Three years

Today in Iraq, three years after the US-engineered toppling of the Saddam statue in Firdaws Square, the leaders of the factions in the biggest electoral list, the UIA, all met to affirm their “freedom” to nominate whomsoever they– rather than the Americans– choose to be their nominee for the PM post.
Against the strong pressure that the Americans have been exerting on them for the past two months, they decided to stick with their existing nomination of Ibrahim Jaafari.
Today, near Firdaws Square, Mohammed Ahmed, a money changer whose shop overlooks the impressionistic statue representing “freedom” that was erected in place of the Saddam statue, said, “It has no meaning because there is no freedom.”
AP’s Bushra Juhi reported that Umm Wadhah, a 51-year-old housewife in black robes who lives nearby, said of the statue.”It does not stand for anything,…It does not symbolize the country, or unity, or anything. We want something that stands for us … all of us.”
Yesterday in Cairo, the increasingly autocratic and out-of-touch Egyptian President, a long-time US friend and ally, told al-Arabiyah TV that,

“Definitely Iran has influence on Shiites… Shiites are 65 percent of the Iraqis … Most of the Shiites are loyal to Iran, and not to the countries they are living in.” He also said civil war “has almost started” in Iraq.

President Mubarak is a Sunni Muslim who leads a large, majority-Sunni Muslim nation. (However, many strands of popular culture inside Egypt are very open to traces of the country’s earlier Fatimid/Shiite past, so it’s not necessarily a good idea for Mubarak to try to play an anti-Shiite card.) His hostile and divisive comments about Iraq’s (ethnically Arab) Sunnis provoked Iraq’s highest-ranking Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni Arab leaders — President Jalal Talabani, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Parliament Speaker Adnan Pachachi to issue a joint statement in which they decried what they described as “An attack on their (Shiites’) patriotism and their civilization,”
Many signs of a desire for national unity still exist inside Iraq, regardless of what some of the Arab world’s unelected leaders, and some machinators and pundits elsewhere, might say…
So, to help mark the third aniversary of the fall of Baghdad to the invasion force, I thought I would just look back at what I was writing on JWN at the time…
I recall I was in Arusha, Tanzania when it happened. I watched the toppling of the statue being endlessly replayed on CNN, on the t.v. in my hotel room there. On April 12, once the scale of the post-fall looting in Iraq had become more evident, I posted this post on JWN. Looking back, I think it wasn’t bad for something written from so far away, and with such little access to good sources of information.
I wrote:

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.

And this:

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.

And this:

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.

So here we are, three years on…
So much mayhem has occurred during those years. So much suffering. And the suffering and the US’s use of arrogant, colonialist political machinations still continue.
But honestly, as I wrote here last Friday, I do think that the end of the US occupation is now (however faintly) in sight.
Two additional, key indicators in this regard are two recent development in the US Congress, which I need to write more about here. From the Friends Committee on National Legislation I have now learned that on March 16, the House of Representatives, our lower house,

voted overwhelmingly to prevent the U.S. from establishing permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. Reps. Allen (ME), Lee (CA), Hinchey (NY), and Schakowsky (IL) sponsored the amendment to the emergency supplemental funding bill that states “None of the funds in this Act may be used by the U.S. government to enter into a basing rights agreement between the United States and Iraq.”

And last week, the powerful Appropriations Committee in the US Senate wrote into the language of a report accompanying the big funding legislation a declaration that, “It is the current policy of the United States to establish no permanent military bases in Iraq.”
Now, all we need is for the full Senate to adopt that declaration…
What we are seeing, folks, are the two houses of the US Congress starting– however creakily– to exert their budget-making powers in important ways to curtail the administration’s behavior in Iraq.
(If you’re a US citizen, go to FCNL’s Iraq Peace Campaign website as fast as you can to see what you can do to help.)