What Are The Problems With Post-War Iraq?
Bartle Bull, Financial Times (London, England), 30 Oct. 2004
In April 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Ferdowsi Square led news broadcasts around the world. Iraqis thronged their capital's main square as the bronze monster was yanked from its feet. After 30 years of brutality and neglect, and three weeks of war, they could finally imagine a life of political freedom, personal liberty and the basic material necessities.
And the Americans had every reason to deliver. Self-interest and even, by the historical standards of hegemonic powers, a basic decency seemed to underwrite America's guarantee. For collateral, the world's only superpower offered its own endless resources, support from 40 nations, and the desires of the Iraqi people themselves. The crowd did not even seem to mind that it was the Stars and Stripes that was draped over the fallen dictator's massive bronze head. It was springtime then.
Ever since, the two sides have been struggling to retrieve the optimism and the trust that have eroded further every day.
On a scalding September morning 17 months later, there was another gathering in the same Baghdad square. Twelve mentally handicapped Iraqi children and teenagers stood chanting and singing in the shade of the statue's plinth. They carried signs handwritten in English that said,"Release our Friends and Do Not Prevent the Medicine". They were there to protest at the kidnapping of two Italian women who, until the previous day, regularly delivered medicine to their homes. Apart from the families of the children, and colleagues of the two women, both named Simona, the only onlookers at the demonstration were a handful of local journalists.
Beyond the tiny gathering the Baghdad traffic swirled and went on its way. Half a dozen moneychangers sat at tables by the kerb, stacks of no-longer new"Bremer" dinars in front of them. There were few pedestrians in the noon heat. The protest had been publicised in advance in the media. But nobody, not the drivers or the moneychangers or the pedestrians, took any notice of the children. Nobody honked a horn or called out from a window, or walked over to show support. As far as I could tell, nobody even looked at the protesters for more than a second or two.
Squatting in the thin shade of a thorny tree, a 60-year-old gardener called Othman seemed pained by it all."It is terrible to kidnap humanitarian workers. These people didn't carry guns, they were helping our country. This is devastating to the reconstruction process. I wish they had kidnapped me instead."
So where is the public outrage? If Iraqis do not care to support the people who deliver their medicine and build their schools and bridges, what part of progress can they possibly care about?"We should all be in the streets, expressing our opinion," Othman says, sharing his decapitated Pepsi can of cool water. Othman makes Dollars 4 a day and is happy to have a job. But he would never travel to the square on his day off to protest for the rebuilding of his country."No, no," he says."We are too poor. We are too tired. If we work we can't come here, if we don't work we can't get here."
Across the street from Othman, 40 yards from the knot of children holding their signs, is the gate of the 14th Ramadan mosque. It is a biggish mosque, not important or monumental, but chunky enough and prosperous looking, with a wall around it and grass on either side of the deep forecourt. In front, above the broad steps and to the right of the main door, there are a couple of old sofas on a dirty carpet. The shade there is cool and, although this is a rebel mosque, and a Sunni one, it is a pleasant place to sit. The gunmen in front are bored and reasonably friendly and, during a brief visit, they do not seem too threatening. Beyond the gate the view is of the traffic, Ferdowsi Square, and the two towers of the city's Sheraton and Palestine hotels. A couple of 19-year-olds with their Kalashnikovs point out the places from which people fire Katyushas and rocket-propelled grenades at the hotels:"Over there from the bed of a Toyota... over here from the back of a donkey... a mortar from behind that tree below the steps."
It is as good a place as any to wonder how Iraqis can hope for reconstruction when the people who come there to help them are kidnapped."We hate the occupation," says 19-year-old Ali."They have given us nothing. After the Gulf War Saddam fixed the electricity within six months. Now it has been a year and a half and we see nothing. Even the appearance of good intentions would be good - just one school, one hospital."
The occupation has in fact built and renovated thousands of schools and hospitals. And the two kidnapped Italians are not the occupation. Indeed, like most NGO employees, they disliked the occupation. They were innocents. I point out that in Madrid, after the train bombings, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets to protest at the killing of the innocent. And the people of Spain, of course, were also against the occupation in Iraq."Yes," says Ali,"but Madrid happened in a stable country with stable police. What can we do here if we want a voice? Even the police are criminals. A few days ago the Americans came here and told us, 'Be careful, the Ba'athists are using police cars for car- bombs.' Yesterday there were gangs fighting behind the mosque for an hour and nobody came to stop them. Nowhere is safe. People are afraid to leave their homes - who wants to gather in the streets?"
