Fragments from Iraq

Iraq is in fragments.  Over the period since 2002 the government of my country, the US, took a number
of decisions whose effect
(quite regardless of their intention,
something of which we can speak later) has been to destroy the
country’s state apparatus and institutions and to fracture the dense
network of social and political relationships that previously held it
together.

I am very sorry indeed that I and those other US citizens who knew all
along– based on the understanding that many of us had about the nature
of Iraq, the nature of Middle Eastern societies, and also, yes, the
often  quite unexpected effects of the use of military poower–
that the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq would turn out
very badly indeed, and who did what we could to prevent the invasion
from being launched in the first place, were unable to prevent it.

I feel deep shame, as a US citizen, that it is the government of my
country that has visited this death and terrible, terrible destruction
on the people of Iraq.  Also, that our President was re-elected,
or as we might say, elected for the first time; but anyway, returned to
the presidency by the citizenry in a generally free polling process– even in the fall of 2004,
once it was already becoming increasingly clear that (1) the invasion
and its after-effects were inflicting increasingly high levels of
death, damage, and destruction on Iraqis, and (2) the WMD ‘pretext’
that had jerked most of the US citizenry, and most of our lawmakers,
into supporting the invasion had zero evidentiary basis and indeed had
been considerably hyped, exaggerating, and one might even say
manufactured by the Bushites.

During the month-long journey in and around three Arab countries that I have just completed, I had
a much starker and more vivid sense of what the destruction of Iraq
must be like and must feel like, for Iraqis.  I had already, some
30 years ago, lived through the destriction that prolonged civil war
(and intermittent Israeli attacks) visited on that country.  And
now, most recently, here I was again– driving through the settled
fields and olive groves of southern Syria; driving along the canals,
through the date-groves and the new ex-urban conglomerations that ring
Cairo; hearing the call to prayer ring out in a city in northern Jordan
as we passed it; seeing the citizens of all three of these Arab
countries going about their daily business with focus and good humor,
more or less confident (most of them) that they could continue to
pursue this very well-rooted but also remarkably adaptable lifestyle
throughout the months and years ahead, perhaps save a little for their
children’s future, perhaps move a bit toward their long-held dream of
winning more real accountability from their governments, enjoying their
friendships and their webs of relations with people from different
communities, sitting around their coffee-shops and sheesha-houses,
going to their mosques and their many ancient churches… with tomorrow
generally fairly well predictable from today, and crucially, a general
(though not complete) environment of public security and public safety.

And there in Iraq, just a few hundred miles away, people who are very
similar to these Arab citizens in so many ways, and who had been lives
very similar to those I was seeing here, had had all these things taken
brutally from them and were now living (and dying) in a state of
generalized, existential fear and uncertainty.

All the citizens of these other Arab countries with whom I spoke
conveyed passionately to me how deeply, deeply disturbing they found
the developments inside Iraq, especially the more recent rounds of
inter-sectarian killing.. 

(I read a really cruel and stupid Tom Freidman column recently in which
in his most accusatory and preachy was he was ‘bemoaning’ the alleged
fact that no Arab or Muslim leaders have spoken out against the
sectarian carnage being enacted in Iraq.  What complete and utter
nonsense!!  Has Tom Friedman actually been to any Arab countries
in recent months and heard what opinion leaders of all sorts are saying
there?  Has he even spoken to any Arabs at all in recent weeks,
apart from Mamoun Fandy, whom he quoted there, who lives and works here
in London?)

And the destruction in Iraq all seemed so much more vivid to me, when I
was there so close, and in such a very similar environment.

I realize this is mostly because of my own failure– when I sit in the
distant US of A– of being able vividly enough to imagine the lives and
conditions that the people of Iraq currently have to suffer.

When I was in Syria and Jordan– as recently as last Saturday– I both
wanted to visit with and talk with some of the million-plus Iraqis who,
because of what the US has done to their country, have had to flee
their homes and loves there and rush to those two countries to seek the
raw physical survival of themselves and their families; and I also
feared doing that.

What could I say to such an Iraqi refugee?

I had a few small encounters with Iraqis, in Jordan.  But still, I
confess that I found it easier to talk about the Iraqi refugees
with Syrians and Jordanians than I thought I would find it to talk to Iraqi refugees in either
place.

I feel ashamed about that, too.

