Quote of the day:
“In Baghdad today, General Garner was huddled inside the opulent Republican palace preparing for the conference. Some of his senior staff members – former and current American ambassadors who are supposed to be reorganizing the ministries – wandered the marbled halls of the palace looking for office space.
“They had no e-mail function, no way for outsiders to reach them by telephone. Several laughed when asked if they had cars and drivers to get them around the city. They are yet to receive interpreters. Two weeks after the end of the fighting, they seemed as ill-equipped as the Iraqis they had come to help.”
(From Douglas Jehl, Pentagon Sending a Team of Exiles to Help Run Iraq, The New York Times,)
You almost have to feel sorry for our occupation administrators, sharing as they evidently are something of the immediate fate of their new Iraqi subjects, or rather colleagues. (I’m struck again that amidst the general lack of hard planning for most aspects of this occupation, one of the most striking oversights has been from the beginning the lack of Iraqis entering with the invading army or, it seems, the administrators to follow. There was, after all, a huge Iraqi exile community in the United States, eager to see Saddam fall; yet only now, two weeks after war’s end do we seem to be sending any of them in.)
If you want to get a sense of both the chaos in Iraq today and the Shiite religious response to it, take a look at Jason Burke’s recent report from Kirkuk for the Guardian, In a land without law or leaders, militant Islam threatens to rule. He writes in part:
“Since the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime, Iraqi administrative systems have collapsed. Although the Americans are working hard to restore a semblance of civic order, they have made little progress so far and society is in chaos. The result is that in much of the country the only functioning social system is that of the mosques and the only leaders with any credibility are the prayer leaders.
“The primary objective of the terrorist actions that bin Laden has sponsored has not been to hurt the economies or the society of the West through physical damage. Instead they have been designed to rally the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims to bin Laden’s banner. By radicalising the Middle East, the war in Iraq has played straight into bin Laden’s hands.
“They had no e-mail function, no way for outsiders to reach them by telephone. Several laughed when asked if they had cars and drivers to get them around the city. They are yet to receive interpreters. Two weeks after the end of the fighting, they seemed as ill-equipped as the Iraqis they had come to help.”
(From Douglas Jehl, Pentagon Sending a Team of Exiles to Help Run Iraq, The New York Times,)
You almost have to feel sorry for our occupation administrators, sharing as they evidently are something of the immediate fate of their new Iraqi subjects, or rather colleagues. (I’m struck again that amidst the general lack of hard planning for most aspects of this occupation, one of the most striking oversights has been from the beginning the lack of Iraqis entering with the invading army or, it seems, the administrators to follow. There was, after all, a huge Iraqi exile community in the United States, eager to see Saddam fall; yet only now, two weeks after war’s end do we seem to be sending any of them in.)
If you want to get a sense of both the chaos in Iraq today and the Shiite religious response to it, take a look at Jason Burke’s recent report from Kirkuk for the Guardian, In a land without law or leaders, militant Islam threatens to rule. He writes in part:
“Since the removal of Saddam Hussein and the Baath regime, Iraqi administrative systems have collapsed. Although the Americans are working hard to restore a semblance of civic order, they have made little progress so far and society is in chaos. The result is that in much of the country the only functioning social system is that of the mosques and the only leaders with any credibility are the prayer leaders.
“The primary objective of the terrorist actions that bin Laden has sponsored has not been to hurt the economies or the society of the West through physical damage. Instead they have been designed to rally the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims to bin Laden’s banner. By radicalising the Middle East, the war in Iraq has played straight into bin Laden’s hands.
“For a substantial number of people in Iraq, Islam is indeed ‘the solution’. The question is ‘whose Islam?’ – that of the extremists or the moderates?”
Human Rights Watch is now reporting, shockingly enough, that:
“The number of civilians killed or wounded since the war ended in northern Iraq is higher than it was during the conflict, Human Rights Watch said today.
“Extensive research at five hospitals and morgues in Kirkuk and Mosul suggests that the high civilian tolls can be attributed to general lawlessness after the collapse of local authorities; the ready availability of weapons and ammunition; and the vast stores of ammunition and ammunition components left behind by the Iraqi military, including landmines, rocket-propelled grenades, and other explosives.
“Many of the victims have been children who play with explosives or pick up unexploded ordinance (UXO) as toys and sustain serious injuries as a result.”
Amid the chaos of the moment, there’s even a chaotic lack of real information about how this war was fought to its conclusion. There, undoubtedly, is a story that not only remains to be told, but may remain untold for a long, long time. How was it, after all, that the Americans entered Baghdad with so little opposition, without a bridge blown, or any of the predicted and feared house to house fighting which might indeed have equalized the terms of war just a little (and which would have caused devastation beyond belief)? In the space where real information about the end of the war should go there is now only tons of speculation, much of it fiercely logical sounding — like all semi-conspiratorial systems of explanation — but leaving a reader at an illogical resting place.
For instance, there has been much speculation that Saddam is now hiding in Moscow or in Mecca (both to my mind absurd possibilities). I include below Pepe Escobar’s speculation on the war’s last days and what lay behind them from the Asia Times because it, at least, raises some of the necessary questions and because it’s based on some actual reportorial footwork in the Middle East. We already know, after all, that the Afghan War was in part determined by those suitcases of money the CIA carted in-country. There’s no reason not to believe something similar might have happened with some leaders of the Republican Guard and others.
