THOUGHTS ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD:

THOUGHTS ON THE FALL OF BAGHDAD: The war is not yet finished. Securing the peace has still even to begin. I think we can attribute the tragic mayhem we presently see in Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities to two main factors:
(1) The legacy of 30-plus years of Baathist authoritarianism, that resulted in the total repression of Iraqi civil society and a serious, longterm degradation of public and even personal morals throughout the country. In a place where children are routinely encouraged by the regime to spy on and report on any suspect political tendencies amongst their teachers, parents, and neighbors– and this has been the case there for nearly two generations now– basic social trust, and the ability to sustain it, are the real casualties; and
(2) Bombs Away Don Rumsfeld’s brilliant “strategy” of moving extremely fast to take out the power-center of the regime, with little thought given to how to consolidate public safety in the rear of the advancing forces.
With regard to the second of these factors, there is a clear and evident contrast with, for example, the situation during the advance of the (Western) Allied armies during WW2. My father, James Cobban, was a Major in British Military Intelligence during that war. In June 1944, he crossed into Normandy a few days after D-Day. He and a colleague then undertook a detailed evaluation of the effectiveness of the “beach organization” that their unit had been planning, for the British sector of the Normandy beach, throughout the previous months. Their clear thought was that Allied forces continuing to island-hop in the Pacific toward the heart of Japan could benefit from this evaluation.
But then, he and his British colleagues, and the Americans with whom they were then–as now–working so closely, immediately turned their attention forward: to how to rule post-victory Germany. Governance of France and Belgium, where the Allied front-line was advancing slowly eastward throughout the rest of 1944, were, I think, left mainly to their own respective national anti-Nazi organizations to plan for. But clearly, ruling post-Nazi Germany would be a task for the major Allied forces. And luckily– as it turned out– they had time to make some fairly solid plans.
The approach the US and Britain adopted, which was informed by the visionary wisdom of US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, was basically that of rehabilitating German society on a tolerant, democratic basis. (It stood in stark contrast to the strongly punitive approach the Allies had tried at the end of WW1, which, as many of them understood, had later helped to incubate Hitlerism.) And the Americans committed themselves to providing the long-term investment of men and finances needed to bring that project to fruition.
Thank God they did–in West Germany, and in post-victory Japan.
On Europe’s eastern front, things were far more chaotic. As the Russians advanced westward, racing to get to Berlin before the Americans, they left in their wake vast areas of absolutely untamed chaos. Plus, the Russians themselves had suffered so hugely during earlier stages of the war– with some ten million Russians killed during the Nazis’ earlier advance into Russia– that they were little inclined to “tame” any of the forces of anti-German vengefulness that were loosed in their wake…
It is worth remembering that in the months after the Russian advance, some eight million ethnic Germans were summarily ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe. (That was the number of the ethnic-German refugees who survived that violent upheaval and made it, somehow, to the relative safety of the US-British zone. One can surmise that further hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans– perhaps millions of them– never made it that far but were slaughtered along the way. It was an ugly, vengeful process. Yes, those families had lived a life of some privilege in Eastern Europe during the years of the Nazi occupation there. But no, they did not deserve to be driven out of their homes like cattle and summarily stripped of all their possessions along the way.)
Now, who knows what is going to happen in Iraq? The fact of the present mayhem behind US-UK lines cannot be wished away, however much Bombs-Away Don desires to do so. It will have lasting as well as immediate political consequences.
Based on my experience of having lived in Lebanon during the first six years of the civil war there, I would say that whoever inside Iraq can manage to sustain the kinds of effective social organizations that are capable of providing public order there will de-facto end up in control of those areas where they are able to do this. People cannot live without personal safety, and this requires some form–whatever form it may be!– of public order.
The Americans are not so far providing it. They seem to have made little provision for doing so. (“Eeeegh! Nation-building! Not for us!”) And the Americans’ non-reponsiveness to the urgent and urgently-expressed need of Iraqis for public order will certainly not go un-noticed. And that includes Bombs-Away Don’s public attitude of condoning–almost celebrating!–the looters at their work.
