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The to-do list | Apr 11, 2003 11:27
The extraordinary lifting of tyranny in Baghdad this week has been compared, by the US leadership among others, to the fall of the exhausted communist regimes in Eastern Europe more than a decade ago. But, even in Romania, those peaceful revolutions left the civil infrastructure relatively intact.
In Iraq, where the dictator has been toppled by a foreign force, it looks like much of that infrastructure will have to be rebuilt from scratch. That is, and was always going to be, the risk of forcible liberation. Government ministries, the university in Basra, even a hospital in Baghdad, have been either destroyed or hollowed out by looters. It's not yet clear whether many of the people who made the trains run on time still have jobs.
The to-do list is long: and the top item must surely be policing - a role for which combat troops are simply not trained, and in which the old police force are unlikely to be accepted. Already the Financial Times is reporting on intimidation in Najaf from an Iraqi militia that claims US backing. Another anti-Saddam militia, several thousand strong, took control of the southeastern city of Amara on Sunday, and had to be threatened with bombing before it withdrew. A returning Shiite cleric was murdered by rivals in Najaf. The Turks are getting jumpy about the Kurds in Kirkuk.
Then there's the job of making sure the population - all 23 million of them - receives food and water in the absence of the old regime's networks. (The liberation of Iraq's oil wealth to pay for it is a matter for the UN Security Council, and thus the key bargaining chip for the France-Germany-Russia axis.) And at some point, the money - which bears Saddam's portrait - will surely have to be changed. A stopgap adoption of the greenback would, to put it mildly, risk misunderstanding in the Arab world.
Ahmed Chalabi has been airlifted into Iraq by one branch of the US government, but another one - the CIA - has leaked a classified report dismissing the ability of Perle and Cheney's favourite to credibly lead a new Iraq.
There's also the important job of tracking down Saddam's fortune - estimated at up to $US24 billion.
Suzanne Goldenberg reported the regime's day of destiny in Baghdad for the Guardian.
Meanwhile, it's either denial, anger or serious self-examination for the Arab world.
It's quite possible to rejoice in the relief of the Iraqi people but still deeply distrust the people who brought the freedom. Frankly, everyone should read this story (link courtesy of my lawyer) about a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, based on recently-declassified diplomatic communications from the Reagan era which shed new light on exactly what Rummy and Cheney were doing in Iraq, and for whom, back then. Whatever your view of the war, you really do need to read this.
Next, please | Apr 10, 2003 09:43
There can be few sights more powerfully symbolic than the toppling of a dictator's statue. And Saddam Hussein's regime has certainly allowed for that scene to be played out over and over, as his ubiquitous images are torn down by his former subjects.
But the disappearance of a 30-year regime leaves a huge vacuum. The question is now, as everyone is saying, what happens next. How well and how quickly can the civil infrastructure be restored? What happens when the coalition forces make the necessary transition from warfare to policing? What will the hundreds of thousands of former soldiers, police and Baath party members do? What will it take to preserve Iraq's territorial integrity? Will any banned weapons actually be found? Will the frightening rush away from liberalism in the Islamic world turn the other way now that the killing is almost over? Will it be a flowering of democracy or another Lebanon? How many people died anyway?
There will, of course, be a challenge for everyone who opposed war. Who, after all, would deny these people relief from the dull, endless grind of their authoritarian regime? It was always thus.
I never wrote off the final sanction of war, if all other avenues had been exhausted, but over the past three weeks, I have wondered even about that. War is a barbaric, arbitrary way of solving problems, if easier to justify when the nominated target is clearly evil. I find the conservative idea that it is part of the human condition and will always be with us depressing and, in its way, defeatist.
In counting the cost and weighing the gains, we ought to acknowledge some serious strikes on our own traditions of truth and transparency, and on the rules-based world that has kept us relatively prosperous and peaceful.
