"In the Arab world, they view this as the Americans destroyed an Arab country."

[BurtWorm]

From an interview with former LA Times Baghdad bureau chief Borzou Daragahi, who gives Brian Lamb of C-SPAN a very pessimistic (i.e., honest) view of the war and the "surge" as reported in Editor & Publisher:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003583815"

Former 'LA Times' Baghdad Chief Says Iraqis Are 'Humiliated'

By Joe Strupp

Published: May 10, 2007 3:40 PM ET



Daragahi, a Pulitzer finalist in 2005, admits to deceiving his family, and editors, on some occasions about life in the war zone: "You know, there was no planning of, OK, I'm going to deceive my wife, I'm going to deceive my family. It was just, you know, you're in this crush of news and trying to get the story out....in addition to that, I had all these bureaucratic duties, because I became bureau chief. I had all these managerial duties - finances and safety issues and logistics, and so on. And so, the pressure, the amount of work was so intense that you end up perhaps sacrificing some facts when you're recounting your day to your family or your spouse, and even your editors."
...

Highlights of the interview, from a C-SPAN transcript, are below:

--On why he believes the military surge won't work:

"Because there is not - even according to General Petraeus' own guidebook for fighting counterinsurgencies, they're not using soldiers, they're not using enough troops to accomplish their goals...But also, more fundamentally, I don't think that they can do this militarily. I don't think the fundamental problems in Iraq right now are military problems."

-- On why Iraqis feel humiliated:

"Iraqis are rather hostile and feel humiliated. And that's the key thing that maybe some of our policymakers don't understand. The presence of the U.S. soldiers is very humiliating to the Iraqis. Even those who, in their minds know that it's necessary to have the soldiers there, at least some kind of force there preventing an all-out civil war from getting even worse...I don't think they appreciate American culture."

-- On charges that the press is too negative on Iraq:

"Well, I would just say, show me those goods."

...

"And I think, in the Arab world – and this is a really disastrous thing, they basically view this is as, you know, the Americans came in and they destroyed an Arab country. And I don’t think they’ll ever forgive us for that."

...

[MADem]

1. Yep, and Ba'athism crosses national borders, and Pan-Arabism, which was dying on the vine, has had

new life breathed into it.

[Jim Warren]

4. Right

Just ask the British how that worked out.....historically.

[MADem]

11. I don't understand your point. The British had nothing to do with either movement.

Pan Arabism was popularized by Gamel Abdul Nassir, President of Egypt, from the fifties forward. It was quite successful for the longest time; his charisma not hurting the concept at all. His attitude was screw the superpowers, play both ends against the middle. Solidarity with the Arab world, ta hell wid everyone else.

Nassir was a huge inspiration to a well-known Ba'athist, Saddam Hussein, who also used Pan Arab themes to good effect, most recently during Gulf War One, where his rhetoric actually persuaded one of our LONG time allies, Jordan, to "sit that one out."

The Ba'ath Party came to full fruition in the sixties, and took root in Iraq as we all know and of course Syria as well. It actually got rolling, in a small way, in SYRIA in the forties and was a reaction to French, not British, colonial rule. They farted around a bit in Lebanon and Jordan, as well, but it didn't come to much in those countries at the end of the day. And in the end, when they finally got in gear in Syria/Iraq, the 'colonials' were already outta there.

The Brits had absolutely nothing to do with either movement, aside from the fact that they hated both of them. I have no idea what you mean with your comment. Are you sure you understand the origins of both?

[dave_p]

14. I don't understand that post either

... but the Brits certainly encountered pan-Arab opposition when they carved up the Fertile Crescent with the French in 1920 - indeed the partition violated a British promise of independence for the whole area from Syria to today's Saudi Arabia.

Syria's early Baathist leaders initially looked to unification of Arab East: the union with Egypt seems to have been almost a rushed afterthought in the face of western and Israeli hostility and domestic pressures. The party did develop a Nasserist wing, but that was crushed in 1963.

