Page 1 of
2 A bitter taste to Iraqi
reality By Dahr Jamail
This March 19 will be the fifth
anniversary of the shock-and-awe air assault on
Baghdad that signaled the opening of the invasion
of Iraq, and when it comes to the American
occupation of that country, no end is yet in
sight. If Republican presidential candidate John
McCain has anything to say about it, the
occupation may never end. On January 7, he assured
reporters he was more than fine with the idea of
the US military remaining in Iraq for 100 years.
"We've been in Japan for 60 years. We've been in
South Korea 50 years or so ... As long as
Americans are not being injured or harmed or
wounded or killed. That's fine with me." He
said nothing, of course, about Iraqis "injured or
harmed or
wounded or killed". In fact,
amid the flurries of words, accusations and
"debates" which have filled the airways and add up
to the primary-season presidential campaign, there
has been a near thunderous silence on Iraq lately
- and especially on Iraqis.
A recent ABC
News/Washington Post poll indicated that 64% of
Americans now feel the war in Iraq was not worth
fighting. American opinion on the war and
occupation, in fact, seems remarkably unaffected
by the positive spin - all those "success" stories
in the mainstream media - of these post-"surge"
months. The media now tell us Iraq is going to be
taking a distinct backseat to domestic economic
issues, that Americans are no longer as concerned
about it.
Once again, with rare
exceptions, that media have had a hand in erasing
the catastrophe of Iraq from the American
landscape, if not the collective consciousness of
the public. What, it occurred to me recently, do
my friends and acquaintances back in Iraq (where I
covered the occupation for eight months during the
years 2003-2005) think not just about their lives
and the fate of their country, but about our
attitudes toward them? What do they think about
the "success" - and the silence - in America?
On October 6, 2004, President George W
Bush proclaimed: "Iraq is no diversion; it is the
place where civilization is taking a decisive
stand against chaos and terror - and we must not
waver."
Iraqis, of course, continue to
witness firsthand this "decisive stand against
chaos and terror". In our world, however, they are
largely mute witnesses. Americans may argue among
themselves about just how much "success" or
"progress" there really is in post-"surge" Iraq,
but it is almost invariably an argument in which
Iraqis are but stick figures - or dead bodies. Of
late, I have been asking Iraqis I know by email
what they make of the American version (or
versions) of the unseemly reality that is their
country, that they live and suffer with. What does
it mean to become a "secondary issue" for your
occupier?
In response, Professor S Abdul
Majeed Hassan, an Iraqi university faculty member
wrote me the following:
The year of 2007 was the bloodiest
among the occupation years, and no matter how
successful the situation looks to Mr Bush,
reality is totally different. What kind of
normal life are he and the media referring to
where four and a half million highly educated
Iraqis are still dislocated or still being
forcefully driven out of their homes for being
anti-occupation? How can the people live a
normal life in a cage of concrete walls [she is
referring to concrete walls being erected by the
Americans around entire Baghdad neighborhoods],
guarded by their kidnappers, killers and
occupation forces? What kind of normal life can
you live where tens of your relatives and your
beloved ones are either missing or in jail and
you don't even know if they are still alive or,
after being tortured, have been thrown
unidentified in the dumpsters?
What kind
of normal life can you live when you have to bid
farewell to your family each time you go out to
buy bread because you don't know if you are
going to see them again? What is a normal life
to Mr Bush? If we're lucky, we get a few hours
of electricity a day, barely enough drinking
water, no health care, no jobs to feed our kids
...
Little teenage girls are given away
in marriage because their families can't protect
them from militias and troops during raids.
Women cannot move unescorted anymore. What kind
of educations are our children getting at
universities where 60% of the prominent faculty
members have been driven out of their jobs -
killed or forced to leave the country by
government militias? Is it normal that areas [on
the outskirts of Baghdad] like Saidiya and Arab
Jubour are bombed because the occupation forces
are afraid to enter the areas for fear of the
resistance? It is always easier to control ghost
cities. It becomes very peaceful without the
people.
On January 8, Bush held video
teleconferences with General David Petraeus and
ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, as well as with
the US-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,
and with members of US Provincial Reconstruction
Teams (PRTs) in Iraq. Afterwards, he told
reporters at a press conference, "It was clear
from my discussions that there's great hope in
Iraq, that the Iraqis are beginning to see
political progress that is matching the dramatic
security gains for the past year."
Members
of the PRTs, he claimed, had told him that "[l]ife
is returning to normal in communities across Iraq,
with children back in school and shops reopening
and markets bustling with commerce". Bush thanked
members of those teams for "making 2007,
particularly the end of 2007, become incredibly
successful beyond anybody's expectations".
