Humvee Democracy

There are all sorts of democracies in this world. There is the Westminster type parliamentary democracy; there is the Presidential form; we have had quite a few communist regimes masquerading as peoples’ democracies in the past; then in our neighbourhood we presently have can only be described as dictatorial democracy or khaki democracy - a contradiction in terms but still there.

The world is now about to see or might see something unique, the installation of a humvee democracy (patent pending) when Iraq goes to the polls on January 30. A poor, battered, traumatised people living in a country that has no electricity, no water, no hospitals, no sewerage, no schools, no houses, and bury their children in their own backyard, are about to be bestowed the gift of democracy and they don’t know what to do with it.

The world keeps hearing of the rising death toll in Iraq and more than 1200 American soldiers have died fighting a war they don’t know why they are fighting. There are thousands more injured. Many of them possibly succumbed to their injuries in hospitals, and many others are now among the walking dead. One report speaks of 31,000 US soldiers having applied for disability benefits for physical or psychological injuries. As US casualties rise, so do those of the Iraqis; but then the latter are only a statistic. Collateral damage, as the Americans dismiss them.

Some like the British medical journal, Lancet, placed the figure as 100,000 Iraqi deaths a few months ago. Children in the war zone die in vast numbers from disease, respiratory ailments, lack of food, and lack of basic medicines. Food is scarce because the border with Syria is sealed to keep “foreign insurgents” out. The cost of the war a few days ago was US $ 149,289,667,350 and it rose to US $ 149,289,736,814 one minute later. That is the rate at which the cost is mounting. Yet the US President says it is worth it.

Operation Phantom Fury was launched on Laylat-e-Qadr, the most important and holy night in the Islamic annual calendar and in the month of Ramadan. Fellujah was flattened with AC-130 gunships, F-16s, 2000 pound bombs and cluster bombs, and the might of the US Army. It left at least 1200 to 1600 - described as Iraqi fighters - dead and 850 American troops injured by November 2004. There is no estimate of the innocent men, women and children killed. Doctors in hospitals and vital telephone lines were targeted to prevent the outside world from knowing what was going on. The idea was to discipline Fellujah before the elections and the result was the peace of a graveyard. Ironically, Fellujah was the city that had resisted Saddam in the past and today the resistance against the occupier continues.

Mosul is the next target. Fierce clashes in Iraq’s third largest city were reported mid-January; amidst reports of a depleted police and election force following defections/resignations. Clashes in Samarah, Ramadi and even in the ‘pacified’ Fellujah, continue.

Babylon, it now turns out has been damaged/destroyed – no–one knows to what extent. A part of the heritage of the Mesopotamian civilisation may have been lost. Once the capital of Hammurabi, of Nebudchadnezzar, the Hanging Gardens that Herodutus saw and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, were the camping grounds of occupation forces in 2003 first by the US Army and then by the Poles. Destroyed rather like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan. But not to worry, Bechtel or Halliburton will restore Babylon in a new jazzed up version.

Justin Raimondo describes how four US soldiers were awarded six months in jail for sadistically pushing an innocent young Iraqi off a bridge into the Tigris. And if this is not enough, one hears of the brutal El Salvador type death squads being pressed into service in Iraq and possibly Syria; they would consist of Shia militiaman and Kurdish Peshmarga fighters to target the Sunni “insurgents”; or should we not call them freedom fighters, for they are fighting on their land for their land. Iraq today has the makings of a Lebanon with all its sectarian and bloody battles.

Almost two suicide attacks take place in Iraq every day. As the well-known Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk says, Arabs have now lost their fear and are now willing to confront and die. Iraqis have watched with contempt and anger as Western businessmen have turned up by the thousand to make money in a country that they first helped destroy. The fear of the dictator and the occupier has gone.

It was Lawrence Freedman who said earlier this month that if Vietnam was McNamara’s war Iraq has become Rumsfeld’s war for all the mistakes he made in not listening to his Generals’ advice about force levels required to restore law and order after Saddam had been toppled, rejecting State Department advice for on post war reconstruction, disbanding the Iraqi Army, then flaunting international regulations on torture. What Freedman does not say here is that a house constructed on rickety foundations was destined to collapse anyway; an adventure begun on wrong premises was bound to fail. All the reasons for going to war were just pretexts.

Just as USA has had to live with a Vietnam syndrome for many years, it may have to live with an Iraq syndrome. The difference is that Buddhism does not believe either in jehad or suicide attacks. In Iraq and in the rest of the Muslim world, it is different.

An emboldened and an angry Muslim world is likely to be the result of this misadventure. More, not less terrorism will be the result. The imagery of the elusive Osama bin Laden and of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, largely created by US propaganda will endure, enticing hundreds, if not thousands, of young Muslims to jehad and martyrdom. The world may soon be looking at Jehad International Inc Part II, the Arab version.

The US may still hallucinate that they are the liberators but the Iraqi resistance to them is not confined to a few fanatical Sunnis or outsiders. There is opposition to US-led Coalition forces (in a steadily weakening coalition of the unwilling) from a population that is increasingly nationalistic in its sentiments, suspicious of US intentions and resentful of its arrogance and insensitivity as reflected in its actions. An imported President and his government are not acceptable. The elections of January 30, if held will change little. If the Sunnis do not participate or are under represented, Iraq will continue to be unstable. Only a leadership of moderates, that is seen to be independent of Washington, will be acceptable to the Iraqis.

In his dispatch of December 28, 2004, Robert Fisk quotes T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia)

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows…We are today not far from disaster.”

Lawrence had said this in the Sunday Times in August 1920. The only difference is that the USA was not tricked into Mesopotamia, it walked into this with its eyes wide shut. And then we sat down by the Rivers of Babylon and we wept.

Source : Hindustan Times 20th Jan 2005