[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:14445] Fwd: Robert Fisk: The Iraq Bush Doesn't Want You to See

[Alfred Kagan]

>X-Sender: willett at mail.infotogo.net@mail.infotogo.net
>Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 09:18:35 -0400
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>From: Charles Willett <willett at liblib.com>
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:14445] Fwd: Robert Fisk:   The Iraq Bush Doesn't 
>Want You to See
>Reply-To: srrtac-l at ala.org
>Sender: owner-srrtac-l at ala.org
>
>The current division of forces in Iraq, as observed by a courageous 
>British journalist who dared to get out of Bagdhad and travel across 
>country by car.
>
>Charles Willett
>
>----Forwarded Message----
>Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 06:31:29 -0400
>To: (Recipient list suppressed)
>From: Bill Thomson <wthomson at umich.edu>
>Subject: Robert Fisk:   The Iraq Bush Doesn't Want You to See
>
>A very informative analysis from Robert Fisk of Britain's Independent.
>
>Peace,
>	Bill
>
>*********************************************************
>
>Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:55:45 -0400
>From: Nabeel Abraham <NABRAHAM at hfcc.edu>
>Subject: The Iraq Bush Doesn't Want You to See
>
>
>'A better and safer place' --Tony Blair justifying the Iraq war in his
>response to the Butler report
>
>
>Robert Fisk In Najaf
>
>20 July 2004, The Independent
>
>
>
>For mile after mile south of Baghdad yesterday, the story was the same:
>empty police posts, abandoned Iraqi army and police checkpoints and a
>litter of burnt-out American fuel tankers and rocket-smashed police
>vehicles down the main highway to Hillah and Najaf. It was Afghanistan Mk2.
>
>Iraqi government officials and Western diplomats tell journalists to avoid
>driving out of Baghdad; now I understand why. It is dangerous. But my own
>fearful journey far down Highway 8 - scene of the murder of at least 15
>Westerners - proved that the US-appointed Iraqi government controls little
>of the land south of the capital. Only in the Sunni Muslim town of
>Mahmoudiya - where a car bomb exploded outside an Iraqi military recruiting
>centre last week - did I see Iraqi policemen.
>
>They were in a convoy of 11 battered white pick-ups, pointing Kalashnikovs
>at the crowds around them, driving on to the wrong side of the road when
>they became tangled in a traffic jam, screaming at motorists to clear their
>path at rifle point. This was not a frightened American column - this was
>Iraq's own new blue-uniformed police force, rifles also directed at the
>windows of homes and shops and at the crowd of Iraqis which surged around
>them. In Iskanderia, I saw two gunmen near the road. I don't know why they
>bothered to stand there. The police had already left their post a few
>metres away.
>
>Yes, it is a shameful reflection on our invasion of Iraq - let us solemnly
>remember "weapons of mass destruction" - but it is, above all, a tragedy
>for the Iraqis. They endured the repulsive Saddam. They endured our
>shameful UN sanctions. They endured our invasion. And now they must endure
>the anarchy we call freedom.
>
>In Baghdad, of course, it was the usual story yesterday; a suicide bomber
>killing 15 Iraqis and wounding another 62 when he blew up his fuel tanker
>bomb next to a police station (pictured above), and an Iraqi defence
>ministry official murdered outside his home. And true to the
>Alice-in-Wonderland world of the new Iraqi government, 43 new Iraqi
>ambassadors were appointed around the world. But who did they represent?
>Iraq? Or just Baghdad?
>
>After the city of Hillah, I came across the police and a scattering of new
>Iraqi army soldiers. At Kufa, they insisted on escorting my car into the
>holy city of Najaf. But miles from the city centre, they turned round and
>told me that under the terms of the ceasefire with Muqtada Sadr's "Mehdi
>Army", they could drive no further. They were right. Sadr's militia - which
>the US army promised to "destroy" last April - guards the old city, the
>main roads to the mosque and the entrance to the great Shrine of the Imam Ali.
>
>Indeed, deep inside this wondrous and golden tiled contribution to Islamic
>architecture - in an air-conditioned office heavy with Chinese pots and
>Iranian carpets - I found the man who helped draw up the map for the US
>military to retreat after they abandoned their siege of Sadr's forces.
>
>"The Americans gave us a map and asked us which roads they could patrol,"
>Sadr's right-hand man, the turbaned Sheikh Ali Smaisin, told me in the
>Najaf shrine yesterday. "I sat with the other members of the 'Beit Shia'
>(the Shia House, which combines a numberf local political groups, including
>the Dawa party) and we set out the roads on which the Americans would be
