Ready for the truth? Iraq is getting better
Half a century ago, in a blistering denunciation of the Korean War, the British war correspondent Reginald Thompson wrote: “It was clear that there was something profoundly disturbing about this campaign and something profoundly disturbing about its commander in chief.”
Thompson’s words could equally well apply to the US-led campaign in Iraq a campaign marked by overblown claims, disingenuous climbdowns and an embarrassing absence of weapons of mass destruction. They could also refer to its commander in chief, US President George W. Bush, the head of a cabal that seeks to install a client regime in Iraq as a first step to extending American-Israeli control across the region. Disturbing, indeed.
But there is something disturbing, too, about the way opponents of the war have portrayed events in Iraq. Visceral distrust of Bush and his sidekick, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, has brought with it a disregard both for facts and for the victims of the Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein. Arab commentators have had no shame in urging their Iraqi brothers, exhausted by three major wars and more than a decade of sanctions, to start a new war “of liberation” against their liberators. Western commentators critical of the war have luxuriated in the failures of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) failures that condemn Iraqis to protracted hardship.
Disaster has been prophesied, self-servingly, at every turn: The war would be protracted (it wasn’t, and most Iraqis had no direct experience of it); tens of thousands would die in the battle for Baghdad (they didn’t); and now, in the words of a British Arabist, “even the most optimistic and moderate Iraqis fear the very real prospect of civil war.”
Not those I know. Not yet. Nor those polled in August by the American research company Zogby International, which found that 70 percent of Iraqis believe their country will be better not worse in five years’ time.
The voice of Iraqis who supported war over continued tyranny has been hushed from the very beginning. Organizers of the great anti-war demonstrations in Britain confiscated banners saying “Freedom for Iraq” and seized photographs of the victims of Halabja, the Kurdish town where Saddam’s army gassed 5,000 civilians. No space was given to people like Freshta Raper, who lost 21 relatives in Halabja and wanted to ask: “How many protestors have asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when she was forced to watch her son being executed? How many know that these mothers had to applaud as their sons died or be executed themselves? What is more moral? Freeing an oppressed, brutalized people from a vicious tyrant or allowing millions to continue suffering indefinitely?”
In mid-summer, I spent over a month in Iraq. What I found there did not correspond to what was being reported most crucially, that the liberators were widely perceived as occupiers. That simply wasn’t true. In Baghdad, where US forces had permitted widespread looting (although not as much as reported) and where security and services were virtually nonexistent, attitudes toward the Americans were mixed. But even in Baghdad, even with Saddam and his sons still lurking in the shadows, the sense of relief at the toppling of the regime was palpable.
A university lecturer showed me the bakery below her apartment where educators who fell foul of the ousted dictator were burned alive and said: “We could smell it. Iraq was a prison above ground and a mass grave beneath it. I feel as if I have been born again.” Outside Baghdad, in the Shiite south, the mood was overwhelmingly upbeat. In Basra, ordinary people gave the thumbs-up at the mere sight of a Briton. In Najaf, a waiter blew kisses (from behind the backs of visiting Iranian mullahs). In Amara, streets were buzzing well after midnight.
Today, the line being peddled is that there is growing popular support for a war of resistance against the CPA and Iraqis working with it. It is said that Iraq is a security-free zone threatened with “Lebanonization.” Bad news sells; good news doesn’t. But there is still, if only just, good news in Iraq: Unemployment remains a huge problem, but despite the slow reconstruction effort more people have jobs and some salaries have risen, particularly for qualified people seeking work in the private sector. Shops are overflowing with imported goods; food prices are lower than they were during Saddam’s last years. Approximately 85 percent of primary and secondary schools have reopened. Some 55,000 Iraqis have enrolled in law-enforcement services and an increasing number of Iraqi policemen are on the streets, directing traffic, guarding buildings and occasionally enforcing the law.
Many Iraqis welcomed with enthusiasm the Cabinet appointed earlier this month by the Governing Council. “These are people who have been to Harvard, Oxford and MIT … educated people,” said an Iraqi opponent of the war on a visit to Beirut. “Some of Saddam Husseins’s ministers hadn’t got beyond primary school.” At the neighborhood level, the nine District Councils of Baghdad that form the City Council meet regularly and appear to be working harmoniously. “To the credit of the CPA civilians who work with the City Council, the degree of transparency and cooperation in the work of the council is impressive,” says Rend Rahim Francke of the Iraq Foundation, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) working for democracy and human rights.
Outside Baghdad, despite the explosion that killed Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim last month, there is greater security than in the capital, crime is lower and services, including electricity, are more available. All Iraqi cities and 85 percent of its smaller towns have fully functioning municipalities. “Self-government, long advocated for Iraq, appears to be working well when put into practice,” says Francke.
It is worth stating the obvious, so momentous is it: For the first time in almost half a century, Iraq has no executions, no political prisoners, no torture and no limits on freedom of expression. Having a satellite dish no longer means going to jail or being executed. There are over 167 newspapers and magazines that need no police permit and suffer no censorship, over 70 political parties and dozens of NGOs. Old professional associations have held elections and new associations have sprung up. People can demonstrate freely and do.
The occupying forces got off to a wretched start. The first US proconsul, retired General Jay Garner, was an unmitigated disaster, stepping jovially through Iraq’s ruins, old and new, like a child in an adventure playground. His successor, Paul Bremer, began badly, disbanding the Iraqi Army and making immediate enemies of half a million serving and retired officers and NCOs. He has yet to announce a timetable for restoring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. However, he has accepted the need for greater reliance on Iraqis albeit in a slow and incremental manner that will not control the escalating violence and has set about transforming a bankrupt economy burdened with a Stalinist industrial structure and three decades of mismanagement.
The concern now is that the Iraqis who stand to benefit from American contracts are a handful of war profiteers nearly all of them Sunnis whose capital came from cooperating with the old regime. Former business associates of Saddam’s late, unlamented son Odai have already won big reconstruction contracts. Iraqis know who these people are. The Iraqi National Congress had been working on de-Baathification of the economy since before the former dictator disappeared, and is still doing so. Bremer should worry less about Al-Qaeda and more about bankrolling those who, for as long as Saddam remains alive, will be hedging their bets on the future.
Julie Flint is a veteran journalist based in Beirut and London. She wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
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