Patrick Cockburn: The Occupation

Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (2006, Verso) is a short (229 pages) and succinct survey of the war from someone who was always outside the US sphere of influence. Cockburn had co-written a previous book on Iraq in the early '90s which made him none too fondly regarded by the Baathists. He entered Iraqi Kurdistan before the war started, and followed Kurdish and "coalition" troops into Kirkuk and Baghdad. He had various contacts with Iraqi exiles, allowing him to follow the run-up to the war as well as touch base later on.

A note on the dangers of journalism in Iraq (pp. 7-8):

The Green Zone in which all the American civilian officials lived was a macabre place, as cut off from the rest of Baghdad as if it had been built on a separate planet. Ghazi al-Yawer, briefly president of Iraq in 2004-5 and not a man notable for expressing critical views of the US and its allies, once remarked that the Green Zone bore 'the same relationship to the rest of Iraq as a safari park does to the real jungle'.

Paradoxically Iraq became so dangerous that journalists, however courageous, could not rebut claims that most of Iraq was safe without being kidnapped or killed themselves. Even with armed guards it was difficult to move. In the spring of 2006 I was in Mosul in northern Iraq, the largest Sunni Arab city, with a 3,000-strong Kurdish brigade of the Iraqi army. Even so it was considered too dangerous for them to go on patrol in daylight (night-time was safer because a rigorously enforced curfew started at 8 p.m., after which the soldiers shot at any person or vehicle moving on the streets). To cover the referendum on the constitution in October 2005 I got a special correspondent's pass from the Interior Ministry permitting me to drive around during the day-time curfew. 'I wouldn't use it if I were you,' warned the friendly official who handed it to me. 'Obviously if one of our policemen or soldiers suspects that you are a suicide bomber he'll open fire immediately, long before you can show him your little pass.'

On the Dec. 2002 London conference of Iraqi exiles (p. 32):

[I]t turned out that the US was going to see if it could rule Iraq on old-fashioned imperial lines and without sharing power with anybody in Iraq. It was always hoping to find a pro-American constituency of liberal, secular, middle-class, nationalist people -- preferably English-speaking. At the London conference it was already becoming plain that the US was uncomfortable with the likelihood that the main beneficiaries of the overthrow of Baathist rule would be Shia religious parties with close links to Iran like SCIRI and Dawa, though Dawa took the more nationalist line and looked to the Iraqi religious leaders for guidance. Over the next three years American officials tried many alternatives to these parties, but the Iraqis most acceptable to Washington usually turned out to have little support in, or knowledge of, their own country. The US found that the divisions among the Iraqi opposition stemmed not solely from the egotism and greed of its leaders but truly reflected the real religious and ethnic fragmentation of Iraq. Some Iraqis had a shrewd idea of what the US was getting itself into, but they were careful not to discourage American officials by emphasizing the risks of their Iraqi venture. Had less arrogant and better-informed people been in charge in Washington in 2003 they might possibly have paused at the edge of the quagmire before jumping in. As the London conference came to an end -- it agreed to reconvene in Kurdistan on January 15 -- an Iraqi friend attending it said: 'I have only one fear. It is that the Americans will realize at the last moment that attacking Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein is not in their own best interests.'

In early 2003 (pp. 35-36):

I spent the first six weeks of the year in Washington and was struck by how little the intense private doubts about Iraq and the war on terror, expressed by even the most establishment figures at dinner parties, ever made it into the papers and almost never on to television. Washington has always been notoriously inward-looking. But the cumulative picture created by the mass of misinformation and disinformation about Iraq and al-Qaeda and the terrorist threat in general had produced a picture of the outside world that was close to fantasy. [ . . . ]

The personality of George W. Bush explained much of the lack of knowledge of, or interest in, what was really happening in Iraq. Iraqi leaders who got as far as the Oval Office said they found him more intelligent than they expected but 'very, very strange'.

