, otherwise the bodies would just remain outside.”

Some estimates of the death toll have been considerably lower than that of The Lancet. The group Iraq Body Count (IBC), which describes itself as an “ongoing human security project,” estimates the number to be 98,850 as of the time of this writing.

The group says on the methodology: “Deaths in the database are derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere.”

IBC adds that figures are included from “incident-based accounts to figures from hospitals, morgues and other documentary data-gathering agencies.”

The website adds, however, that “IBC’s main sources are information gathering and publishing agencies, principally the commercial news media who provide web access to their reports.” Also, the IBC only records violent deaths, and only those of civilians.

The unofficial cemeteries around Iraq hold their own additions to the numbers doing the rounds. And no one knows what these add up to.

In his final State of the Union address in January, George W. Bush proudly held up the newly formed “Awakening Groups,” known locally in Iraq as the Sahwa, as examples of both Iraqi cooperation and independence. Members of these groups now total nearly 80,000, and are paid $300 of U.S. taxpayer money a month to not attack occupation forces. These groups are referred to as “Concerned Local Citizens” by the military, as though they are comprised of concerned fathers and uncles who suddenly became keen to collaborate with members of a foreign occupation force which has eviscerated their country.

In reality, most of the Sahwa are resistance fighters who are taking the money, arms, and ammunition, whilst biding their time to build their forces to move, once again, against the occupation forces which now support them, in addition to planning to move against the Shia dominated government. Furthermore, it is widely known in Iraq that many of the Sahwa are al-Qaeda members, the irony of which is not lost to Iraqis, who heard the U.S. propaganda as to the reasons the Sahwa were formed: to drive al-Qaeda from Iraq and to promote security so as to enable political reconciliation within the government in Baghdad by providing the space for this to occur.

Illustrating the counter-productive nature of Bush’s plan, Iraq’s puppet government, led by U.S.-installed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is having nothing to do with the Sahwa. When the U.S. military began to organize the Sahwa by buying off prominent Tribal Sheikhs across Iraq’s al-Anbar province, Maliki made it clear that none of the Sahwa would ever be granted positions within the government security apparatus.

And why should he feel differently? With Shia mlitiamen and death squad members he supports comprising the brunt of the Iraqi military and police, why would Maliki choose to grant legitimacy to the very groups who wish to gain a counter-balance of power in the Baghdad government?

Despite the periodic bickering and blaming from the Bush administration aimed at Maliki and his government, the Prime Minister remains in power for the sole reason that he and his cronies enjoy the backing of the occupation forces. After all, this is an “Iraqi” government that is located within the Green Zone. It is an “Iraqi” government that would not last five minutes without that kind of protection, as polls in Iraq indicate that it enjoys less than one percent support from the Iraqi population.

Arming (and splitting) Shia and Sunni

“I can’t think of a more classic example of divide and rule,” Phil Aliff, a then active duty U.S. soldier with the 10th Mountain Division told me at Fort Drum last October. He served nearly one year in Iraq from August 2005 to July 2006, in the areas of Abu Ghraib City and Fallujah, both west of Baghdad. Aliff was disgusted in the U.S. policy of, as he described it, “Arming the Sunni while politically supporting the Shia … how is that promoting reconciliation?”

According to the U.S. military, 82 percent of the Sahwa are Sunnis. Now the Sahwa, as my Iraqi colleague Ahmed Ali and I have been reporting for Inter Press Service, are openly challenging the government in Baghdad. In Baquba, the capital city of Diyala province, they are in the process of forcing the resignation of the Shia police chief of the province, Gen. Ghanim al-Qureyshi. A local Sahwa member told Ali in Baquba recently that their demands also include “the nomination of four Sunni assistants to be available as the new police chief, hiring 5,000 members of the Sahwa to serve as government security personnel, and government police no longer to be allowed into certain predominantly Sunni districts in an effort to eliminate the sectarian conduct of the police.”

So much for reconciliation. The Sahwa albeit wrought with its own infighting, corruption, and power struggles, now form an effective counterweight to the Iraqi government and are beginning to demand posts in various ministries in Baghdad, as well as power within government security forces.

General Mahdi Subeih, the commander of the order preservation forces in the interior ministry in Baghdad, announced to the Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper in the U.K. on March 3: “The growth in the security role of the members of the Awakening Councils made them a third security force in the country alongside the army and the police.” He went on to state, “The councils are trying to exploit their successes in order to acquire political gains as their leaders are demanding the formation of a ministry dedicated to running the affairs of the councils.”

Subeih claimed, “The rebellion by some of the members of the Awakening Councils and the confrontations that erupted between them and the security forces reveal the depth of the chasm between the two sides.”

Thus, the U.S.-backed predominantly Sunni Sahwa is now both large and powerful enough to make demands of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, and hopes of reconciliation have never been so distant as the U.S.-backed elements of the Sunni and Shia power structure have never been as divided.

The U.S. military continues to train hundreds of thousands of members of the Iraqi Army/Police/Security forces. These forces, the majority of which are members of various militias or criminal gangs whose loyalty lies elsewhere, remain largely unable or unwilling to operate effectively. Nevertheless, there numbers are in the hundreds of thousands now, tens of billions of dollars have been spent, and the result is the U.S. backing of both sides of a growing conflict.

A Colonial Strategy

Divide and rule is not new to the United States, nor is it new as imperial strategy. Even before the U.S. existed, colonial strategy was keen to it. In A People’s History of the United States, historian Howard Zinn quotes Gary Nash, who writes of the period in the 1750’s when native American’s and blacks greatly outnumbered white Europeans, “Indian uprisings that punctuated the colonial period and a succession of slave uprisings and insurrectionary plots that were nipped in the bud kept South Carolinians sickeningly aware that only through the greatest vigilance and through policies designed to keep their enemies divided could they hope to remain in control of the situation.”

Zinn writes, “The white rulers of the Carolinas seemed to be conscious of the need for a policy, as one of them put it, ‘to make Indians & Negros a checque upon each other lest by their Vastly Superior Numbers we should be crushed by one or the other.’ And so laws were passed prohibiting free blacks from traveling in Indian country. Treaties with Indian tribes contained clauses requiring the return of fugitive slaves. Governor Lyttletown of South Carolina wrote in 1738: ‘It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes.’”

And not just between “Indians and Negros,” but also strife between poor whites and blacks was fomented during the 1700’s so the powerful elites could remain in control of the colonies. Zinn adds, “It was the potential combination of poor whites and blacks that caused the most fear among the wealthy white planters.”

Spring 2004 was perhaps the closest time in the occupation a unified Sunni-Shia front of resistance to the occupation existed. While the U.S. military assaulted the city of Fallujah in April of that year, Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was carrying out his first intifada against the occupiers across much of Baghdad and southern Iraq. I witnessed Shia and Sunni demonstrating together against the occupation in the Khadamiya and Adhamiya neighborhoods of Baghdad. When I was in Fallujah there were members of Sadrs’ militia, the Mehdi Army, as well. Later, during Sadr’s second intifada, Sunni mujahedin from Fallujah would cart weapons to Najaf to the Mehdi Army there.