America's cluster-bomb diplomacy has caused some substantial collateral damage. Hopefully the grudge-bearing will stop, and idiot Congressmen will forget about their trade wars with France, Germany, Mexico and Canada. Helen Clark's apology for unwisely stating the eveident truth - that Iraq would not have been attacked under a Gore presidency - will be accepted and filed away. Hell, maybe someone will threaten the repressive Stalinist regime in "allied" Uzbekistan with forcible democracy, instead of feeding it economic lollies and inviting its leader to the White House.
Key determinants will be the shape of any new Iraqi government, progress towards justice in the occupied territories - and this would have been a different war if that had been achieved first - and whether the White House hawks are happy now or already planning their next push on Iran or Syria.
Regarding the first, I can't see the ascension of Ahmed Chalabi, if it happens, leading anywhere good. What use is an Iraqi leader who can't visit Jordan without being arrested for a $40 million bank fraud? There are, of course, other exiles who offer both competence and integrity, but they are not all friends with Perle and Cheney.
The second looks most unpromising. The Israeli government has been using the cover of war next door to redraw its own map, placing settlers in the Palestinian area of Jerusalem, and staging attacks where it pleases - yesterday an air strike in Gaza killed 12 Palestinians, including several children. An extremist Jewish group apparently attacked a West Bank school, injuring 29 children.
Worst of all, the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz appears to be hinting that the much-vaunted "Road Map" for peace is dead before it starts, and will simply be wrecked by the Sharon government.
The third: who knows? Do you believe Rumsfeld? Or Powell and Blair?
Meanwhile, amid the high-fiving back home, Congressional Republicans are trying to make the odious USA Patriot Act, introduced as a temporary curtailment of civil liberties, permanent. (The Democrats, in a rare burst of courage, have asked for an investigation into the awarding of Iraqi reconstruction contracts to several countries, including, of course, Halliburton, which still pays vice president Dick Cheney.)
The Guardian rounds up the views of the Arab press on events in Iraq, who are either in denial or know something we don't.
Like nobody really died | Apr 09, 2003 10:39
"We share sacrifices. We share grief. We pray for those families who mourn the loss of life; American families, British families …" George W. Bush let the sentence hang in the air. I genuinely thought he was about to say "Iraqi families". It would have been a decent and thoughtful thing to do. But he didn't.
Instead, Bush and Blair got through the whole of their press conference in Belfast yesterday, each paying tribute to coalition dead, without acknowledging that any Iraqi citizen has suffered so much as a paper cut in the past two weeks. As an exercise in denial, it was right up there with the daily briefings from the Iraqi information minister.
Both men are often described by their supporters as "courageous". But real courage would dictate that they tackled the consequences of their actions head-on. Contend that the deaths of civilians - or, let's face it, the poor Iraqi conscripts - have been a regrettable consequence of the pursuit of a greater goal of liberation. They might even be right. But they didn't try. It was like nobody had really died.
But, then, tragic stories like that of 12-year-old Ali Ismaeel Abbas, orphaned and hideously injured when a missile struck his house this week, raise the bar pretty high on a war of liberation. The Jordan Times story on the boy is particularly heart-wrenching. I cried when I read this:
"Can you help get my arms back? Do you think the doctors can get me another pair of hands?" Abbas asked. "If I don't get a pair of hands I will commit suicide," he said with tears spilling down his cheeks.
Al-Jazeera also covered the story, with, inevitably, upsetting pictures. It did get a little play in the Western media - to their credit, Reuters, the CNN World website and USA Today picked it up. Ali may receive prosthetic arms from a British charity as a direct result. But, unlike the slick rescue of a pretty, blonde US private, it didn't command the world's front pages.
The loyal troops at NZPundit.com - all two of them - are in a lather about my "unhealthy" post yesterday. Craig Ranapia wondered if "a desire for 'unmediated' cover as a conduit for 'truth' is just a way to make sadistic voyeurism respectable?". So he doesn't seem moved by the death and dismemberment of bystanders, just the thought of showing it. What an excellent value system.