However, Bill and I did get a chance to sit down and talk in Amman with
two Iraqi friends of fairly long standing.  These are people who
have not– yet– fled their country completely.  They are people
whom I like and admire a lot, but with whom I have in the past had some
strong disagreements.  primarily over the US decision to invade
their country, which both of them supported strongly at the time,
overwhelmingly on human-rights grounds.  But because I like
and admire them both so much, and really care about their wellbeing, I
have tried to keep in touch with them as much as all of our busy
schedules have allowed, and I am glad that they have done the
same.  Our meeting in Amman last week was the first time I’d seen
them since January 2006.  We all had a lot to talk about.

Let me tell you a little about what we discussed with these friends, whom I’ll call ‘T’ and ‘J’…

Since the spring of 2003, T has worked with first one, then another of
the non-political, technical bodies established as part of the
post-invasion Iraqi governance structure. He is fairly well-clued-in
politically.  He had come to Amman on business, and intended to
return to Baghdad after a few days– though he also said he was fairly
seriously looking for a way to quit his job (and quite likely also the
country?) in the not-too-distant future.

I asked him, of course, what he thought would happen if/when the US
forces leave Iraq completely.  He said (unprompted by me) that he
judged there is a chance
that this development would concentrate the minds of the various
parties and trends inside Iraq on the need to figure out a way to
effect a workable reconciliation among them.  “But if the
Americans stay, we can expect the situation to remain bad,” he
said.  He did also note, however, that right now, conditions in
many parts of Iraq are so very, very insecure that many or most Iraqis
currently want the US
troops to come to their neighborhoods…

He also noted something I have not seen reported before, namely that
security conditions in Baghdad are so dire that the US Embassy there–
hidden deep inside the Green Zone though it is– gets mortared by insurgents every
day.  He said that the Embassy is so well protected that
these mortar rounds don’t cause casualties.  But still, this
mortaring is a constant reminder to everyone inside the Green Zone that
there are areas very close to their perimeter where the insurgents are
still able to operate with near-impunity.

T is someone who in many ways admires Ahmed Chalabi a lot.  (Okay,
that’s another point of disagreement between us.)  He says that
what he admires is Chalabi’s highly tuned ability to do political deals
and his sheer ability to survive any number of political
vicissitudes.  So here’s what he sees Chalabi’s latest political
scheme as being: to try to broker a political deal to unite the
“extremist” Shiites with the “extremist” Sunnis in Iraq.  Okay, I
failed to ask the obvious follow-up question, which would have been to
press him to define what he meant by the “extremists” in each of those
camps.

But still, you have to hand it to Ahmed Chalabi, who as far as I know
is a longtime secularist, for his sheer chutzpah.

Plus, it is not a totally crazy idea…

T, who as I noted above had been a strong supporter of the US invasion
of Iraq, now very evidently judged that it had failed to deliver for
his people.  During the two hours we spent together, the four of
us discussed the key mis-steps the Bushites had taken that had ensured
that failure.  (This was mostlyl predicated, for him and the other
two participants in the conversation, on the proposition that the
degree of chaos, state failure, and internal social-political
breakdown– fitna— that Iraq
is presently witnessing was not in fact the intended goal of some of the people
in the Bush administration from the get-go.  For my part, I am
among those who believe that the break-up of Iraq quite likely was the clear intention of
at least some members of the administration; though presumably they
never intended that this break-up would suck the Americans in in such a
damaging way that the US’s global power would be so seriously
diminished as it has been…  However, I also believe there are
some in the administration, including most likely the President
himself, who honestly believed all the rhetoric about making Iraq into
a “successful”, “modern”, well-functioning, democratic, and above all
pro-American country that might also cause the citizenries of all the
other Arab countries to desire to emulate it… Anyway, I don’t want to
go too much further into the whole enquiry in those guys intentions at
this pooint.  The effects
of their actions have anyway now become crystal clear.)

So anyway, the discussion was an interesting one.  Bill said he
thought the key mis-steps had been Bremer’s decisions, made with a
single stroke of his pen, to disband the Iraqi army and (through the
Debaathification policy) the vast majority of the Iraqi civil service
and otherr key institutions of governance and social preservation, as
well.