>permitted to make their patrols. This map was then returned to the American
>side and they accepted our choices for roads they could control."
>
>I was not surprised. US forces are under so many daily guerrilla attacks
>that they cannot move by daylight along Highway 8 or, indeed, west of
>Baghdad through Falujah or Ramadi. Across Iraq, their helicopters can fly
>no higher than 100 metres for fear of rocket attack. Save for a solitary
>A1M1 Abrams tank on a motorway bridge in the Baghdad suburbs, I saw only
>one other US vehicle on the road yesterday: a solitary Humvee driving along
>a patrol road in Najaf agreed by the Mehdi Army. Three faraway Apache
>helicopters were hedge-hopping their way towards the Euphrates.
>
>That the "muqawama" - the resistance - controls so many hundreds of square
>miles around Baghdad should be no great surprise. The new US-appointed
>government has neither the police nor the soldiers to retake the land. They
>announce martial laws and telephone tapping and bans on demonstrations and
>a new intelligence service -- but have neither the manpower nor the ability
>to turn these institutions into anything more than propaganda dreams for
>foreign journalists and a population that desperately craves security.
>
>Even the ceasefire agreement set out between the Americans and the Mehdi
>Army is astonishing in its breadth. According to Sheikh Smaisin, it allowed
>the police to return to their checkpoints outside the city and the
>abandonment of official buildings by members of the Mehdi Army. I found the
>police back in control of their station at Kufa, a large American tank
>shell-hole through the wall as a reminder of the recent fighting. Article
>Three states that no one can be arrested or captured, Article Four that
>there should be no public carrying of weapons - the Mehdi Army certainly
>appeared to be abiding by this clause yesterday. Articles Five and Six say
>that "occupation forces" - the Americans - must remain in their bases
>except for small patrol routes which they can use to reach these
>fortifications.
>
>Astonishingly, the final clause - still under debate when the Americans
>"transferred" power on 28 June - calls for the withdrawal of all legal
>charges against Muqtada Sadr for the murder of Sayed Abdul-Majid al-Khoi
>last year. When revealed by the occupation authorities more than six months
>after they had been secretly drawn up, the second most senior US officer in
>Iraq said that as a result of the accusations, his forces would "kill or
>capture" Sadr.
>
>But it was Sadr's men who courteously greeted me at their checkpoint in
>Najaf yesterday and took me to speak to Sheikh Smaisin at the Imam Ali
>shrine. He complained that US troops had several times broken the
>ceasefire. "Two weeks ago, two of their Humvees turned up outside Sadr's
>home and the soldiers began questioning people. We told our forces not to
>open fire and we complained and then these soldiers were withdrawn."
>
>Sadr's forces - "a public current", Sheikh Smaisin calls them with
>unexpected discretion - supposedly suffered less than a hundred casualties
>in the US attack; the Americans say they killed 400 of them.
>
>Smaisin has little time for such statistics. "What we see in the occupation
>is American force with a British brain," he says. "This is just the same as
>the British occupation of Basra in 1914 and Baghdad in 1917. Our movement
>cannot be overcome because we are patriotic and Islamic, just like the
>forces opposing the occupation in the Sunni areas of Iraq. The westerners
>want to set up a sectarian government but we don't accept this. Now they
>have an insurrection from Fao in the south to Kirkuk in the north. Shia and
>Sunni are together. And any government that is not elected in free and
>honest elections - well, there's a problem there."
>
>So much, then, for the Allawi government, even if the Shia insurrection is
>a shadow of the Sunni version. But the evidence of my journey yesterday -
>through the southern Sunni cities which long ago rejected American rule, to
>the holiest Shia city where its own militia controls the shrines and the
>square miles around them - suggested that Mr Allawi controls a capital
>without a country.
>
>It took two weeks to arrange my trip, and I travelled with a Muslim cleric
>in my car who urged me to read my Arabic newspaper whenever urchins
>approached to urge my driver to buy window sponges. They would run their
>sponges over the windows of the car and stare inside, looking - so we
>believed - for foreigners. They were spotters. And they didn't see me.
>
>But what I saw was infinitely more disturbing: a nation whose government
>rules only its capital, a country about which we fantasise at our peril.


-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu