By now, everyone (who reads these dispatches anyway) knows that the American government, demanding an invasion of Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, is filled with retreads, including Donald Rumsfeld, from a Reagan-era government which supported Baathist, Saddamist Iraq, while it was using such weapons against its own people and helped the Iraqis target its Iranian enemy with the same weapons. But few in America remember that, while Bush the Son now demands “liberation” and “democracy” for Iraq, the government of Bush the Father, with the chance to deliver one and possibly both in 1991, made the logical imperial calculation and refused.
Below, Brandon Sprague in today’s San Francisco Chronicle Insight writes of the forgotten Shia revolt of 1991 that, ill-armed as it was, reached the suburbs of Baghdad before Saddam crushed it, in part with American-bought helicopters, while the Americans, who had just crushed his armies in Kuwait watched. The elder Bush and his circle simply decided that Baghdad in the hands of the majority Shia population (potentially more religious, more inclined to ally with Iran) would be an Iraq not in American interests. We preferred the bark of the dog we knew in Baghdad and left Saddam in power.
There’s no reason to believe that this time around “liberation” would prove different. A crucial member of the Iraqi exiled opposition, the scholar Kanan Makiya, has just realized this and written an angry denunciation of parts of the Bush administration in today’s British Observer for its recently revealed postwar occupation plans and the deal it has quietly struck with Turkey which threatens to make the last decade of Kurdish life in Northern Iraq seem like a golden age. Makiya is the author of Republic of Fear, an important book about the cult of Saddam. His defection from the administration team would be another small but significant indication of the fragility of their “coalition of the willing.”
Finally, to mix laughter with horror, make sure you take the “World History 101 – Mid-term exam” at the end of this dispatch (it stumbled into my email from who knows where, but via a friend) and then click on the “weapons of mass destruction error message” (posted at the ZNET website). Tom
Broken promises
How the United States failed the Iraqi resistance
By Brandon Sprague
The San Francisco Chronicle
February 16, 2003As an Iraqi American, Saif Ataya is a product of the American dream and, also, of one of its broken promises. He came to San Francisco from a Saudi Arabian desert camp in the middle of nowhere 10 years ago without enough money to buy a razor to shave his scraggly beard.
After living through what he calls his own personal holocaust – including the deaths of his mother and other family members – Ataya was happy to be in the United States. But then again, he was a refugee in large part due to U.S. policy gone awry.
As an Iraqi American, Saif Ataya is a product of the American dream and, also, of one of its broken promises. He came to San Francisco from a Saudi Arabian desert camp in the middle of nowhere 10 years ago without enough money to buy a razor to shave his scraggly beard.
After living through what he calls his own personal holocaust – including the deaths of his mother and other family members – Ataya was happy to be in the United States. But then again, he was a refugee in large part due to U.S. policy gone awry.
It was the first President George Bush who had encouraged him – and hundreds of thousands of other oppressed Shiite Muslims in the south of Iraq – to rise up against Saddam Hussein immediately after the first Persian Gulf War.
U.S. support for a final coup de grace against Hussein seemed a given.
Brandon Sprague wrote this story for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he is a student.
To read more Sprague click here
Our hopes betrayed
How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of democratic Iraqis
By Kanan Makiya
February 16, 2003
The ObserverThe United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities.
The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the US of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government.
The plan reverses a decade-long moral and financial commitment by the US to the Iraqi opposition, and is guaranteed to turn that opposition from the close ally it has always been during the 1990s into an opponent of the United States on the streets of Baghdad the day after liberation.
Kanan Makiya is professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, Massachusetts
To read more Makiya click here
World History 101 – Mid-term exam
This test consists of one (1) multiple-choice question (so you better
get it right!) Here’s a list of the countries that the U.S. has bombed since
the end of World War II, compiled by historian William Blum:China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Congo 1964
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Grenada 1983
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1980s
Nicaragua 1980s
Panama 1989
Iraq 1991-99
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia 1999———————————————-
In how many of these instances did a democratic government,
respectful of
human rights, occur as a direct result? Choose one of the following:(a) 0
(b) zero
(c) none
(d) not a one
(e) a whole number between -1 and +1
To reach the “weapons of mass destruction error message” click here