So much of the Iraq war operates below the
radar screen of the mainstream media that we
rarely glimpse what is really going on - either in
the daily lives of Iraqis or in the daily life of
the war itself. The news we do get is generally
filled with moments when large numbers of
soldiers, policemen and civilians are killed in
suicide attacks; or with the surreal machinations
of American and Iraqi politicians so disconnected
from Iraqi reality that they can hardly venture
outside Baghdad's hermetically sealed "Green
Zone", even with convoys of armed guards.
In the meantime, Western reporters in Iraq
are, by and large,
locked
into their own little Green-Zone-style situations,
held back from anything like normal reporting by
the dangers they face. Fortunately, there are
significant exceptions to this rule. Many
reporters do venture outside their protective
cocoons - often at great peril to themselves - to
chase down stories, do real investigative
journalism, or explore as best they can the daily
lives of Iraqis and the nature of the Iraqi
resistance.
By normal journalistic
standards, their reports should be plastered
across front pages and dominate the TV news about
Iraq; but, alas, they all too often are relegated
to the inside pages or obscure locations on the
Internet. And most Americans consequently get, at
best, the briefest glimpses of any deeper Iraqi
reality.
Nevertheless, some of the larger
picture is out there, even if in hard to find
places and so accessible only to those of us with
the time and persistence to dig it up. Take, for
example, Maysan province, a small Shi'ite area in
southeastern Iraq abutting Iran. Maysan is not in
the Sunni triangle, so it is not in the eye of the
Sunni resistance hurricane. It is not occupied by
American troops, but the British Staffordshire
Regiment, renowned for its non-aggressive approach
to occupying Iraq.
The region's only claim
to newsworthiness has been its status as the
historical home of the Marsh Arabs, infamously
dispersed by Saddam Hussein when he drained the
marshes that cover a substantial portion of the
province. In 2003, there was a brief flurry of
Maysan coverage when, just after the invasion, the
marshes were partially re-flooded and some of the
Marsh Arabs returned to their ancestral home.
An unnoticed hotspot Maysan is
worth our attention for another reason: for the
past two-plus years it has been the site of a
low-intensity, low-visibility war that may be a
better measure of the fate of the occupation than
higher profile battles in cities like Fallujah and
Tal Afar.
It has been the subject of some
excellent but little noted investigative
journalism, notably a magnificent recent report by
Pamela Hess of United Press International and an
earlier background piece by Doug Struck of the
Washington Post.
Maysan province has a
rebellious history. Saddam was never able to bring
it to heel and this was a key motivation for
draining the marshes and displacing the Marsh
Arabs. But even this draconian solution didn't
pacify Maysan. For years, the Saddam regime
maintained an occupying force of 20,000 troops
there, partly because of the province's proximity
to Iran and partly to suppress local guerrillas,
who remained active right up to the American
invasion.
When the American attack became
imminent and Saddam pulled his troops out of the
area to defend Baghdad, the local guerrillas
immediately took control of the capital, Amarah,
and installed their own government. The British -
in charge of southern Iraq for the American-led
Coalition Provisional Authority - arrived five
days later, and local residents greeted them as
invaders with no business in town.
According to Captain Andy McLannahan, the
British commander, the local attitude was, "What
are you doing here?" As far as the locals were
concerned, "it was they who ousted Hussein's
forces, not the US invasion". When the British
imposed their authority and displaced the
insurgent government, the residents were bitter.
As UPI's Hess put it, "In the local eyes they had
just traded one occupation for another."
Since then, the British have had no better
success than Saddam in subduing the province. The
resistance there has evolved through several
stages, each a response to changing occupation
strategies and their own capabilities. At first,
insurgents fought sporadic guerrilla battles with
the British. This so strained the capacity of the
1,000 strong occupation force that the British
actually withdrew from Majar al Kabir, the town
with the most militant and aggressive resistance
cells. During this period, the province became a
center of strength for the Mahdi Army, the
military wing of the Sadrist movement that would
eventually fight major battles with the Americans
in Najaf and Sadr City, Baghdad's enormous Shi'ite
slum.
In the spring of 2004, the poorly
armed, poorly trained Sadrists felt strong enough
to challenge the British directly, and a 100-day
battle commenced in the provincial capital of
Amarah. (There was little coverage of this, in
part because the almost simultaneous and far
larger battle in Najaf drew so much attention.)
The British claimed complete victory - 800
guerrillas killed without the loss of a single
British soldier - but they also discontinued
virtually all patrols in the city, leaving local
governance to the supporters of the resistance.
This withdrawal also marked an end to various
ambitious reconstruction projects that had been
promised and scheduled by the occupiers. In
January 2005, the Sadrists won the provincial
elections.
Finally, in April, the British
ordered the Staffordshire Regiment to pacify
Amarah and retake full control of the province.
They utilized a strategy similar to the one the
Americans were applying in the Sunni areas of the
country: armed patrols invaded rebellious
neighborhoods and broke into the homes of
suspected resistance fighters (and their suspected
supporters), arresting large numbers and killing
anyone who resisted.
Construction began on
13 impregnable police stations in an attempt to
convert the police into a viable weapon against
the resistance. According to the US Command in
Iraq, these stations were to be the most imposing
structures in town, equipped with "guard towers,
security walls, generator installation, exterior
lighting, bullet-proof glass, bars on exterior
windows, steel exterior doors, and an antenna".
These, in turn, would "improve the morale of the
police so they will do a better job", and so,
supposedly, deal with a pattern found in
rebellious areas across Iraq - police unwilling or
unable to fight the guerrillas.
