|
WHO SAID this and when? "The people of England have been led
in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape
with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a
steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are
belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than
we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient
that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster."
Answer: T E Lawrence (of Arabia fame) in The
Sunday Times in August, 1920. And every word of it is true
today. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We
were lied to about the links between Saddam Hussein and September
11, 2001. We were lied to about the insurgents - remember how
they were just "dead-enders" and "remnants"? - and we were lied
to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire country was
steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying powers or
of the government of satraps that they have set up in their
place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections next
month.
Over the past year, there has been evidence
enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed,
that our Western armies - when they are not torturing prisoners,
killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in
Iraq - are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the
like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East. My
own calculations - probably conservative, because there are
many violent acts that we are never told about -suggest that
in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown
themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day.
How does this happen? Is there a suicide-bomber
supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we done to create
this extraordinary industry? Time was, in Lebanon, when a suicide
bombing was a once-a-month event. Or in Palestine/Israel a once-a-week
event. Now, in Iraq, it is daily or twice daily.
And American troops are sending home increasingly
terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces
in the towns and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence
of ex marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee
hearing in Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian
board - which had to decide whether to give refugee status to
an American deserter from the 82nd Airborne - that he and his
fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women
and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car
with his arms up.
"We killed the man," Massey said. "We fired
at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle." Massey assumed
that the dead Iraqis didn't understand the hand signals to stop.
On another occasion, according to Massey, marines - in reaction
to a stray bullet – opened fire and killed a group of unarmed
protesters and bystanders.
"I was deeply concerned about the civilian
casualties," Massey said. "What they the marines were doing
was committing murder." The defector from the 82nd Airborne,
Jeremy Hinzman, told the court that "we were told to consider
all Arabs as potential terrorists... to foster an attitude of
hatred that gets your blood boiling".
All this, of course, is part of the "withholding
of information". It took months before the Abu Ghraib torture
and abuses were made public - even though the International
Red Cross had already told the American and British authorities.
It took months, for that matter, for the British Government
to respond to the outrageous beatings - and one killing – carried
out on defenceless Iraqis in Basra, first exposed by The
Independent. In the first seven months of last year, the
authorities maintained that they still "controlled" Iraq, even
though - when I drove 70 miles south of Baghdad in August -
I found every checkpoint deserted and the highways littered
with burnt American trucks and police vehicles.
Still we are not told how many civilians were
killed in the American attack on Fallujah. The Americans' claim
that they killed more than 1,000 insurgents – only insurgents,
mark you, not a single civilian among them - is preposterous.
Still we are not free to enter the city. Nor, given the fact
that the insurgents still appear to be there, is it likely that
anyone can do so. Why are American aircraft still bombing Fallujah,
weeks after the US military claimed to have captured it?
It is difficult, over the past year, to think of anything that
has not gone wrong or grown worse in Iraq. The electrical grid
is collapsing again, the petrol queues are greater than they
were in the days following the illegal invasion in 2003, and
security is non-existent in all but the Kurdish north of the
country.
The proposal to put Saddam's minions on trial
looks more and more like an attempt to justify the invasion
and distract attention from the horrors to come. Even the forthcoming
elections are beginning to look more and more like a diversion.
For if the Sunnis cannot – or will not - vote, what will this
election be worth? Donald Rumsfeld gave us the first hint that
things might not be going quite to plan when he spoke before
the American election about a poll in "parts" of Iraq. What
does this mean?
Yet, still the invaders go on telling us that
things are getting better, that Iraq is about to enter the brotherhood
of nations. Bush even got re-elected after telling this lie.
The body bags are returning home more frequently than ever -
we are not supposed to ask how many Iraqis are dying - yet still
we are told that the invasion was worthwhile, that Iraqis are
better off, that security will improve or - my favourite, this
one - that they will get worse, the nearer we get to elections.
This is the same old story that Bush and Rumsfeld used to put
about last spring: that things are getting better - which is
why the insurgents are creating so much violence; in other words,
the better things are, the worse things are going to get. When
you read this nonsense in Washington or London, it might make
sense. In Baghdad, it is madness. I wouldn't want to try it
out on the young American soldiers who were so arrogantly informed
by Rumsfeld that "you go to war with the army you have".
