The war’s one simple truth —
Iraqis do not want us
By Robert Fisk
Apr. 8— A war founded on illusions, lies and right-wing
ideology was bound to founder in blood and fire. Saddam had weapons
of mass destruction. He was in contact with al-Qa’ida, he was involved
with the crimes against humanity of Sept. 11. The people of Iraq would
greet us with flowers and music. There would be a democracy.
Even the pulling-down of Saddam’s statue was a fraud. An American
military vehicle tugged the wretched thing down while a crowd of only
a few hundred Iraqis watched. Where were the tens of thousands who should
have pulled it down themselves, who should have been celebrating their
“liberation?”
On the night of Apr. 9 last year, the BBC even managed to find a “commentator”
to heap abuse on me and The Independent for using quotation marks around
the word “liberation.”
In fact, freedom from Saddam’s dictatorship in those early days
and weeks meant freedom to loot, freedom to burn, freedom to kidnap,
freedom to murder. The initial American and British blunder — to
allow the mobs to take over Baghdad and other cities — was followed
by the arrival of the far more sinister squads of arsonists who systematically
destroyed every archive, every government ministry (save for Oil and
Interior which were, of course, secured by US troops), Islamic manuscripts,
national archives, and irreplaceable antiquities. The very cultural
identity of Iraq was being annihilated.
Yet still the Iraqis were supposed to rejoice in their “liberation.”
The occupying power sneered at reports that women were being kidnapped
and violated—in fact, the abductions of men as well as women were
at the rate of 20 a day and may now be as high as 100 a day—and
steadfastly refused to calculate the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed
each day by gunmen, thieves and American troops.
Even this week, as the promises and lies and obfuscations fell apart,
the American military spokesman was still only able to give military
casualties — this when more than 200 Iraqis are reported to have
been killed in the US attack on Fallujah.
Over the months, the isolation of the occupation authorities from the
Iraqi people they were supposed to care so much about was only paralleled
by the vast distance in false hope and self-deceit between the occupying
powers in Baghdad and their masters back in Washington.
Paul Bremer, America’s proconsul in Iraq, started off by calling
the resistance “party remnants,” which is exactly what the
Russians used to call their Afghan opponents after they invaded Afghanistan
in 1979. Then Mr Bremer called them “diehards.” Then he called
them “dead-enders.” And, as the attacks against US forces
increased around Fallujah and other Sunni Muslim cities, we were told
this area was the “Sunni triangle,” even though it is much
larger than that implies and has no triangular shape.
So when President Bush made his notorious trip to the Abraham Lincoln
to announce the end of all “major military operations” —
beneath a banner claiming “Mission Accomplished” —and
when attacks against US troops continued to rise, it was time to rewrite
the chapter on post-war Iraq. “Foreign fighters” were now
in the battle, according to the US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld.
The US media went along with this nonsense, even though not a single
al-Qa’ida operative has been arrested in Iraq and of the 8,500
“security detainees” in American hands, only 150 appear to
be from outside Iraq. Just two percent.
Then as winter approached and Saddam was caught and the anti-American
resistance continued, the occupying powers and their favorite journalists
began to warn of civil war, something no Iraqi has ever indulged in
and which no Iraqi has ever been heard discussing. Iraq was now to be
frightened into submission. What would happen if the Americans and British
left? Civil war, of course. And we don’t want civil war, do we?
The Shia remained quiescent, their leadership divided between the scholarly
and pro-Western Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and the impetuous but intelligent
Muqtada Sadr. They opened their mass graves and mourned those thousands
who were tortured and executed by Saddam’s butchery and then asked
why we used to support Saddam, why it took us 20 years to discover the
need to stage our humanitarian invasion.
If the occupation authorities had bothered to study the results of a
conference on Iraq held by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies in Beirut
recently, they might be forced to acknowledge what they cannot admit:
that their opponents are Iraqis and that this is an Iraqi insurgency.
An Iraqi academic, Sulieman Jumeili, who lives in the city of Fallujah,
told how he discovered that 80 percent of all rebels killed were Iraqi
Islamist activists. Only 13 per cent of the dead men were primarily
nationalists and only 2 per cent had been Baathists.
But we cannot accept these statistics. Because if this is an Iraqi revolt
against us, how come they aren’t grateful for their liberation?
So, after the atrocities in Fallujah just over a week ago when four
US mercenaries were killed, mutilated and dragged through the streets,
General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, sanctioned what is
preposterously called “Operation Vigilant Resolve.” And now
that Sadr’s thousands of Shia militiamen had joined in the battle
against the Americans, General Sanchez had to change the narrative yet
again.
