Patrick Cockburn: Iraq is a country no more. Like much else, that was not the plan

The death rate in Baghdad has fallen, but it is down to ethnic cleansing

Sunday, 16 March 2008

'It reminds me of Iraq under Saddam," a militant opponent of Saddam Hussein said angrily to me last week as he watched red-capped Iraqi soldiers close down part of central Baghdad so the convoy of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, might briefly venture into the city.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the US and the Iraqi governments claim that the country is becoming a less dangerous place, but the measures taken to protect Mr Maliki told a different story. Gun-waving soldiers first cleared all traffic from the streets. Then four black armoured cars, each with three machine-gunners on the roof, raced out of the Green Zone through a heavily fortified exit, followed by sand-coloured American Humvees and more armoured cars. Finally, in the middle of the speeding convoy, we saw six identical bullet-proof vehicles with black windows, one of which must have been carrying Mr Maliki.

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Drift to War

October 2007 - Paul Rogers Oxford Research Group

There was a decrease in US military casualties in Iraq during October. A decline in civilian casualties was also claimed by the US military authorities but other agencies, including Iraqi government sources, were less positive. These other reports were more plausible given the huge increase in the use of air power by the US military – there were more than three times as many air strikes in the first ten months of 2007 as in the whole of 2006.

In any case, even if the security situation in Iraq was showing some small sign of improvement, attention shifted a thousand miles to the east where even the violent conflict in south east Afghanistan was overshadowed by political developments in Pakistan.

The return of the former Prime Minister Benzir Bhutto had been expected to see a consolidation of power in the hands of General Musharraf in combination with Mrs Bhutto and her party. In the event, a suicide bomb attack on her motorcade on the day of her arrival indicated the problems that would be faced and Mrs Bhutto returned to her residence in Dubai before the end of the month.

As the security situation in the border districts with Afghanistan deteriorated, General Musharraf endeavoured to take direct control of the country, leaving the US attempts to broker a Musharraf/Bhutto coalition in disarray. By the end of the month it looked highly unlikely that the forthcoming elections would be held, especially as many key members of opposition political parties were being detained by security forces on behalf of the Musharraf regime.

Further Sanctions against Iran

In the United States, the situation in Pakistan caused concern but this scarcely impinged on the 2008 presidential election campaign. Indeed, it was the issue of Iran that became steadily more prominent during the course of October, with the Bush administration announcing a further round of sanctions at the end of the month. These appeared to pre-empt further international discussions and, on the surface, appeared mainly directed at Iran’s presumed nuclear weapon programme. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice concentrated on this, saying that “the international community cannot just sit idly by until we face unpalatable choices. A nuclear weapon in the hands of the Iranian regime would be deeply destabilizing in the world’s most volatile region.” Read article

Saving Iraq

The Nation| article | posted June 27, 2007 (web only)
Robert Dreyfuss

Last week, a fierce critic of the Bush Administration's war in Iraq went, perhaps, a bridge too far. Pauline Baker, president of the Fund for Peace, flatly predicted that there is no hope for Iraq, other than its collapse and fragmentation. Upon issuing a report that described Iraq as the second most unstable "failed state" after Sudan, Baker told the Washington Post, "We have recommended...that the administration face up to the reality that the only choices for Iraq are how and how violently it will break up."

And she's not the only one. Many opponents of Bush's adventure in Iraq, from left to center-right, have thrown up their hands. Most notorious, Senator Joe Biden, Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Ambassador Peter Galbraith have written off Iraq, either predicting or encouraging its breakup into mini-states. Countless others have concluded that ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq have hardened into permanent hatreds. And there are those who--sadly or gleefully, depending on their point of view--declare definitively that Iraq was never really a nation. Instead, they say, it is an artificial creation that never existed except in the minds of British imperialists like Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell.

Such sentiments are being challenged by a nascent bloc of Iraqi nationalists who, against all odds, are working to put together a pan-Iraqi coalition that would topple the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Maliki's ruling alliance includes separatist Kurdish warlords and Iranian-backed Shiite fundamentalists, both of whom want to carve out semi or wholly independent statelets. Although it has not yet jelled, Maliki's opposition--which includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as well as Christians, Turkmen and others--is within striking distance of creating a functioning parliamentary majority. Read more

A Culture of Atrocity

Truthdig.com Posted on Jun 18, 2007 By Chris Hedges

AP Photo / Karim Kadim

Mohammed Saleem, 18 months old, and four family members were killed when U.S. forces opened fire on their vehicle in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood in June 2004 during fighting between Americans and followers of a radical cleric.

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—to murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

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