Caesar’s famous beginning – “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est” — might well turn out to apply to Iraq. There is the Kurdish north, under the protection of American and British planes for more than a decade, hardly touched by our second Iraq war, and since that war ended barely reported upon. Now, Patrick J. McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times offers us a first-hand account of that unfamiliar Iraq ( Outside Baghdad, Oases of Calm). His piece begins:
“There are no nightly power blackouts, bursts of automatic-weapons fire, rumbling tanks or ominous helicopter fly-bys. Residents stroll the shops, munch a burger at MaDonal or sip a beer in an outdoor cafe by the canal.
“No one frets about beating curfew or getting stuck at a checkpoint. Cars and trucks flow smoothly down the streets, aided by smartly outfitted traffic cops. U.S. troops can be seen without helmets or flak vests, sometimes posing for photos with appreciative residents.
“‘This must have been what Paris felt like when the Americans came after World War II,’ said Sgt. Steven Roach, fresh in from Baghdad. ‘You don’t sense that everyone wants to take a shot at you.'”
McDonnell describes Hassam, a Kurd curious about conditions to the South in Baghdad. “So, two months ago, he and a friend drove south. What they saw stunned them. ‘Everything was crazy, and everyone was fearful,’ Hassam recalled. ‘When we came back to Kurdistan it felt like Europe.'”
Mind you, Kurdistan now experiences 50% unemployment (as opposed to 70% or higher further south) and a questionable future. Nonetheless, it is evidently an oasis of calm compared the Sunni areas of central Iraq, which are now in sullen revolt. Of them Pepe Escobar writes in the Asia Times (No kharabba at the end of the tunnel):
“The guerrillas’ master plan is to prevent any possible normalization of the American occupation. Pragmatic businessmen in Abu Dhabi agree that the much-vaunted battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people cannot be won.
“No one frets about beating curfew or getting stuck at a checkpoint. Cars and trucks flow smoothly down the streets, aided by smartly outfitted traffic cops. U.S. troops can be seen without helmets or flak vests, sometimes posing for photos with appreciative residents.
“‘This must have been what Paris felt like when the Americans came after World War II,’ said Sgt. Steven Roach, fresh in from Baghdad. ‘You don’t sense that everyone wants to take a shot at you.'”
McDonnell describes Hassam, a Kurd curious about conditions to the South in Baghdad. “So, two months ago, he and a friend drove south. What they saw stunned them. ‘Everything was crazy, and everyone was fearful,’ Hassam recalled. ‘When we came back to Kurdistan it felt like Europe.'”
Mind you, Kurdistan now experiences 50% unemployment (as opposed to 70% or higher further south) and a questionable future. Nonetheless, it is evidently an oasis of calm compared the Sunni areas of central Iraq, which are now in sullen revolt. Of them Pepe Escobar writes in the Asia Times (No kharabba at the end of the tunnel):
“The guerrillas’ master plan is to prevent any possible normalization of the American occupation. Pragmatic businessmen in Abu Dhabi agree that the much-vaunted battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people cannot be won.
“Subject to daily distress, most Iraqis are not allowed the luxury of even bothering with the political process. Their real, pressing problem is the absence of kharabba – electricity. With temperatures reaching 50 degrees Celsius and non-stop power cuts, tempers couldn’t be hotter [T]here was no substantial lack of power in Saddam’s Iraq. At the end of April, the lucrative contract for reconstruction and renovation of Iraq’s electricity grid was awarded to the Bush-connected Bechtel Corporation. But nothing has happened so far. US estimates are that three years are necessary to restore the electricity grid. Kharabba, not jihad, may be the US’s nemesis in Iraq.”
In the Sunni areas, where the U.S. seems to have missed it’s moment, American troops are dying and, as Robert Worth of the New York Times recently reported, morale is desperately low (Extension of Stay in Iraq Takes Toll on Morale of G.I.’s):
“They are tired of patrolling hostile Iraqi towns in the punishing heat. They are tired of fighting an invisible enemy, knowing that a rocket-propelled grenade or mortar attack could come at any moment. Many are skeptical about the peacekeeping work they have been asked to do. Many are openly angry at the Army and the Pentagon, whom they accuse of dishonesty about the length of their stay or the nature of their mission.