His friend Gordy thought my post was "sad", which it was, but not in the sense he meant it. The raw hospital footage I saw - and, more to the point, heard - preyed on my mind all day yesterday. No one, surely, could have felt otherwise. Well, maybe Gordy could:
"THe US has achieved a stunning stunning victory at historically minimal costs," he chirped, "and once the evidence starts flooding out of what a dispicable [sic] regime has just been defeated, its either admit you're wrong or demand unmeetable standards of proof."
Yes, the various Iraqi forces fighting the US and British troops have been pounded to within an inch of defeat. They have been outmatched for weapons, technology, communications and competence of command. Since Sunday in Baghdad they have died at a ratio of about a thousand to one versus US troops. But - through patriotism, fear or a mixture of both - many of them have kept coming. They have crowded into cars and buses and charged the US lines, AK47s pointlessly blazing, imminent precision death assured. They all have families. If you don't feel anything about that, you have no soul.
We'll leave "stunning stunning victory" for history to call. It has been rapid, yes, and, assuming that the infrastructure can be restored, that the US promises of self-determination can be taken at face value, that resistance can be quelled inside months, that Rumsfeld's threats to invade Syria and Iran are just idle bluster, that Perle and Cheney aren't allowed to install their millionaire criminal friend Ahmed Chalabi, there is the promise of a better world for the Iraqi people. The question, of course, is whether less traumatising options for change were foreclosed in the charge to war.
But the predictions of Richard Perle that "patriotic Iraqis" would be "willing to fight to liberate their country" by fighting with US forces, that support from the US would trigger "a full-blown insurrection against Saddam" and so on have been quite unfounded. Reports from the Islamic world constantly and consistently speak of a defeat for liberal, West-facing ideas as the war has rolled on.
This from the weblog of Salam Pax (who I hope is alright), a supporter of democracy in Iraq and a victim of the regime:
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do." Samuel P. Huntington
Shias in Southern Iraq certainly have a right to feel liberated, but they appear to be making the limits of their affection for the Americans quite clear. And people who scorned the endless pictures of adoring subjects around Saddam might be advised to temper their hailing of the odd welcoming crowd in Basra. This is, after all, a country where it pays to smile nicely at the man with the gun.
Robert Fisk has some vox pops on liberation from Baghdad's hospitals.
The US has budgeted 120 times more for military action than for humanitarian aid. (Which raises the question of whether it might have been kinder to offer Saddam and his inner circle several billion dollars each to just go away.)
And, just by way of comedy, an illustration of why the idea that Bush had something to contribute to the Northern Ireland peace process yesterday was so absurd. No, it wasn't Bush's mangled reference to "young generations of Northern Irelanders". Or even the White House statement last week that Bush was meeting Blair in "Dublin". No, it's the official schedule that outlined "the Trip of the President to Belfast, Ireland." Jaysus. Isn't that what all the fighting's been about all these years? These people are way too stupid to run the world …
Humming 'Que Sera Sera' | Apr 08, 2003 11:11
"Jesus!" exclaimed Peter Arnett as the dull whoomp of an explosion sounded. Then, whoomp, again.
Arnett was in a media centre in central Baghdad, waiting to deliver a report by satellite to someone called Eric. I know, because he was near a live microphone that was somehow feeding through the German webcam I was watching, late last night.
I had watched the webcam before, seen cars and buses circling a big public plaza and smoke crowding the horizon, but it had never had sound before. I could hear horns honking from the traffic, then, at one point, the sirens of two fire engines as they rushed through.
"I'm waiting for IFB," said Arnett to someone off-mic. "I'm waiting for IFB."
I hooked up my MiniDisc recorder to the computer, hopeful that the controversial correspondent would pass the time by saying something out of order - perhaps a those-bastards-at-NBC rant.
But he didn't. He hummed a tune. I'm pretty sure it was 'Que Sera Sera'. He did his first piece, then hummed 'Que Sera Sera' again, then finished with a rap about how the media technology trained on this war was unprecedented, and how it was the job of him and other reporters to show and tell whether the US forces were conducting the fighting as they had promised, with due regard for civilian life.