Also during Spring 2004, the U.S. military had supply lines cut, and later admitted to losing control of swaths of Iraq it usually controlled. Thus, a new strategy was needed for the occupiers, because “only through the greatest vigilance and through policies designed to keep their enemies divided could they hope to remain in control of the situation.”

Nearly three years later, the fruits of this strategy are clear.

The Political Splits

Added insurance comes from internal divisions within parties and alliances within the U.S.-backed government. Recently, Iraq’s presidential council refused to ratify a provincial election bill passed by the Iraqi parliament, purportedly due to the refusal of Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi (a member of the Supreme Islamic Council) to sign the bill. The move angered several political groups, particularly the Sadr movement and the Dawa Party, which has soured the “three point deal” agreed upon by the main political coalitions of the parliament, which would have entailed three main laws at once: the provincial elections bill, the general pardon bill, and the federal budget.

On March 7 al-Hayat newspaper reported, “The refusal by the Iraqi presidential council to ratify the provincial election bill opened the door for the emergence of new political disagreements between the various parliamentary coalitions, especially in the ranks of the Shia dominated ‘United Iraqi Alliance.’” Analysts are predicting new splits between the four major parties that comprise the UIA, the Supreme Islamic Council, the al-Sadar movement, the Fadhila party, and the Dawa party. al-Hayat noted, “The al-Sadr movement expected that the results of the elections for the provincial councils in the provinces of southern Iraq, which are supposed to be held before the end of this year, will lead to the loss of the Supreme Islamic Council of more than half the seats it now possesses. The Fadhila party also expected that the elections might shift the balances of power in central and southern Iraq…”

Some political observers considered that the presidential council’s decision, which forced the bill to be returned to the parliament, caused a disturbance in some of the political agreements between the various political coalitions. Abdul-Karim al-Salami, one of the leaders of the al-Sadr movement, told al-Hayat: “the al-Sadr movement enjoys wide popularity in the provinces of the south” and that ratifying the provincial election bill and holding the elections on schedule would lead to the SIC “losing control” of the southern provinces…”

In the Kurdish controlled north the situation is no different. The U.S. simultaneously supports both Kurdish warlords, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, as well as Marzoud Barzani, in their continuing struggle for power against one another.

Nevertheless, the U.S. has relied heavily on the Kurds from the beginning, even using Kurdish Pershmerga militiamen to augment U.S. forces in that region during the invasion. Yet, when Turkey decided to begin launching air strikes, artillery barrages and ground incursions into Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, the U.S. supplied the Turkish military with coordinates of Kurdish rebel groups, without, of course, notifying their puppets in Baghdad or Northern Iraq.

A “Success” Doomed to Fail the Iraqi People

The various U.S. military and political strategies in Iraq are the primary cause of the continuing sectarianism. The occupation forces and their methods are dividing Iraqi groups, and rather than promoting reconciliation, are encouraging increases in violence, power struggles, and strife. Thus, the military strategy is actually making the political process more difficult by failing to provide the actors the space needed for any progression towards reconciliation. The ultimate (and tragic) irony, is that this strategy also makes the possibility for a much larger civil war far more likely.

Perhaps this is the “success” and “progress” Bush and others refer to when they reference the so-called surge.

“The men I served with are professionals,” Reppenhagen told the audience at a panel of U.S. veterans speaking of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, “They went to Iraq to defend the U.S. But we found rapidly we were killing Iraqis in horrible ways. But we had to in order to remain safe ourselves. The war is the atrocity.”

The event, which has drawn international media attention, was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It aims to show that their stories of wrongdoing in both countries were not isolated incidents limited to a few “bad apples”, as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences.

The panel on the “Rules of Engagement” (ROE) during the first full day of the gathering, named “Winter Soldier” to honour a similar gathering 30 years ago of veterans of the Vietnam War, was held in front of a visibly moved audience of several hundred, including veterans from Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Winter soldiers, according to U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, are the people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours

Reppenhagen served in Iraq from February 2004-2005 in the city of Baquba, 40 kms northeast of Baghdad. He said his first experience in Iraq was being on a patrol that killed two Iraqi farmers as they worked in their field at night.

“I was told they were out in the fields farming because their pumps only operated with electricity, which meant they had to go out in the dark when there was electricity,” he explained, “I asked the sergeant, if he knew this, why did he fire on the men. He told me because the men were out after curfew. I was never given another ROE during my time in Iraq.”

Another veteran of the occupation of Iraq on the panel was Vincent Emmanuel. He served in the Marines near the northern Iraqi city of Al-Qaim during 2004-2005. Emmanuel explained that “taking potshots at cars that drove by” happened all the time and “these were not isolated incidents”.

Emmanuel continued: “We took fire while trying to blow up a bridge. Many of the attackers were part of the general population. This led to our squad shooting at everything and anything in order to push through the town. I remember myself emptying magazines into the town, never identifying a target.”

As other panelists nodded in agreement, Emmanuel spoke of abusing prisoners who he knew were innocent, adding, “We took it upon ourselves to harass them, and took them to the desert to throw them out of our Humvees, while kicking and punching them when we threw them out.”

Two other soldiers testified about planting weapons or shovels on civilians they had accidentally shot, to justify the killings by implying the dead were fighters or people attempting to plant roadside bombs.

Jason Washburn was a corporal in the marines, and served three tours in Iraq, his last in Haditha from 2005-2006.

“We were encouraged to bring ‘drop weapons’ or shovels, in case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent,” he said, “By the third tour, if they were carrying a shovel or bag, we could shoot them. So we carried these tools and weapons in our vehicles, so we could toss them on civilians when we shot them. This was commonly encouraged.”

Washburn explained that his ROE changed “a lot”.

“The higher the threat level, the more viciously we were told to respond. We had towns that were deemed ‘free fire zones’. One time there was a mayor of a town near Haditha that got shot up. We were shown this as an example because there was a nice tight shot group on the windshield, and told that was a good job, that was what Marines were supposed to do. And that was the mayor of the town.”

Jason Wayne Lemue is a Marine who served three tours in Iraq.

“My commander told me, ‘Kill those who need to be killed, and save those who need to be saved’, that was our mission on our first tour,” he said of his first deployment during the invasion nearly five years ago.

Lemue continued, “After that the ROE changed, and carrying a shovel, or standing on a rooftop talking on a cell phone, or being out after curfew [meant the people] were to be killed. I can’t tell you how many people died because of this. By my third tour, we were told to just shoot people, and the officers would take care of us.”

John Michael Turner served two tours in the Marines as a machine gunner in Iraq. Visibly upset, he told the audience, “I was taught as a Marine to eat the apple to the core.” Turner then pulled his military metals off his shirt and threw them on the ground.

“Apr. 18, 2006 was the date of my first confirmed kill,” he said sombrely. “He was innocent, I called him the fat man. He was walking back to his house and I killed him in front of his father and friend. My first shot made him scream and look into my eyes, so I looked at my friend and said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen’, and shot him again. After my first kill I was congratulated.”

Turner explained one reason why establishment media reporting about the occupation in the U.S. has been largely sanitised. “Anytime we had embedded reporters, our actions changed drastically,” he explained. “We did everything by the books, and were very low key.”

To conclude, an emotional Turner said, “I want to say I’m sorry for the hate and destruction that I and others have inflicted on innocent people. It is not okay, and this is happening, and until people hear what is going on this is going to continue. I am no longer the monster that I once was.”

He said nothing, of course, about Iraqis “injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” In fact, amid the flurries of words, accusations, and “debates” which have filled the airways and add up to the primary-season presidential campaign, there has been a near thunderous silence on Iraq lately — and especially on Iraqis.

A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll indicated that 64% of Americans now feel the war in Iraq was not worth fighting. American opinion on the war and occupation, in fact, seems remarkably unaffected by the positive spin — all those “success” stories in the mainstream media — of these post-surge months. The media now tells us that Iraq is going to be taking a distinct backseat to domestic economic issues, that Americans are no longer as concerned about it.

Once again, with rare exceptions, that media has had a hand in erasing the catastrophe of Iraq from the American landscape, if not the collective consciousness of the public. What, it occurred to me recently, do my friends and acquaintances back in Iraq (where I covered the occupation for eight months during the years 2003-2005) think not just about their lives and the fate of their country, but about our attitudes toward them? What do they think about the “success” — and the silence — in America?

On October 6, 2004, George W. Bush proclaimed: “Iraq is no diversion; it is the place where civilization is taking a decisive stand against chaos and terror — and we must not waver.”

Iraqis, of course, continue to witness firsthand this “decisive stand against chaos and terror.” In our world, however, they are largely mute witnesses. Americans may argue among themselves about just how much “success” or “progress” there really is in post-surge Iraq, but it is almost invariably an argument in which Iraqis are but stick figures — or dead bodies. Of late, I have been asking Iraqis I know by email what they make of the American version (or versions) of the unseemly reality that is their country, that they live and suffer with. What does it mean to become a “secondary issue” for your occupier?

In response, Professor S. Abdul Majeed Hassan, an Iraqi university faculty member wrote me the following:

The year of 2007 was the bloodiest among the occupation years, and no matter how successful the situation looks to Mr. Bush, reality is totally different. What kind of normal life are he and the media referring to where four and a half million highly educated Iraqis are still dislocated or still being forcefully driven out of their homes for being anti-occupation? How can the people live a normal life in a cage of concrete walls [she is referring to concrete walls being erected by the Americans around entire Baghdad neighborhoods], guarded by their kidnappers, killers, and occupation forces? What kind of normal life can you live where tens of your relatives and your beloved ones are either missing or in jail and you don’t even know if they are still alive or, after being tortured, have been thrown unidentified in the dumpsters?

What kind of normal life can you live when you have to bid farewell to your family each time you go out to buy bread because you don’t know if you are going to see them again? What is a normal life to Mr. Bush? If we’re lucky, we get a few hours of electricity a day, barely enough drinking water, no health care, no jobs to feed our kids . . .

Little teenage girls are given away in marriage because their families can’t protect them from militias and troops during raids. Women cannot move unescorted anymore. What kind of educations are our children getting at universities where 60% of the prominent faculty members have been driven out of their jobs — killed or forced to leave the country by government militias? Is it normal that areas [on the outskirts of Baghdad] like Saidiya and Arab Jubour are bombed because the occupation forces are afraid to enter the areas for fear of the resistance? It is always easier to control ghost cities. It becomes very peaceful without the people.

On January 8th, President Bush held video teleconferences with General David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, as well as with the US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and with members of US Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq. Afterwards, he told reporters at a press conference, “It was clear from my discussions that there’s great hope in Iraq, that the Iraqis are beginning to see political progress that is matching the dramatic security gains for the past year.” Members of the PRTs, he claimed, had told him that”[l]ife is returning to normal in communities across Iraq, with children back in school and shops reopening and markets bustling with commerce.” Bush thanked members of those teams for “making 2007, particularly the end of 2007, become incredibly successful beyond anybody’s expectations.”

Mohammad Mahri’i, an Iraqi journalist, has a rather different take on the situation: “The problem with Bush is that his people believe him every time he lies to them,” he writes me. “His reconstruction teams are invisible and I wish they could show me one inch above the ground that they built.”

Maki al-Nazzal, an Iraqi political analyst from Fallujah who has been forced to live abroad with his family, thanks to ongoing violence and the lack of jobs or significant reconstruction activity in his city, which was three-quarters destroyed in a U.S. assault in November 2004, offered me his thoughts on the Western mainstream coverage of Iraq.

The media should not follow the warlords’ and politicians’ propaganda. It is our duty to search for the truth and not repeat lies like parrots. The U.S. occupation is bad and no amount of media propaganda can camouflage the mess inside occupied Iraq. We are ashamed of the local and Western media [for] marketing the naked lies told by generals and politicians. Comparing two halves of 2007 is ridiculous.

Bush and his heroes, [head of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul] Bremer, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and now Petraeus always lied to their people and the world about Iraq. U.S. soldiers are getting killed on a daily basis and so are Iraqi army and police officers. Infrastructure is destroyed. In a country that used to feed much of the Arab world, starvation is now the norm. It is ironic that Iraq was not half as bad during the 12 years of sanctions. Our liberation has pushed us into a state of unprecedented corruption.

General David Petraeus, U.S. surge commander in Iraq, insists that “we and our Iraqi partners will . . . continue to look beyond the security realm to help the Iraqis improve basic services, revitalize local markets, repair damaged infrastructure and create conditions that allow displaced families to return to their homes.”

Iraqis know differently. Al-Nazzal is realistic:

Petraeus wants us to celebrate the return [to Baghdad] of 50,000 Iraqis who were starving in Syria, when five million remain in exile and internally displaced. What he conveniently forgets to mention is that those who returned found their houses either destroyed or occupied by others. He also wants to be praised for handing over the nation’s security to militias he allowed to form rather than to academics and technocrats. Iraq has no medicines in its hospitals, no electricity, no potable water, no real security, and no well-guarded borders. Nevertheless, some people say they are happy for what is going on in Iraq!

Much as they would like to believe the claims of success and progress from American officials, Iraqis — surrounded by disaster — cannot do so.

37-year-old Sammy Tahir, a Kurdish education advisor living in Baghdad, offers the following assessment of the cautious but upbeat claims being made by Petraeus and others:

“No improvement in any service can be found in Iraq. On the contrary, we are much worse now and we are back to painting old buildings to make them look better. Kurdistan is still full of displaced Iraqis from southern and mid-Iraq.”

About this Mari’i writes:

“It was the generals who destroyed Iraq in the first place and I do not see any improvement in basic services. For example, most of Baghdad has been without electricity for about two weeks at the time of writing!”

