What the Bush Administration Has Wrought in Iraq

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/09/1069/

What the Bush Administration Has Wrought in Iraq
by Patrick Cockburn

Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, Patrick Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book on his years covering the war in Iraq, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction. This essay will be the new introduction to the paperback edition of that book, due this fall.


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Most of my Iraqi friends had fled Iraq for Jordan or Syria or, when they could get a visa, Western Europe. Soon, I could not enter the coffee shop of The Four Seasons, the hotel where I usually stayed in the Jordanian capital of Amman, without seeing several Iraqis I knew sitting at other tables. These were the better-off. The poor often had to chose between staying in jobs where they were at risk, becoming permanently unemployed, or taking flight. I was in contact with a Sunni family called al-Mashadani who lived in the west Baghdad district of Hurriya. It was under attack by Shia militiamen. Khalid, the father, worked as mechanic in the railway station. He was forced to leave his job when the repair yard was taken over by Shia militiamen. He stayed away and asked a Shia fellow worker to pick up his salary. This worked until the Shia militias found out what was happening and threatened to kill any Shia who passed on the salary of a Sunni.

Khalid was forced to leave for Syria where he found work. He left behind his wife, Nadia, and four children, the eldest of whom was eight years old. Living with them in the house was Nadia’s sister, Sarah, whose husband had been an ordinary guard at the Oil Ministry building. He was killed by the resistance who considered that his job made him a collaborator with the government. On December 25, 2006, this whole family group was told by the Shia militia to get out of their house immediately without taking any possessions or be killed. They fled into the night and sat beside the road until a charitable minibus driver picked them up. Eventually, they found refuge in a school. Nadia recalled that “we stayed 29 days in a dark and damp room and we couldn’t go out of it when the students were studying.” Her husband in Syria offered to return, but she told him to stay because the family could not afford for him to lose his job.

Nadia blames the Americans for the sectarian civil war that had engulfed her family. She says: “We were living together, Sunni and Shia, and there was no sign of sectarian differences between us in Iraq until the Americans came and encouraged sectarianism and let in foreign terrorists.” Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam Hussein and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shia but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shia defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the U.S. occupation, unlike the Shia who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunni saw the Shia who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.

The war in Iraq that started in 2003 has now lasted longer than the First World War. Militarily, the conflicts could not be more different. The scale of the fighting in Iraq is far below anything seen in 1914-18, but the political significance of the Iraq war has been enormous. America blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness. The vastly expensive U.S. war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Tony Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.

At times, President Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the U.S. by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country. By 2007, the administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of U.S, assertions four years earlier that Saddam Hussein was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

The U.S. occupation has destabilized Iraq and the Middle East. Stability will not return until the occupation has ended. The Iraqi government, penned into the Green Zone, has become tainted in the eyes of Iraqis by reliance on a foreign power. Even when it tries to be independent, it seldom escapes the culture of dependency in which its members live. Much of what has gone wrong has more to do with the U.S. than Iraq. The weaknesses of its government and army have been exposed. Iraq has joined the list of small wars — as France found in Algeria in the 1950s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s — that inflict extraordinary damage on their occupiers.

Baghdad-Arbil
April 2007