And then he thanked everyone - the people at the destination broadcaster, his local crew - repeatedly. See you at this time tomorrow, he said.
An Italian TV reporter moved in range next. She talked a lot, and was possibly dissing her bosses, the war, the Iraqis, the Americans, her hotel staff, whatever. I couldn't tell. Her cigarette lighter was almost empty - I could hear the wheel turn six or eight times in quick succession every time she lit up. She made the kind of noise people make to themselves when their lighters run out.
After the Italian reporter finished, the screen went black. When it came back, it wasn't the familiar picture of the plaza and the cars, but raw Reuters video, for a story about a Baghdad hospital.
A group of people pushed a wheeled bed bearing a man with leg injuries across a courtyard and into a hospital. The video still had its incidental sound; a clatter of nervous, urgent, scared noises in the background. It struck me that we never see hospital pictures on our television without a booming voiceover steering the context. We see short, sharp edits, then it's onto the next item.
This part of this hospital was not overcrowded and seemed clean. The beds held men with fresh and grievous injuries; some apparently missing limbs, another with terribly burned hands. One man had an abdominal injury and his head forced back at an angle in some kind of neck brace. I couldn't see uniforms on any of them, but it was hard to tell.
The sound was the worst thing. Men, agitated, moaning in pain, some apparently delirious. It made it seem much more real and disturbing and I wondered who they were and whether their families knew they were in hospital. War correspondents see this all the time and presumably get used to it.
The shots for that item finished. The next batch were Baghdad street scenes, clearly from the same day. A woman in a traditional black gown was shouting something to two men, her hands raised. People milled at the side of the street, looking nervous and confused. A lot of people were armed: two teenagers stood, one of them clinging to what I took to be a grenade launcher. They weren't "crack" Republican Guards, or Fedayeen "death squads". They just looked like folks, scared. Nobody should have to go through this.
The Reuters pictures will presumably have screened somewhere by now; edited, voiced-over, mediated, minus their incidental sound. For all the talk of unprecedented coverage, we get little enough of a look at what war really looks like.
The friendly fire incident captured by the BBC in Northern Iraq this week gave us a little window on hell. That's what it actually looks like when "Iraqi positions" are "taken out" or "shut down" or "neutralised" or any of those other phrases. How many hundreds of times has this happened out of our sight? Part of me wants to see CNN's gung-ho cavalry rider Walter Rogers in a scene like that, pissing his pants with fear.
War coverage would be different if everybody had cameras. If everybody had cameras, maybe we'd know what hideous event led to the truckload of corpses of women and children seen by a Red Cross worker in Hilla. Maybe that's the next step in war coverage - unmediated cameras, everywhere; robots that don't make editorial choices and can't be intimidated by governments. But you can't make people watch, can you?
Waiting at the gates of Babylon | Apr 07, 2003 10:42
Guess who's waiting on the Jordanian border to save souls for Christ - once His holy weapons have shredded the Iraqi resistance? Missionaries from two of the biggest evangelical Christian missions in the US: the Southern Baptist Convention and the Samaritan's Purse.
Groups like these enter difficult territories bearing aid and comfort - Samaritan's Purse even operates hospitals in some countries. But they also bring an uncompromising mission of converting the locals to their version of Christianity.
Unsurprisingly, this message is not always welcome. Three missionaries were killed by an Islamic gunman in Yemen late last year. More seriously, the missionaries also endanger genuine aid workers, and the unwitting locals who they manage to convert, usually from Islam.
As this story points out: "As evangelical Christian emissaries have spread throughout the Muslim world, their presence has increasingly proved to be a lightning rod for anti-American sentiment while provoking the anger of native Christian sects and Islamic clerics."
