Meet
the New Iraqi Strongman:
Paul Bremer
By
Robert Fisk
Counterpunch.org
10 September, 2003
Paul
Bremer's taste in clothes symbolises "the new Iraq" very well.
He wears a business suit and combat boots. As the proconsul of Iraq,
you might have thought he'd have more taste. But he is a famous "anti-terrorism"
expert who is supposed to be rebuilding the country with a vast army
of international companies-most of them American, of course-and creating
the first democracy in the Arab world. Since he seems to be a total
failure at the "anti-terrorist" game-50 American soldiers
killed in Iraq since President George Bush declared the war over is
not exactly a blazing success-it is only fair to record that he is making
a mess of the "reconstruction" bit as well.
In theory, the news
is all great. Oil production is up to one million barrels a day; Baghdad
airport is preparing to re-open; every university in Iraq is functioning
again ; the health services are recovering rapidly; and mobile phones
have made their first appearance in Baghdad. There's an Iraqi Interim
Council up and hobbling.
But there's a kind
of looking-glass fantasy to all these announcements from the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA), the weasel-worded title with which the
American-led occupation powers cloak their decidedly undemocratic and
right-wing credentials. Take the oil production figures. Lieutenant-General
Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, even chose to use these statistics
in his "great day for Iraq" press conference last week, the
one in which he triumphantly announced that 200 soldiers in Mosul had
killed the sons of Saddam rather than take them prisoner. But Lt-Gen
Sanchez was talking rubbish. Although oil production was indeed standing
at 900,000 barrels per day in June (albeit 100,000bpd less than the
Sanchez version), it fell this month to 750,000. The drop was caused
by power cuts--which are going to continue for much of the year-and
export smuggling. The result? Iraq, with the world's second-highest
reserves of oil, is now importing fuel from other oil producing countries
to meet domestic demands. Then comes Baghdad airport. Sure, it's going
to re-open. But it just happens that the airport, with its huge American
military base and brutal US prison camp, comes under nightly grenade
and mortar attack. No major airline would dream of flying its aircraft
into the facility in these circumstances. So, weird things are happening.
The Iraqis are told, for example, that the first flights will be run
by "Transcontinental Airlines" (a name oddly similar to the
CIA's transport airline in Vietnam), which is reported to be a subsidiary
of "US Airlines" and the only flight will be between Baghdad
and-wait for it-the old East Berlin airport of Schonefeld. A British
outfit calling itself "Mayhill Aviation" has printed advertisements
in the Iraqi press saying that it intends to fly a Boeing 747 once a
week from Gatwick to Basra, a route which suggests that it is going
to be British military personnel and their families who end up using
the plane.
Open universities
are good news. And few would blame Bremer for summarily firing the 436
professors who were members of the Baath party. In the same vein, the
CPA annulled the academic system whereby student party members would
automatically receive higher grades. This is real de-Baathification.
But then it turned out that there wouldn't be enough qualified professors
to go round. Quite a number of the 436 were party men in name only and
received their degrees at foreign universities. So, at Mustansiriyah
University, for example, the very same purged professors were re-hired
after filling out forms routinely denouncing the Baath party. Bremer
seems to have a habit of reversing his own decisions; having triumphantly
announced that he'd sacked the entire Iraqi army, he was humiliatingly
forced to put them back on rations in case they all decided to attack
US soldiers in Iraq.
Health services?
Well, yes, the new Iraqi health service is being encouraged to rehabilitate
the country's hospitals and clinics. But a mysterious American company
called Abt Associates has turned up in Baghdad to give "Ministry
of Health Technical Assistance" support to the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) and "rapid response grants to address health
needs in-country". It has decreed that all medical equipment must
accord with US technical standards and modifications-which means that
all new hospital equipment must come from America, not from Europe.
And then there's the mobile phones. Just over a week ago, my roaming
Lebanese cellular pinged into life at midnight and, after a few hours
of scrambled voice communication, picked up mobile companies in Kuwait,
Qatar and Bahrain (depending on where you happened to be in Baghdad).