In the north– and I mean that term in a fairly expansive sense– the Kurdish forces look poised, perhaps, to provide public order. But if they do so, we cannot tell yet what the reaction of the Turks and other neighboring powers will be. And it’s not even certain that inter-Kurdish rivalries may not break out again. The same rivalries that crippled the Kurdish areas 1991-96… So, still some big uncertainties there.
In the rest of the country, I would place a strong bet on some of the Shi-ite religious organizations being well-placed to provide the public order that the people need. Under Saddam, the Shi-ite religious hierarchy was subject to all the same kinds of repression and control as, say, the Russian orthodox church under Stalin. But still, the outline of Shi-ite religious hierarchies remained. So has some form of strong Shi-ite self-identification of the 60-plus-percent of Iraqis who are Shi-ites. Plus, they have exile-based organizations just across the border in Iran, and an Iranian government that will be very supportive of them, even if in an extremely manipulative way.
I saw on CNN Friday that a Shi-ite cleric filmed in Baghdad gave a sermon that seemed to echo very closely some recent statements made by Iranian President Khamanei. To the effect that, while they were glad that Saddam had been toppled, still they knew the US forces had only come in on a pretext of searching for weapons of mass destruction, but that their real motives remained suspect and their plans should be resisted….
So my conclusion is that because the peace in Iraq is still far from being won– or even, yet, pursued– by the dominant US part of the US-UK coalition, the war itself is still far from being over. There will be huge challenges, alignments, and realignments of different locally based powers ahead; and many of these shifts of power may be accompanied by further recourse to violence. ( The Iraqi exile politicans are like a froth that dances on the top of this beer. They may have an impact– but only insasmuch as they have or quickly find a real base among the locally-rooted forces.)
We in the global anti-war movement need, I think, to keep our focus clear. We can quickly rejoice that Saddam is no longer in power. But in a real sense, now, Saddam is not the issue. (I can even unite with Bombs-Away Don on that.) The issue is the wellbeing of and longterm prospects for Iraq’s 24 million people. How on earth can they be saved from falling into chronic, extremely atrocious and destabilizing, Lebanon-like disorder??
It is clear to me that the further use of aggressive violence is not going to bring this about. As we have already seen, the massive violence applied to Iraq by the US-UK forces has already brought forth torrents of follow-on violence from within that deeply-scarred society. Our emphasis has to be on continuing to urge everyone involved to use the many nonviolent means that remain in order to resolve the remaining issues of serious disagreement.
Thank God we still have the UN! For all its flaws, and for all the battering it took at the hands of US arrogance last month, it is still there as an institution that we or any of the parties involved inside Iraq can call on to help to negotiate an exit out of the present, extremely anti-humane state of chaos inside Iraq.
People living, like Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld, in tidy, secure western countries where by and large the maintenance of public order is not even an issue really do not, in my humble opinion, understand how central that one, socially-generated “commodity” is to the wellbeing of actual humans.
Can the presence of the US forces inside Iraq contribute to the provision of public order? Certainly, it is their responsibility to do so, under the 4th Geneva Convention. (And the fact that, in their “race” toward Baghdad, they apparently failed to make any effective plans at all to secure public order in the areas behind their lines could possibly even be described as a “grave breach” of Geneva-4; that is, a war crime.)
By the same token, if they cannot provide public order then they should just get out of the country, rather than staying, possibly compounding the problem of insecurity by their presence, and by their continuing presence preventing anyone else from doing the job.
Can we see a democratic, tolerant, and self-governing Iraq emerge from all this? No, this goal still, sadly, sadly, seems far away. I guess we need to continue to hope, pray, and work hard for it to come about.
But the central message remains: Violence still cannot solve problems successfully, in Iraq or anywhere else.