The fall of Hussein has been celebrated by the ransacking of schools, hospitals, museums and government offices. Anti-occupation humanitarian aid workers are kidnapped. Thirty-five children are killed by suicide bombers at a celebration for a new sewage facility - and most quotes in the newspapers show the parents blaming American soldiers for suckering their kids with football and sweets. In the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, the latest uprising forces the cancellation of a Dollars 70m infrastructure programme designed to create 15,000 jobs and a variety of improved services. The Russian firm rebuilding a power plant outside Baghdad leaves Iraq, withdrawing almost 400 workers after the toll of its kidnapped employees reaches 40. Bombs threaten the January elections. Even the UN and the Red Cross are bombed.
Iraqis currently have the best constitution and the least despotic and most inclusive government in the Middle East - backed up by the full blessing of the UN. They will, should they choose to, have elections in three months' time. They are already participating in unprecedented levels of representative local government in growing pockets across the country. Their invasion was the most careful in the history of warfare. Even the worst motives ascribed to their occupier - greed for oil, a Zionist plot to transform the Middle East, megalomaniacal imperialism - argue for an occupation that would prefer to be nice on the ground. Thousands of aid workers and doctors and engineers and lorry drivers with spare parts are eager to come to their country and participate in renewal. Their own children are keen to play football and chase sweets - even if it means they have to hang out with GIs and attend the opening of sewage plants.
The occupation has, of course, made appalling mistakes. At the local level there have been the innumerable, avoidable, inevitable savageries of war. Visiting the Iraqi Hizbollah in a poor district of Baghdad, I once met two neighbourhood doctors who showed me around their clinic. They said it had recently been trashed by American soldiers. The place was a mess, with furniture upended, files emptied on the ground, doors broken. During the fighting in Sadr City I have seen Iraqi children with severed arteries, severed genitals, liquefied intestines. The father of one such boy once told me,"This fighting today is just practice. In five years this child will take revenge for himself." The child was six.
There have also been devastating mistakes at the other end of the scale, on the levels of culture, psychology and strategy. America's Palestine policy ensures that Iraqis simply cannot believe it when they are told that the occupation sincerely wants to help. And it should probably have been foreseen that, after 35 years under the Ba'ath Party, Iraqis would see all power, any manifestation of the state, as the enemy.
In April 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Ferdowsi Square led news broadcasts around the world. Iraqis thronged their capital's main square as the bronze monster was yanked from its feet. After 30 years of brutality and neglect, and three weeks of war, they could finally imagine a life of political freedom, personal liberty and the basic material necessities.
And the Americans had every reason to deliver. Self-interest and even, by the historical standards of hegemonic powers, a basic decency seemed to underwrite America's guarantee. For collateral, the world's only superpower offered its own endless resources, support from 40 nations, and the desires of the Iraqi people themselves. The crowd did not even seem to mind that it was the Stars and Stripes that was draped over the fallen dictator's massive bronze head. It was springtime then.
Ever since, the two sides have been struggling to retrieve the optimism and the trust that have eroded further every day.
On a scalding September morning 17 months later, there was another gathering in the same Baghdad square. Twelve mentally handicapped Iraqi children and teenagers stood chanting and singing in the shade of the statue's plinth. They carried signs handwritten in English that said,"Release our Friends and Do Not Prevent the Medicine". They were there to protest at the kidnapping of two Italian women who, until the previous day, regularly delivered medicine to their homes. Apart from the families of the children, and colleagues of the two women, both named Simona, the only onlookers at the demonstration were a handful of local journalists.
Beyond the tiny gathering the Baghdad traffic swirled and went on its way. Half a dozen moneychangers sat at tables by the kerb, stacks of no-longer new"Bremer" dinars in front of them. There were few pedestrians in the noon heat. The protest had been publicised in advance in the media. But nobody, not the drivers or the moneychangers or the pedestrians, took any notice of the children. Nobody honked a horn or called out from a window, or walked over to show support. As far as I could tell, nobody even looked at the protesters for more than a second or two.
Squatting in the thin shade of a thorny tree, a 60-year-old gardener called Othman seemed pained by it all."It is terrible to kidnap humanitarian workers. These people didn't carry guns, they were helping our country. This is devastating to the reconstruction process. I wish they had kidnapped me instead."
