[Peace-discuss] Counterpunch on the anniversary

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Four Years Later in Iraq
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Pick almost any date on the calendar and it'll turn out that the US 
either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN 
Ambassador into the Security Council to declare to issue an ultimatum. 
It's like driving across the American West. "Historic marker, 1 mile", 
the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing 
on dead Indians. "On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US 
cavalry .... "

It's three o'clock in the afternoon, Sunday March 18, one day short of 
the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa 
in 1916;of the day the U.S. Senate rejected (for the second time) the 
Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of the active phase of the US 
invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10 pm broadcast March 19, 2003, 
by President G.W. Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq 
had commenced.

This was the attack on Dora Farms outside Baghdad where some Iraqi 
whispered into his phone that Saddam Hussein was visiting his children. 
Down hurtled four 2000-pound bunker-busters and 40 cruise missiles. 
There were high fives in the White House situation room at news of a 
mangled Saddam being hauled from the rubble. It all turned out to be 
nonsense, like most military bulletins out of Iraq. The bunker busters 
all missed the compound. Saddam Hussein wasn't there. Uday and Qusay 
weren't there. Fifteen civilians died, including nine women and a child.

Here I was, a couple of days shy of four years later, in a used 
paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina 
Turner's side of the story on life with Ike. My cell phone rang. It was 
my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east 
through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil, in northern 
Iraq. He gave me a brisk précis of the piece he'd file the next day. 
Every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale 
to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for 
missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast 
majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught. He'd 
talked that day to Kassim Naji Salaman, a truck driver replacing his 
murdered brother at the wheel of an oil tanker. Salaman was now the sole 
bread earner for 18 women and children because so many of his male 
relatives had been killed "I can't even visit the village where they 
live," he told Patrick. "Soldiers or militia or just men in masks might 
kill me. I don't even know how to send them money".

I've had many such phone calls from Patrick since March 2003, as he 
returned time after time to Iraq, either to Baghdad or to the north. 
Unlike the embedded reporters he's never felt moved to announce a 
"turning point", as when they blew away Uday and Qusay on July 22, 2003. 
CNN's studio generals said on the news that night it was a big blow to 
the Iraqi resistance. Then Saddam was hauled out of a hole on December 
15, 2003, just in time for Christmas. Maybe the death knell of the 
resistance, the studio generals exulted. Then came one "new dawn" for 
Iraq after another: the handback of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004, the 
two elections and the new constitution in 2005. Now we have the "surge" 
into Baghdad, designed to whip the Shi'a back into line.

Contemptuous of all such bulletins, right from the start Patrick has 
relentlessly described the disintegration of Iraq, by measurements large 
and small. Remember that 13 years of sanctions ­- a horrible 
international onslaught of the health and well-being of a civilian 
population, enthusiatically supported by liberals in the US and Europe 
­- Iraq's plight was already dire. When the war began, Baghdad had 20 
hours of power a day. Now it's down to 2. Not thousands, not tens of 
thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds 
of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and 
Jordan. It's the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East 
since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Dawn after dawn rises over Iraq to 
reveal tortured corpses in the river beds, on the rubbish dumps, by the 
side of the road: bodies riddled with bullets, punctured by drills, 
whipped with wire cable, blown apart.

The U.N. says that in the two months before this last Christmas 5,000 
Iraqi civilians were killed. The months since have probably been as bad. 
Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it from ruin to 
the graveyard, plundering the corpse as it did so.

There's plenty of blame to go round. You'd think these days that the 
cheerleaders for war were limited to a platoon of neocons, as potent in 
historical influence as were supposedly the Knights Templar. But it was 
not so. The coalition of the enablers spread far beyond Cheney's team 
and the extended family of Norman Podhoretz. Atop mainstream corporate 
journalism perch the New York Times and the New Yorker, two prime 
disseminators of pro-invasion propaganda, written at the NYT by Judith 
Miller, Michael Gordon and, on the op ed page, by Thomas Friedman. The 
New Yorker put forth the voluminous lies of Jeffrey Goldberg and has 
remained impenitent till this day.

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a 
filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman 
Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal 
interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous 
pieces attacking the antiwar "hard left". Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and 
Michael Berube played this game eagerly. Berube lavished abuse on Noam 
Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the 
therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking 
the tradition of "left internationalism". Others, like Ian Williams, 
played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was 
negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush 
administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did. "The ball will be 
very much in Saddam Hussein's court," Williams wrote in November, 2002. 
"The question is whether he will cooperate and disarm, or dissimulate 
and bring about his own downfall at the hands of the U.S. military." (In 
fact Saddam had already "disarmed", as disclosed in Hussein Kamel's 
debriefings by the UNSCOM inspectors, the CIA and MI6 in the summer of 
1995 when Kamel told them all, with corroboration from aides who had 
also defected, that on Saddam Hussein's orders his son-in-law had 
destroyed all of Iraq's WMDs years earlier, right after the Gulf War. 
This was not a secret. In February 2003 John Barry reported it in 
Newsweek.Anyone privy to the UNSCOM, CIA and MI6 debriefs knew it from 
1995 on.)

As Iraq began to plunge ever more rapidly into the abyss not long after 
the March, 2003 attack, this crowd stubbornly mostly stayed the course 
with Bush. "Thumpingly blind to the war's virtues" was the head on a 
Paul Berman op ed piece in February, 2004.Christopher Hitchens lurched 
regularly onto Hardball to hurl abuse at critics of the war.

But today, amid Iraq's dreadful death throes, where are the parlor 
warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all 
it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq 
to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and 
Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility 
they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the 
American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging ? 
Sometimes I dream of them, -- Friedman, Hitchens, Berman -- like 
characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump 
on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the 
local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband 
or her son.

Post coldwar Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on 
Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the 
afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great 
crusade shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed 
this war from the start ­ the real left, the libertarians and those 
without illusions about the "civilizing mission" of the great powers.

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