Professor Hassan shares a similar view:

“What the Americans hadn’t destroyed by the end of the military operations of 2003, they have finished off over the past four years, and I don’t think that the occupation forces and their assigned government would like to do anything about the displacement of Iraqi families, simply because they are the ones who created that situation.

The sectarian violence, which led to this mass displacement, was initiated by the U.S. and its allies to divide the Iraqi community in accordance with American plans and the published ‘new’ Iraqi constitution, which emphasizes sectarian issues. The occupation would like to divide Iraq into small sectarian and ethnic regions to be able to easily command, control, and conquer them. The major objective of the occupation is to control oil production and reserves in Iraq and the Middle East region. Displacing families is, to them, acceptable collateral damage.

According to Tahir:

“Children always went to school before the late 2007 crackdown and it was mainly the military operations that stopped them from doing so in some areas where the Americans attacked towns and villages. Bush has been saying the same words since 2003, but things have always gotten progressively worse in Iraq. He and his generals are destroying both Iraq and the U.S. by continuing this war. The U.S. economy will never hold against the expenses of war and Iraq is totally destroyed.”

During a surprise visit to Baghdad on January 15th, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that last year’s “surge” of American forces was paying dividends and suggested that she could “help push the momentum by her very presence” in Iraq.

Mahri’i’s offers a lament for the American presence and those “dividends”:

“It seems that Americans do not care about what has been done to Iraq. They decorated Bremer, who is a war criminal, with top medals. [In December 2004, Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him.] Why not honor another criminal like Petraeus and other Bush administration officials with the same medals for lying to them while their soldiers and our people are getting killed?”

Tahir, on the other hand, has a warning: “It seems that all U.S. politicians and the majority of Americans think the way [Sen.] McCain does. But they should not think Iraq is Japan or South Korea.”

Mahri’i agrees: “Such leaders will write the final page of history for their country. If Americans keep electing such adventurers, then I can see the end of their country approaching fast.”

Professor Hassan states what is clearly on the minds of many Iraqis as the occupation grinds on and the American presidential race revs up, though she may be more charitable than many of her compatriots:

Most Americans figured out the real reasons behind the invasion of Iraq and the terrible consequences of that war for them, currently and in the future. The American people I know are kind, considerate, and understanding. I am sure they will do what it will take to end this occupation. They know by now that this is not a war of the American people; it is the oil companies’ war, so why should they sacrifice their young men and women for oil companies’ greed?

Last October, speaking of the US-led invasion and occupation at Stanford University, where he is now a visiting fellow of the Hoover Institute, former CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid told the audience, “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.” General Abizaid’s comment came roughly a month after former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan wrote in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

While many in the US, along with Bush administration officials and leading presidential candidates (both Democratic and Republican) continue to refuse to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe that is the occupation of Iraq, Iraqis don’t have the same luxury.

Early on in my time in Iraq, during the first year of the occupation, the Iraqis I met were generally quick to differentiate between the policies of the US government and the desires of the American people.

Over time, after brutal US military operations against cities like Najaf, Fallujah, Al-Qa’im, Samarra, and Ramadi, after Abu Ghraib, after Haditha, after the near-total collapse of their country’s infrastructure and the shredding of its social fabric, I began to witness occupation-weary Iraqis ceasing to draw that same critical line.

Recently, a resident of Baquba (who asked not to be identified by name for fear of retribution for talking to the media), told my Iraqi colleague Ahmed Ali, “The lack of security is a direct result of the occupation. The Americans crossed thousands of miles to destroy our home and kill our men. They are the reason for all our disasters.”

Abu Tariq, a merchant from Baquba, believes the US military intentionally destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure. He told Ali,

The Americans destroyed the electricity, water-pumping stations, factories, bridges, highways, hospitals, schools, burnt the buildings, and opened the borders for the strangers and terrorists to get easily into the country. The one who does all these things is void of humanity. I hate America and Americans.

Abu Taiseer, another resident of Baquba, summed up Iraqi bitterness this way:

At the very beginning of the occupation, the people of Iraq did not realize the U.S. strategy in the area. Their strategy is based on destruction and massacres. They do anything to have their agenda fulfilled. Now, Iraqis know that behind the U.S. smile is hatred and violence. They call others violent and terrorists while what they are doing in Iraq and in other countries is the origin and essence of terror.

Jalal al-Taee, a retired teacher, told Ali what more Iraqis than ever likely believe:

“In Baquba, people have severe hatred towards the Americans and a large number of residents have become enemies of the U.S. army. The people of Diyala province have been oppressed and treated unjustly by the U.S. army and the [Baghdad] government. In order to improve the situation, the U.S. army should let the people of this city rule it by themselves.”

For months now the U.S. military has been actively building what it calls ‘Awakening’ forces and “concerned local citizens” in an effort to reduce attacks on occupation forces.

Members of the forces, which comprise primarily former resistance fighters and tribal groups, are paid 300 dollars monthly. There are at present about 80,000 recruits to these groups. The U.S. military plans to cap the number at 85,000.

According to the U.S. military, 82 percent of the members are Sunni.

The forces, which are opposed by the Iraqi government led by U.S.-appointed Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, are also being strongly criticised by Sunni residents in Baghdad and other cities.

“The armed groups called ‘Awakening’ are now the only powerful players in many Sunni areas in Baghdad, and so they show their power the way others did,” Qussay al-Tai’i, a lawyer from Saydiya town southwest of Baghdad told Inter Press Service (IPS). “It seems that violence has become routine procedure for American soldiers, Iraqi security men and now the so-called Awakening fighters.”

Witnesses from the area who have recently fled to Baghdad told IPS that more than 200 residents have been arrested by Awakening fighters supported by the al-Muthanna battalion of the Iraqi army.

“They came and arrested my 14 and 17-year-old sons,” said Hajja Um Ahmed. “I told them my sons are only schoolboys who did nothing wrong, but they pushed me away.”

Saydiya residents are worried that some of the detainees will be executed as others were in Fallujah and other areas where ‘Awakening’ fighters have taken over.

“They will kill them in cold blood and throw their bodies in garbage dumps,” the terrified father of a 35-year-old detainee, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “They told my son when they took him that they would cut off his head, and it seems that they meant it.”

“They have spread their spies all over the area and threatened us with arrest if we ever talk about this to the press,” a merchant who did not give his name told IPS. “You too must be careful because they really hate journalists.”

The Sunni religious group, The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), has condemned the detentions, and says the occupation forces and the current government are responsible for the safety of the detained.

“We draw the world’s attention to the new wave of detentions and executions by this new toy of the occupation,” Sheikh Hatam Ali of the AMS told IPS in Baghdad. “Thousands of Iraqis are being detained, tortured and executed while the U.S. occupation and its illegitimate so-called Iraqi government tell the world lies about reconciliation and justice among Iraqis.” U.S. military units apparently did not interfere with raids conducted by the Iraqi army and the ‘Awakening’ fighters in Saydiya. The raids have added to the large numbers of people detained.