Mohammad Mahri'i, an Iraqi journalist, has
a rather different take on the situation: "The
problem with Bush is that his people believe him
every time he lies to them," he writes me. "His
reconstruction teams are invisible and I wish they
could show me one inch above the ground that they
built."
Maki al-Nazzal, an Iraqi political
analyst from Fallujah who has been forced to live
abroad with his family, thanks to ongoing violence
and the lack of jobs or significant reconstruction
activity in his city, which was three-quarters
destroyed in a US assault in November 2004,
offered me his thoughts on the Western mainstream
coverage of Iraq.
The media should not follow the
warlords' and politicians' propaganda. It is our
duty to search for the truth and not repeat lies
like parrots. The US occupation is bad and no
amount of media propaganda can camouflage the
mess inside occupied Iraq. We are ashamed of the
local and Western media [for] marketing the
naked lies told by generals and politicians.
Comparing two halves of 2007 is ridiculous.
Bush and his heroes, [head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority L Paul] Bremer,
[secretary of defense Donald] Rumsfeld and now
Petraeus always lied to their people and the
world about Iraq. US soldiers are getting killed
on a daily basis and so are Iraqi army and
police officers. Infrastructure is destroyed. In
a country that used to feed much of the Arab
world, starvation is now the norm. It is ironic
that Iraq was not half as bad during the 12
years of sanctions. Our liberation has pushed us
into a state of unprecedented corruption.
Petraeus, US "surge" commander in
Iraq, insists that "we and our Iraqi partners will
... continue to look beyond the security realm to
help the Iraqis improve basic services, revitalize
local markets, repair damaged infrastructure and
create conditions that allow displaced families to
return to their homes."
Iraqis know
differently. Al-Nazzal is realistic:
Petraeus wants us to celebrate the
return [to Baghdad] of 50,000 Iraqis who were
starving in Syria, when 5 million remain in
exile and internally displaced. What he
conveniently forgets to mention is that those
who returned found their houses either destroyed
or occupied by others. He also wants to be
praised for handing over the nation's security
to militias he allowed to form rather than to
academics and technocrats. Iraq has no medicines
in its hospitals, no electricity, no potable
water, no real security, and no well-guarded
borders. Nevertheless, some people say they are
happy for what is going on in Iraq!
Much as they would like to believe
the claims of success and progress from American
officials, Iraqis - surrounded by disaster -
cannot do so.
Thirty-seven-year-old Sammy
Tahir, a Kurdish education advisor living in
Baghdad, offers the following assessment of the
cautious but upbeat claims being made by Petraeus
and others:
No improvement in any service can be
found in Iraq. On the contrary, we are much
worse now and we are back to painting old
buildings to make them look better. Kurdistan is
still full of displaced Iraqis from southern and
mid-Iraq.
About this Mari'i writes:
It was the generals who destroyed
Iraq in the first place and I do not see any
improvement in basic services. For example, most
of Baghdad has been without electricity for
about two weeks at the time of
writing!
Professor Hassan shares a
similar view:
What the Americans hadn't destroyed
by the end of the military operations of 2003,
they have finished off over the past four years,
and I don't think that the occupation forces and
their assigned government would like to do
anything about the displacement of Iraqi
families, simply because they are the ones who
created that situation.
The sectarian
violence, which led to this mass displacement,
was initiated by the US and its allies to divide
the Iraqi community in accordance with American
plans and the published "new" Iraqi
constitution, which emphasizes sectarian issues.
The occupation would like to divide Iraq into
small sectarian and ethnic regions to be able to
easily command, control, and conquer them. The
major objective of the occupation is to control
oil production and reserves in Iraq and the
Middle East region. Displacing families is, to
them, acceptable collateral
damage.
According to Tahir:
Children always went to school
before the late 2007 crackdown and it was mainly
the military operations that stopped them from
doing so in some areas where the Americans
attacked towns and villages. Bush has been
saying the same words since 2003, but things
have always gotten progressively worse in Iraq.
He and his generals are destroying both Iraq and
the US by continuing this war. The US economy
will never hold against the expenses of war and
Iraq is totally destroyed.
During a
surprise visit to Baghdad on January 15, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice said that last year's
"surge" of American forces was paying dividends
and suggested that she could "help push the
momentum by her very presence" in Iraq.
Mahri'i's offers a lament for the American
presence and those "dividends":
It seems that Americans do not care
about what has been done to Iraq. They decorated
Bremer, who is a war criminal, with top medals.
[In December 2004, Bush bestowed the
Presidential Medal of Freedom on him.] Why not
honor another criminal like Petraeus and other
Bush administration officials with the same
medals for lying to them while their soldiers
and our people are getting killed?
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