If this is to be billed as a war for tolerance, then the record of Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham and head of Samaritan's Purse, is worth a look. Two months after September 11 he called Islam a "very evil and wicked religion" and last year said Muslims hadn't sufficiently apologised for the terrorist attacks and challenged Muslim leaders to offer to help rebuild Lower Manhattan or compensate the families of victims to show they condemn terrorism.
The Southern Baptist Conference - often linked with President George W. Bush - is even worse. At its pastors' conference last year, a former SBC president, the Rev. Jerry Vines, described the prophet Muhammad as a "demon-possessed paedophile". US Islamic groups were understandably appalled. Amazingly, both the SBC's outgoing president and the incumbent the Rev. Jack (no relation) Graham supported Vines.
The missionaries' presence in Southern Iraq will go down, as we say in my country, like a cup of cold sick. I just hope that if and when the bullets do fly, it will be the missionaries and not any unfortunate bystanders who cop them.
Al-Jazeera's money apparently wasn't good enough for the US content delivery service Akamai when the Arab satellite news channel approached Akamai seeking a solution to the constant hacking attacks that have effectively taken its English-language website off the Internet.
Akamai's system delivers chunky content to a global network of local caches (here, it has caches installed at Xtra, Ihug and TelstraClear), greatly improving the experience of the far-flung Net user. Because content is effectively available from any of thousands of servers at once, it's also a very sweet way of beating denial-of-service attacks, which rely on flooding servers in a single location.
According to news stories, Akamai - doubtless fearing a visit from the thought police - talked to al-Jazeera, but refused its business. Yet the English al-Jazeera site is suddenly reachable - and a quick traceroute will reveal that it redirects to: a1151.g.akamai.net (210.55.6.159). How odd.
As the Americans dart in and out of Baghdad just to show they can, and the press briefings of Saddam's information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf become increasingly fictional, it seems that much of what is said and done in this war is said and done for political, rather than military, reasons. Israel's Ha'aretz has an excellent analysis of the propaganda war.
The Arab News has an intriguing story about un-embedded journalists trying to beat the Kuwaiti gatekeepers and get into Iraq.
Its reporter, Essam Al-Ghali, followed up with a pretty compelling account of what it's like - and who to be afraid of - as an un-embedded journalist in Iraq: "The American forces have put blanket restrictions on all unembedded reporters in Iraq, effectively banning them from traveling inside the country. Obtaining the necessary escort in order to report freely as an unembedded journalist is extremely difficult, if not impossible. Basically, the only journalists authorized to be in Iraq are those embedded with the troops, and they are escorted at all times. What those journalists are allowed to see and report on is controlled by the unit's military commander."
And Arab News also has a story on a profoundly disillusioned "embedded" Arab journalist who escaped after being captured by Iraqis and, safely home in India, says coalition and civilian casualties are routinely covered up by the system: "This is what bugs you. You have to submit everything that is filed from the front to military censorship. Still they sit in judgment of reports from the other side. They call them enemy lines. Whose enemy? Are you a journalist or a soldier? Though they are there to write, you forget about the Iraqi people. But you lose all your objectivity. The restrictions on reporting are such that it only justifies the reason for those who wanted to go to war."
An American protestor shot in the face by Israeli forces in the occupied territories. And Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships have stormed a small Gaza Strip village, rounding up all men between the ages of 25-50 and conducting house-to-house searches.
Having tangled itself up in its story about the second Baghdad market bombing, the Blair government is venturing into sleaze. Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon, embarrassed at having Robert Fisk's story about the US missile fragment found at the scene quoted to him by dissident Labour MPs, has implied that Fisk is either bent or a fool.
And, more than a week after the event, he came up with another piece of "intelligence" to the effect that that Iraqi authorities had been seen "clearing up" the bomb site soon afterwards. This follows Jack Straw's initial "intelligence" to the effect that the Iraqi commander of air defences in Baghdad had been replaced, implying that the cause of the explosion was misdirected anti-aircraft fire.
Fisk's paper, The Independent, was unimpressed, describing Hoon as "a smooth politician who relies on nuance to do his dirty work."
