War Post

"115 bridges were bombed. What did that have to do with Kuwait?"

Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon talked to Charlie Rose on the five year anniversary of the Iraq war and immediately turned the conversation back to Kuwait, sanctions and the 1990s. He pierced through the current rhetorical stasis of Sunni-Shi’a, of benchmarks, and of blaming Iraqis to the "material reality" of America’s first destruction of Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent decade of sanctions that killed maybe a million, kept the country’s infrastructure ruined, expanded the Iraqi diaspora and plainly convinced Iraqis that the Americans were not interested in liberation when they invaded in 2003.

He was searing in his criticisms, as he attacked "amnesia" in this country about the American-made devastation of Iraq before it was invaded. He explained to Rose that the myriad Iraqi uprisings which followed Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait and which were not supported by the United States were mixed and wide-ranging. They did not fit into exclusive frames broken down into religious groups — the favorite sought-after media explanation for any violence in Iraq and the Middle East today. After all, as he explained, there was an uprising in 16 of the 18 provinces of Iraq, from the Shia holy cities to "mixed" Baghdad and even Saddam’s home province of Tikrit.

The seemingly ignored recent history of America’s complicity in destroying Iraq before the jingoes launched shock-and-awe is vital to any view of Iraq in 2008 and, while the point should seem obvious, it seems to escape most coverage on this anniversary. The mainstream focus is instead on a "what-if" timeline that looks at the mistakes of the past five years outside of the context of the 1990s, which indirectly serves to support the rationale of going to war in the first place.

A rough transcription of one of the interview’s best moments:

Antoon: The problem we have also in the discourse is all this talk about mistakes and what-not. The premise of the entire war is not questioned. Even if no mistakes were ever done, citizens need to understand that human beings by and large do not like to be occupied by foreigners, no matter what. And that was the case, so even if no mistakes would have been done, people would have said in a very short period of time, thank you, bye bye.

Rose: Okay, then that raises the question of whether you could have done it in a way that you did not create the idea of occupation. You created the idea of liberation, not occupation. Unless you say that’s not possible at all?

Antoon: It would have been impossible because the practices of the United States army and Pentagon reflect also a certain ideology and a way of looking at the Middle East and a way of looking at the past and its history. So, we don’t have time to go through all of that, but these mistakes are made. They are not side mistakes. They reflect the structure and the approach to the Middle East and to Iraq and to its history and this amnesia that I’m talking about.

Two of Antoon’s remarks have stuck with me all day. The first is his citing of a US general in 1991, that "we bombed them back to the pre-industrial age." It immediately brings to mind Arundhati Roy and her article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," which the New York Times refused to publish after 9/11.

"In America there has been rough talk of ‘bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age,'’" Roy wrote then. "Someone please break the news that Afghanistan is already there. And if it’s any consolation, America played no small part in helping it on its way."

Iraq was half-way there after eight years of war with Iran — supported by the US — and farther down the road after Operation Desert Storm. The United States made sure it never recovered with sanctions through the 1990s, only to bomb the devastation all over again beginning in 2003, our five year anniversary. And Americans still wonder why there are insurgents.

The second quote from Antoon was in response to Rose asking what sort of conditions were needed for reconciliation: water, sanitation, the basic amenities of modern, unoccupied life. Antoon nodded but shot back: "It’s a crime after five years that electricity is not back to pre-war levels, because Saddam Hussein, who was a dictator I detested, was able to have electricity back in 45 days."

"So why is the United States not achieving that in five years? It’s not just miscalculation. That was never the priority."

 

Mark Danner writes for the New Yorker and is a professor at Berkeley and Bard. He spoke in Cairo last week as a visiting professor at AUC, days before returning to Iraq to cover the civil war. Hear his lecture here.

Danner’s essay in the current New York Review of Books frames the course in Iraq in the 2002 warning of a then-98 year-old George F. Kennan: "Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end."

