The real lessons of Fallujah

Source?

Believe the article or not
I am not posting the source. Either you agree with the writer or you don't.

btw I agree with the writer.

I agree. What's the source!

The source was obviously an idiot.

Right!

Rather than calling the author or the source an idiot, I'd like to see some debate over the points brought up. How many of you thought our incursion in Iraq would deal a blow to the terrorist networks responsible for 9/11? Raise your hand if you think the war in Iraq has taken precious resources away from the fight against terrorism. Come on Ablers! A free and open debate is the bulwark of freedom. I know, I lived under the totalitarian regime of Franco, where we had to hold secret meetings in order to debate political questions.

Wednesday's eruption of popular hatred aimed at the occupying American forces in Fallujah contradicts the Pollyanna-ish spin we keep hearing from the Bush loyalists and the neocons.

Originally we were told the American miliary would be greeted as "liberators," with flower petals tossed at the soldiers feet. Little Iraqi children would swarm the Marines chanting, "Boooosh, Boooosh, Boooosh," and Iraq would instantly transform into a pro-American, pro-Bush nation, grateful to be freed from the monsterous Saddam.

Of course reality bites, and bites hard.

Despite the spin we've seen on this forum innumerating the glories of post-Saddam Iraq, suggesting it's paradise, the fact is, nothing could be further from the truth.

In Baghdad, Iraqi's largest, most urbanized city, there is a food shortage and a lack of clean, running water. Raw sewage fills the streets. Electricity is rationed and many homeowners go without power completely. Gasoline, once plentiful and cheap, has soared in price 300%. Unemployment is epidemic, as is crime and lawlessness.

But at least thirsty, hungry and cold Iraqis can thank President "Boooosh" for removing Saddam from power.

Is there any wonder why the world saw a glimpse of the rage demonstrated this week by Iraqis in Fallujah toward the USA?

The educated/decent people of Iraq realize we are doing good for their country, the ones who were mimicking Somolia, their hearts and minds can't be won...and they aren't the ones we should base our actions on.

Bremer has destroyed my country
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Bremer has destroyed my country

Even the pro-US manager of Iraq's Pepsi plant feels betrayed by an occupation which has spawned fear, hatred and chaos

Naomi Klein in Baghdad
Saturday April 3, 2004
The Guardian

'Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier. She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head. "No," she replies. We try not to notice that there are 60 room keys in pigeonholes behind her desk - the place is empty. "Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?" She hesitates. "Ahh ... No."

We return to our current hotel - the one we want to leave because there are bets on when it is going to get hit - and flick on the TV: the BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the September 11 commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether invading Iraq has made America safer. They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators and pretty much anyone else associated with the Americans. Which is why we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her decision: if you want to survive in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us. (We thought about explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are sporting the maple leaf - that is, when they aren't trying to disappear behind their newly purchased headscarves.)

The US occupation chief, Paul Bremer, hasn't started wearing a hijab yet, and is instead tackling the rise of anti-Americanism with his usual foresight. Baghdad is blanketed with inept psy-ops organs like Baghdad Now, filled with fawning articles about how Americans are teaching Iraqis about press freedom. "I never thought before that the coalition could do a great thing for the Iraqi people," one trainee is quoted as saying. "Now I can see it on my eyes that they are doing good things for my country and the accomplishment they made. I wish my people can see that, the way I see it."

Unfortunately, the Iraqi people recently saw another version of press freedom when Bremer ordered US troops to shut down a newspaper run by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr. The militant Shia cleric has been preaching that Americans are behind the attacks on Iraqi civilians and condemning the interim constitution as a "terrorist law." So far, al-Sadr has refrained from calling on his supporters to join the armed resistance, but many here are predicting that closing down the newspaper - a nonviolent means of resisting the occupation - was just the push he needed. But then, recruiting for the resistance has always been a specialty of the presidential envoy to Iraq:

Bremer's first act after being tapped by Bush was to fire 400,000 Iraqi soldiers, refuse to give them their rightful pensions, but allow them to hold on to their weapons - in case they needed them later. While US soldiers were padlocking the door of the newspaper's office, I found myself at what I thought would be an oasis of pro-Americanism, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company. On May 1 this bottling plant will start producing one of the most powerful icons of American culture: Pepsi-Cola. I figured that if there was anyone left in Baghdad willing to defend the Americans, it would be Hamid Jassim Khamis, the Baghdad Soft Drinks Company's managing director. I was wrong.