Less than a week later, however, the Americans ordered the system shut
down because the Bahrain operating company, by opening its service so
early, was supposedly not giving other bidders a fair chance at the
contract. Those other companies are largely American.
Of course, Iraqis
protest at much of this. They protest in the streets, especially against
the aggressive American military raids, and they protest in the press.
Much good does it do them. When ex-Iraqi soldiers demonstrated outside
Bremer's office at the former Presidential Palace, US troops shot two
of them dead. When Falujah residents staged a protest as long ago as
April, the American military shot 16 dead. Another 11 were later gunned
down in Mosul. During two demonstrations against the presence of US
troops near the shrine of Imam Hussein at Karbala last weekend, US soldiers
shot dead another three. "What a wonderful thing it is to speak
your own minds," Lt-Gen Sanchez said of the demonstrations in Iraq
last week. Maybe he was exhibiting a black sense of humour.
All this might be
incomprehensible if one forgot that the whole illegal Iraqi invasion
had been hatched up by a bunch of right-wing and pro-Israeli ideologues
in Washington, and that Bremer- though not a member of their group--fits
squarely into the same bracket. Hence Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime
instigators of this war-he was among the loudest to beat the drum over
the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist-is now trying to deflect
attention from his disastrous advice to the US administration by attacking
the media, in particular that pesky, uncontrollable channel, Al-Jazeera.
Its reports, he now meretriciously claims, amount to "incitement
to violence"-knowing full well, of course, that Bremer has officially
made "incitement to violence" an excuse to close down any
newspaper or TV station he doesn't like.
Indeed, newspapers
that have offended the Americans have been raided by US troops in the
same way that the Americans have conducted raids on the offices of the
Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leader, Ayatollah
Mohammed al-Hakim, is a member of the famous Interim Council-not exactly
a bright way to keep a prominent Shia cleric on board.
But the Council
itself is already the subject of much humour in Baghdad, not least because
its first acts included the purchase of cars for all its members; a
decision to work out of a former presidential palace; and-this the lunatic
brainchild of the Pentagon-supported and convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi-the
declaring of a national holiday every 9 April to honour Iraq's 'liberation"
from Saddam.
This sounds fine
in America and Britain. What could be more natural than celebrating
the end of the Beast of Baghdad? But Iraqis, a proud people who have
resisted centuries of invasions, realised that their new public holiday
would mark the first day of their country's foreign occupation. "From
its very first decision," an Iraqi journalist told me with contempt,
"the Interim Council de-legitimised itself." And so there
has begun to grow the faint but sinister shadow of a different kind
of "democracy" for Iraq, one in which a new ruler will have
to use a paternalistic rule-moderation mixed with autocracy. a la Ataturk
-to govern Iraq and allow the Americans to go home. Inevitably, it has
been one of the American commentators from the same failed lunatic right
as Wolfowitz-Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum think tank, which
promotes American interests in the region-to express this in its most
chilling form. He now argues that ''democratic-minded autocrats can
guide [Iraq] to full democracy better than snap elections''. What Iraq
needs, he says, is "a democratically-minded [sic] strongman who
has real authority", who would be "politically moderate"
but "operationally tough" (sic again).
Of course, it's
difficult to resist a cynical smile at such double standards, although
their meaning is frightening enough. What does "operationally tough"
mean, other than secret policemen, interrogation rooms and torturers
to keep the people in order- which is exactly what Saddam set up when
he took power, supported as he was at the time by the US and Britain?
What does "strongman" mean other than a total reversal of
the promise of "democracy" which Bush and Tony Blair made
to the Iraqi people?
Democracies are
not led by autocrats, and autocrats are not led by anyone but themselves.
The Pipes version of the strongman democracy, by the way, involves the
withdrawal of American troops to '`military bases away from population
centres" where they "serve as the military partner of the
new government [sic] guaranteeing its ultimate security..." In
other words, US forces would hide in the desert to avoid further casualties
unless it was necessary to storm back to Baghdad to get rid of the "strongman"
if he failed to obey American orders.