To what end will the exposure of the incompetence and criminality of bureaucratic decisions of the last 4 years lead? The American perception to the war was blinded; it’s more recently that the lethal blunders of the White House and Pentagon are being laid bare, in Bob Woodward’s State of Denial and in reviews/essays like Danner’s and the Economist’s Max Rodenbeck, also in NY Books. Condoleeza Rice didn’t know the chain of command in Iraq and Paul Bremer was stubborn in following orders to De-Baathify Iraq and immediately disband the army — even if the State Dept. knew nothing about the orders and found out about them after the fact, in the newspapers. As Danner writes,

Since the first thrilling night of shock and awe, reported with breathless enthusiasm by the American television networks, the Iraq war has had at least two histories, that of the war itself and that of the American perception of it. As the months passed and the number of attacks in Iraq grew, the gap between those two histories opened wider and wider.

The real shocks of the conflict — beyond that the decision makers in the Pentagon and White House were foreign policy amateurs to horrific degrees — are the human costs in Iraq and the dominance of what Danner calls a "War of Imagination" in America since 9/11. Leaders imagined transformation through a dilettante strategy for a new Iraq and a new Middle East; the region would mold itself to evangelical idealism and neocon pet projects, like Ahmad Chalabi, no matter how far apart that view was from all reality in Iraq and beyond. The American public, responding to buzz words and reminders of terror broadcast out of Washington to a cowed, obsessed media, widely believed the image. The bodies of American soldiers and arguments over how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died jolted the dream.

…for most Americans, the War of Imagination—built of nationalistic excitement and ideological hubris and administration pronouncements about "spreading democracy" and "greetings with sweets and flowers," and then about "dead-enders" and "turning points," and finally about "staying the course" and refusing "to cut and run"—began, under the pressure of nearly three thousand American dead and perhaps a hundred thousand or more dead Iraqis, to give way to grim reality.

While Danner, like many others, sees in the midterm elections a public coming-to-grips with reality and a call to dramatically alter the American course in Iraq, I’m still skeptical. This is from the detachment of living in Cairo, but whether it’s the continued controversy of the term "civil war" in American war talk or the insistence, even today, on the benefit of free elections in a country that thousands flee daily, can you say the American public is really outraged?

Will they ever be, or is this Bush’s ultimate Mission Accomplished?

Art work: George Grosz. (American, 1893-1959. Born and died in Germany.). Die Gesundbeter (German Doctors Fighting the Blockade) from Got mit uns (God for us). (1918, published 1920). Via MoMA.

 

Max Rodenbeck asks "How Terrible Is It?" in the newest NY Review of Books, reviewing two recent National Security Strategies and three book: this one by Harvard prof. Louise Richardson, Winning the Un-War by Carlos Peña, and Overblown by John Mueller.

Five years after George Bush launched America on a global crusade to "rid the world of evil," it is safe to say that the tide has turned. No, America is not winning, although some argue that it might be politic, at this juncture, to declare victory.^[1] Nor is America necessarily losing, as others have asserted. What has happened instead is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

This is not surprising. What is surprising is that it has taken so long for Americans to notice.

Rodenbeck’s review is some of the best, most basic criticism of this long rhetorical war that I have read in a while. The hollow foreign policy views that the US government publishes in National Security Strategies are easy fodder for rational disagreement: that a nuclear  Iran would never actually strike the US "because it would risk annihilation in response," that "America poses a far greater threat to Iran than Iran does to the United States;" and that "perversely, it is this threat, more than anything else right now, that bolsters Iran’s oppressive and unpopular government." Or that Iraq and Afghanistan are "no more a ‘war on terror’ than were the American invasions of Grenada and Panama."

Rodenbeck summarizes many of the key points of Richardson’s terror scholarship. Here are two:

1. Terrorism is anything but new. Violence by nonstate actors against civilians to achieve political aims has been going on for a long, long time. The biblical Zealots known as the Sicarii used it against the Romans, as well as against fellow Jews, in the vain hope of provoking the Imperium to so extreme a response that they would foment a mass uprising. Following the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe, the German radical Karl Heinzen published a tract, simply titled Murder, which advocated selective homicide as a spark to general revolt. Various groups soon put such ideas into practice. The Clerkenwell bombing of 1867, carried out by the Fenians, an Irish nationalist group, prompted a surge of hysteria in London reminiscent of the response provoked by September 11.

