« Collective Punishment | Main | You Know You're Sovereign When »
November 18, 2004
Insurgents? Not Giving Up. Marines? Not Leaving.
The word is already out --can you say du-uh-- that turning Fallujah into rubble may just have stoked the resistance and will not achieve any of its stated goals:
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The recapture of Fallujah has not broken the insurgents' will to fight and may not pay the big dividend U.S. planners had hoped — to improve security enough to hold national elections in Sunni Muslim areas of central Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi assessments.Instead, the battle for control of the Sunni city 40 miles west of Baghdad has sharpened divisions among Iraq's major ethnic and religious groups, fueled anti-American sentiment and stoked the 18-month-old Sunni insurgency.
Here's what to watch out for, though, from the very next paragraph:
Those grim assessments, expressed privately by some U.S. military officials and by some private experts on Iraq, raise doubts as to whether the January election will produce a government with sufficient legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the country's powerful Sunni Muslim minority.
Leaving aside the Kurds, every indication is that each brutal assault by the U.S. military strengthens Sunni-Shia unity:
On the fourth day of the ground attack on Falluja, last Friday, joint Shia-Sunni prayers were held in the four mosques in Baghdad, and were massively well attended. Inter-communal prayers were the hallmark of the 1920 revolution, revived early this year by the Iraqi National Foundation Congress, a loose umbrella organisation of academics, cross-sectarian clerics and veteran political leaders.
And the other claim, that elections must be delayed, cancelled or limited because of the security situation is a bogus pretext that we will hear much more of as the January deadline nears. For one thing, all our actions are making the situation less tenable. Here's how it works. First we flatten Fallujah, claiming that, otherwise, elections cannot be held. Then the claim becomes elections cannot be held because people are too upset over Fallujah being flattenned.
The second obvious point is made by Hussain al-Shahristani, a scientist who was tortured in Saddam's Abu Ghraib for refusing to work on his weapons program:
"I don't understand how delaying elections will improve the security situation," Hussain al-Shahristani, a Shiite scientist who is close to al-Sistani. "I believe that the most important reason for the deteriorating security situation in the country is the postponement of elections."
It's very clear what the occupation and their puppet Allawi will move to cancel elections unless they are assured of being able to control the outcome. That's democracy for you, imperial style.
I understand the security situation is a real issue but the immediate step to take is obvious: withdraw the American forces, especially from the Sunni triangle. Their presence is probably the number one security problem. And how do airstrikes, tanks, and massive firepower improve the security situation?
But, the Marines seem to have no intention of withdrawing even from Fallujah:
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Senior Marine intelligence officers in Iraq are warning that if American troop levels in the Falluja area are significantly reduced during reconstruction there, as has been planned, insurgents in the region will rebound from their defeat. The rebels could thwart the retraining of Iraqi security forces, intimidate the local population and derail elections set for January, the officers say.They have further advised that despite taking heavy casualties in the weeklong battle, the insurgents will continue to grow in number, wage guerrilla attacks and try to foment unrest among Falluja's returning residents, emphasizing that expectations for improved conditions have not been met.
It is quite amazing what kind of outrageous propaganda gets reported on as serious news these days. Does anyone --any journalist who's actually there, these Marine officers, anyone-- actually doubt that every man, women and child in Fallujah would like the Marines to leave? Especially given the destruction unleashed upon their city? Yet the Marines insist they must stay, otherwise, elections "will be derailed" in January -- when it's clear that if the Marines stay either people will not return at all or, if they return, there will be constant attacks on the U.S. forces -- at which point we will declare the area too unsafe to hold elections, of course.
Posted by zeynep at November 18, 2004 08:31 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.underthesamesun.org/mt-tb.cgi/306
Comments
I have been saying this for months -- that the US wants the nation to be in chaos because it allows it to continue having its puppet regime run things. Free and fair elections will likely result in leadership not so subservient to US interests. What does serve US interests is having an iron fist leader like Saddam, as Thomas Friedman once wrote, but one who serves us.
Posted by: Colin at November 18, 2004 10:35 AM
"Does anyone...actually doubt that every man, women and child in Fallujah would like the Marines to leave?"
They may have some popular support but surely you don't believe this rhetoric any more than the propaganda on the other side?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1359782,00.html
Such is the fear that the heavily armed militants held over Fallujah that many of the residents who emerged from the ruins welcomed the US marines, despite the massive destruction their firepower had inflicted on their city.
A man in his sixties, half-naked and his underwear stained with blood from shrapnel wounds from a US munition, cursed the insurgents as he greeted the advancing marines on Saturday night.
"I wish the Americans had come here the very first day and not waited eight months," he said, trembling. Nearby, a mosque courtyard had been used as a weapons store by the militants.