But today Bremer
is the strongman, and under his rule US troops are losing hearts and
minds by the bucketful with each new, blundering and often useless raid
against the civilians of Iraq. Still obsessed with capturing-or, rather,
killing-Saddam, they are destroying any residual affection for them
among the population. On a recent operation in the town of Dhuluaya,
for example, two innocent men were killed and the Americans' Iraqi informer-originally
paraded before those he was to betray in a hood to keep his identity
secret-was executed by his own father. The enterprising newspaper Iraq
Today found that the "intelligence" officers of the 4th Infantry
Division even left behind mug shots, aerial reconnaissance photographs
and secret operational documents-complete with target houses and briefing
notes-at the scene. The paper, in the true tradition of journalism,
gleefully published the lot, including the comment of the father of
Sabah Salem Kerbul, the young informer who worked for the Americans
during "Operation Peninsula Strike". He shot his son first
in the foot and then in the head. "I have killed him," he
said. "But he is still a part of my heart."
Indeed, anarchic
violence is now being embedded in Iraqi society in a way it never was
under the genocidal Saddam. Scarcely a day goes by when I do not encounter
the evidence of this in my daily reporting work in Baghdad. Visiting
the Yarrnouk hospital in Baghdad on Monday to seek the identity of civilians
killed by American troops in Mansur the previous day, I came across
four bodies Iying out in the yard beside the building in the 50C heat.
All had been shot.
No one knew their identities. They were all young, save one who might
have been a middle-aged man, with a hole in his sock. Three days earlier,
on a visit to a local supermarket, I noticed that the woman cashier
was wearing black. Yes, she said, because her brother had been murdered
a week earlier. No one knew why.
In a conversation
with my driver's father--who runs a photocopying shop near Bremer's
palace headquarters--a young man suddenly launched into praise for Saddam
Hussein. When I asked him why, he said that his father's new car had
just been stolen by armed men. Trying to contact an ex-prisoner illegally
held by the Americans at his home in a slum suburb of Baghdad, I drove
to the mukhtar's house to find the correct address. The mukhtar is the
local mayor. But I was greeted by a group of long-faced relatives who
told me that I could not speak to the mukhtar--because he had been assassinated
the previous night.
So, if this is my
experience in just the past four days, how many murders and thefts are
occurring across Baghdad--or, indeed, across Iraq? Only two days ago,
for example, five men accused of selling alcohol were reportedly murdered
in Basra. Again, there was no publicity, no official statement, no death
toll from the CPA. Only a few days ago, I sat in the conference hall
that the occupation authorities use for their daily press briefings,
follies that are used to condemn "irresponsible reporting",
but which record only a fraction of the violence of the previous 24
hours- violence which, of course, is well known to the authorities.
And there was a
disturbing moment when Charles Heatley, the British spokesman from the
Foreign Office, appointed by Tony Blair at the behest of Alastair Campbell,
talked about the reports of abduction and rape in Iraq. He acknowledged
that there had been some cases, but then-I enjoyed the beautiful way
in which he tried to destroy any journalistic interest in this terrible
subject -talked about the number of "rumours" that turned
out to be untrue when checked out. But this is not the experience of
The Independent, which in just one day recently discovered the identity
of one young woman who had been kidnapped, raped and then freed--only
to attempt suicide three times at her home. Another family gave the
paper a photograph of their abducted daughter in the hope that it might
be printed in the Iraqi press.
Why don't the occupation
authorities realise that Iraq cannot be "spun"? This country
is living a tragedy of epic proportions, and now-after its descent into
hell under Saddam-we are doomed to suffer its contagion. By our hubris
and by our lies and by our fantasies-including the fantasies of Tony
Blair-we are descending into the pit.
For the people of
Iraq, the next stage in their long suffering is under way. For us, a
new colonial humiliation, the like of which may well end the careers
of George Bush and Tony Blair, is coming. Of far more consequence is
that it is likely to end many innocent lives as well.
Robert Fisk is a
reporter for The Independent