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August
2, 2003
Paternalistic
Democracy for Iraq
Bremer's
Looking-Glass Fantasy
By ROBERT FISK
Paul Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the
new Iraq" well. He wears a business suit and combat boots.
As the pro-consul of Iraq, you might have thought he'd have more
taste.
But he is a famous "antiterrorism"
expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast
army of international companies--most of them American, of course--and
creating the first democracy in the Arab world.
Since he seems to be a total failure
at the "anti-terrorist" game--50 American soldiers
killed in Iraq since President George W. Bush declared the war
over is not exactly a blazing success--it is only fair to record
that he is making a mess of the "reconstruction" bit
as well.
In theory, the news is all great. Oil
production is up to one million barrels a day; Baghdad airport
is preparing to reopen; every university in Iraq is functioning
again and the health services are recovering rapidly.
And an Iraqi Interim Council is up and
hobbling.
But there's a kind of looking-glass fantasy
to all these announcements from the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), the weasel-worded title with which the American-led occupation
powers cloak their decidedly undemocratic and  right-wing credentials.
Take the oil production figures. Lieutenant-General
Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, even chose to use
these statistics in his "great day for Iraq" press
conference last week, the one in which he announced that 200
soldiers in Mosul had killed the sons of Saddam rather than take
them prisoner. But Sanchez was talking rubbish.
Although oil production was indeed standing
at 900,000 barrels per day in June (albeit 100,000bpd fewer than
the Sanchez version), it fell last month to 750,000. The drop
was caused by power cuts and export smuggling.
The result? Iraq, with the world's second-highest
reserves of oil, is now importing fuel.
Then comes Baghdad airport. Sure, it's
going to reopen. But it just happens that the airport, with its
huge American military base and brutal US prison camp, comes
under nightly grenade and mortar attack.
No major airline would dream of flying
its aircraft into the facility in these circumstances.
The Iraqis are told, for example, that
the first flights will be run by "Transcontinental Airlines"
(a name oddly similar to the CIA's transport airline in Vietnam),
which is reported to be a subsidiary of "US Airlines",
and the only flight will be between Baghdad and--wait for it--the
old East Berlin airport of Schonefeld.
Open universities are good news. And
few would blame Bremer for summarily firing the 436 professors
who were members of the Baath Party.
In the same vein, the CPA annulled the
academic system whereby student party members would automatically
receive higher grades. But then it turned out that there wouldn't
be enough qualified professors to go round. Quite a number of
the 436 were party men in name only and received their degrees
at foreign universities.
So at Mustansiriyah University, for example,
the very same purged professors were rehired after filling out
forms routinely denouncing the Baath Party.
Bremer seems to have a habit of reversing
his own decisions; having triumphantly announced that he'd sacked
the entire Iraqi Army, he was humiliatingly forced to put them
back on rations in case they all decided to attack US soldiers
in Iraq.
Health services? Well, yes, the new Iraqi
health service is being encouraged to rehabilitate the country's
hospitals and clinics. But a mysterious American company called
Abt Associates has turned up in Baghdad to give "Ministry
of Health Technical Assistance" support to the US Agency
for International Development and "rapid response grants
to address health needs in-country".
It has decreed that all medical equipment
must accord with US technical standards and modifications--which
means that all new hospital equipment must come from America,
not from Europe.
Of course, Iraqis protest at much of
this. Much good does it do them.
When Iraqi ex-soldiers demonstrated outside
Bremer's office at the former Presidential Palace, US troops
shot two of them dead. When Falujah residents staged a protest
as long ago as April, the American military shot 16 dead. Another
11 were later gunned down in Mosul.
During two demonstrations against the
presence of US troops near the shrine of Imam Hussein at Karbala
last weekend, US soldiers shot dead another three.
"What a wonderful thing it is to
speak your own minds," Sanchez said of the demonstrations
in Iraq last week.
All this might be incomprehensible if
one forgot that the whole illegal Iraqi invasion had been hatched
up by a bunch of right-wing and pro-Israeli ideologues in Washington,
and that Bremer--though not a member of their group--fits squarely
into the same bracket.
Hence Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime
instigators of this war--he was among the loudest to beat the
drum over the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist--is
now trying to deflect attention from his disastrous advice to
the US Administration by attacking the media, in particular that
pesky, uncontrollable channel, Al-Jazeera.
Its reports, he now meretriciously claims,
amount to "incitement to violence"--knowing full well,
of course, that Bremer has officially made "incitement to
violence" an excuse to close down any newspaper or TV station
he doesn't like.
Indeed, newspapers that have offended
the Americans have been raided by US troops in the same way that
the Americans have conducted raids on the offices of the Supreme
Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader, Ayatollah
Mohammed al-Hakim, is a member of the famous Interim Council--not
exactly a bright way to keep a prominent Shia cleric on board.
