The Asia Times has some quite good articles on Iraq. The only problem is they tend to be too long for convenient posting. From
When fear turns to anger
By Nir Rosen
atimes.com
here is an excerpt.
In every mosque and religious center in the country one can purchase the DVDs, CDs, tapes and literature of the Islamic revolution that rejects "American democracy" and "American freedom". In Shi'ite stores you can buy books about Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, and in Sunni stores you can buy radical Sunni magazines published in Saudi Arabia.
What happens in the "Green Zone" of the occupiers behind their walls is a land of make-believe that does not affect the rest of Iraqis living in the "Red Zone", which is the rest of the country. The people who work for the occupation in the Green Zone rarely venture beyond its walls, and Iraq is as alien to them as they are to Iraqis. The Coalition Provisional Authority, or CPA, is known by soldiers as "can't produce anything" because, as one army major explained, "it is understaffed, getting funds is a long and drawn out process, they are out of touch with the reality on the ground and their mission is unrealistic given their constraints".
Morale is low among the soldiers, who have no mission and now view Iraqis as "the enemy" through a prism of "us and them". An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of "a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum".
Congressional staffers put in six months to spice up their resumes, former military or State Department officials fish for contracts with General Electric or KBR after they finish their stint. They don't have to deal with many Iraqis.
In the Rashid cafeteria for military and civilian servants of the occupation, non-Iraqis serve the food. When they do deal with Iraqis, they have interesting choices. The deputy minister of interior has been diverting arms and stockpiling them privately. He is accompanied by two doting American intelligence agents. Perhaps he is their last hope, should all else fail. The Americans here all complain "we don't have an Iraqi [Hamid] Karzai", as though the US-approved leader of Afghanistan is a success. The minister of higher education has banned all student unions that are not ethnically or religiously based. He is forcing even Christian girls to cover their heads, and instituting mandatory Islamic education.
In the bathroom of the country director of an important Washington-based and US-funded democratization institute I found, in the bidet by the toilet (Americans don't use bidets), a thick orange book entitled The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Koran, a brochure explaining that Arabic is written from right to left, and a guide to focus groups. It is from these focus group results that the people in the Green Zone learn "what Iraqis want".
A motivated and well compensated man with experience in Asia and Eastern Europe, the country director was dejected, his advice ignored by the CPA, the tribal leaders he lectured about democracy interested only in securing contracts with the Americans. He seemed to be missing the point when he was lecturing to the Farmers' Union about civil society, while the war was going on in Iraq. He was looking forward to November, he said, when he would return home to "vote [George W] Bush out of office".
lurqer |