As Bremer took over (p. 68-69):

The assurances about Iraqis ruling Iraq were soon forgotten. Everything was to be controlled by US advisers with a few British assistants. Iraqis were to play a secondary role. The reason for the American change of tack was that the war had been so easy. The US thought it had no need for friends or allies. There was also a strategic reason for keeping all power in its own hands. The US had hesitated to advance on Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991 because it feared he would be succeeded by a Shia regime, probably highly Islamic in direction and close to Iran. Twelve years later Washington faced the same dilemma. Some 60 per cent of Iraqis were Shia. Their demand was for elections which they were bound to win. The US reaction was to announce that a poll could not be organized for several years. Washington felt it had the strength in Iraq to move pieces around on the Iraqi political chessboard as it wished. Democracy was on the agenda but only if it produced a government supportive of Washington. Asked at the end of April 2003 about the visibly growing influence of the Shia clergy, a senior member of the US administration said: 'We don't want Persian fundamentalism to gain any foothold. We want to find more moderate clerics and move them into positions of influence.' He assumed that members of the Shia hierarchy, far and away the most influential leaders in their community, could be promoted and demoted at the whim of the US.

More (pp. 72-73):

There was something dysfunctional about the occupation from the beginning. It could not carry out important projects even when its own most crucial interests were involved. A friend of mine called Ali, long in exile but a specialist in broadcasting, was hired to help create a pro-American satellite television station. This was very important for the CPA, which complained continually that the al-Jezeera satellite channel was biased against it. Ali rapidly found that his task was made more difficult because the well-connected American company which had won the contract to establish the television station had never done so before. Experienced Iraqis who had previously worked in television in Baghdad could not be hired because they had been in the top ranks of the Baath party. 'The only person I was allowed to hire from the old Iraqi television was the man who looked after the parking lot,' lamented Ali. Desperately though the CPA needed the channel it was months before it got off the ground. (Though Bremer may also have been lucky; one Iraqi friend said, 'If more Iraqis had been able to hear his broadcasts about dissolving the army and purging the Baath party there would have been a revolution.')

(pp. 101-102):

For a few weeks American soldiers could be seen eating in Iraqi restaurants. It did not las long. Soldiers discovered they could not relax even for a moment. Across the road from my hotel was Baghdad University. One day a soldier joined a queue there to buy a soft drink. An Iraqi man came up to him and said 'Hello mister', drew a pistol from his pocket and fired. There were shouts of 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Great) from the crowd of students as the badly injured soldier was driven away from the university campus. He died later in hospital. These were still pinprick attacks but whenever I talked to Iraqis standing near the scene of an incident they always said they approved of what had happened. I had spent enough time covering guerrilla wars in Northern Ireland, Lebanon and Chechnya to sense that, with this level of public approval and the vacuum of authority throughout Iraq, the anti-American armed resistance would find it easy to grow rapidly.

(p. 108):

All the ingredients leading to an insurrection against the US occupation were present in those first crucial months of the invasion. I had witnessed the palpable hatred of the US army in Baghdad and Sunni areas of central Iraq. Even so the guerrilla war developed at surprising speed. After the British captured Baghdad in 1917 it was still three years before the Shia tribes of the mid-Euphrates rose in rebellion. Iraq is a mosaic of communities with different interests, but during the first disastrous year of the occupation the US showed a genius for offending everybody simultaneously. Even the Kurds, America's one reliable ally in the country, were outraged to discover that the Pentagon was hoping to bring in 10,000 Turkish troops to police western Iraq.

The successful US invasion was turning into a political catastrophe so swiftly because the occupation lacked legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis and the world. Investigative teams failed to find the Weapons of Mass Destruction which had been America's and Britain's justification for going to war. The only way Washington could have overthrown Saddam Hussein and avoided a backlash against occupation would have been to hand over ultimate control of the country to the UN as quickly as possible. But this was never feasible because the purpose of the war, int he eyes of the American right, both nationalist and neoconservative, was to show that the US was the sole superpower, and did not need the UN or any other allies.

Who were the suicide bombers? (p. 119):

The suicide bombers were usually non-Iraqis, with the majority coming from Saudi Arabia and others from Jordan, Syria or Egypt. They were motivated by Islamic fundamentalism and hatred of the occupation. It was the invasion of Iraq which radicalized them. An investigation into 300 young Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, showed that very few had any contact with al-Qaeda or any radical organization prior to 2003. Some thirty-six Saudis who did blow themselves up did so for the same reasons, according to the same study commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers. A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in International Affairs Centre in Israel, also concluded that almost all had been radicalized by Iraq alone.