"All the trouble in Iraq is because of Bremer," Khamis told me, flanked by a line-up of 30 Pepsi and 7-Up bottles. "He didn't listen to Iraqis. He doesn't know anything about Iraq. He destroyed the country and tried to rebuild it again, and now we are in chaos." These are words you would expect to hear from religious extremists or Saddam loyalists, but hardly from the likes of Khamis. It's not just that his Pepsi deal is the highest-profile investment by a US multinational in Iraq's new "free market". It's also that few Iraqis supported the war more staunchly than Khamis. And no wonder: Saddam executed both his brothers and Khamis was forced to resign as managing director of the bottling plant in 1999 after Saddam's son Uday threatened his life. When the Americans overthrew Saddam, "you can't imagine how much relief we felt", he says.

After the Ba'athist plant manager was forced out, Khamis returned to his old job. "There is a risk doing business with the Americans," he says. Several months ago, two detonators were discovered in front of the factory gates. And Khamis is still shaken from an attempted assassination three weeks ago.

He was on his way to work when he was carjacked and shot at, and there was no doubt that this was a targeted attack; one of the assailants was heard asking another, "Did you kill the manager?" Khamis used to be happy to defend his pro-US position, even if it meant arguing with friends. But one year after the invasion, many of his neighbours in the industrial park have gone out of business. "I don't know what to say to my friends anymore," he says. "It's chaos." His list of grievances against the occupation is long: corruption in the awarding of reconstruction contracts, the failure to stop the looting; the failure to secure Iraq's borders - both from foreign terrorists and from unregulated foreign imports. Iraqi companies, still suffering from the sanctions and the looting, have been unable to compete.

Most of all, Khamis is worried about how these policies have fed the country's unemployment crisis, creating far too many desperate people. He also notes that Iraqi police officers are paid less than half what he pays his assembly line workers, "which is not enough to survive"., The normally soft-spoken Khamis becomes enraged when talking about the man in charge of "rebuilding" Iraq. "Paul Bremer has caused more damage than the war, because the bombs can damage a building but if you damage people there is no hope." I have gone to the mosques and street demonstrations and listened to Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters shout "Death to America, Death to the Jews", and it is indeed chilling. But it is the profound sense of disappointment and betrayal expressed by a pro-US businessman running a Pepsi plant that attests to the depths of the US-created disaster here.

"I'm disappointed, not because I hate the Americans," Khamis tells me, "but because I like them. And when you love someone and they hurt you, it hurts even more." When we leave the bottling plant in late afternoon, the streets of US-occupied Baghdad are filled with al-Sadr supporters vowing bloody revenge for the attack on their newspaper. A spokesperson for Bremer is defending the decision on the grounds that the paper "was making people think we were out to get them".

A growing number of Iraqis are certainly under that impression, but it has far less to do with an inflammatory newspaper than with the inflammatory actions of the US occupation authority.

As the June 30 "handover" approaches, Bremer has unveiled a slew of new tricks to hold on to power long after "sovereignty" has been declared. Some recent highlights. At the end of March, building on his Order 39 of last September, Bremer passed yet another law further opening up Iraq's economy to foreign ownership, a law that Iraq's next government is prohibited from changing under the terms of the interim constitution.

Bremer also announced the establishment of several independent regulators, which will drastically reduce the power of Iraqi government ministries. For instance, the Financial Times reports that "officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority said the regulator would prevent communications minister Haider al-Abadi, a thorn in the side of the coalition, from carrying out his threat to cancel licences the coalition awarded to foreign-managed consortia to operate three mobile networks and the national broadcaster."

The CPA has also confirmed that after June 30, the $18.4bn that the US government is spending on reconstruction will be administered by its embassy in Iraq. The money will be spent over five years and will fundamentally redesign Iraq's most basic infrastructure, including its electricity, water, oil and communications sectors, as well as its courts and police. Iraq's future governments will have no say in the construction of these core sectors of Iraqi society.