In November 2007, the International Committee of the Red Cross announced that around 60,000 people were currently detained in Iraq. “They are still waiting for their problem to be solved, and the Iraqi government does not seem willing to solve it,” Luqman Mohammad, a journalist and human rights activist in Baghdad told IPS. “This country needs a comprehensive solution by the whole international community.”

‘Awakening’ forces have been widely criticised for corruption and for brutal tactics. Many speak of them as “gangs”, “criminals”, “dogs of the Americans”, and “thieves.” But the Bush administration, and many media outlets in the west, credit the ‘Awakening’ forces with bringing stability to volatile areas.

This propaganda, like others of its ilk, gains ground, substance, and reality due largely to the ignorance of those ingesting it. The snow job by the corporate media on the issue of sectarianism in Iraq has ensured that the public buys into the line that the Sunni and Shia will dice one another up into little pieces if the occupation ends.

It may be worthwhile to consider that prior to the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq there had never been open warfare between the two groups and certainly not a civil war. In terms of organization and convention, Iraqis are a tribal society and some of the largest tribes in the country comprise Sunni and Shia. Intermarriages between the two sects are not uncommon either.

Soon after arriving in Iraq in November 2003, I learned that it was considered rude and socially graceless to enquire after an individual’s sect. If in ignorance or under compulsion I did pose the question the most common answer I would receive was, “I am Muslim, and I am Iraqi.” On occasion there were more telling responses like the one I received from an older woman, “My mother is a Shia and my father a Sunni, so can you tell which half of me is which?” The accompanying smile said it all.

Large mixed neighborhoods were the norm in Baghdad. Sunni and Shia prayed in one another’s mosques. Secular Iraqis could form lifelong associations with others without overt concern about their chosen sect. How did such a well-integrated society erupt into vicious fighting, violent sectarianism, and segregated neighborhoods? How is one to explain the millions in Iraq displaced from their homes simply because they were the wrong sect in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Back in December 2003 Sheikh Adnan, a Friday speaker at his mosque, had recounted a recent experience to me. During the first weeks of the occupation, a U.S. military commander had showed up in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province located roughly twenty-five miles northeast of Baghdad with a mixed Sunni-Shia population. He had asked to meet with all the tribal and religious leaders. On the appointed day the assembled leaders were perplexed when the commander instructed them to divide themselves, “Shia on one side of the room, Sunni on the other.”

It would not be amiss, perhaps, to read in this account an implanting of a deliberate policy of “divide and rule” by the Anglo-American invaders from the early days of the occupation.

There have been no statistical surveys in recent years to determine the sectarian composition of Iraq. However, when the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Paul Bremer, formed the first puppet Iraqi government, a precedent was set. The twenty-five seats in the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), were assigned strictly along sectarian lines based on the assumption that 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20 percent Sunni, and 20 percent Kurds, who are mostly Sunni. For good measure, a couple of Turkoman and a Christian were thrown in.

It is evident that this puppet troupe deployed at the onset of “democracy” in Iraq was mandated to establish to the population that it was in the larger interest to begin thinking, at least politically, along sectarian and ethnic lines. Inevitably, political power struggles ensued and were cemented and exacerbated with the January 30, 2005, elections.

Mild surface scratching reveals a darker, largely unreported aspect of the divisive U.S. plan. A UN report released in September 2005 held Iraqi interior ministry forces responsible for an organized campaign of detention, torture, and killing of fellow Iraqis. These special police commando units were recruited from the Shia Badr Organization and Mehdi Army militias.

In Baghdad during November and December 2004, I heard widespread accounts of death squads assassinating Sunni resistance leaders and their key sympathizers. It was after the failure of Operation Phantom Fury, as the U.S. siege of Fallujah that November was named, that the Iraqi resistance spread across Iraq like wildfire. Death squads were set up to quell this fire by eliminating the leadership of this growing resistance.

The firefighting team had at its helm the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, ably assisted by retired Colonel James Steele, adviser to Iraqi security forces. In 1984–86 Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisory group in El Salvador. Between 1981 and 1985 Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighboring Honduras. In 1994 the Honduras Commission on Human Rights charged him with extensive human rights violations, reporting the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers. A CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras has placed on record documents admitting that the operations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by “special intelligence units,” better known as “death squads,” of CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured, and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas. Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.

The only public mention of any of this I have seen was in Newsweek magazine on January 8, 2005. It quotes Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense at the time, who discussed the use of the “Salvador Option” in Iraq. It compared the strategy being planned for Iraq to the one used in Central America during the Reagan administration:

Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the US government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many US conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

US-backed sectarian death squads have become the foremost generator of death in Iraq, even surpassing the U.S. military machine, infamous for its capacity for industrial-scale slaughter. It is no secret in Baghdad that the U.S. military would regularly cordon off pro-resistance areas like the al-Adhamiyah neighborhood of Baghdad and allow “Iraqi police” and “Iraqi army” personnel, masked in black balaclavas, through their checkpoints to carry out abductions and assassinations in the neighborhood.

Consequently, almost all of Baghdad and much of Iraq is now segregated. The flipside is that violence in the capital city has subsided somewhat of late now that the endgame of forming the death squads, that of fragmenting the population, has been mostly accomplished.

Baghdad resident, retired General Waleed al-Ubaidy told my Iraqi colleague recently, “I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and that everything is fine, but the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq.” Baghdad today is a divided city.

Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad’s municipalities told my colleague, Ali al-Fadhily, “Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and neighborhoods. There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with. Each is divided into little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes.” Al-Adhamiyah, on the Russafa side of Tigris River, is now entirely Sunni, the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya, and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by Shia militias.

Not being privy to the U.S. machinations, Iraqis in Baghdad blame the Iraqi police and Iraqi army for the sectarian assassinations and wonder why the U.S. military does little or nothing to stop them. “The Americans ask [Prime Minister Nouri al] Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations knowing full well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing,” says Mahmood Farhan of the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group.

A more recent manifestation of the divisive U.S. policy has been the “purchase” of members of the largely Sunni resistance in Baghdad and in al-Anbar province that constitutes one-third of the geographic area of Iraq. Payments made by the U.S. military to collaborating tribal sheikhs already amount to $17 million. The money passes directly into the hands of fighters who in many cases were engaged in launching attacks against the occupiers less than two weeks ago. Tribal fighters are being paid $300 per month to patrol their areas, particularly against foreign mercenaries. Today the military refers to these men as “concerned local citizens,” “awakening force,” or simply “volunteers.”

Arguably, violence in the area has temporarily declined. “Those Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes,” announced a thirty-two-year-old man from Ramadi, who spoke with al-Fadhily on terms of anonymity, “They know they are sinking deeper into the shifting sand, but the collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy against them.” By the end of November 2007, the U.S. military had enlisted 77,000 of these fighters, and hopes to add another 10,000. Eighty-two percent of the fighters are Sunni.