“Last week relatives of soldiers in the division began circulating an e-mail message complaining about conditions in Falluja, along with a letter from an unidentified soldier. ‘Our morale is not high or even low,’ the letter says. ‘Our morale is nonexistent.’ They cannot venture beyond the gates of their outposts, for fear of being shot. So they sit on their bunks, listening to CD’s, cracking jokes, trying not to think about when they will go home.”p>
(To read the full letter from the unidentified Third Infantry Division soldier Worth mentions click here)
To the South, in Shia Iraq, things are chaotic. There seems to be on-going looting, sabotage, and banditry, but not yet a guerrilla struggle. Nonetheless, the occupation forces and their Iraqi Governing Council are already in stiff competition for legitimacy. Only recently, according to the Washington Post (Cleric Calls for ‘Islamic Army’) in the holy city of Najaf:
“A leading Shiite Muslim cleric today issued a sharp challenge to American authority and the U.S.-backed Iraqi leadership, announcing plans to form an independent “Islamic army” and denouncing the Iraqi Governing Council as an ‘illegitimate’ body of American ‘lackeys.’
“Moqtada Sadr, the 30-year-old activist who heads one of Iraq’s major Shiite movements, did not spell out his reasons for raising such an army, nor did he expressly call for the overthrow of the current authorities.
“But in an emotional address to several thousand followers during Friday prayers at a mosque in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, Sadr called on all Iraqis to reject the 25-member Governing Council He urged followers of his Hawza seminary-based movement to unify their ranks and form a separate council that would represent ‘justice.’
“‘We must not stand by with folded arms,’ Sadr said as followers chanted, ‘No to America, no to the Devil.'”
So, it seems, at the moment there is not one Iraq; there are three Iraqs in only one of which – the calm one – are Iraqis in any way in control of the process that is remaking their society. (Does that tell us anything?) The question of whether a single Iraq will in the future reappear has not been answered.
Pointing Fingers: It’s not only in Washington that fingers are pointing. The Scotsman reports (Desperate Blair Blames Hoon) that in the wake of the suicide of weapons of mass destruction expert David Kelly,
“Downing Street officials were last night fighting to save Tony Blair’s premiership by attempting to pin blame for Dr David Kelly’s suicide on the Ministry of Defence. In an effort to shift attention away from the Prime Minister and on to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, aides stressed that the decision to name Kelly as the likely source of claims the government ‘sexed up’ its second Iraq dossier was ‘purely a Ministry of Defence operation’.
“The desperate move to bolster Blair followed public calls for his resignation from a former minister, and an incident on his Japanese tour where he was left speechless by the question from a journalist: ‘Do you have blood on your hands, Prime Minister?'”
Vietnam, the analogy that won’t go away:
A reader writes: “I’m sure you’ve seen today’s WP [Washington Post] headline ‘U.S. Plans To Enlist Iraqis in Operations.’ Apart from the vegetation, that
was all that was lacking. Those folks who were drawing parallels with
Vietnam were off the mark because there wasn’t a puppet government with
a gallant indigenous army fighting shoulder to shoulder with their American saviors. Now we have the puppet, and soon we will have our own
sepoys. Will the jungle be far behind?”Indeed, with the 7,000-odd Iraqis the U.S. has suddenly decided to train into a militia, a “civil defense” force (another Vietnam term), to take over guard duty at pipelines, ammunition dumps, and power plants from American troops who can then concentrate on “anti-guerrilla missions” (yes, we’re no longer ducking the term), all we’re missing is the word “Iraqization.” (It was Richard Nixon who put the term “Vietnamization” into the language.)
But Iraqization at this point will be no easy matter in the bottom two-thirds of that tripartite country. In an essay, “Imposing Our Will,” in the most recent Nation magazine (unfortunately not available on the internet), Jonathan Schell, who came of reportorial age in Vietnam, offers the following comments on any policy of Iraqization:
“The administration that promised ‘regime change’ delivered only regime smash. In a colossal omission, it forgot that Iraq would after all have to have some sort of government or other. A new American administrator L. Paul Bremer, was brought in to impose a new tough policy. In his words, ‘We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country.’ When this strategy, so drastically at odds with any idea of democracy or self-determination, appeared to backfire, Bremer reversed course and decided to appoint the ‘Governing Council’ of Iraq that has just come into existence. Now he seeks to perform a miracle even more remarkable than any that was required in Vietnam – to create out of thin air a regime that will do America’s will without the presence of American forces.