But the council itself is already the
subject of much humour in Baghdad, not least because its first
acts included the purchase of cars for all its members; a decision
to work out of a former presidential palace; and--this the lunatic
brainchild of the Pentagon-supported and convicted fraudster
Ahmed Chalabi--the declaring of a national holiday every April
9 to honour Iraq's "liberation" from Saddam.
What could be more natural than celebrating
the end of the Beast of Baghdad? But Iraqis, a proud people who
have resisted centuries of invasions, realised their new public
holiday would mark the first day of their country's foreign occupation.
And so there has begun to grow the faint
but sinister shadow of a different kind of "democracy"
for Iraq, one in which a new ruler will have to use a paternalistic
rule--moderation mixed with autocracy, a la Ataturk--to govern
Iraq and allow the Americans to go home.
Inevitably, it has been one of the American
commentators from the same failed lunatic right as Wolfowitz--Daniel
Pipes of the Middle East Forum think tank, which promotes American
interests in the region--to express this in its most chilling
form.
He now argues that "democratic-minded
autocrats can guide [Iraq] to full democracy better than snap
elections". What Iraq needs, he says, is "a democratically
minded [sic] strongman who has real authority", who would
be "politically moderate" but "operationally tough"
(sic again).
Of course, it's difficult to resist a
cynical smile at such double standards, although their meaning
is frightening enough. What does "operationally tough"
mean, other than secret policemen, interrogation rooms and torturers
to keep the people in order--which is exactly what Saddam set
up when he took power, supported as he was at the time by the
US and Britain?
What does "strongman" mean
other than a total reversal of the promise of "democracy"
which Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair made to the
Iraqi people?
Democracies are not led by autocrats,
and autocrats are not led by anyone but themselves.
But today Bremer is the strongman, and
under his rule US troops are losing hearts and minds by the bucketful
with each new, blundering and often useless raid against the
civilians of Iraq.
Still obsessed with capturing--or, rather,
killing--Saddam, they are destroying any residual affection for
them among the population. On a recent operation in the town
of Dhuluaya, for example, two innocent men were killed and the
Americans' Iraqi informer--originally paraded before those he
was to betray in a hood to keep his identity secret--was executed
by his own father.
The enterprising newspaper Iraq Today
found that the "intelligence" officers of the 4th Infantry
Division even left behind mug shots, aerial reconnaissance photographs
and secret operational documents--complete with target houses
and briefing notes--at the scene. The paper gleefully published
the lot.
Anarchic violence is now being embedded
in Iraqi society in a way it never was under the genocidal Saddam.
Scarcely a day goes by when I do not encounter the evidence of
this in my daily reporting work.
Visiting the Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad
to seek the identity of civilians killed by American troops in
Mansour this week, I came across four bodies lying out in the
yard beside the building in the 50C heat. All had been shot.
Three days earlier, on a visit to a supermarket,
I noticed that the woman cashier was wearing black. Yes, she
said, because her brother had been murdered a week earlier. No
one knew why.
Trying to contact an ex-prisoner illegally
held by the Americans at his home in a slum suburb of Baghdad,
I drove to the mukhtar's house to find the correct address. The
mukhtar is the local mayor. But I was greeted by a group of long-faced
relatives who told me that I could not speak to the mukhtar--because
he had been assassinated the previous night.
So if this is my experience in just the
past four days, how many murders and thefts are occurring across
Baghdad--or, indeed, across Iraq?
Only a few days ago, I sat in the conference
hall that the occupation authorities use for their daily press
briefings, follies that are used to condemn "irresponsible
reporting", but which record only a fraction of the violence
of the previous 24 hours--violence which, of course, is well
known to the authorities.
And there was a disturbing moment when
Charles Heatley, the British spokesman from the Foreign Office,
appointed by Blair at the behest of Alastair Campbell, talked
about the reports of abduction and rape in Iraq. He acknowledged
that there had been some cases, but then--I enjoyed the beautiful
way in which he tried to destroy any journalistic interest in
this terrible subject--talked about the number of "rumours"
that turned out to be untrue when checked out.
But this is not the experience of the
Independent, which in just one day recently discovered the identity
of one young woman who had been kidnapped, raped and then freed--only
to attempt suicide three times.
Why don't the occupation authorities
realise that Iraq cannot be "spun"? This country is
living a tragedy of epic proportions, and now--after its descent
into hell under Saddam--we are doomed to suffer its contagion.
By our hubris and by our lies and our fantasies we are descending
into the pit.
For the people of Iraq, the next stage
in their long suffering is under way. For us, a new colonial
humiliation, the like of which may well end the careers of Bush
and Blair, is coming. Of far more consequence is that it is likely
to end many innocent lives as well.
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and
St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
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