I suppose it is possible that Hoon's account of the bombing is correct. But it simply doesn't make anywhere near as much sense as the obvious view: that the serial numbers on the missile fragment indicate that it was an American HARM anti-radar missile; and that HARM missiles become confused and lose their course if the targeted radar facility is switched off while they are in flight, which the Iraqis appear to have been doing. (This explanation also, of course, enjoys the considerable advantage of not having to be progressively bolstered with unverifiable "intelligence" reports.)
If Hoon had said no, we weren't using HARM missiles on that day, or in that area, it might have been some sort of refutation. But he didn't even mention the HARM missile, only "cruise missiles", which no one is claiming were the cause of the explosion that killed 62 civilians.
And given the growing number of documented friendly fire casualties and bombs dropped on civilians, is it really that hard to believe that this one went astray? They really ought to give up on this one - war is a brutal business and all that - but I suppose there's little enough chance of that.
Our war and theirs | Apr 04, 2003 10:36
More than ever, the West and the rest of the world seem to be seeing very different wars in Iraq.
While the western media fusses over the operational details of the war and a creepy - and possibly premature - note of triumphalism comes through America reports, the Islamic world is seeing, hearing and reading about dead and dismembered children.
This story, quoting an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokesman, seems to have had remarkably little play in the western media:
"Our four-member team went to Hilla hospital south of Baghdad, and what it saw there was a horror. There were dozens of smashed corpses," said Roland Huguenin-Benjamin.
This story, from the Independent in South Africa, quotes more ICRC workers:
The International Committee of the Red Cross described as "horrific" on Thursday the scene at a hospital south of Baghdad, describing hundreds of Iraqi men, women and children "practically dismembered by explosions".
Red Cross spokesperson Floran Westphal, speaking from Geneva, said Red Cross workers reported seeing the local 280-bed hospital completely full of suspected casualties of coalition bomb attacks.
A Red Cross doctor at the town of Hilla, 10 kilometres south of Baghdad, told CNN about 280 Iraqis had been wounded from bombing and fierce fighting the previous 48 hours.
He said the hospital was "overwhelmed" by hundreds of casualties, adding he was "shocked" by what he saw.
The Arabic News is quoting news reports that "the American jets bombarded a gynecology hospital that belongs to the Iraqi Red Crescent and this resulted in the killing of more than 30 Iraqi children and wounding other 215, including one doctor at the hospital whose leg was chopped."
The Asian Times has this commentary on "the Hilla massacre":
Initially, Murtada Abbas, the director of Hilla hospital, was questioned about the bombing only by Iraqi journalists - and only Arab cameramen working for Reuters and Associated Press were allowed on site. What they filmed is horror itself - the first images shot by Western news agencies of what is also happening on the Iraqi frontlines: babies cut in half, amputated limbs, kids with their faces a web of deep cuts caused by American shellfire and cluster bombs. Nobody in the West will ever see these images because they were censored by editors in Baghdad: only a "soft" version made it to worldwide TV distribution.
This one from the Jordan Times yesterday:
Television pictures of bleeding children and weeping mothers in Iraq, beamed into millions of homes, have raised the level of anger on the Arab street over the US-led war launched two weeks ago.
"It hurts the hearts, it stirs up hatred of Americans and it's better that way," said an Egyptian economics student, Sherif, commenting on footage aired daily on Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite television.
A terrible picture of a coffin containing the bodies of a woman and her baby, a pacifier still stuck in his mouth, was displayed on the front page of a major newspaper here, Al Akhbar.
And this one from the same source.
Five-year-old Nader should not have been out playing last night. He now sits on a hospital bed with a bandage covering one eye after stepping on an explosive south of Baghdad.
The boy rests his head on his elbow on the bed's metallic bar while looking out from the window with his left eye.
