Occupational hazards
11.07.2003 [10:39]
In a recent article in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria observed: “We’re (Americans) untouchable at war but clumsy at peace.” This must rank as the understatement of all time. Two months and 20 days after Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down in Baghdad — in an event carefully staged to show how unpopular he had been and how delighted Iraqis were at having been liberated by the US — even so fervent a believer in America’s civilising and democratising mission as Zakaria can no longer deny that what the Americans brought to Iraq was not liberation but chaos.
Today, as the chaos has persisted, resistance to what more and more Iraqis perceive as an occupation of their country has begun to grow, and become more organised and deadly.
Let us compare the myth the Bush administration wove around its invasion and the reality on the ground. It expected the ‘coalition’ soldiers to be greeted as saviours in most parts of the country. After a quick victory, rendered painless for the Iraqis by the extraordinary precision of US ‘smart’ weapons, they would set up a new Iraqi government, consisting mostly of the Iraqi dissidents, who had returned as part of the American wagon train, and long suppressed democratic elements within the country. This ‘transitional’ government would work closely with the Americans to restore peace, rebuild the infrastructure, and draw up a federal or confederal constitution, under which elections could be held.
The rebuilding of the infrastructure would be done rapidly and efficiently by transnational firms. Only firms belonging to countries that had joined the ‘coalition of the willing’ would be considered. This was further narrowed by sleight of hand into ‘American firms’. The US would not be paying more than a tiny fraction of the cost (till now Bush has sanctioned $ 2.4 billion). The Iraqis would pay for it themselves, out of their oil revenues.
To enable them to do so the US would get the UN to lift the sanctions that were imposed on Iraq 12 years ago. Legal trivia, such as the requirement of Resolutions 687 and 1441 that Iraq had first to be certified as free of WMDs by the UN’s weapons inspectors, would be brushed aside by the UN Security Council. In as little as two — definitely not more than five — years Iraq would emerge as a modern, prosperous and democratic nation, a beacon for the rest of the region.
And now the reality: the coalition’s first surprise was that Iraqis did not welcome them as liberators, not even in southern Iraq. Meeting stiff resistance in cities and towns like Basra, Nasiriyah and Najaf, the British and American forces were compelled to declare them ‘legitimate military targets’ and start bombing and strafing them.
Civilians began to die in thousands. The ‘embedded’ journalists continued to nourish the myth that few Iraqis were dying. But an NGO, Iraq Body Count, calculated that more than 1,000 civilians lost their lives in Nasiriyah alone, and that the overall civilian death count came to 7,000-10,000. Add to that at least three times the number who were seriously injured and one gets an inkling of why Americans are facing guerrilla fighters today.
True to predictions, the Iraqi army did not fight very hard, but it did not surrender either. Instead it took its weapons and melted into the civilian population. Nor did it have any intention of handing these in later. On June 15, the last day for the surrender of weapons, Iraqis had handed in 123 pistols, 76 semi-automatic rifles, 435 automatic rifles, 46 machine guns, 11 anti-aircraft weapons and 381 grenades and bombs — a drop in Iraq’s ocean of weaponry. Still no one in Washington or London challenged the rhetoric of liberation, at least in public.
The Americans’ third surprise was that a significant part of the Iraqi Shias did not want democracy, but theocratic rule. This raised the spectre of Iran, the last thing the Americans wanted to see. So out went all plans to install a democracy as soon as possible. This was legitimised, shamefully, by UN SC Resolution 1443, which gave the US and Britain the right to rule Iraq for an indefinite period of time with only a face-saving presence for the UN. In place of genuine democracy, for which the Iraqis are suddenly deemed to be unready, the American governor, Paul Bremer, is trying to set up an Iraqi consultative council of 25 persons. This convinced the sceptics among the Iraqis that they were now a subject people.
If the Americans had little idea of how the Iraqis felt, they had even less of how to govern a defeated nation. The first thing any conqueror does is to reassure the conquered people that they are free to carry on with business as usual. It has all the time in the world to weed out the suspect elements within the administration later. But such an announcement would not have gone down well with the media, to whom the war had been sold as a battle against evil. So instead, the first priority, American spokesmen told the world, was to cleanse the administration of all Ba’ath Party members. As if that was not enough, they made barely veiled threats that a lot of them would be tried as war criminals.
It did not occur to them that in a country that had been ruled by one party for 45 years, everyone of consequence would have joined the Ba’ath. So overnight the administration simply disappeared. Out also went the police, and in came the looters. While the looting caught the attention of the media, only Robert Fisk of the Independent reported that Baghdad also began to suffer 70 murders a week.
By the end of May, as no WMDs were found, Iraqis became convinced that they had been invaded and occupied only for their oil. Organised resistance has begun to grow. And much of it has been directed towards ensuring that the Americans cannot pump Iraqi oil out of the ground. Oil pipelines have been sabotaged and power lines cut. As a result, Baghdad, which was receiving 1,300 MW a day when the Americans came, was receiving only 800 MW by mid-June.
And they have begun to kill American and British soldiers. US spokesmen have been telling the press that so far 23 soldiers have been killed by ‘remnants loyal to Saddam’. But a US defence department website that gives a detailed list of US casualties of war, lists 31 soldiers as killed by the Iraqi resistance between May 1 and June 30 — 13 in May and 18 in June. Even this may be an underestimate as another 25 are listed as having died because of explosions or accidental discharge of their weapons in ‘non-combat’ situations. The full cost of Iraq in terms of lives in May and June comes to 64. In this period, only seven American soldiers died anywhere else. Of these three died in Afghanistan and four in Kuwait.
As attacks multiply, anger builds up on the soldiers against the civilians. Nervous soldiers are therefore shooting more and more of them on the merest suspicion. This is just what the Iraqi resistance wants.
In short, everything that could go wrong in Iraq has gone wrong. At the present rate, 400 US soldiers will die in Iraq in a year. That will be enough to ensure that Bush doesn’t get re-elected. But the count could go up. That is why he is so keen to get Indian and Pakistani soldiers into Iraq — to die in place of Americans in a war he started and doesn’t know how to finish. And he is successfully playing us off against each other. Mr Vajpayee, beware. Morality apart, you too face an election next year.
www1.iraqwar.ru |