On the later civil war (pp. 208-209):

Sectarian hatred was escalating rapidly. Until a few months before the bomb in Samarra, Iraqi friends used to say to me that Iraq was not like Lebanon. Now they were silent or asked what the Lebanese civil war had been like. Districts where Sunni and Shia had lived together peacefully for decades, if not centuries, were being torn apart in a few days. In the al-Amel neighbourhood in west Baghdad, mixed but with a Shia majority, Sunni householders found envelopes pushed under their doors with a Kalashnikov bullet inside and a letter telling them to leave immediately or be killed. It added that they must take all their goods which they could carry and only return later to sell their houses. The reaction to the letter, which could have been the work of one person, was immediate. The Sunni in al-Amel started barricading their streets. Several Shia families, believed to belong to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, were murdered the same day as the threatening letters were received. 'The local Sunni suspected those Shia of being behind the letters,' said my informant. 'Probably they called in the local resistance and asked them to kill the SCIRI people.'

In conclusion (pp. 221-222):

Much of this book has been about the peculiarities of Iraq and the mistakes made by Americans when occupying it. But not all the reasons which led Washington to invade were unique to the US. For the two years before 9/11 I lived in Moscow. I had seen how Vladimir Putin had risen from obscurity in 1999 in the weeks after four apartment buildings were mysteriously bombed in Moscow killing 300 people. Putin had presented himself as Russia's no-nonsense defender against terrorism. He used this threat to launch his own small victorious war against Chechnya and manipulated a minor threat tot he state to win and hold the presidency. He speedily demolished the free press. George W. Bush followed almost exactly in Putin's footsteps two years later in the wake of the September 11 destruction of the World Trade Center. Civil liberties were curtailed. The same authoritarian rhetoric was employed. War was declared on terrorism. The American and Russian governments, the two former protagonists in the Cold War, latched on to the same limited 'terrorist' threat to justify and expand their authority. Putin and Bush, though neither were ever in the army, started to walk with the same military swagger.

By 2006 part of the US establishment was searching for a scapegoat for failure in Iraq. The American generals had a point in saying that Rumsfeld should have been fired for incompetence but the same charge could be levelled at the whole of the Bush administration, starting with the president. the fact that nobody was fired underlined that the White House's priorities were ultimately to do with domestic politics and not strengthening America's position in the Middle East. This position is far weaker now than it was three years ago. The 'terrorists' with whom George W. Bush is meant to be at war have a base in Iraq that they yearned for but never secured in Afghanistan. Firing Rumsfeld or any other senior official would have been an open admission of how badly the war was going with possibly damaging electoral consequences. This was the pattern throughout the occupation. A series of misleading milestones -- the fictitious turnover of sovereignty in 2004, the elections of 2005 -- were put in place to give an illusory impression of progress. All the while the Iraqi state and society came ever closer to dissolution.

Actually, there's one more paragraph, about how the war exposed the limits of American power.

One more general comment about the Iraq war books so far. Most focus in the rise of the resistance, which peaked in the May 2004 Sunni and Shia revolts. Since then resistance has been continuous, and sectarian violence has only increased. The nominal change in sovereignty which took place with Bremer's departure in mid-2004 marked the end of daily CPA news briefings -- in effect, this was the acknowledgment that the era of "good news" was over in Iraq. In the post-Bremer era, the US has become more adept at riding out this catastrophe, even though the net effect is only to deepen it. This story has been severely underreported. In many ways, it's like Vietnam, where we focused on the faux optimism leading up to the Tet offensive and the end of Johnson's presidency, then ignored Nixon's protracted, cynical, brutal retreat, which by the end represented most of the damage to Vietnam and the region. From May 2004 on, the US has assumed a deadly game of defeat avoidance: first by backing off in Najaf and Fallujah, then by propping up an Iraqi face in place of the disgraced Bremer, then by standing up an Iraqi army that has primarily been a vehicle of civil war. That civil war has provided camouflage for reports on the resistance, and has contained the resistance by preventing any sort of unity between Sunnis and Shiites from forming. It has kept the Shia parties uncomfortably in the US camp, as they find themselves in need of US arms to protect their people. It's a dangerous and nasty game that the US is playing there, and it needs to be exposed. No doubt it will before long. But for now, the current spate of books, at least move us past the propaganda that led us into this despicable war.

posted 2006-02-18