The tone and content of reporting is, of course, also greatly influenced by the Iraqi leadership's habit of banishing reporters on a whim. CNN and Fox News have been turfed out and now al-Jazeera has withdrawn its correspondents from Iraq after one reporter was banished by the Iraqis. With CBS having voluntarily withdrawn, and Peter Arnett fired by NBC, US media simply doesn't have many journalists in a position to bear witness to civilian casualties. (Although there are still plenty of embedded TV plonkers wittering on about how "we" captured this position or "we" fired on that. This seems stupendously unprofessional behaviour to me, and it's strictly verboten on the BBC.)
The ICRC has established its own Iraq news page, which is worth checking for that increasingly rare commodity, unmediated information.
Jemima Khan, the English-born wife of Pakistani cricket legand Imran Khan, has filed a seriously disturbing report on the state of public opinion in Pakistan. Musharaf will be worried.
Even the moderates here in Pakistan are outraged. Across the board, young and old, poor and rich, fundamentalist and secularist are united in their hatred of the US and their contempt for Britain. Such unprecedented unanimity in a country renowned for its ethnic and sectarian divides is a huge achievement.
Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the leader of the combined religious party Majlis Muttahida Amal (MMA), announced triumphantly: "The pro-West liberals have lost conviction. Islamic movements have come alive."
Cryptome has an interesting post about depleted uranium and sandstorms. No, I don't know quite what to think about the many claims made about depleted uranium versus the official word, but they keep being made ...
The English translation of iraqwar.ru is now on the main IraqWar site.
And while everyone's distracted by Iraq, what on earth are the Israelis doing over Lebanon?.
Oh, and my other, less opinionated, blog Wide Area News at the Mediawatch site, is freshly updated.
Two Analyses | Apr 02, 2003 15:39
Oh, get me. I say I'm taking a break for a few days and I'm back the next day. But I figure these two analyses are important and timely and deserve to be read as widely as possible.
The English-language Saudi website Arab News devotes an editorial headed Creating Bin Ladens to what it sees happening on the Arab street:
"The most astounding aspect of this bitterness toward the US and UK, and the willingness of young Arabs to die fighting them, is that most of them probably never gave Iraq a second thought a few weeks ago. They were anything but militant; they have been turned into militants by events."
And the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland - who has been, if anything, pro-war - gazes aghast at the story, broken by his newspaper of the US plan for post-war Iraq, which calls for 23 ministries all headed by Americans, with help from the likes of the "controversial" - hell, let's just get to the point and say "corrupt" - Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi:
"This is a form of foreign rule so direct we have not seen its like since the last days of the British empire. It represents a break with everything America has long believed in."
Frankly Jonathan, some of us have felt that way all along …
Standing back | Apr 01, 2003 11:48
I'm taking a break from war-blogging for a few days: securing my supply-lines and all that. It is perhaps also time to stand back and consider what's happening in this war.
"Tell me, who do you want to win the war?" Gordon King from NZPundit asked me yesterday in an email.
Fair question. Er, the United Nations, I replied.
This war has been ill-advised, poorly planned and dishonestly sold. It should never have happened. But it has come so far that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and his regime is the only viable result. To leave Saddam and his henchmen in place would surely provoke a bloody purge and (especially assuming sanctions stayed in place) even worse suffering for the people of Iraq.
Unfortunately, the road to Saddam leads through thousands of civilians and unwitting military conscripts - who, like the coalition troops, are all somebody's sons and fathers, daughters and mothers. It is possible that terms will emerge for a ceasefire that saves the face of both sides, but I can't presently conceive of what that would look like.
A moral dilemma looms here: ideally, having decided on an inevitable outcome, we should wish for the collapse of the regime and a quick and straightforward conclusion to the war. But, even now, a rapid conclusion would be hailed as a victory and an endorsement by the White House extremists who procured the war in the first place. The Plan would be back on again, the intellectual inbreds behind it would feel vindicated.
John Roughan in the Herald said this on Saturday:
"I just hope Iraq puts up sufficient resistance to work this bad blood out of the American system."