Posted by: greg at November 18, 2004 05:05 PM
Some more from that article:
"It was horrible," he told an AFP reporter."We suffered from the bombings. Innocent people died or were wounded by the bombings.
"But we were happy you did what you did because Fallujah had been suffocated by the Mujahidin. Anyone considered suspicious would be slaughtered. We would see unknown corpses around the city all the time."
The same story of arbitrary executions was told by another resident, found by US troops cowering in his home with his brother and his family.
Posted by: greg at November 18, 2004 05:07 PM
yeah, 'cause any paper owned by rupert murdoch is always a great source of relatively objective reporting.
Posted by: liz at November 18, 2004 06:48 PM
I heard on Fox News today that there were NO civilian casulties. No sense confusing people with reality.
Posted by: Terry at November 18, 2004 07:36 PM
...this is... so... deeply... painful...
but in a certain sense I agree with Greg.
I think Zeynep overstated matters. You could probably find SOMEONE in Fallujah who would like the marines to stay. Indeed, that Times story (which is partly from AFP) may be quite accurate. The fact that Murdoch owns it tells you something but not that every single thing in it is a lie. For instance, the Telegraph -- which is truly a shameful piece of trash with reporters who are likely on the payroll of British intelligence and in any case often write unadulterated propaganda -- STILL carries some good reporting from time to time. It's a complicated world.
Now having said that, let me say why I believe that in the larger sense Zeynep is right and Greg is wrong.
1. You can find SOME genuine evidence for absolutely anything you want to believe. During World War II, you could have found Jews who would have told you how much they admired Hitler and how lucky the Jewish people were to have him as Fuhrer.
A favorite trick of all deceptive media is to focus on outliers, and make them appear the norm. There truly were Iranians who would have welcomed Iraq conquering Iran in the eighties, and I bet you Baathist papers ran interviews with them.
If it's not possible to make outliers appear the norm, deceptive media will at least give them far more weight than they deserve, so a 1/99 split is presented as 50/50.
I suspect something like this is going on with this Times story.
2. Even if there WERE many people in Fallujah who are glad the marines are there (which I highly doubt), that misses the forest for the twigs. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, Islamists there grew greatly in power, both because of Soviet brutality and because of the aid they received from outsiders (the US, Pakistan, etc.). So I'm sure there were cases where cities were taken over by the Islamists and Islamists oppressed people there to the point that some residents were glad to see the Soviets occupy such cities.
Greg has the mindset of a faithful member of the Soviet communist party, who would seize upon any sign of this and say: "See! We're doing the right thing!" But of course he'd be blind to the fact that it was the Soviet occupation itself that gave extreme Islamists in Afghan society such power.
I have spoken.
Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at November 19, 2004 03:04 AM
Ok, I overstated for rhetorical purposes. You could perhaps find someone. And I have no doubt some of the insurgents made life very unpleasant for some of the people of Fallujah. As I keep pointing out "the resistance" is a mixed bag. But even as such, "the resistance" seems to enjoy broad support among the populace whereas the occupation and the Allawi enjoys almost none. (And the Kurds are merely trying to ensure a set up that they can survive under.)
And also, I believe the Tawhid and Jihad people (the group Zarqawi is allegedly heading) are probably not interested as much in opposing the occupation as using the occupation in fighting against their perceived enemies -- which seems to include most of humanity. Still, my point is that it's a good guess to assume the Marines are not welcome in Fallujah and their presence will just further inflame the people whose town lies in ruins.
Posted by: zeynep at November 19, 2004 02:06 PM
Realistically the fact that the paper is owned by Rupert Murdoch just means they decide to run the story whereas another paper might spike it. He doesn't actually get to write the articles. It's not even written by a staff writer, AP and AFP (hardly a hotbed of pro-Americanism, the AFP).
I think you're fooling yourself to think the Baathist party would run interviews of Iranian outliers. They would just make them up out of whole cloth. Why bother finding actual people to interview?
As biased as I believe the typical journalist is, I don't think most western journalists would simply make up stuff. They might parrot propaganda, they might fall for a staged scene, they might editorialize in a report. But I think it's likely the quotes here are real.
I don't have any real feeling for what percent of the population supports the insurgents. I don't think you can get a good feeling from the reports we see. The problem is that 5-10% is a huge percentage. 95% of the (original) population of Fallujah could support the Americans and that would still leave 15,000 fighters. And of course as civilians (most of them were allowed) the fighters would have become a larger percentage of the remaining population.
But in your analogy to Jews under Hitler you're talking about the minority persecuted population. The analagous peoples here are the women, sufis, etc being terrorized by these warlords. Even if they do have the support of the local population that's more akin to Hitler having won elections in Germany.
Posted by: greg at November 20, 2004 12:59 PM