So, in later decades, did the wave of anarchist terrorism that swept Europe and the United States. Revolutionaries assassinated seven heads of state between 1881 and 1914. Paris suffered bomb attacks no fewer than eleven times between 1892 and 1894. In the 1930s and 1940s of the last century, Menachem Begin’s Irgun organization slaughtered scores of Palestinian civilians and British soldiers. The Israeli leader went on to share a Nobel Peace Prize.

11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve. When Britain sent its army into Northern Ireland in 1969 in response to the Troubles, it took just two years for the majority of Catholics, who were at first relieved by their presence, to turn against them. The turnaround for the US in Iraq was far shorter. During the seven months between September 2003 and April 2004, as Charles Peña reminds us in Winning the Un-War, the proportion of Iraqis saying that attacks on foreign troops were somewhat or fully justified leapt from 8 percent to 61 percent. This was exactly the period when a sudden surge in attacks on US forces, following the initial post-invasion calm, prompted vigorous counterinsurgency measures. That is all the time it took, it seems, for Iraqis to decide they did not like being searched, beaten up, shot at, jailed, and humiliated by American troops, whatever the reasons given. Recent polls show some 61 percent of Iraqis still approve of attacking the Americans, and 78 percent believe the US presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing."

MapsofWar.com, via here.

Calling all those who will be watching this tomorrow at their schools–Guantanomo: How Should We Respond?–please do find time to post comments. I will too. 

 

 With more than 200 schools in at least 44 states already participating, "Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” is an unprecedented collaborative effort of academia, journalism, religion, medicine and even the military in exploring the Government’s detention policy and practices in the “war on terror.” On October 5th, Seton Hall will host an all-day conference available at academic institutions across the United States to study the national and international implications of indefinitely detaining hundreds of individuals deemed "enemy combatants."

"Guantánamo: How Should We Respond?” has taken on increased importance since President George W. Bush’s announcement on September 6 that fourteen suspected terrorist previously held in secret United States facilities abroad will be transferred for trial by military commission at Guantánamo. This decision casts into question both what it means to have a fair trial in such a setting and the failure of the Government even to bring charges against the vast majority of the present detainees.

The Guantánamo Teach-in will offer participants incisive analysis with diverse perspectives. Across America, from Maine to New Mexico, from Florida to Hawaii, and from Texas to Montana, law schools, colleges, universities, community colleges and seminaries will be linked in a national dialogue on the lessons of Guantánamo, sparked by, but not limited to, the broadcast presentations.

Andy Carroll passed along some information about Imperial War Museum letters that I can hopefully coax into appearing on this site. In an email he included the following except, from the British edition of his book Behind the Lines

It is a serious experience to be in occupied territory. Immediately the country falls to our arms, we set about establishing a state of just government, order, security and well being. This is no easy job. There are lots of hostile influences at work. The Arab is divided in his allegiance. He will know that any encouragement he gives to us will be repaid by merciless punishment if a turn in fortunes of war should reinstate the Turk. Then again, the Turk is a hard taskmaster but he is a Moslem. Religion has a great influence over the Arab; but our policy is right and must win in the long run. The Turk’s plan was to destroy both life and property. Ours is to build up and as time goes on and freedom and security and prosperity are firmly established the old prejudices will die a natural death.
— Robert Stewart Campbell, an officer with the British Royal Engineers, writing home to his family in 1917 from Mesopotamia 

 

They were called upon to fight a Muslim enemy, alongside comrades who sometimes questioned their loyalty. They returned home to neighborhoods where the occupation is commonly dismissed as an imperialist crusade, and where Muslims who serve in Iraq are often disparaged as traitors.

 

This is from yesterday’s Times, a story about Muslims in the Marines. Arabic fluency is an asset in Iraq (despite inital accent acclimation), but for the Arabic-speaking American soldiers, in this case 5 Yemeni-American brothers and cousins from Brooklyn, knowing Arabic meant no war filter. "They heard what their comrades could not. A frantic sequence of foreign words was, they knew, a girl crying out that her father was dead."