A letter in the Herald today condemns his wish as "obscene":
"He is basically saying that he wants more coalition soldiers in body bags, not to mention the many more dead Iraqis a longer war would produce."
Yet Roughan is hardly alone in such thoughts, or in noting that the fighting and killing is as much - or even more - about the survival of elements of the American leadership as it is about the survival of Saddam (which is unlikely).
It depends on where you perceive the greater threat, I guess. Since September 11, 2001, we have heard a great deal from some quarters about the threat posed to our values by millennial Islamism. But, leaving aside the question of exactly how invading Iraq served to defeat radical Islam, I have always believed that our values of plurality, democracy and tolerance, in the West at any rate, were far too strong to be bombed away by extremists.
Those values have, however, proved far more vulnerable to attrition under the "War on Terror". The stunning rollback of privacy authorised under the USA Patriot Act (only a scoundrel would give a law such a name), the internment of thousands of people without charge, the snatching back of official information from the public domain, the failure of the US political system to perform as advertised.
More so, the howling-down of dissent, the cowing of the mass media, the apparent psychosis gripping a fair chunk of the American population. The bonfires into which radio stations have urged their listeners to throw Dixie Chicks CDs after their lead singer uttered a single criticism of the American president: why don't they just cut to the chase and start burning books?
It was staggering to believe that, as war approached, two US Representatives could actually devote their taxpayer-funded time to forcing the House cafeteria to rename French fries and French toast as "freedom fries" and "freedom toast". (The moron responsible, Rep. Bob Ney claimed only "a couple of people with accents" had complained. I liked the French embassy response: "We are at a very serious moment, dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes.")
I depend on a stable and prosperous America; a distracted, angry, fearful and intolerant power is not what any of us need. I have friends in America who are distraught at what their country is becoming.
Even more, we depend on stable international institutions. As I have previously noted, the United Nations, the European Union, Nato, Nafta, the Arab League and, probably, the World Trade Organisation, have all been damaged in White House bullrush to war. A number of key governments have been destabilised. World public opinion of America has plummeted, even in countries that have been its allies for decades. In that sense, Saddam - or perhaps al-Qaeda - had taken victories before a missile was fired.
The various lies that have been, and continue to be, told by "our" governments about war are especially corrosive to democracy, especially if the media is disinclined to play its role in holding governments to account.
I got a couple of emails about yesterday's post ('We're being lied to'); one claimed I was "biased", and implied that as a journalist I was a liar myself. The other said that "it is so clear for any lie the yanks give there are 100 from the other side". Yes, but they're the bad guys. I have maintained some respect for Tony Blair through this (at the least, he was able and willing to stand up before a hostile audience and make a case, which is more than Bush ever did), not to mention an emotional investment in the Westminster System. But what his officials have said in the past week is beyond mere spin, it is cynical.
And anyway, if you strip out the obvious battle fantasies, the Iraqis appear to be giving a more straightforward account of casualties than the coalition. There's no point in blaming al-Jazeera either. As a fine story in the International Herald Tribune pointed out this week, al-Jazeera is an incredibly important force in the Middle East:
"In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, precipitating the first Gulf war, state-run media in the Arab world suppressed the news for three days. Today, word of such an attack would be out within minutes because of a television station called Al Jazeera."
And America's response to this agent of democracy is? To attack its website, ban its reporters, condemn it from the pulpit of government. It's depressing and it's wrong.
In the end, what any of us wants to happen will have little or no bearing on what happens in this war. Clearly, most Iraqis appear to both despise Saddam and distrust their would-be liberators. It's hard not to admire soldiers who stand in the face of overwhelming technical and air superiority. But as people die, neighbouring governments teeter and self-styled mujahadeen begin to pour in to carry on a fight that has already transformed into something far more dangerous than it was a week ago, the philosophy that brought this war needs to be rooted out like the bad weed that it is.
PS: The writing (including Sy Hersch's Rumsfeld investigation) in The New Yorker this week is simply tremendous. I can't believe we get this stuff for free.
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