[MADem]

15. Well, back when they were drawing lines on maps and making countries that looked like Jordan

:rofl: --how drunk would ya have to be to come up with that shape--it wasn't really the population that had any say. It was tribal leaders, Emirs, Sheiks, and Top Tough Guys that somehow acquired the title "King" for Western consumption. And the main gripers were mostly guys whining that so-and-so over there got more hectares worth of 'Emirate' than they did.

That goofy marriage with Syria failed for a couple of reasons; their economies weren't in sync, their geographic separation was too difficult to overcome, long distance management of the country was fraught with misunderstanding and miscommunication, and lastly, but perhaps most importantly, after that little Army coup the locals pulled, Nassir lost interest! He could have sent his boyz over to kick ass, but he decided that running that joint long-distance was more trouble than it was worth...he was right. It was a dumb idea in the first place!

[dave_p]

19. The main gripers were the nationalists

There was already a nationalist movement in Damascus, which Hussein was keen to liaise with - the people who in 1920 proclaimed his son Faisal ruler, only to be shelled into submission by their uninvited French rulers. Iraq saw similar resistance, so the British gave them the displaced Feisal and gave his brother Transjordan, both under strict control. It was a grotesque betrayal, when unity could have been achieved.

The UAR failed principally because the lower middle class that the Baath drew much of its support from didn't like Nasser's socialist innovations. And nobody much liked being the obvious junior partner, without even a separate party to represent them in the Union government. Nasser couldn't have done anything about the secession anyway short of mobilizing a counter-coup on the ground, and the best coup-makers were all on the other side.

[MADem]

20. My take on the UAR is that Nassir could have crushed any rebellion, but he chose not to

He had no small amount of assets, to include human ones, in country. I think he concluded it was just a shitty idea in the first place. He had already outlawed political parties save his flavor, flattened the commies and the Islamists, and the junior partner thing was being felt, no doubt. But Syria was a bit of a money pit...and he just didn't want to deal with it any more. So he let the coup ride. The idea of having the hero of Suez running the show, from the Syrian perspective, was a lot more attractive than the reality, too.

They still have their two star flag, to connect them to Egypt. Funny, Iraq still has their three star flag (against the day that they joined the club, which never happened or even got seriously off the ground), Bremer's wishes notwithstanding, though Saddam tossed the Allah-u-Akhbar in there around the previous war to play to the faith-based crowd.

Also funny how the brother who got Transjordan was such a fuckup, but he had to have had, or married, some decent genetic code. Sonny boy was no piker, and Grandson certainly doesn't play either.

[dave_p]

7. I think it's done the opposite

Baathism's founding pan-Arabism has been mostly myth since the 1960s (the Syrian and Iraqi sections hated each other even before Saddam took power in Baghdad), and any pan-Arab alternative's going to find itself blocked by widening Shia-Sunni division. The Iraq chaos threatens to divide the Arab world more than any of the political rivalries of the past half-century.

[MADem]

10. Well, Pan-Arabism is a Nassir construct--it goes back to his ill-fated and short lived union with

Syria, many years ago.

They're two separate things, I am not suggesting that they are married in any way, except, perhaps, in the mind of the late Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, who was a fan of both.

As for the Shi'a-Sunni business, although you find Shi'as in Iraq in substantial numbers, most Shi'as are in Iran, and Iranians aren't Arabs. They're Indo-Europeans, Persians, southwest Asians...not Arabs. And they'll tell you so, quite indignantly, too.

[dave_p]

12. It goes back way beyond Nasser

It wasn't even new when the Baath's Syrian founders embraced it in the 1940s, before anyone had heard of him.

I'm well aware that Iranians aren't Arabs. But most of Lebanon's Muslims are Shia, Syria's Alawi (a Shia offshoot broadly aligned with Iran) number 2.5m and dominate the government, and Shia make up nearly half of Yemen's population as well as significant minorities in many Gulf states.