Retired rear admiral David Nash, who heads the Project Management Office, which administers the funds, describes the $18.4bn as "a gift from the American people to the people of Iraq". He appears to have forgotten the part about gifts being something you actually give up. And in the same eventful week, US engineers began construction on 14 "enduring bases" in Iraq, capable of housing the 110,000 soldiers who will be posted here for at least two more years. Even though the bases are being built with no mandate from an Iraqi government, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations in Iraq, called them "a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East".

The US occupation authority has also found a sneaky way to maintain control over Iraq's armed forces. Bremer has issued an executive order stating that even after the interim Iraqi government has been established, the Iraqi army will answer to US commander Lt General Ricardo Sanchez. In order to pull this off, Washington is relying on a legalistic reading of a clause in UN security council resolution 1511, which puts US forces in charge of Iraq's security until "the completion of the political process" in Iraq. Since the "political process" in Iraq is never-ending, so it seems is US military control. In the same flurry of activity, the CPA announced that it would put further constraints on the Iraqi military by appointing a national security adviser for Iraq.

This US appointee would have powers equivalent to those held by Condoleezza Rice and will stay in office for a five-year term, long after Iraq is scheduled to have made the transition to a democratically elected government. There is one piece of this country, though, that the US government is happy to cede to the people of Iraq: the hospitals.

On March 27 Bremer announced that he had withdrawn the senior US advisers from Iraq's health ministry, making it the first sector to achieve "full authority" in the US occupation.

Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States will maintain its military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military bases and the largest US embassy in the world.

It will hold on to authority over Iraq's armed forces, its security and economic policy and the design of its core infrastructure - but the Iraqis can deal with their decrepit hospitals all by themselves, complete with their chronic drug shortages and lack of the most basic sanitation capacity. (The US health and human services secretary, Tommy Thompson, revealed just how low a priority this was when he commented that Iraq's hospitals would be fixed if the Iraqis "just washed their hands and cleaned the crap off the walls".)

I'm of the thinking that what happened in Somalia has sparked ideas for these savages. We can't pull out now, we just can't.

