"Where have all the Flower's gone?" Bernie Lewis has the answer.
A Question, and Answers
Why Iraqis were slow to embrace their liberators.
BY BERNARD LEWIS
Sunday, April 6, 2003 12:01 a.m.
"Where are those cheering crowds we were told would come out to greet us?"
This question was asked with increasing urgency--by most with puzzlement, by some with anguish, by others with derision, according to temperament and allegiance. It is a fair question, and it deserves an answer. Different answers have been offered to this question, varying again according to temperament, allegiance, and other factors. But in any answer, three points are of central importance.
The first of these is the Iraqi rising and repression of 1991.
At the beginning of the Gulf War in that year, the U.S. government called on the people of Iraq to rise in rebellion and overthrow the tyrant who had oppressed them for so long. They responded readily, and rebellions broke out in many parts of the country. But in the meantime, the victorious U.S. had accorded a cease-fire to the defeated Iraqi dictator. In the days that followed, Saddam Hussein, using the helicopters that the cease-fire agreement had allowed him to retain, ostensibly for transport purposes, crushed the rebellion, region by region and group by group, Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north, killing tens of thousands in the most brutal way, including with chemical weapons.
Various explanations have been offered as to why the United States government granted a cease-fire in the moment of victory, and there are even some who still defend it. There is no defense--though some have offered explanations--of the abandonment of those whom we had incited to rebel. Our Iraqi friends--and I mean friends--saw this as a betrayal; and this left, at the very least, a legacy of caution and suspicion.
This caution and suspicion were revived and reinforced by two new concerns, one deriving from the conduct of the war, the other from the debate about the war.
In purely military terms, the decision to go straight for Baghdad, bypassing the cities of the south, was no doubt a wise tactical choice. It did however leave the largely Shiite south under Saddam Hussein's control. He probably had insufficient regular forces there to cope with a major military assault, but the whole monstrous apparatus of surveillance and repression remained in place, and the people in the south knew very well what would happen to them if they revealed their real sympathies prematurely.
Their understandable caution was further reinforced by the strong and vocal opposition to the war around the world and more especially in the United States. This manifested itself in many ways and, under their very eyes, in the mostly critical questioning of the military by the media in the press briefings taking place on their doorstep.
For us in the West, this is the normal free debate of an open society. But Iraqis, both rulers and ruled, have had no experience of any such thing since the overthrow of the parliamentary regime and the establishment of the dictatorship almost 50 years ago. What they believe they see is indecision, hesitation, even weakness and fear.
This could only intensify their worry that once again the United States may flinch from finishing the job, and reach some kind of accommodation, if not with Saddam Hussein himself, then with some like-minded but more amenable successor, found among his entourage. There are indeed audible voices advocating just such a resolution of the conflict.
The public debate against the war will be similarly understood--or rather misunderstood--both by Saddam Hussein and by his subjects, and will have the unintended effect of encouraging him and discouraging them. The antiwar campaign will not end the war, but it may turn out to have made it longer and harder.
Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of "What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response" (Oxford, 2002).
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