And Iraq's pretty fundamental to any pan-Arab vision. Saudi fear of Iranian domination of its northern neighbor will stoke continued division for the foreseeable future. The issue is likely to be not pan-Arabism but stopping the whole Arab world from descending into conflict and even deeper impotence.

[MADem]

13. Nassir popularized it, though. It was going nowhere until he got ahold of it.

As it was, the Ba'ath start in the forties also went nowhere, until Hafiz al-Assad (who trained in Egypt, and had some of the Nassir spirit rub off on him) and Saddam got the party started.

Look, I don't dismiss that the Sunnis and Shi'as are playing a showdown game; but Shi'as represent fifteen percent -- TOPS -- of the world's Muslims, and as a group, they're, well, POOR. The Sunnis have two things--the MONEY, and the HOLY PLACES. What do the Shi'as have? Presence in oil producing nations, and a propensity to reproduce at a startling rate. They also, whenever they get power, manage to fuck it up. Look at Iran--it's horrible, it's repressive, and it's corrupt as all hell. It's like the days of the Shah, only instead of Pahlavi favorites getting the swag, it's the fellahs in turbans. And the infrastructure there now is AWFUL. Crumbling, rotted, and disfunctional. WAY worse than the Shah days, when the roads were repaired with nicely painted lines, the electricity was reliable, you could actually get a lazy sort of reliable service at government offices and the phones worked. So,no liberty, no open government,and really crappy surroundings and services--that's the shi'a legacy. Look at their increasing power in Lebanon--same shit. They aren't making things better there.

You wanna see Sunnis get motivated? Let the Shi'a make a move to acquire, by force, guardianship of the Holy Sites at Meccah and Medinah. And that IS what they're after in the long haul, along with Jerusalem (I think it should be an INTERNATIONAL city, myself, with all faiths running the joint on a board, with each one taking the chair in rotation) and Arab hegemony. None of those concepts will sell well to the wealthier Sunnis in the region, first because Sunnis consider Shi'as to be heretical cultists, kinda like mainline Protestants look at Mormoms, and secondly because the Shi'a agenda is run out of Teheran, which ain't Arab.

The Sunnis may not like the Americans much, and they'd never admit it, but they'd love it if America attacked Iran, just to beat those guys back. We won't do it, but they wouldn't mind it. They'd make all the "appropriate" noises, and then close the door and dance a jig in glee...

[dave_p]

16. The Shia have Iran

... and Iran is now (thanks to the dismantling of Iraq and western threats to Syria) the only Muslim power in the region.

The charge of Shia "propensity to reproduce at a startling rate" is extremely dubious. Iran halved its own birth rate in the 1990s alone, and the Shia proportion in Iraq and Lebanon hasn't grown radically since the first censuses.

As for Lebanon, Hezbollah seems to be gaining strength largely through local perceptions of its social accomplishments as well as its stance against Israel. Its hospitals are widely reported and it's said to be outpacing the government in housing reconstruction.

I don't agree either that even most Sunnis would welcome an attack on Iran, especially when it triggered a massive escalation of the conflict in Iraq and Shia counter-action elsewhere. It would also leave the Palestinians helpless and Israel more powerful than ever.

Shia-Sunni sectarianism and the strategic instability it generates are the enemy of pan-Arabism. Any short-term gain from an Iranian setback would quickly fade as Shia (and perhaps later Palestinian) actions and increased Israeli strategic supremacy tore the region apart again.

[MADem]

22. Well, I'm looking at this from a Saudi viewpoint, frankly.

The ones I talk to want Persia pushed back. They don't necessarily want invasion, or lots of bloodshed, they just want them checked so they don't get any ideas. And what's good for Saudi Arabia is good for Jordan, seeing as they get most of their dough from those guys. The Saudis are awfully generous when they want to be, and they just want the Persians back in a box. The Egyptians aren't loving the Shi'a either.

It's just how they feel. I'm not passing judgment in any way on their opinion, mind you. Just noting it.

I also think the Egyptians would take some exception to that "only power in the region" assertion about Iran. Granted, they sit on the African continent, but then again, the Persians aren't in "Arabia" either.

And while the Persians, and Shi'as as a whole, may have gotten a handle on their population explosion lately, let me tell you, the population of Teheran in 1979 made it look like a provincial village compared to the nutz2butts crowding you see there nowadays. Hell, most of the population was born AFTER the Revolution, and they're the majority now. The population has exploded in the last three decades, even with the culling of the Iran-Iraq War and the exodus of everyone who got the hell out from the mid seventies to the mid eighties and beyond if they could swing it. And if you contrast the Shi'a populations around the region from the late seventies to now, it's a massive increase. It's changed the character of nations like Lebanon, certainly.

[dave_p]

2. That's how I see it too

The country has been destroyed. It's difficult to see it becoming a strong independent entity for a generation, if ever. That was, of course, the plan all along: failed states can't protect their resources against foreign monopolies.

Americans need to take a long, hard look at just what's been done in their name. This isn't some civil war that came irresistably out of Iraqi society: this was the planned wholesale vandalization of a strategically important country and its heritage aimed at turning it into an ongoing war-zone and dividing an already volatile region.

[BlooInBloo]

3. They view it that way because that's what happened.

[mitchtv]

5. Isn't that what happened?

that's exactly what we did/are doing.

[murloc]

6. Terrorist destroyed Two buildings in NYC

We destroyed two countries in response.

We (rightfully) call those who destroy buildings terrorist

But what do they call those who destroy countries?

[question everything]

18. Oh come on!

Terrorists destroyed two buildings? What about the 3000 innocent people that died?

No, this did not provide justification to invade Iraq but, really, where is your sense of decency?

[murloc]

21. Yes its tragic and horrid. Please don't jump to conclusions

We are all horribly aware of the loss life that day.

Just because I don't recount it every time I mention 9/11, doesn't mean I have forgotten.

My post was meant to draw a simplistic analogy to our response, not to be an in depth analysis of 9/11 and the war, all in the subject line no less. Not to mention I'm a terrible writer.

Nonetheless, let me rephrase:

Terrorist destroyed 2 buildings and killed 3,000 innocent lives.

We destroyed two countries and killed 300,000 in response.

If they are terrorist...what does that make us?

[Swamp Rat]

23. Welcome to DU!

:hi:

[BurtWorm]

26. Your point is well taken.

:toast:

[question everything]

28. Thank you. This "compares and contrasts"

not only things but also lives.

[nam78_two]

30. Welcome to the nuthouse

Your points are well-taken.

[mmonk]

8. It doesn't matter. There are oil fields and reserves there.

And they can still fool the American people into thinking they are doing it to keep them safe (while they make their deposits).

[WinkyDink]

9. We did, and they won't. Destroy and forgive, that is. EVER. EVER. EVER.

Unto Eternity, if we also steal the ownership of their oil.

Those foreign oil workers' lives won't be worth the paper their contracts are written on.

[mudesi]

17. That's not a 'view', that's a FACT.

America did destroy Iraq. It's not an opinion.

[Erika]

24. We had no right nor cause to be in Iraq

Other than the dark side represented by W and his corporatists.

[Amonester]

25. Add the U.K. (and to a lesser degree, Australia) to their list of ...

foreign "terrarists" who destroyed Iraq and murdered its people, children included.

[Vidar]

27. Of course, theya are right.

[JCMach1]

29. There is no such thing as the 'Arab' world...

The views on the issue are very diverse here.

If there is universal hatred, it's for Mr. Bush, not America.

[BurtWorm]

31. Daragahi's point, of course, is that there will be consequences for America

once Bush is history because of what the Bushists did to an Arab country. Or do you think once Bush and his crew are gone, all will be forgotten and forgiven?

[JCMach1]

32. Things are not forgotten here that easily... if anything,

the region has moved-on without the help of the U.S.

Over the last 10yrs change has hit this region like a tidal wave...

The Arabs have a love and hate relationship between each other... you can ad the U.S. to that list...

American culture and goods are much more popular here than in Europe... go figure.