Politically, the U.S. administration maintains its support of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. The fallout has been blatantly clear. On the first of December, Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Accordance Front, which is the Sunni political bloc in the Iraqi Parliament, was placed under house arrest by Iraqi and U.S. security forces in the Adil neighborhood, west of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces also detained his son Makki and forty-five of his guards. They were accused of manufacturing car bombs and killing Sunni militia members in the neighborhood who have been working with the U.S. military. Members of the Accordance Front, which holds 44 of the 275 seats in the Iraqi Parliament, promptly walked out. Maliki has, several times in the last several weeks, hurled public accusations and criticisms at al-Dulaimi, sending political and sectarian shock waves, further crippling the crumbling political process.

It is important to mention that Maliki, a U.S. puppet par excellence, acts only as told. After the January 2005 elections, the government that came into power had chosen Ibrahim al-Jaafari as its prime minister. When Jaafari refused to toe the U.S./UK line, Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart Jack Straw flew to Baghdad, and before their short trip ended Jaafari was out and Maliki was in as prime minister.

In the context of these facts let us now return to the big question: Will Iraq descend further into a sectarian nightmare if the occupation ends?

An indicator of how things will likely resolve themselves upon the departure of foreign troops may be drawn from the southern city of Basra. In early September, 500 British troops left one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the heart of the city and ceased to conduct regular foot patrols. According to the British military, the overall level of violence in the city has decreased 90 percent since then.

This may or may not be a guarantee of a drop in sectarianism upon the departure of the invading armies, but it does prove that when the primary cause of the violence, sectarian strife, instability, and chaos is removed from the equation of Iraq, things are bound to improve rapidly.

Are we still going to believe that the occupation is holding Iraq together?

The Washington Post on November 23 reports, “Returnees Find a Capital Transformed.”

People in the US are willing to believe the establishment media telling them that refugees are returning to their homes in Baghdad in an environment of improved security and new hope.

It is true that there have been fewer American soldiers killed in Baghdad and the number of Iraqis fleeing to Syria has declined. However, this relatively quieter security situation needs to be placed in its proper context, something the Western media steadfastly refuses to do.

We are proudly informed that buying off Sunni militias and resistance fighters at $300 per month is among the latest U.S. military tactics, but we are conscientiously kept uninformed about the implications of such a move. Nor is there any mention of the growing antagonism it has generated in the US-backed Iraqi Government under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. By its own admission, the U.S. military has paid over $17 million, so far, to recruit 77,000 Sunni fighters, many of whom were launching attacks against the Americans a few weeks ago (International Herald Tribune).

Post purchase, the US military has rechristened them “Concerned Local Citizens,” or “Awakening Forces.” The target is to procure another 10,000.

The current recruitment has indeed contributed to a de-escalation of violence in the capital city, and across much of al-Anbar province, which comprises one third of the geographic area of Iraq.

Reiterated Strategy

We are proudly informed that buying off Sunni militias and resistance fighters at $300 per month is among the latest U.S. military tactics, but kept uninformed about the implications of such a move.

After it failed to take control of Fallujah during the April 2004 assault, the US employed a similar tactic. It was a presidential election year in the US (as is 2008) and in order to save face, the U.S. military “handed” over security operations in Fallujah to the very people it had fought in April. Money and weapons flooded the city and strengthened the mujahedeen.

At the time a much larger battle was in the offing, the November 2004 U.S. siege of Fallujah, which left thousands dead, and destroyed approximately 70 percent of the city. It is worth noting that the attack was launched on November 8, 2004, just days after it was determined that George W. Bush would remain in office.

Under the “new and improved” conditions, consider the following:

* the fragility of the political balance in Iraq;

* the Middle Eastern regional instability;

*the ever intensifying U.S. threats of an attack against Iran;

* the likelihood of the “Concerned Local Citizens” staying loyal to their new masters;
and then let us consider what calamity awaits the occupied country.

Political Capital

Both the Maliki government and the Bush administration are using the return of refugees as political capital. This projection bears little relation to the ground reality.

To place an inconsequential fact on record, since the beginning of the US “surge” earlier this year, the number of people displaced from their homes in Iraq has quadrupled, and the number of detentions carried out by both Iraqi and U.S. security forces has escalated astronomically. On November 13, the International Committee for the Red Cross estimated there are around 60,000 people detained in U.S. and Iraqi prisons around Iraq.

Refugees returning to Baghdad have been projected in the West as evidence of the “surge” having brought security to Baghdad. Both the Maliki government and the Bush administration are using them as political capital. This projection bears little relation to the ground reality which indicates a steep decline in the number of returnees.

A recent UN survey, revealing the modest number of families returning to Baghdad, shows that “46 percent were leaving [Syria] because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security” (The New York Times).

It crucial to consider, but evidently not by the western media, that as of October 1st the Syrian government has imposed new visa restrictions whereby Iraqis who can prove they need medical treatment or intend to conduct business alone are permitted entry into Syria.

Iraqis who are barred entrance have the option of staying in a refugee camp on the border in the middle of the desert, or returning home.

Not More is Not Less

“It is true that hundreds of fighters were killed or detained by the so-called Awakening Forces, but there are thousands who will never quit fighting until this occupation is ended.”

Let us not discount the fact that the “lower violence rate” being reported by the Western media establishments imply that violence in Iraq is now down to 2005 levels, which at the time was considered catastrophic. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that “nearly 90 percent of US journalists in Iraq say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit.” Those surveyed have admitted that the “coverage has painted too rosy a picture of the conflict” (Reuters).

The not-so-rosy reality is that the resistance has merely shifted location. As Ali Khamees, a former major of the Iraqi army, recently told my Iraqi colleague in Ramadi, Ali al-Fadhily, “it is true that hundreds of fighters were killed or detained by the so-called Awakening Forces, but there are thousands who will never quit fighting until this occupation is ended. I believe it is a new strategy employed by the resistance to reduce the suffering of people in al-Anbar and move somewhere else to fight.”

Attacks against U.S. forces have increased notably in other Iraqi provinces like Diyala, Saladin and Mosul.

On November 28, a female suicide bomber wounded seven US soldiers in Baquba, the capital city of the volatile Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. The previous day in the same city, another suicide bomber detonated his explosives filled vest in front of the police headquarters, killing six people and wounding seven, according to Iraqi police reports.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a 32 year old Ramadi resident cautioned my Iraqi colleague, al-Fadhily, “those Americans thought they would decrease the resistance attacks by separating the people of Iraq into sects and tribes. They are going deeper into the shifting sand. The collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy against them.”

Provinces like Saladin, Diyala and the Kurdish controlled north, now under regular bombardment from the Turkish military which is threatening invasion, have become more volatile than ever.

The Bush administration talks of withdrawing up to 5,000 troops from Diyala province, but on November 24 US military officials revealed that the overall number of American troops in Diyala will actually increase since the replacement brigade for the one being removed is larger and will mean more boots on the ground.

Crafting Political Chaos

“Those Americans . . . are going deeper into the shifting sand. The collaborators are fooling the Americans right now, and will in the end use this strategy against them”

The U.S. policy of propping up the Sunni militias whilst backing the Shia government has heightened the volatility of an already precarious political situation. Deep fissures are one fall out of this classic divide and rule tactic.