At this
point, the guerrillas abandoned their failed
effort to confront the British directly and
settled into the pattern that characterizes the
war everywhere in the country: improvised
explosive devices (IEDs)by roadsides and
hit-and-run attacks targeting the patrols of the
occupying power. By the middle of summer, the new
strategy had begun to inflict consistent
casualties on the British, and Maysan province
officially became a hot spot of insurgency.
A war of attrition The ongoing
battle in Maysan catches something of the nature
of the guerrilla war in other under-reported parts
of Iraq. UPI's Hess pointed to the hallmark of
guerrilla warfare when reporting, "Despite the
violence, the Iraqis here consider Maysan to be
safe and secure because - unlike in the Sunni
triangle - local civilians and police are not the
targets of the insurgents."
In other
words, the local Shi'ite resistance is mainly in
the business of expelling the occupation. They
target British soldiers, and mostly try to avoid
civilian casualties. Because the police have not
attacked them, they usually do not target the
police. They are for the most part (in the classic
guerrilla mode) defenders of the local order, and
there would be little violence if the British did
not enter the towns and cities where the
resistance is strong. In these circumstances, the
local population feels safe (when the British are
not around) because they do not expect attacks
from the resistance.
The British, like all
historic occupation armies, have a great deal of
trouble dealing with (or even understanding) this
strategy. One intelligence officer told Hess:
"Anything that smacks of the insurgency from the
north [the police] jump on quite quickly," But the
British seem bewildered by the local police's
"live and let live" attitude toward the local
resistance, an attitude captured by British
commander McLannahan:
The local [Iraqi] army brigade
patrols the rural areas of Maysan, interdicting
smugglers and insurgents. Police forces patrol
inside the cities, and are less likely - because
of tribal ties and local loyalties - to crack
down on militiamen. However, they reliably turn
up weapons caches. When you ask them if they
caught the people, they usually have "just got
away".
Hess sums up the British
position thusly:
The British estimate that, like much
of Iraq, most of the locals only want to get on
with the lives. It is a small minority that is
up to no good. "But the large majority allow the
small number to carry on," McLannahan
acknowledged.
As in any low-intensity
guerrilla war, the "large majority" allow the
guerrillas to continue to operate. The police and
National Guard do their part by failing to
apprehend the local guerrillas, even when ordered
to do so by their British superiors.
It is
clear that the resistance in Maysan has now dug in
for a protracted war of attrition. Their 2004
offensive, designed to expel the British entirely,
failed while producing many casualties. But the
new IED-based hit-and-run tactics can undoubtedly
be sustained for as long as the British remain,
just as the earlier campaign against Saddam
continued for years.
In the meantime, the
occupation guarantees support for the resistance,
not only by arresting and killing suspected
activists whose family and friends are then drawn
into the battle, but also by stoking the
continuing crisis that prevents residents from
maintaining a viable local economy.
During
the brief five-day period when local residents
ruled the province, before the British asserted
their control, they "broke the earthen levees and
opened the floodgates" that had kept the marshes
dry. This action, designed to restore their
historic source of sustenance, was not successful
in restoring the local economy.
Previous
diversions of rivers north of Maysan (in Baghdad
and elsewhere) meant that there was insufficient
water to refill the marsh area. Later, constantly
increasing pollution, thanks to destroyed sewage
systems in these same upstream areas, contaminated
the re-flooded parts of the marshes, making them
unviable for cultivation.
This misfortune
made clear, even to the most parochial locals,
that the fate of Maysan province rests on larger
national reconstruction programs now largely in
abeyance. Virtually all of them blame the
occupation for its failure to reconstruct the
country and for the constantly escalating crises
that result from that failure - the pollution of
the marshes, the chronic electrical outages, the
lack of medicine, and the absence of other
infrastructural necessities that even the Saddam
regime had delivered semi-reliably.
As
local resident Rahan Nahie told the Washington
Post's Doug Struck in early 2005, "All the babies
are sick, and the environment all around is bad.
There are no fish here. We have no jobs. We need
help."
This discontent will continue to
fuel the rebellion as long as the British, like
the Americans, respond to protests, both peaceful
and violent, with military violence. One British
official expressed this imperial attitude
perfectly when he told Struck, "The province is
clearly in need of a strong authority." The
comment reflects a British decision to continue to
root out the resistance by military means, which
in turn guarantees both ongoing misery for the
local population and a growing guerrilla war.
Maysan is by no means a typical province,
as the many elements in its history make clear.
But then, each province (and each city within each
province) is similarly unique. There are
nevertheless enduring patterns here that catch
something of the experience of Iraqis - with the
exception of those in Kurdish areas of the country
- under the American and British occupation.
Uninterrupted economic decline is an
enduring pattern; brutal repression of dissent is
another, as are the absence of a responsive
government and an ever more fervent local desire
to expel the occupation. Even where the war is
largely invisible to us, there are resistance
movements in ever expanding areas that the
occupation simply cannot control.
The
high-profile battles, the suicide car-bomb
offensives, and the constitutional debates will
have little impact on this inexorable drumbeat of
occupation and resistance.
Michael
Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at Stony
Brook University, has written extensively on
popular protest and insurgency, and on American
business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq
appears regularly at TomDispatch, Asia Times
Online, ZNET, Against the Current and Z Magazine.
His books include Radical Politics and Social
Structure and Social Policy and the
Conservative Agenda. His e-mail address is
Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net