Not only were they, in the words of one of these Brooklyn-by-Yemen men, "not as foreign" as other Marines in Iraq, they had to frame the Islamic questions of when Muslims may kill other Muslims with their desire to serve in the Marines. Some of the men from this set of brothers and cousins, back in Brooklyn, respond tepidly to reporters questions about Iraq ("you can’t say ‘purple heart’ in Arabic"), while another shouts "Yeah, we’re going to Yemen next!"

I read this story and instantly thought of the mutiny of the 15th Lancers in Iraq in 1916, detailed in Indian letters from David Omissi’s Indian Voices of the Great War. In February 1916, the 15th Lancers - all Indian Muslims - refused to march from Basra to the front; they wouldn’t fight other Muslims so close to the Holy Places of Karbala, Najaf and Baghdad. The Muslim Marines from Brooklyn described in the Times served ably in Iraq. The closest thing to mutiny, perhaps, was after the war when one of them fled an arranged marriage in Yemen to marry his New York girlfriend. But the attitudes of their fathers, wives, and friends in the story - "It’s a sin. Nobody kills other Muslims. They’re like brothers." - were acted on by foreign, Muslim soldiers in Iraq before, 90 years ago.

A regiment of Indian Lancers preparing to charge.

Here are some of the letters, all from Omissi’s book:

Ashraf Ali Khan to Signalling Instructor Dafadar Fateh Mahomed Khan (Hindustani Muslim, 6th Cavalry, France)

6th Cavalry
Sialkot
24th March 1916

We have got the depot of the 15th Lancers here now; and they were in France from the beginning of the war, and went thence to Basra. The whole regiment united there for the purpose of taking an oath not to fight against Muslims. They all took the oath and laid the Qu’ran on their heads, and swore not to tell anyone of their compact. But a jemadar of that regiment told the CO all about the affair. He at once ordered the ‘fall in’ to be sounded and everyone had to fall in just as he was, whether dressed or not. When the men had fallen in, the other regiments took possession of their arms. They were then ordered to embark on a ship and all refused.
    After that it was decided that the denial of the Indian commissioned officers of all knowledge of the affair should be accepted. They denied it all (in spite of the fact that they too had sworn on the Qu’ran) and they were acquitted. The rest - the non-commissioned officers and troopers, 429 in number - were arrested and punished with various terms of imprisonment.

Rahimdad Khan (Pathan) to Sher Khan (Mirpur, Kashmir?)

19th Lancers
France
21st May 1916

I learn from Karamdad’s letter that Fateh Khan has been sent to transportation [for mutiny]. A thousand pities! It is a subject for great thankfulness that Alladad Khan escaped as he was in hospital at Bushire [Persia]. 439 cavalrymen [of the 15th Lancers] were transported for refusing to fight against the Turks. This was a great mistake to behave to our king in this way. The enemy no doubt are Turks, but in spite of this our men ought not to have been untrue to their salt. It is a thousand pities that I, poor creature as I am, can do nothing in the matter. Well, we must have patience and trust that in time they will be released. I hope so, for there is great talk about the matter.

Fateh Ullah (Punjabi Muslim) to Fateh Ahmed
(Supply and Transport No. 5 Base Supply Depot, France)

Lyallpur
Punjab
30th June 1916

We have learnt from Nasir Khan’s letter that his brother Raja Khan has been sentenced by court martial to fourteen years’ imprisonment. This has caused us much grief. The details which he gives are that when the 15th Lancers reached Basra they were ordered to fight against the Turks. They, however, declined to take up arms against their brother Muslims and asked to be sent to some other theatre of war. A court martial was convened and 400 men were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. Since then, it has been reported in the newspapers that the new Viceroy has ordered that these men should be sent to some other theatre of war, since they did not in reality decline to fight for the Sirkar, and should not have been called upon to fight against the Turks against their wish. I do not know why action has not been taken on this order. It is very sad that fate should have dealth thus cruelly with this regiment in the end, after they had done such good service and gained so much renown elsewhere. Now they are all imprisoned in the fort Rangoon in Burma, and are not allowed to receive or send letters. My idea is that the Government have acted in this way simply to vindicate their authority, and that after the war all these unfortunates will be released.

In fact, a year later in summer of 1917, on the King’s birthday, the 15th Lancers were released.