In the meantime, to the men in Washington, the details of chaos in Iraq may not matter much, not right now anyway. The irony that what they may end up having to repress would be an Islamic “democracy” that threatened to tip over into some kind of theocratic state (or even theocratic states, were Iraq to fragment) cannot perhaps be lost on them. But the war, truly folks, was never about the kindly remaking of Iraqi society, any more than the Afghan war was about the liberation of Afghan women from the hideous strictures of the Taliban. The war was a message to the world, putting on display a new version of American power and how it should be exercised; it was part of a larger grab for global dominance involving oil, geopolitics, and the securing of new military bases in the region. It was about an ascendant Pentagon’s growing power within the American establishment and about the profits that a group of large corporate entities, tied into the Pentagon and intimately connected to the men of this administration, are capable of drawing from the destruction of a society and then the reconstruction of what they consider worth reconstructing. There’s nothing particularly startling about all this — it seems self-evident, except, of course, in the mainstream media, where it’s at best relegated to the odd piece on opinion pages, opinion being, of course, what it is — nothing to take too terribly seriously.
For the rest of my dispatch today, I thought I might include a little packet of three pieces from the conservative side of things — where all of this is no less self-evident. It’s important to remember that there is a strong, honorable, conservative anti-imperial position and that it has been resurgent of late. Its angry emergence is potentially an important phenomenon of the present period. Below Eric Margolis, columnist for the Toronto Sun, writes on those new bases in Iraq and the way in which they will help turn American air power into “the new Dreadnaught of our modern day”; Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute suggests the “lessons” not to be learned from our recent war (and so, implicitly, the “lessons” that the neocons in Washington are in a rush to draw from it); and finally, in a piece posted on Alternet, Ted Rall explores just exactly how sleazy this war and occupation is already proving to be. Tom
Newest U.S. colony ruled by air power
By Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor
The Toronto Sun
April 27, 2003London — PM Tony Blair’s popularity has risen with the end of the Iraq invasion. Britons, like Americans, enjoy jolly little wars in which large numbers of heathen savages are mowed down by western military technology at minimal cost to imperial troops. Add Britain’s most recent invasion of Iraq to her list of 19th century colonial “little wars,” like the Zulu, Ashanti, Afridi wars and, of course, the more famous campaign against Sudan’s Dervishes, and their “fiendish” leader, the Khalifa, a 19th-century version of Osama bin Laden.
In spite of Blair’s modestly resurgent popularity, a thunderstorm of questions is coming from parliament, media and the public over Bush/Blair claims that Iraq had to be urgently invaded because it posed, in Bush’s words, “an imminent threat to the U.S. and the world,” and, as Blair claimed, “Iraq possesses huge quantities of weapons of mass destruction.”
To read more Margolis click here
Avoiding Bogus Lessons from the Iraq War
By Ted Galen Carpenter
The Cato Institute
April 24, 2003Bush administration leaders already seem to be drawing several lessons from the Iraq conflict. Unfortunately, many of those lessons are erroneous. If the United States bases its foreign policy on those bogus lessons, the outcome could be extremely unpleasant.
Bogus lesson 1: The relatively easy military victory means that the occupation of Iraq should go equally well.
The administration and its supporters place great stock in the scenes of Iraqis in Baghdad and elsewhere welcoming U.S. troops as liberators. But that initial reaction does not solve the numerous underlying religious, ethnic, and ideological tensions in that society that could make the occupation a frustrating and dangerous enterprise.
Iraq is an inherently fragile, artificial entity that the British cobbled together after World War I from three very different provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Washington has pledged to preserve the unity of the country, but that could prove extremely challenging…
Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and is the author or editor of 15 books on international affairs including “Peace & Freedom: Foreign Policy for a Constitutional Republic
To read more Carpenter click here
Say It Slowly: It Was About Oil
By Ted Rall
AlterNet
April 25, 2003Iraq is going to hell. Shiites are killing Sunnis, Kurds are killing Arabs and Islamists are killing secular Baathists. Baghdad, the cradle of human civilization, has been left to looters and rapists. As in Beirut during the ’70s, neighborhood zones are separated by checkpoints manned by armed tribesmen. The war has, however, managed to unite Iraqis in one respect: Everyone loathes the United States.
Some Iraqis hate us for deposing Saddam Hussein. No dictator remains in power without the tacit support of at some of his subjects. Now that we’ve committed the cardinal sin of conquest – getting rid of the old system without thinking up a new one – even those who chafed under Saddam blame us for their present misery.
Others resent our Pentagon-appointed pretender, 58-year-old banker/embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.Ted Rall is the author of “Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan,” an analysis of the underreported Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project and the real motivations behind the war on terrorism.
The Baghdad deal
By Pepe Escobar
The Asia Times
April 25, 2003BAGHDAD – Much of the world was surprised. After the spirited resistance in the south of Iraq, how could Baghdad possibly have fallen in only two days?
An Asia Times Online investigation in Baghdad, Tikrit and Najaf has yielded a clear certainty among Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi’ite, as to the answer: The Pentagon and the Ba’ath Party leadership made a safqua (“secret deal” in Arabic) for the (almost) bloodless fall of Baghdad. Crucially, this safqua may have included a package of American green cards for top Republican and Special Republican Guard commanders and their families.
“Shaku maku”? (“What’s new”?). “Makushi”? (No news). In the answer to this popular exchange in Baghdad slang, makushi has been replaced by safqua.