American Imperialism
Off The Rails
By Haroon Siddiqui
Toronto
Star
31 October, 2003
More
people dead in Iraq proves that the American occupation of Iraq is working.
That's what George W. Bush says.
"The more successful
we are on the ground, the more the killers will react," he said
following the latest terrorist attacks. "The killers can't stand
the thought of a free society."
Deputy Defence Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz sounds the same note. The chief architect of the war
on Iraq, who on Sunday barely escaped its terrorist aftermath in Baghdad,
claimed that everything is just swell in his new duchy.
The bravado goes
well beyond the need to say the right things about staying the course.
Or the standard political practice of keeping your chin up when the
chips are down. (Ernie Eves, watching his administration hit the skids:
"The Tories are not toast." Barbara Hall, looking at sinking
polls: "I always expected it to be tight.")
The Bush administration
is taking its pre-war dishonesty to new heights. After manipulating
intelligence, exaggerating the Iraqi threat, dishonestly tying it to
Al Qaeda and ignoring its own internal pre-war warnings about post-war
chaos, it is busy insisting that night is day.
Billboards across
Baghdad proclaim, "The city is getting better." Iraqis are
as incredulous as Muslims around the globe after being subjected over
the last year to a $240 million State Department ad campaign soft-selling
America.
Imperialism by sloganeering
may be amusing. What is not is Washington's take on the terrorism now
permeating the land where it didn't exist until the Americans took control
of it.
Over the last six
months, America has blamed the steadily rising resistance and terrorism
in Iraq on a changing cast of characters:
The thousands of
criminals released from jail by Saddam Hussein in his final days.
"Dead-enders,"
"bitter-enders" and "Baathist remnants." The assertion
was duly augmented by breathless American media accounts from the "Sunni
triangle," home of Saddam loyalists.
Troublesome Shiites,
who were said to have the support of the even more troublesome Shiite
Iran. Donald Rumsfeld even warned the Tehran mullahs not to intervene.
"Fedayeen,"
said to be an Iran-backed militia.
Guerrillas of Ansar
al-Islam, a religious outfit battling the secular Kurds. But the Ansar
were soon eliminated by American bombing.
Al Qaeda, said to
be infiltrating from Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia or all three.
They are said to
number 1,000. Or 2,000. Or 3,000. Or maybe only "a very, very small
percentage" of the resisters, according to Maj.-Gen. Raymond Odierno
last week. "Iraqis do not like Iranians here. They don't like Syrians."
By last Saturday,
however, another American commander, Brig.-Gen. Martin Dempsey, was
saying that he had "not seen any infusion of foreign fighters in
Baghdad."
But by Monday's
blasts, Brig.-Gen. Mark Herling had this assessment: "We've not
seen attacks we could attribute to foreign fighters before. We've seen
those today."
On Tuesday, Bush
cited both Saddam supporters and "foreign terrorists" of unnamed
origins coming over from Iran and Syria (even as his biggest cheerleader,
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's special envoy to Iraq, was saying that
neither country had a hand in the terrorism).
Do the Americans,
from the president down, know what they are talking about?
And does the memory
of the American media ever stretch beyond yesterday?
Despite the presence
of 130,000 U.S. troops, 22,000 other coalition troops, tens of thousands
of newly trained Iraqi security forces, an unknown number of FBI agents
and the endless interrogation of thousands of Iraqi detainees, there's
no telling yet who the terrorists are.
Bush has ordered
more barriers and barricades at susceptible sites in Iraq. That should
help. What likely won't, is the $335 million high-tech spying gear
blimps, drones, electronic jammers, etc. announced by Wolfowitz.
Gizmos are not what America lacks but human intelligence, common sense
and the right policies.
America is losing
the war in Iraq despite having won it, so monumental has been its misrule.
Besides turning
general Iraqi goodwill into outright hostility, it has managed to alienate
even its handpicked Iraqi Governing Council on a range of issues, from
delaying the long-promised elections, to inviting Turkish troops.
Getting foreign
troops to relieve U.S. soldiers offers a perfect example of Bush's tin
ear.
After failing to
strong-arm Turkey into joining the war, he leaned on the new government
there to ignore public opinion and agree to send peacekeepers. But,
given the Ottoman occupation of Iraq and contemporary Turkish oppression
of Kurds, Iraqis balked. The people of Turkey do not want their troops
to go, nor do the people of Iraq want them to come. But Bush persists.
Pakistan was ready
to dispatch a battalion, if paid for. India, miffed at Bush's post-9/11
tilt to arch-rival Pakistan, would have loved nothing more than winning
U.S. gratitude. But both backed off due to domestic anti-Americanism
engendered by his policies.
Bush is right to
claim the situation in Iraq is improving. It is bound to, considering
how bad it has been. But he remains mired in a quagmire.