By MATTHEW GUTMAN
BAGHDAD
Gliding his straight razor over a client's face, Ahmed Kadduri, of the Kadduri barber shop in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Adamiyeh, lifted his eyes long enough to spit out, "It was the Zionists and the foreign organizations that did it." He was, of course, referring to Wednesday's murder of four and the mutilation of two American contractors in Fallujah.
The lynchings, referred to by many here as the "accident," remain a much-debated topic, slicing down the center of Iraq's political and ethnic divide and pitting Sunni against Shi'ite. Despite the mutilations' denunciation of by some Fallujah clerics, over the weekend some Iraqis displayed a perplexing combination of denial and support for the attacks. Suddenly a short man with a shiny bald pate popped up from his seat in front of Kadduri. "The Americans were mutilated because of the women detained at Abu Ghraib [a massive coalition prison complex near Fallujah that served as Saddam's depository of political dissidents and criminals]. They are kept naked and they are raped. It was revenge for our women." Meet Col. Abdel Hadi Muhammad Ali (of the disbanded Iraqi army), said the barber, introducing the diminutive colonel. Ali continued his harangue that "Iraqis are gracious hosts, but when you humiliate us we fight like lions." Soon the Fallujans will be called "the Lions of Fallujah" for their resistance, he said. The others nodded. Ali said he had taken four bullets fighting the coalition's invasion last March. He proudly rolled up his sleeve to reveal two quarter-size scars, one on his forearm, the other on his biceps. Coalition officials staunchly deny the claim of inhumane conditions in Abu Ghraib. The proliferation of rumors, it is said in coalition circles, has gotten the best of many Iraqis. Kadduri's clients gabbed about the incident not so much stunned by the lynching's horrors but apprehensive of the American response. US administrator L. Paul Bremmer has said that those who killed the four Americans "will not go unpunished." That a few said they saw nothing wrong with the attack highlighted the stark cleavage in culture between occupier and occupied. Soon after the war, Ali observed that a soldier from a convoy of American armored personnel carriers "smiled and waved at a group of little girls. Had one of them been my daughter, I would have jumped on the tank and killed him." American women might be treated "like animals or pieces of flesh, but we don't want Iraqi women to be like that." Just above his head, a TV blared racy music videos on the Lebanese-based Zen satellite station. The hundreds of thousands of satellite dishes and receivers Iraqis have purchased since the war are jerry-rigged on rooftops, balconies, and tiny patches of grass all over this city. Kadduri's young assistant blushed and turned from the television back to his seated client. Dr. Gilan Mahmood Ramiz, a Princeton-trained Iraqi political scientist banished by Saddam in the early 1990s, observed that the people of Fallujah are "provincial and primitive. They are at base still a tribal society." During an interview in his Baghdad home, he also blamed the lynching on the coalition's failure to establish a unifying provisional government.
Had it encouraged political activity among the intelligentsia and professional class, "city politics would have eliminated the tribal village politics of towns like Fallujah." With Saddam gone and a "quisling" provisional government in his place, some Iraqis have reverted to the only mode available: arcane tribal politics guided by the principles of honor, shame, and ultimately revenge. And on Friday, Fallujah's leaders almost admitted as much. "Fallujah is based on a tribal model which demands revenge. This led to the uncontrolled and severe reaction of the people," Muhammad al-Handani was quoted as saying by the daily Azzaman. But support for the insurgency also depends somewhat on one's religious background. Sunnis tend to support the terrorist attacks, because with Saddam gone they feel "disenfranchised," said Ramiz. The Shi'ites, who tentatively support US efforts in Iraq and have born the brunt of the insurgency, have decried the lynchings as barbaric. "These people give all Iraqis a bad name," said Faisal Abu Khalil, a Shi'ite physicist at al-Mustanseriyeh University of Baghdad and an occasional client of Kadduri's. The mutilation, he said, had shocked his family: "It is inhumane and simply un-Muslim." "I wonder what the point of it all is," he asked. "Do they really feel they can defeat the Americans, to banish them, by desecrating their bodies?" Well, some do. "In all I believe the attack on the Americans was OK," concluded Ali. "If America continues to lie to the Iraqi people, I assure you I will be first in line to join the resistance to oust the Americans."

L.R.R.Hood- Agree- Terrorism is like a bacterial infection. If it is not completely wiped out, it will return, often in a stronger, mutated form, that is much more difficult to get rid of!

We've been to easy with our velvet hammer approach and that will never work, we'll be there forever with never a victory. Those savages only understand what Saddam taught them, get out of line and you die, you cannot win their hearts and minds.

We've faught this battle too PC like, time to get serious about winning.

I think it is intellectually lazy to continue to refer to the Iraqi effort to resoist the occupation as "terrorists." All that it accomplishes is to allow people here to feel smug about approving further acts of oppression.

Thank you for that wonderful example of why we have no business being there in the first place.


You fall into the same American Exceptionalist trap as others here. What makes them "savages?" Is it the fact that they are not blonde haired and blue eyed? That they don't speak English? The fact that they live somewhere besides the US?


So you are admitting that this had nothing to do with Iraqi "liberation?" This is an exercise in imperialism and it is going horribly wrong.

I think it's intellectually lazy to believe they are defending their country, they are terrorist who are trying to establish their own little regime(s) and if not dealt with it will fester into something someone will have to deal with sooner or later. If they wanted to share in a better place to live they would be helping instead of murdering.

If we're not going to get serious about winning, then we should pull the troops out and let them have their blood bath civil war.

So, what you seem to be implying is that they are "terrorists" becasue they oppose the US' plans?


Of course, the chaos and violence are the pretty much the result of the US invading, or have you forgotten that?

Right Wing Fascists
Taken together, these latest measures paint a telling picture of what a "free Iraq" will look like: the United States will maintain its military and corporate presence through 14 enduring military bases and the largest US embassy in the world.

*The Right Wing Fascist/Neocons will never announce the truth that Iraq is destined to be a colony of US Imperialism. This "liberation" of Iraq is an outright sham! Most of the world's population knows this!!!

Americans are treated like mushrooms. "Kept in the dark and fed dung."

What exactly do you think was going on there before the US went there?