In his last hours as US proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer decided to
tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed
across the land of Iraq.
He drafted a new piece of legislation forbidding Iraqi motorists to
drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly
announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound
their car horns except in an emergency. That same day, three American
soldiers were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of
more than 60 attacks on US forces over the weekend. And all the while,
Mr Bremer was worrying about the standards of Iraqi driving.
It would be difficult to find a more preposterous - and chilling -
symbol of Mr Bremer's failures, his hopeless inability to understand
the nature of the débâcle that he and his hopeless occupation
authority have brought about. It's not that the old "Coalition
Provisional Authority" - now transmogrified into the 3,000-strong US
embassy - was out of touch. It didn't even live on Planet Earth. Mr
Bremer's last starring moment came when he departed Baghdad on a US
military aircraft, with two US-paid mercenaries - rifles pointed
menacingly at camera crews and walking backwards - protecting him
until the cabin door closed. And Mr Bremer, remember, was appointed to
his job because he was an "anti-terrorist" expert.
Most of the American CPA men who have cleared out of Baghdad are doing
what we always suspected they would do when they had finished trying
to put a US ideological brand name on "new" Iraq; they have headed off
to Washington to work for the Bush election campaign. But those left
behind in the "international zone" - those we have to pretend are no
longer an occupation authority - make no secret of their despair. "The
ideology is gone. The ambitions are gone. We've no aims left," one of
them said last week. "We're living from one day to the next. All we're
trying to do now - our only goal - is to keep the lid on until January
2005 [when the first Iraqi elections are supposed to be held]. That's
our only aim - get past the elections - and then get the hell out."
The production of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad "court" last week - he
was actually sitting in one of his former palaces - was therefore the
occupiers' last card. After this, there is going to be no more "good
news" in Iraq, no more devices, no more tricks, no more captures to
brighten our eyes before the November elections in the US. Yet even
the court melodrama was symptomatic of how little power the West is
prepared to cede to an Iraq to which it last week falsely claimed to
be handing "full sovereignty".
Americans continue to hold Saddam - in Qatar, not in Iraq - and
Americans ran the court in which Saddam appeared. American soldiers in
plain clothes were the "civilians" in the court. American officials
censored the tapes of the hearing, lied about the judge's wish to
record the sound of the trial, and marked the videotapes "cleared by
US military"; three US officers later confiscated all the original
tapes of the trial. "The last time that happened to me," one of the
reporters involved said afterwards, "was when the Iraqi government
took my tapes in Basra during the 1991 Gulf War."
But it's not just the crude handling of the start of Saddam's show
trial - where he had, of course, no defence counsel. For if he is ever
to be given a fair trial in the future, the "muting" of the tapes last
week will have set an important precedent. For he can now be
"silenced" again - if, for example, he deviates from the script and
starts telling the court about his close association with the US
rather than his non-existent contacts with al-Qa'ida.
But America's occupation continues in many other ways. Its 146,000
soldiers are still all too much in evidence in Iraq, its tanks
guarding the walls of the US "embassy", its armour littered throughout
Baghdad, its convoys humming - and sometimes exploding - along the
highways outside the city. The "new" and "sovereign" government cannot
order it to leave. Mr Bremer's raft of reconstruction contracts to US
companies ensures that American firms continue to cream off Iraq's
money, described quite accurately by Naomi Klein in The Nation as
"multibillion robbery". And Mr Bremer managed to institute a set of
laws that the "new" and "sovereign" government is not permitted to
change.
One of the most insidious was the re-introduction of Saddam's 1984 law
banning all strikes. This piece of folly was intended to muzzle the
so-called Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions. Yet the trade unions are
among the few secular groups in Iraq opposing religious orthodoxy and
fundamentalism. A strong trade union movement could provide a vital
base of political and democratic power in a new Iraq. But no, Mr
Bremer preferred to protect big business.
And all the while, the power of the mercenaries has been growing.
Blackwater's thugs with guns now push and punch Iraqis who get in
their way: Kurdish journalists twice walked out of a Bremer press
conference because of their mistreatment by these men. Baghdad is
alive with mysterious Westerners draped with hardware, shouting and
abusing Iraqis in the street, drinking heavily in the city's poorly
defended hotels. They have become, for ordinary Iraqis, the image of
everything that is wrong with the West. We like to call them
"contractors", but there is a disturbing increase in reports that
mercenaries are shooting down innocent Iraqis with total impunity. US
military and diplomatic officials have now set an 80/20 ration target
for "security" details - 80 Iraqi mercenaries for every 20 Western
mercenaries.
And even if President Bush can forget it, the Abu Ghraib scandal burns
on in a country where the filth and nudity and humiliation inflicted
by US soldiers will take a generation to erase from the memory. One
leftist group in Baghdad now claims that several women, allegedly
raped by Iraqi policemen at the jail while Americans watched, have
been murdered by their families for their "dishonour".
Large areas of the country are now effectively outside any government
control - even America's. Fallujah is a virtual people's republic and
lynch law is occurring even in Baghdad. The so-called "Mehdi Army" of
Muqtada al-Sadr publicly executed a 20-year-old man in the slums of
Baghdad's Sadr City last month for "collaboration" with the Americans.
Understandably, few journalists dare to travel outside Baghdad - much
to the pleasure of the US military. "They killed all those poor people
at the wedding party near the Syrian border and our military sources
told us there'd been a *****-up," an American correspondent complained
last week. "Then [Brigadier General Mark] Kimmitt says that all the
dead were terrorists and he knows we can't go and prove he's wrong."
Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister, we must recall, was a CIA man, an
MI6 man and a former Baathist. Indeed, he boasted to journalists that
he had taken money from 14 intelligence agencies while he was in
exile. However "free" Mr Allawi thinks Iraq is, he will not turn
against his American protectors - nor against the glowering figure of
John Negroponte, the new US ambassador of Honduras fame.
Ironically, the only real hope for the new government would be to do
what a majority of its people say they want: to tell the Americans to
leave. This, of course, Mr Allawi cannot do. His "sovereign"
government needs those American troops to protect it from the people
who don't want the American troops in Iraq.
And so we boil our way on to those January 2005 elections, the lid
dangerously lifting from time to time to horrify us with little
glimpses of the future. Many Iraqis believe that there will be a new
dictator, a "democratically minded strongman" in the creepy expression
of American neo-conservative Daniel Pipes, to bring about the security
that we have failed to give them.
For after the elections, if indeed they are held, we shall
self-righteously claim we can no longer be blamed for anything that
goes wrong in Iraq. We liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, we shall say.
We gave them "democracy" - and look what a mess they made of it.
The Independant.
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| User: "Tadapope" |
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| Title: Re: The new "free" Iraq! |
10 Jul 2004 11:36:42 PM |
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Isn't that a federally guarding the gates of independence?
Tangents are infinite in all of nature in
all 21 universes constantly and at random.
Oh Joy & Lysergically Yours!
Tom
The Psychedelick Pope
Patron Saint of the Internet
Saint Isadore of Laytonville
http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/me/
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