No longer were his enemies Saddam “remnants” or even al-Qa’ida;
they were now “a small (sic) group of criminals and thugs.”
The Iraqi people would not be allowed to fall under their sway, General
Sanchez said. There was “no place for a renegade militia.”
So the marines smashed their way into Fallujah, killing more than 200
Iraqis, including women and children, while using tanks fire and helicopter
gunships against gunmen in the Baghdad slums of Sadr City. It took a
day or two to understand what new self-delusion had taken over the US
military command. They were not facing a country-wide insurgency. They
were liberating the Iraqis all over again! So, of course, this will
mean a few more “major military operations.” Sadr goes on
the wanted list for a murder after an arrest warrant that no one told
us about when it was mysteriously issued months ago —supposedly
by an Iraqi judge — and General Mark Kimmitt, General Sanchez’s
number two, told us confidently that Sadr’s militia will be “destroyed.”
And so the bloodbath spreads ever further across Iraq. Kut and Najaf
are now outside the control of the occupying powers. And with each new
collapse, we are told of new hope. Yesterday, General Sanchez was still
talking about his “total confidence” in his troops who were
“clear in their purpose,” how they were making “progress”
in Fallujah and how — these are his actual words, “a new dawn
is approaching.”
Which is exactly what US commanders were saying exactly a year ago today
— when US troops drove into the Iraqi capital and when Washington
boasted of victory against the Beast of Baghdad.
Source: CounterPunch
An Iraqi intifada
Now the war is being fought in the open,
by people defending their homes
By Naomi Klein
Baghdad, Iraq, Apr. 12— Apr. 9, 2003 was the day Baghdad
fell to US forces. One year later, it is rising up against them.
Donald Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just a few “thugs,
gangs and terrorists.” This is dangerous wishful thinking. The
war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by regular
people defending their homes and neighborhoods - an Iraqi intifada.
“They stole our playground,” an eight-year-old boy in Sadr
City told me this week, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field,
next to a rusty jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in
an area of Baghdad that is otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected
rubbish.
Sadr City has seen little of Iraq’s multibillion-dollar “reconstruction,”
which is partly why Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army have so much
support here. Before the US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, provoked
Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting
and killing his deputies, the Mahdi army was not fighting coalition
forces, it was doing their job for them.
After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional
Authority still hasn’t managed to get the traffic lights working
or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City,
Sadr’s so-called “outlaw militia” can be seen engaged
in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories
from looters. In a way, the Mahdi army is as much Bremer’s creation
as it Sadr’s: it was Bremer who created Iraq’s security vacuum
- Sadr simply filled it.
But as the June 30 “hand-over” to Iraqi control approaches,
Bremer now sees Sadr and the Mahdi as a threat that must be taken out
- along with the communities that have grown to depend on them. Which
is why stolen playgrounds were only the start of what I saw in Sadr
City this week.
In al-Thawra hospital, I met Raad Daier, a 36-year-old ambulance driver
with a bullet in his lower abdomen, one of 12 shots fired at his ambulance
from a US Humvee. According to hospital officials, at the time of the
attack, he was carrying six people injured by US forces, including a
pregnant woman who had been shot in the stomach and lost her child.
I saw charred cars that dozens of eye-witnesses said had been hit by
US missiles, and local hospitals confirmed that their drivers had been
burned alive. I also visited Block 37 of Sadr City’s Chuadir district,
a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. Residents said
US tanks rolled down their street firing into their homes. Five people
were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, aged four.
And I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the
Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what
was Sadr’s headquarters in Sadr City.
On Apr. 8, according to witnesses, two US tanks broke down the walls
of the center while two guided missiles pierced its roof, leaving giant
craters in the floor and missile debris behind.
The worst damage, however, was done by hand. The clerics at the Sadr
office say that US soldiers entered the building and crudely shredded
photographs of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shia cleric in
Iraq. When I arrived at the destroyed center, the floor was covered
in torn religious texts, including several copies of the Koran that
been ripped and shot through with bullets. And it did not escape the
notice of the Shias here that hours earlier, US soldiers had bombed
a Sunni mosque in Falluja.
For months the White House has been making ominous predictions of a
civil war breaking out between the majority Shias, who believe it’s
their turn to rule Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold on
to the privileges they amassed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
But this week the opposite appears to have taken place. Both Sunni and
Shia have seen their neighborhoods attacked and their religious sites
desecrated. Up against a shared enemy, they are beginning to bury ancient
rivalries and join forces against the occupation. Instead of a civil
war, they are on the verge of building a common front.
You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands
of Shias lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks
in Falluja. “We should thank Paul Bremer,” Salih Ali told
me. “He has finally united Iraq. Against him.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