It would be pleasant to record some happiness
somewhere in the Middle East. Palestinian elections in the New
Year? Well, yes, but if the colourless and undemocratic Mahmoud
Abbas is the best the Palestinians have to look forward to,
after the far too colourful Yassir Arafat, then their chances
of achieving statehood are about as dismal as they were when
Arafat resided in his Ramallah bunker.
The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is
not trying to close down illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza
because he wants to be nice to the Palestinians; and his spokesman's
dismissive remarks about the West Bank - that the Gaza withdrawal
will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde" - does not
suggest that the occupied are going to receive statehood from
their occupiers. Which means, one way or another, that the intifada
will restart. At which point, the Israelis will complain that
Abbas cannot "control his own people", and the Israelis and
the Palestinians will return to their hopeless conflict.
It is impossible to reflect on the year in
Iraq without realising just how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian
struggle affects the entire Middle East. Iraqis watch the Palestinian
battle with great earnestness. Saddam Hussein's support for
the Palestinians was one with which many Iraqis could identify
- even if they loathed their own dictator. And I doubt very
much if the suicide bomber would have come of age so quickly
in Iraq without the precedent set by the suicide bombers of
Palestine and, before them, of Lebanon.
It is this precedent-setting capacity of events
in the Middle East - not the mythical "foreign fighters" of
George Bush's fantasy world - that is costing America so much
blood in Iraq. When Sharon tries to prevent Palestinian statehood,
Iraqis remember that his closest ally is represented in Iraq
by an army which most of them regard as occupiers. When US forces
learn their guerrilla warfare techniques from the Israelis -
when they bomb houses from the air, when they abuse prisoners,
when they even erect razor-wire round recalcitrant villages
- is it surprising that Iraqis treat the Americans as surrogate
Israelis?
We shouldn't need the evidence of ex-marine
Massey to show us how brutal the occupying armies have become
- and how irrelevant Iraq's "interim" government truly is. In
Washington or London, these "ministers" play the role of international
statesmen, but in Baghdad, where they hide behind the walls
of their dangerous little enclave, they have as much status
as rural mayors. Besides, they cannot even negotiate with their
enemies.
Which leads us to the one clear fact about
the last year of chaos and anarchy and brutality in Iraq. We
still do not know who our enemies are. Save for the one name,
"Zarqawi", the Americans - with all the billions of dollars
they have thrown into intelligence, their CIA mainframe computers
and their huge payments to informers – simply do not know whom
they are fighting. They "recapture" Samarra- three times - and
then they lose it again. They "recapture" Fallujah and then
they lose it again. They cannot even control the main streets
of Baghdad.
Who would have believed, in 2003, as US forces drove into Baghdad,
that within two years they would be mired in their biggest guerrilla
war since Vietnam? Those few of us who predicted just that -
and The Independent was among them - were derided as
nay-sayers, doom-mongers, pessimists.
Iraq is now proving all over again what we
should have learned in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: that Arabs
have lost their fear. It has been a slow process. But a quarter
of a century ago, the Arabs lived in chains, cowed by occupiers
and oppressive regimes. They were a submissive society and they
did as they were told. The Israelis even used a "Palestinian
police force" to help them in their occupation. Not any more.
The biggest development in the Middle East over the past 30
years has been this shaking off of fear. Fear - of the occupier,
of the dictator - is something that you cannot re-inject into
people. And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.
Iraqis are just not prepared to live in fear
any more. They know they must depend on themselves - our betrayal
of the 1991 rising against Saddam proved that - and they refuse
to be frightened by their occupiers. It was we who warned them
of the dangers of civil war, even though there never has been
a civil war in Iraq. As a people, they watched Westerners turn
up by the thousand to make money out of a country that had been
beaten down by a corrupt dictatorship and UN sanctions. Is it
any surprised that Iraqis are angry?
The American columnist Tom Friedman, in one
of his less messianic articles, posed a good question before
the 2003 invasion. Who knows, he asked, what bats will fly out
of the box when we get to Baghdad? Well, now we know. So we
should repeat Lawrence's chilling remark - without the quotation
marks and the date 1920. We are today not far from a disaster.
Robert Fisk, The Independent, 27 December
2004
|
