- A war founded on illusions, lies and right-wing ideology
was bound to founder in blood and fire. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
He was in contact with al-Qa'ida, he was involved with the crimes against
humanity of 11 September. The people of Iraq would greet us with flowers
and music. There would be a democracy.
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- Even the pulling-down of Saddam's statue was a fraud.
An American military vehicle tugged the wretched thing down while a crowd
of only a few hundred Iraqis watched. Where were the tens of thousands
who should have pulled it down themselves, who should have been celebrating
their "liberation"?
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- On the night of 9 April last year, the BBC even managed
to find a "commentator" to heap abuse on me and The Independent
for using quotation marks around the word "liberation".
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- In fact, freedom from Saddam's dictatorship in those
early days and weeks meant freedom to loot, freedom to burn, freedom to
kidnap, freedom to murder. The initial American and British blunder--to
allow the mobs to take over Baghdad and other cities--was followed by the
arrival of the far more sinister squads of arsonists who systematically
destroyed every archive, every government ministry (save for Oil and Interior
which were, of course, secured by US troops), Islamic manuscripts, national
archives and irreplaceable antiquities. The very cultural identity of Iraq
was being annihilated.
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- Yet still the Iraqis were supposed to rejoice in their
"liberation". The occupying power sneered at reports that women
were being kidnapped and violated--in fact, the abductions of men as well
as women were at the rate of 20 a day and may now be as high as 100 a day--and
steadfastly refused to calculate the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed
each day by gunmen, thieves and American troops.
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- Even this week, as the promises and lies and obfuscations
fell apart, the American military spokesman was still only able to give
military casualties--this when more than 200 Iraqis are reported to have
been killed in the US attack on Fallujah.
-
- Over the months, the isolation of the occupation authorities
from the Iraqi people they were supposed to care so much about was only
paralleled by the vast distance in false hope and self-deceit between the
occupying powers in Baghdad and their masters back in Washington.
-
- Paul Bremer, America's proconsul in Iraq, started off
by calling the resistance "party remnants", which is exactly
what the Russians used to call their Afghan opponents after they invaded
Afghanistan in 1979. Then Mr Bremer called them "diehards". Then
he called them "dead-enders". And, as the attacks against US
forces increased around Fallujah and other Sunni Muslim cities, we were
told this area was the "Sunni triangle", even though it is much
larger than that implies and has no triangular shape.
-
- So when President Bush made his notorious trip to the
Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of all "major military operations"--beneath
a banner claiming "Mission Accomplished"--and when attacks against
US troops continued to rise, it was time to rewrite the chapter on post-war
Iraq. "Foreign fighters" were now in the battle, according to
the US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. The US media went along with
this nonsense, even though not a single al-Qa'ida operative has been arrested
in Iraq and of the 8,500 "security detainees" in American hands,
only 150 appear to be from outside Iraq. Just 2 per cent.
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- Then as winter approached and Saddam was caught and the
anti-American resistance continued, the occupying powers and their favourite
journalists began to warn of civil war, something no Iraqi has ever indulged
in and which no Iraqi has ever been heard discussing. Iraq was now to be
frightened into submission. What would happen if the Americans and British
left? Civil war, of course. And we don't want civil war, do we?
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- The Shia remained quiescent, their leadership divided
between the scholarly and pro-Western Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and the
impetuous but intelligent Muqtada Sadr. They opened their mass graves and
mourned those thousands who were tortured and executed by Saddam's butchery
and then asked why we used to support Saddam, why it took us 20 years to
discover the need to stage our humanitarian invasion.
-
- If the occupation authorities had bothered to study the
results of a conference on Iraq held by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies
in Beirut recently, they might be forced to acknowledge what they cannot
admit: that their opponents are Iraqis and that this is an Iraqi insurgency.
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- An Iraqi academic, Sulieman Jumeili, who lives in the
city of Fallujah, told how he discovered that 80 per cent of all rebels
killed were Iraqi Islamist activists. Only 13 per cent of the dead men
were primarily nationalists and only 2 per cent had been Baathists.
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- But we cannot accept these statistics. Because if this
is an Iraqi revolt against us, how come they aren't grateful for their
liberation? So, after the atrocities in Fallujah just over a week ago when
four US mercenaries were killed, mutilated and dragged through the streets,
General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, sanctioned what is preposterously
called "Operation Vigilant Resolve". And now that Sadr's thousands
of Shia militiamen had joined in the battle against the Americans, General
Sanchez had to change the narrative yet again.
-
- No longer were his enemies Saddam "remnants"
or even al-Qa'ida; they were now "a small (sic) group of criminals
and thugs". The Iraqi people would not be allowed to fall under their
sway, General Sanchez said. There was "no place for a renegade militia".
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- So the marines smashed their way into Fallujah, killing
more than 200 Iraqis, including women and children, while using tanks fire
and helicopter gunships against gunmen in the Baghdad slums of Sadr City.
It took a day or two to understand what new self-delusion had taken over
the US military command. They were not facing a country-wide insurgency.
They were liberating the Iraqis all over again! So, of course, this will
mean a few more "major military operations". Sadr goes on the
wanted list for a murder after an arrest warrant that no one told us about
when it was mysteriously issued months ago--supposedly by an Iraqi judge--and
General Mark Kimmitt, General Sanchez's number two, told us confidently
that Sadr's militia will be "destroyed".
-
- And so the bloodbath spreads ever further across Iraq.
Kut and Najaf are now outside the control of the occupying powers. And
with each new collapse, we are told of new hope. Yesterday, General Sanchez
was still talking about his "total confidence" in his troops
who were "clear in their purpose", how they were making "progress"
in Fallujah and how--these are his actual words, "a new dawn is approaching".
-
- Which is exactly what US commanders were saying exactly
a year ago today--when US troops drove into the Iraqi capital and when
Washington boasted of victory against the Beast of Baghdad.
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- Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author
of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new
book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism
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- http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk04092004.html
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