Tom Hull: Nir Rosen: In the Belly of the Green Bird

I've read books in a row about Iraq. They reveal a great deal about how the Bush-Cheney invasion and occupation went over the deep end. The reading order helps drive home a story of progressive damage and decay, both by moving forward in time and by shifting the focus more and more to the Iraqi resistance. The books:

Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (2006, Pantheon)

Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (2005, Henry Holt)

Nir Rosen, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006, Free Press)

These three books track one important vector in the progression of the occupation: namely, how the US first underestimated then thoughtlessly and recklessly amplified popular Iraqi resistance to the Bush-Cheney administration's vain and arrogant revolution -- also known as the Occupation. Other vectors are worth exploring: the selling of the war has been largely documented, although there is certainly more dirt to be revealed; the crooked intentions and gross malfeasance of the CPA and the reconstruction debacle still is largely undocumented, although its consequences are in plain sight; the interactions and interests of other countries and NGOs have been little explored; a comprehensive detailing of the damage to Iraq's society and economy from all quarters would be an eye opener. But the main thing these books show is that the disaster caused by the invasion and occupation was completely predictable on the basis of little more than a broad sense of history and a bit of insight into human nature.

We now know that when US forces invaded the Iraqi people were divided on the issue of whether to welcome their self-proclaimed liberators. We can look at this division as offering a window of opportunity when the US could have proven its good intentions. Too bad Bush-Cheney had no such good intentions, at least that offered anything most Iraqis might actually want -- stability, order, justice, progress, peace, prosperity. But even if the US actually meant well, the division was deep enough that it would sideline those intentions. Shadid and Rosen quote various Iraqi proverbs, but an American one suffices here: "when you're up to your ass in alligators, it's hard to remember that you got in to drain the swamp." The fact is that it's impossible to do good works when people are shooting at you. And we're not just talking about Iraqis shooting at their American liberators here -- the Americans were the ones who came in shooting from day one. It also seems to be impossible to only hit what you're shooting at, and it's even harder to know that what you're shooting at is the real problem. As it turns out, the scatter spreads, eventually roping everyone into the fight.

That's pretty much what happened. A lot of things made it predictable, but one of the most basic is built into the very nature of armed forces everywhere, Americans included. John Powers, in Sore Winners: American Idols, Patriotic Shoppers, and Other Strange Species in George Bush's America, has a relevant footnote citing Colin Powell on Vietnam:

Powell is no softy, as he shows in this rumination on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam: "I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male. If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able batallion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

The obvious conclusion is that people with dull perceptions of right and wrong, especially ones armed to the teeth, shouldn't be set loose in someone else's country. Nir Rosen mostly writes about Iraqis, but he has one chapter on how American soldiers operate, called "If They're Not Guilty Now, They Will Be Next Time: Fall 2003." Here's a long quote (pp. 98-100), but it says a lot about the US occupation:

Inside the intelligence section of the army's civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board, I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American soldiers suppressing Muslim-Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig's blood and shot some Muslim rebels to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs is supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, acting as intermediaries between the two, restore normalcy, and empower local institutions. One brigade commander in Tikrit explained to a civil affairs major that "I am not here to win hearts and minds; I am here to kill the enemy." He refrained from providing his civil affairs team with security, so they could not operate. Not far, in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it. He gave half a dozen families only a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two thirteen-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash. The American rule was that anybody digging on roadsides would be shot. It became common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as "material witnesses" when the suspects were not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers left notes for the suspects, letting them know their families would be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on military vehicles routinely shot at Iraqi cars that approached too fast or too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. "They were up to no good," they would explain. Every commander became a law unto himself. A war crime to one was legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country's methods for suppressing an urban anti-occupation insurgency, the army implemented the lessons they learned and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents. The Fourth Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. Down south, in Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son.

"Americans think they can just throw new paint on the walls and it will win people over," said one expert. Their tactics of handing out candy to children during th eday and arresting their fathers at night were not winning hearts or minds. It was hard to be patient when mosques were raided, protestors shot, innocent families gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened soldiers in vehicles. It was hard to be patient in hours of traffic jams that Americans caused by closing off so many main roads to guard their facilities or because of "incidents." Their vehicles blocked the roads and they answered no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars were forced to drive "wrong side," as Iraqis called it, nearly killing each other. Iraqis became experts in walking over the concertina wire that divided so much of their cities; first one foot pressed the razor wire down, then the other stepped over. They were experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage, at sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that could be reused.

The fear of death was constantly there when the soldier in a Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aimed his machine gun at you, when the aggressive armed white men in the SUVs raced by, running you off the road, scowling behind their wraparound sunglasses, shooting at any car coming too close, when the soldier at the checkpoint aimed his machine gun at you. Iraqis were reminded at all times who had control over their lives, who could take them with impunity. In the summer of 2003 hundreds of Iraqis would approach the Green Zone, seat of the former dictator and his current replacements, looking for jobs. The American soldiers spoke no Arabic and their Iraqi interlocutors no English. One frustrated American soldier raised his M16 and pointed the barrel at an Iraqi man's face, telling him he was trained in killing people, not career counseling. Elsewhere that summer, an old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad International Airport, or BIAP, as Saddam International Airport is now known. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the immense soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to "get the fuck away." She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman, and shouting at her that if she did not leave "we will kill you."

Morale was low among the soldiers, who had no clear mission and viewed Iraqis as "the enemy" through a prism of "us and them." An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of "a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training, or plan and who are operating in a vacuum."

In a bathroom of an important Washington-based and U.S.-funded democratization institute I found in the bidet by the toilet a thick orange book entitled The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Koran. It was next to a brochure explaining that Arabic is written from right to left and a guide to focus groups. It was from these focus group results that the people in the Green Zone learned "what Iraqis want."

Prowar flacks keep insisting that we only hear the bad news from the occupation, never the good. The problem with this is that good news and bad news don't cancel each other out. Bad news is poison; mix that in with food or drink -- good news -- and you still have poison. It may be more tempting, but you have to dilute it extremely to overcome the toxicity. It's easy enough to find examples of US commanders who are conscientious, who understand that they need to help Iraqis and who try to act honorably, but even they are in over their heads, and the brass doesn't really support them -- to do so would mean that they'd have to knuckle down on every commander who makes the US unwelcome in Iraq. Do that and they'd get a mutiny, but that's not even the toughest aspect of the problem: the brass, and the administration, have only the slightest idea what makes them so unwelcome. The only insight the politicos have into this problem is their skill at manipulating US public opinion, as if Iraqis are following US polls to help make up their own minds.

Still, it goes on. I saw Nir Rosen and two Iraqi expatriates on PBS last night. Rosen reported that he had just got back from Iraq, and that the civil war there had grown more ominous than ever. In particular, he pointed out that Moqtada Sadr's Mahdi Army has to a large extent taken over the Iraqi police, and that Sadr has given up any interest in brokering a united Sunni-Shiite opposition to the US; now he's just another thug warlord. The two expats tried to hang on to whatever threads of hope they could find -- surely self-interest will favor cooperation over civil war. One expressed hope that direct talks between Zalmay Khalilzad and Iran will lead to some kind of breakthrough. I can't imagine what that might be. (Maybe he wants to become ambassador to Tehran? Before or after the apocalypse?) One effect of breaking Iraq into so many pieces is that none of its neighbors have the ability, much less the interest, in putting it back together again. Aside from the political embarrassment that would follow letting their defenses down, I doubt that anyone in the Bush-Cheney administration much cares either. They've reduced Iraq to the level of war-torn Afghanistan, or maybe even Liberia.

posted 2006-05-23