On November 29, legislators blocked Prime Minister Maliki’s attempts to get approval for nominees to fill the vacant portfolios of justice and communications in the cabinet. This was done by getting legislators from several parties to boycott the session and ensure that parliament did not have the requisite quorum to vote on the nominations.

The cabinet and parliament in Baghdad remain paralyzed thereby effectively derailing US efforts to push legislation for privatization of Iraq’s oil. Over a dozen ministers have quit Maliki’s government this year. These include members of the Accordance Front, the largest Sunni block in the parliament, which withdrew its support in August. The cabinet is presently composed primarily of Shia and Kurds which only underscores the sectarian and ethnic battle lines that the U.S. policies have drawn in Iraq.

Before swallowing the Bush administration rhetoric of things getting better in Iraq today, we would do well to cast a glance at the real picture of the calamitous occupation.

The Just Foreign Policy group in the US places over 1.1 million Iraqis dead as a direct result of the US led invasion and occupation. A conservative estimate of the wounded would be 3 million.

The UNHCR enlists an approximate 2.2 million Iraqis that have fled the country altogether, and another 2.4 million that have been internally displaced. An Oxfam International report released in July found another 4 million Iraqis who were in need of emergency assistance.

Iraq’s population at the time of the US invasion in March 2003 was roughly 27 million, and today it is approximately 23 million. Elementary arithmetic indicates that currently over half the population of Iraq are either refugees, in need of emergency aid, wounded, or dead.

While the US establishment media proffers us the assurance of “Baghdad’s Weary Start to Exhale as Security Improves,” for most Iraqis safe and secure survival remains a distant dream. For Americans it is perhaps time to act on the words of Carl Schurz and “cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”

“The history of liberty is a history of resistance.”
— Woodrow T. Wilson

“We rely on Hezbollah and these other countries which are helping us now because it’s all we have,” Abu Khalil, an unemployed construction worker injured by bomb shrapnel during last summer’s war in Lebanon told me. As we stood talking in the warm spring sun outside his largely destroyed village of Aita Ech Chaab, a few hundred yards from Lebanon’s southern border, he added, “And we rely on Hezbollah to protect us again from the next Israeli aggression, because our own government cannot and will not do that job.”

In its savage 34-day assault on Lebanon, the Israeli government had hoped to knock down precisely that sentiment. One of the stated aims of the war, in which more than a thousand Lebanese and more than 40 Israelis were killed, was to turn the Lebanese against Hezbollah for having triggered the conflict. An ironic assumption considering that the creation of Hezbollah was a direct response to an earlier Israeli attack.

Formed in 1982 to resist the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, Hezbollah became a political entity in 1985. As a sworn enemy of staunch U.S. ally Israel, it has been labeled a “terrorist organization” by Washington. The sustained propaganda and bellicose posturing of the U.S. government regarding the outfit have kept most Americans ignorant of its true nature and of the fact that a large number of Lebanese are currently aligning with Hezbollah in a bid to thwart the policy of global hegemony being pushed by the Bush administration in Lebanon.

Another irony is that nearly half the members of the massive opposition alliance joining Hezbollah against the U.S.-backed Lebanese government are Christians.

Michel Samaha, a Maronite Christian who was Lebanon’s information minister from 1992 to ‘95 and in 2003-04, is among the growing number of Christians, Druze and Sunnis to have joined the Lebanese Shiites in moving Hezbollah toward a democratic government in Lebanon. His reasons, like those of many others, lie in the perception of U.S. policy as being injurious to his country.

Samaha says Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Ministers Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt are seeking to strengthen themselves by accommodating the priorities of the United States, Israeli hawks and U.S. neocons in administering Lebanon. Of the much touted Hezbollah-Iran link, Samaha said that the Shiites in Lebanon who support Hezbollah are “… not Iranians; they are Lebanese and they have their independent agenda. It is this resistance who fought in the south. These are the Lebanese Shiites who fought. What we have witnessed during the second Israeli war on Lebanon is the defeat of Israel in Israel itself. It is not Iranians. It is the Lebanese fighters, the Lebanese mujahedeen, who fought in this important war and emerged victorious.”

Today, the credibility of Hezbollah has gone beyond that of a legitimate resistance movement. Extensive social programs in times of peace and ongoing rehabilitation efforts after the war have brought Hezbollah greater appreciation and acclaim among the Lebanese people.

The civilian population of south Lebanon comprises the poor of the country, who have survived on farming and had little if any support from the government. It is Hezbollah that has provided them education, healthcare and other social support services, particularly during the Israeli occupation that lasted until May 2000.

Ostensibly to teach an unforgettable lesson to Hezbollah leadership and to Tehran, the Israeli military, with the endorsement of the Bush administration, plastered southern Lebanon with 100,000 artillery shells and 1 million cluster bombs. Unexploded, the latter are a menace and continue to make farming impossible.

Israel’s air force, armed with U.S.-manufactured and -fueled F-16s, went on a rampage with more than 14 combat missions every single hour of the war, destroying, among other things, 73 bridges, 400 miles of roads, 25 gas stations, 900 commercial structures, two hospitals, 350 schools and 15,000 Lebanese homes.

Political fallout from the war has been disastrous in Israel, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s public approval rating reached an all-time low of 2 percent in March, according to the daily Yediot Ahronoth.

More recently, an Israeli investigative commission released a damning preliminary report on Olmert’s handling of the war that found he had “made up his mind hastily” to launch the air, sea and land attack last July. It accused him of “a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence,” and described his stated goals of freeing two captured Israeli soldiers and crushing Hezbollah as “overly ambitious and impossible to achieve.”

Last summer, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon announced on Israeli army radio that “all those in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah” and “villages should be flattened by the Israeli air force before ground troops move in.”

Such rhetoric and the ensuing actions have not had the effect desired by the U.S. and Israel. Instead of becoming unpopular, Hezbollah has garnered massive political alliances.

Said Samaha: “I’m a Christian, but I’m a Lebanese too. I can’t disassociate myself from the Shiites when faced with Israel. … It is unacceptable to me if the resistance is excluded from decision-making. It may be the Shiite mujahedeen, but it is a Lebanese resistance embedded in Lebanese society of which Christians, Shiites, Druze and Sunnis are the bedrock

The Bush administration policy on Lebanon and its unbridled support for Israel have galvanized a powerful opposition to the Lebanese government.

However, George W. Bush made a brazen assault on reality at a news conference the day the U.N.-brokered cease-fire took place between Hezbollah and Israel on Aug. 14, 2006. “Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis,” he declared. “How can you claim victory when you were a state within a state in southern Lebanon, and now you’re going to be replaced by an international force?”

“There’s going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon,” he added, referring to the UNIFIL force [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] that was to assist the Lebanese army in controlling the area.

Having just returned from southern Lebanon, I can tell you that UNIFIL has not replaced Hezbollah in any capacity. Loyalty to Hezbollah and to countries like Iran that are involved in postwar reconstruction projects is at an all-time high. Languid UNIFIL soldiers stand speckled across the border, smoking cigarettes and watching cars pass.

