Die, Then Vote.
This Is Falluja
By Naomi Klein
13 November, 2004
The
Guardian
The
hip-hop mogul P Diddy announced at the weekend that his "Vote or
Die" campaign will live on. The voter registration drive during
the US presidential elections was, he said, merely "phase one,
step one for us to get people engaged".
Fantastic. I have
a suggestion for phase two: P Diddy, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio
and the rest of the self-described "coalition of the willing"
should take their chartered jet and fly to Falluja, where their efforts
are desperately needed. But first they are going to need to flip the
slogan from "Vote or Die!" to "Die, then Vote!"
Because that is
what is happening there. Escape routes have been sealed off, homes are
being demolished, and an emergency health clinic has been razed - all
in the name of preparing the city for January elections. In a letter
to United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, the US-appointed Iraqi
prime minister Iyad Allawi explained that the all-out attack was required
"to safeguard lives, elections and democracy in Iraq."
With all the millions
spent on "democracy-building" and "civil society"
in Iraq, it has come to this: if you can survive attack by the world's
only superpower, you get to cast a ballot. Fallujans are going to vote,
goddammit, even if they all have to die first.
And make no mistake:
it is Fallujans who are under the gun. "The enemy has got a face.
He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja," marine Lt Col Gareth Brandl
told the BBC. Well, at least he admitted that some of the fighters actually
live in Falluja, unlike Donald Rumsfeld, who would have us believe that
they are all from Syria and Jordan. And since US army vehicles are blaring
recordings forbidding all men between the ages of 15 and 50 from leaving
the city, it would suggest that there are at least a few Iraqis among
what CNN now obediently describes as the "anti-Iraqi forces".
Elections in Iraq
were never going to be peaceful, but they did not need to be an all-out
war on voters either. Mr Allawi's Rocket the Vote campaign is the direct
result of a disastrous decision made one year ago. On November 11 2003,
Paul Bremer, then chief US envoy to Iraq, flew to Washington to meet
George Bush. The two men were concerned that if they kept their promise
to hold elections in Iraq within the coming months, the country would
fall into the hands of insufficiently pro-American forces.
That would defeat
the purpose of the invasion, and it would threaten President Bush's
re-election chances. At that meeting, a revised plan was hatched: elections
would be delayed for more than a year, and in the meantime, Iraq's first
"sovereign" government would be hand-picked by Washington.
The plan would allow Mr Bush to claim progress on the campaign trail,
while keeping Iraq safely under US control.
In the US, Mr Bush's
claim that "freedom is on the march" served its purpose, but
in Iraq, the plan led directly to the carnage we see today.
Mr Bush likes to
paint the forces opposed to the US presence in Iraq as enemies of democracy.
In fact, much of the uprising can be traced directly to decisions made
in Washington to stifle, repress, delay, manipulate and otherwise thwart
the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people.
Yes, democracy has
genuine opponents in Iraq, but before George Bush and Paul Bremer decided
to break their central promise to hand over power to an elected Iraqi
government, these forces were isolated and contained. That changed when
Mr Bremer returned to Baghdad and tried to convince Iraqis that they
weren't yet ready for democracy.
Mr Bremer argued
that the country was too insecure to hold elections, and besides, there
were no voter rolls. Few were convinced. In January 2004, 100,000 Iraqis
peacefully took to the streets of Baghdad, and 30,000 more did so in
Basra. Their chant was "Yes, yes elections. No, no selections."
At the time, many argued that Iraq was safe enough to have elections
and pointed out that the lists from the Saddam-era oil-for-food programme
could serve as voter rolls. But Mr Bremer wouldn't budge and the UN
- scandalously and fatefully - backed him up.
Writing in the Wall
Street Journal, Hussain al-Shahristani, chairman of the standing committee
of the Iraqi National Academy of Science (who was imprisoned under Saddam
Hussein for 10 years), accurately predicted what would happen next.
"Elections will be held in Iraq, sooner or later," he wrote.
"The sooner they are held, and a truly democratic Iraq is established,
the fewer Iraqi and American lives will be lost."
Ten months and thousands
of lost Iraqi and American lives later, elections are scheduled to take
place with part of the country in the grip of yet another invasion and
much of the rest of it under martial law. As for the voter rolls, the
Allawi government is planning to use the oil-for-food lists, just as
was suggested and dismissed a year ago.
So it turns out
that all of the excuses were lies: if elections can be held now, they
most certainly could have been held a year ago, when the country was
vastly calmer. But that would have denied Washington the chance to install
a puppet regime in Iraq, and possibly would have prevented George Bush
from winning a second term.
Is it any wonder
that Iraqis are sceptical of the version of democracy being delivered
to them by US troops, or that elections have come to be seen not as
tools of liberation but as weapons of war?
First, Iraq's promised
elections were sacrificed in the interest of George Bush's re-election
hopes; next, the siege of Falluja itself was crassly shackled to these
same interests. The fighter planes didn't even wait an hour after George
Bush finished his acceptance speech to begin the air attack on Falluja.
The city was bombed at least six times through the next day and night.
With voting safely over in the US, Falluja could be destroyed in the
name of its own upcoming elections.
In another demonstration
of their commitment to freedom, the first goal of the US soldiers in
Falluja was to ambush the city's main hospital. Why? Apparently because
it was the source of the "rumours" about high civilian casualties
the last time US troops laid siege to Falluja, sparking outrage in Iraq
and across the Arab world. "It's a centre of propaganda,"
an unnamed senior American officer told the New York Times. Without
doctors to count the dead, the outrage would presumably be muted - except
that, of course, the attacks on hospitals have sparked their own outrage,
further jeopardising the legitimacy of the upcoming elections.
According to the
New York Times, the Falluja general hospital was easy to capture, since
the doctors and patients put up no resistance. There was, however, one
injury: "An Iraqi soldier who accidentally discharged his Kalashnikov
rifle, injuring his lower leg."
I think that means
he shot himself in the foot. He's not the only one.
· Naomi Klein
is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows
www.nologo.org