T disagreed.  He said he didn’t think those steps had been too,
too serious.  But he said the key mis-steps had been taken at two
key earlier junctures, namely in the composition of the key conference
of Iraqi then-exiles that was convened in London in December 2002, when
participation in the proceedings was organized, as he saw it, along
almost wholly sectarian lines.  (“We need to have X numbers of
Sunnis and Y numbers of Shiites, and Z number of Kurds, along with a
certain representation of women and Christians on each of the key
committees…”)  That approach, he said, had instituted a clear
sectarian mindset into the planning there; and that mindset carried on
seamlessly into the way the first Interim Governing Council was
constituted, and later into the organizing principles of the big,
powerful parties and coalitions that competed in the various elections
of 2005…

(Of course, given that two of the key organizations participating in
the London conference were the Da’wa Party and SCIRI– both of them
parties with explicitly sectarian agendas– I think it is hard to see
how the conference itself might have been organized along lines
incompatible with those two parties’ principles.)

He said the other key mis-step had been that the Americans had
completely failed to anticipate, and plan to prevent, the wave of
looting– and primarily, the looting of governmental institutions–
that engulfed most of Iraq after the fall of the Saddam regime. 
He said he felt particularly btter about the Americans’ failure to
prevent the looting from happeninbg, because in some of the
pre-invasion planning sessions in which he’d been involved he warned
explicitly of the long tradition of farhoud
(looting; pillage) that had punctuated many key turning-points in
Iraq’s history.  “Yes, it is a long, and sad, tradition with us,”
he said.  “Read any of the standard hiustories and they’ll tell
you about it.”  He said that the fears about farhoud had been clearly inserted
into some of the working papers prpoduced by the US State Department’s
“Future of Iraq” project– so he had been surprised and dismayed when
he found the US invasion force seemed to have taken almost no steps at
all to prevent it.

One of the lasting legacies of that particularly virulent wave of farhoud that occurred in Iraq in
the immediate wake of the US invasion was that it left the country with
almost no functioning levers of governance or state administration, at
all.  This means that a citizenry that over many generations had
become quite accustomed to the state taking a strong role in the
provision of basic services and basic life-support systems suddenly
found itself robbed of such services and systems.  It also means
that the country’s “politicians” actually, to this day, have very few
levers of administration through which, even if they wanted to, they
could deliver services to their people; and in the absence of being
able to spend their time and attention on carrying out such tasks–
tasks which might, in any normally functioning state system, lead them
to cooperate with each across sectarian and georgraphic boundaries as
they work, for example, to establish a safe water network for the
country, or well-functioning internal markets for national products–
they have instead seen “politics” as devoid from national
administration; they have seen it as a vicious zero-sum game fought out
over the riches of graft and patronage, rather than seeing it as a way
to do useful things for their own people.

It was not only the looting that contributed to that situation. 
But it sure helped bring it about, while it also epitomized a situation
in which public security was suddenly, terrifyingly quite absent for
the vast majority of Iraqi families.

And yes, the US planners of the invasion notably did almost exactly
nothing to prevent that breakdown of publiuc order.  What was that
very dismissive thing that Rumsfeld said when he was asked about the
looting?  “Freedom is untidy” or whatever?

My own take on the looting question is that, actually, it was not an
“oversight”.  Instead, it was absolutely a function of the
extremely anti-democratic, “stealth” way in which Rumsfeld, Cheney, and
the Prez all sat together and schemed
to make the US invasion of Iraq politically doable.  After all, as
Bob Woodward and others have revealed it, one of the whole points about their war-plan
was that it should not involve the mustering at any point of an
invasion force of the size that would have been needed to be capable of
ensuring public security inside Iraq in the post-combat phase.

For Rumsfeld, having the force be light, mobile, and hi-tech was his
“experiement” in configuring a force different from the
massively-scaled land armies that dominated US military planning during
the days of the Cold War (and before that, the two World Wars,
too.)  For Cheney and the Prez, having the force not be anywhere near as
large in numbers as, for example, the force with which Pres. George
Bush I had reconquered that tiny sliver of land called Kuwait, was a
more explicitly political decision.  They needed to be able to
muster the invasion force “under the CNN line”, as the saying goes…
In other words, to have it grow up in small increments, none of which
would alone unduly startle anyone else either inside or outside the US,
but all of which taken together would provide a force just minimally
capable of toppling Saddam, with little heed given to what would happen
the day after that…

Anyway, it was really interesting to hear our friend T’s view of the
devastating impact he saw the post-invasion looting as having had on
Iraq’s politics and society.