UNIFIL is also seen by many in Lebanon as an indirect sign of favoritism toward Israel.

Mohammed Kundoulay, a 17-year-old secondary school student, said “… it’s a good thing for UNIFIL to help us get our land back.” When I asked him about UNIFIL mine-removal operations he said, “We need this help now after the Israelis conducted terrorism against us.”

His friend, Jaffar Assaf, was more precise, “We hope the U.N. maintain their position and help to defend us from Israel. Although in fact, the U.N. should be in Israel and not here if they want to defend us from them, since they [the Israelis] were the ones who invaded Lebanon, not vice versa.”

The indifference of the government in Beirut has left hundreds of thousands in south Lebanon almost entirely dependent upon and therefore loyal to Hezbollah.

Prime Minister Siniora and his cronies obtained pledges of more than $7 billion in aid and loans at a meeting in Paris in January, but have done precious little to help war victims rebuild their lives.

“We’ve applied to the government for help. They came and inspected the damage and said they would let us know. We’re still waiting,” said Mahmoud al-Khateib, 45, whose electronics repair shop in southern Beirut was damaged by an Israeli bomb.

Change his name and location and it’s the same story across the south.

In the town of Bint Jbail, which was hammered by Israeli airstrikes, I met with neighborhood mayor Ali Beydoun in his partially destroyed house. He had returned to rebuild the house while his family stayed on in Beirut. Beydoun was equally angry with the current Lebanese government and the Israeli military. “We support the opposition to the government because we want our rights and we want justice and support. At least the head of the government should come see what has happened in his country.”

Siniora has yet to visit southern Lebanon to assess the war damage. “Instead he went on a holiday to Jordan.” Waving his arm toward central Bint Jbail, destroyed by Israeli airstrikes and artillery shells, Beydoun asked me, “Is it possible for a prime minister not to know or care about his own country?”

I heard similar sentiments from several others.

During the Israeli attack on Lebanon in July 2006, the town of Aita ech Chaab was pummeled severely. The Ridda family and several others took refuge in the basement of a building for several days. At one point, the father stepped into an adjacent room for his morning prayers and was killed by an Israeli missile. Here the Ridda family shows the Koran that was with him when he died.

“Siniora was sitting with Condoleezza Rice when Israel was bombing us with U.S. bombs,” raged Abed Ridda, referring to the visit of the U.S. secretary of state to Beirut during the war. The move is perceived as having added insult to injury, and the Lebanese are in no hurry to forgive or forget.

Reconstruction in southern Beirut and across much of southern Lebanon was spearheaded by Hezbollah. Additionally, countries like Iran and Qatar have adopted towns or areas. Qatar has undertaken to rebuild the towns of Khiam, Ait Ech Chaab, Bint Jbail and Ainata, where Hezbollah enjoys substantial support. By the end of January Qataris had handed out more than 5,000 compensation checks averaging about $6,000 in these towns.

In Dahiyeh, blocks upon blocks of 10-story apartment buildings were leveled by Israeli bombing, and empty craters are all that remain in some places. In this suburb, Hezbollah initiated reconstruction through its NGO arm, Jihad al-Binaa. This resourceful organization has a task force of some 1,500 engineers.

In the absence of an effective administration during the Lebanese civil war, Jihad al-Binaa took on the role of a local municipality for the Shiite community and it continues to do so. Once the bombings ended in August 2006, Hezbollah wasted no time and allocated $12,000 to each family that had lost a house. For those most in need, it undertook direct reconstruction.

A 22-year-old electrician, Hussein Shara’a, stood talking to me beside a gaping crater that was once his 10-floor apartment building, “The government is giving us nothing, while Hezbollah is doing a great job for us. Even with all that remains to be done, we can survive because the important thing is that we won the war.”

The suburb is dotted with countless green and yellow Jihad al-Binaa banners proclaiming in Arabic: “Carrying On. Together We Resist. Together We Rebuild.”

Iranian money and expertise have facilitated the repair or reconstruction of 60 schools across Lebanon, with work planned on an additional 100. Iran has pledged more than $112 million to help the south rebuild, three times the amount initially offered by the U.S.

Hussam Khoshnevis, head of the Iranian mission to aid reconstruction of Lebanon, told reporters recently that four hospitals in a list of 22 and 30 places of worship, including 10 churches and some Sunni mosques, had been repaired. Electricity has been restored to 60 villages, and 10 major bridges have been rebuilt. Iranian engineers are also overseeing the repair of all of Lebanon’s damaged roads.

The anger toward the Beirut administration is palpable. Bilal Hussein Jama’a of Bint Jbail commented as he took a break from mixing concrete for his home: “They [the Israelis] can bomb us one day and we’ll rebuild the next. We are not afraid of them. But the rebuilding is on our own, with the help of Qatar and Hezbollah and Iran, but not our own impotent government.”

The fact that three of the biggest contributors at the Paris meeting were the United States, France and Saudi Arabia only adds fuel to the fire. All three are viewed by the opposition as supporters of Siniora and his allies Hariri and Jumblatt. People believe money meant for reconstruction is going elsewhere.

Fears about the redirection of aid money are not unfounded and are based on more than the typical government corruption and officials lining their pockets. During the war last summer, the Saudis, in close consultation with the U.S., began pumping money into Lebanese Druse, Christian and Sunni political groups in order to counter the influence of Hezbollah. Both Saudis and Americans cooperated in procuring aid for the Internal Security Force of Lebanon, which is essentially a militia that answers directly to Siniora.

There is also speculation that sectarian groups, such as followers of Jumblatt and supporters of Hariri, are rearming and training in remote camps within Lebanon in preparation for hostilities with Hezbollah.

It is difficult to comprehend such elaborate preparation for a worst-case scenario when a simple end to hostilities lies in allowing the underrepresented in Lebanon a greater voice in the government.

Samaha believes this won’t happen because the rulers wish to strengthen their local power by appeasing the powerful abroad, namely the United States, Israeli expansionists and the neocons in the Middle East.

Emil Lahoud, the president of Lebanon and another supporter of the opposition, holds the same opinion — that the power brokers in his government take orders from external powers rather than from the people they claim to represent.

During an interview inside the presidential palace, Lahoud told me: “Everyone has got someone from outside to help. So whenever it is time for a decision they would do nothing if the instruction from outside thus dictated. Because of that, we don’t have a united government, and the other problem is that we don’t have a voice.”

On the question of whether or not Hezbollah should disarm, as the U.S. and Israel demand, Lahoud, a Maronite Christian himself, was unambiguous: “The resistance is mostly Shiite. If the Christians and Sunni wish to join they are very welcome. It so happens that this is Shiite land in the south which they fought for. I am asked why I want them to remain strong. I say, ‘We are at war. If these people weren’t here, Israel would have arrived in Beirut like they did in 1982.’ As long as we are in a state of war with Israel, we need resistance, and whoever wants to can join it. It’s the only way we can stand up to Israel. We have seen all the Arab countries which promised to help do nothing.”

It is this prevailing reaction that has become the power and capital of Hezbollah.