So where is the public outrage? If Iraqis do not care to support the people who deliver their medicine and build their schools and bridges, what part of progress can they possibly care about?"We should all be in the streets, expressing our opinion," Othman says, sharing his decapitated Pepsi can of cool water. Othman makes Dollars 4 a day and is happy to have a job. But he would never travel to the square on his day off to protest for the rebuilding of his country."No, no," he says."We are too poor. We are too tired. If we work we can't come here, if we don't work we can't get here."
Across the street from Othman, 40 yards from the knot of children holding their signs, is the gate of the 14th Ramadan mosque. It is a biggish mosque, not important or monumental, but chunky enough and prosperous looking, with a wall around it and grass on either side of the deep forecourt. In front, above the broad steps and to the right of the main door, there are a couple of old sofas on a dirty carpet. The shade there is cool and, although this is a rebel mosque, and a Sunni one, it is a pleasant place to sit. The gunmen in front are bored and reasonably friendly and, during a brief visit, they do not seem too threatening. Beyond the gate the view is of the traffic, Ferdowsi Square, and the two towers of the city's Sheraton and Palestine hotels. A couple of 19-year-olds with their Kalashnikovs point out the places from which people fire Katyushas and rocket-propelled grenades at the hotels:"Over there from the bed of a Toyota... over here from the back of a donkey... a mortar from behind that tree below the steps."
It is as good a place as any to wonder how Iraqis can hope for reconstruction when the people who come there to help them are kidnapped."We hate the occupation," says 19-year-old Ali."They have given us nothing. After the Gulf War Saddam fixed the electricity within six months. Now it has been a year and a half and we see nothing. Even the appearance of good intentions would be good - just one school, one hospital."
The occupation has in fact built and renovated thousands of schools and hospitals. And the two kidnapped Italians are not the occupation. Indeed, like most NGO employees, they disliked the occupation. They were innocents. I point out that in Madrid, after the train bombings, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the streets to protest at the killing of the innocent. And the people of Spain, of course, were also against the occupation in Iraq."Yes," says Ali,"but Madrid happened in a stable country with stable police. What can we do here if we want a voice? Even the police are criminals. A few days ago the Americans came here and told us, 'Be careful, the Ba'athists are using police cars for car- bombs.' Yesterday there were gangs fighting behind the mosque for an hour and nobody came to stop them. Nowhere is safe. People are afraid to leave their homes - who wants to gather in the streets?"
The fall of Hussein has been celebrated by the ransacking of schools, hospitals, museums and government offices. Anti-occupation humanitarian aid workers are kidnapped. Thirty-five children are killed by suicide bombers at a celebration for a new sewage facility - and most quotes in the newspapers show the parents blaming American soldiers for suckering their kids with football and sweets. In the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, the latest uprising forces the cancellation of a Dollars 70m infrastructure programme designed to create 15,000 jobs and a variety of improved services. The Russian firm rebuilding a power plant outside Baghdad leaves Iraq, withdrawing almost 400 workers after the toll of its kidnapped employees reaches 40. Bombs threaten the January elections. Even the UN and the Red Cross are bombed.
Iraqis currently have the best constitution and the least despotic and most inclusive government in the Middle East - backed up by the full blessing of the UN. They will, should they choose to, have elections in three months' time. They are already participating in unprecedented levels of representative local government in growing pockets across the country. Their invasion was the most careful in the history of warfare. Even the worst motives ascribed to their occupier - greed for oil, a Zionist plot to transform the Middle East, megalomaniacal imperialism - argue for an occupation that would prefer to be nice on the ground. Thousands of aid workers and doctors and engineers and lorry drivers with spare parts are eager to come to their country and participate in renewal. Their own children are keen to play football and chase sweets - even if it means they have to hang out with GIs and attend the opening of sewage plants.
The occupation has, of course, made appalling mistakes. At the local level there have been the innumerable, avoidable, inevitable savageries of war. Visiting the Iraqi Hizbollah in a poor district of Baghdad, I once met two neighbourhood doctors who showed me around their clinic. They said it had recently been trashed by American soldiers. The place was a mess, with furniture upended, files emptied on the ground, doors broken. During the fighting in Sadr City I have seen Iraqi children with severed arteries, severed genitals, liquefied intestines. The father of one such boy once told me,"This fighting today is just practice. In five years this child will take revenge for himself." The child was six.
There have also been devastating mistakes at the other end of the scale, on the levels of culture, psychology and strategy. America's Palestine policy ensures that Iraqis simply cannot believe it when they are told that the occupation sincerely wants to help. And it should probably have been foreseen that, after 35 years under the Ba'ath Party, Iraqis would see all power, any manifestation of the state, as the enemy.