“Today, people are asking how long the United States ‘will have to stay’ until success is achieved, but this masks the more important question of whether the mission is possible at all. The real question may be how long the United States can bear to stay before failure is accepted. In Vietnam, it took more than a decade.”
And if we “fail” in the bottom two-thirds of the country, what will happen to that top third, poised between an unknown state(s)-to-be to the south and an all too well known power, Turkey, to the north?
Below, I’ve included three pieces on imperial adventures and their consequences. To turn this into a brother act, the first piece I’ve chosen is by Orville Schell, Jonathan’s brother and Dean of the journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley. In a piece in Yale Global online, he wonders how our leaders could have been so surprised by the development of a guerrilla war in Sunni Iraq, given the last century of imperial/colonial history. Then, Niall Ferguson, a British lover of empire but also a canny-minded historian, offers a riff in the Washington Post‘s Sunday Outlook section on building an empire Walmart-style, with cut-rate goods. It’s another way of thinking about imperial overstretch. (Our leaders, after all, were so dazzled by our military might that they forgot to take into account non-military factors, whether Iraqi or American.) Finally, in this month’s Progressive magazine, Howard Zinn has penned a predictive (since written in mid-June) and stirring piece on how empires fall and peoples awake. Tom
Is Iraq Becoming a New Vietnam?
by Orville Schell
YaleGlobal
July 14, 2003While the preparation for the American invasion of Iraq was going on, there was a tendency to dismiss those few voices who warned against getting bogged down in a quagmire. The swift conclusion of the “shock and awe” campaign, fortified by symbolic events like the fall of Saddam Hussein’s statues in Baghdad, seemed to leave skeptics of an early and complete military victory tarred as irredeemably false prophets.
However, two months after the official “end” of the Iraq war, with the loss of nearly 180 Coalition troops and a large number of wounded, these once discounted prophets of gloom now suddenly seem far more sage in their predictions than they were made to appear when they first annunciated their cautionary warnings. Talk of guerrilla warfare, body counts, and escalations of troop force has now replaced gloating about the success of our initial invasion and the wonders of precision-guided munitions
Orville Schell is the author of numerous books on China, covered the war in Indochina and is now Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
To read more Schell click here
Empire On A Shoestring
By Niall Ferguson
The Washington Post Outlook section
July 20, 2003The motto of America’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, is simple and to the point: “Always Low Prices. Always.” Piling them high and selling them cheap is as much a principle of American life as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” But should it also be the basis of American foreign policy?
Back in April, administration officials talked as if the reconstruction of Iraq would somehow be self-financing. That seemed optimistic at the time; today it is simply incredible. What we are witnessing is not so much “Empire Lite” — in Michael Ignatieff’s catchy phrase — as “Cut-Price Colonization.” Americans need to realize now that nations cannot be built the way Wal-Mart sells patio sets: on the cheap.
Niall Ferguson is Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University, and a senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.
To read more Ferguson click here
Humpty Dumpty Will Fall
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive Magazine
August 2003The “victory” over an already devastated and disarmed Iraq led Bush, Rumsfeld, and their teammates into a locker-room frenzy of exultation and self-congratulation. I half expected to see Bush joyfully pouring beer on Rumsfeld’s head and Ashcroft snapping a towel at Ari Fleischer’s derrière.
But it turns out that the war did not bring order to Iraq, but chaos, not crowds of cheering Iraqis, but widespread hostility. “No to Saddam! No to Bush!” were the signs, as Iraqis contemplated their ruined historic treasures, their destroyed homes, and the graves of their dead–thousands and thousands of civilians and soldiers, with many more men, women, children wounded. And it goes on as I write this in mid-June–an ugly occupation. I see a headline: “U.S. Troops Kill 70 in Iraqi Crackdown.”
Howard Zinn, the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” is a columnist for The Progressive.