Iraq- The West Shakes Up The Middle East

by Patrick Cockburn

  Yet war movies such as Saving Private Ryan give the impression that modern war is fought at point-blank range along the lines of the battle of Waterloo.

  Television or still photographs of real wars always look tame by comparison, which is why images such as the Soviet Army raising the red flag over the Reichstag or the French surrender had to be restaged for the cameras after the shooting had stopped.

  In practice, the television camera is an immensely influential but clumsy and misleading instrument for covering warfare. For instance, during the rout of the Iraqi army during the American invasion of 2003, there were frequent pictures of tanks on fire giving an impression that the Iraqi army had fought to the end. This was an important point to establish since, if Iraqi soldiers had refused to fight for Saddam Hussein, then they might not feel they had been defeated and be capable of resuming the war later on.

  I recall climbing on top of burnt-out tanks on the road north of Baghdad in the last days of the war and finding no bodies inside. The tanks had been abandoned before they were hit from the air. In other words, there was probably a lot more fighting to come.

  The most frustrating moment for me and many other reporters came as the war escalated in 2004. It soon became clear that the US-led occupation forces controlled only islands of territory and their military position was deteriorating.

  But George Bush and Tony Blair were able to maintain that the war was confined to only four out of 18 provinces of Iraq and the extent of the violence was being exaggerated by the media. This was quite untrue, but journalists could not disprove it because if we ventured into these supposedly pacific provinces we stood a good chance of being kidnapped or decapitated.

  All this was very different from being a reporter in Lebanon during the Israeli invasion 20 years earlier. It might be dangerous but it was often safer to be a journalist than anybody else. The most ferocious Lebanese militias issued press credentials which usually preserved one from harm by their fighters.

  But in Iraq journalists were fair game for kidnappers or casual killers.

  This limited the extent to which journalists could leave their hotels, though it was still possible with extreme caution.

  I used to travel with two cars, the job of the second one being to see if we were being followed and, if so, tell us immediately so we could dodge down side streets and escape the car thought to be interested in our movements.

  Even minimal security is expensive and a side-effect of having to take such measures was to make it impossible for freelance journalists not working for major papers, television companies or radio stations to stay in Baghdad.

  Many journalists took the option of embedding with the American or British armies. This was not the total surrender to the powers-that-be as it was sometimes portrayed. Good journalists who knew what they were about could produce critical stories but they go only where the Americans went. An example of the disadvantage of this was the US marines' bloody but victorious assault on Fallujah in November 2004 which was heavily covered by the media. But the insurgents' counterstroke, during which they captured most of the northern city of Mosul for a few days, passed almost unnoticed by the outside world because there were few American troops there and hence no embedded journalists to report this military disaster.

  The worst coverage of the Iraq war was probably at the beginning and at the end of the conflict. At the beginning there was the uncritical acceptance that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In the last two years Washington had equal success in selling the "surge", the limited reinforcement of US troops employing more aggressive tactics, as turning the tide in favour of the US. A danger now is that this myth will take on a life of its own leading to similar methods being employed in Afghanistan and the far right in the US blaming President Obama for withdrawing from Iraq just as victory was being won.

  Sunday, 26 April 2009

  TORTURE PROBABLY KILLED MORE AMERICANS THAN 9/11

  The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.

  "The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

  Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. “It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counterproductive. “People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."

  In his compelling book How to Break a Terrorist, Major Alexander explains that prisoners subjected to abuse usually clam up, say nothing, or provide misleading information. In an interview he was particularly dismissive of the "ticking bomb" argument often used in the justification of torture. This supposes that there is a bomb timed to explode on a bus or in the street which will kill many civilians. The authorities hold a prisoner who knows where the bomb is. Should they not torture him to find out in time where the bomb is before it explodes?

  Major Alexander says he faced the "ticking time bomb" every day in Iraq because "we held people who knew about future suicide bombings". Leaving aside the moral arguments, he says torture simply does not work. "It hardens their resolve. They shut up." He points out that the FBI uses normal methods of interrogation to buildup trust even when they are investigating a kidnapping and time is of the essence. He would do the same, he says, "even if my mother was on a bus" with a hypothetical ticking bomb on board. It is quite untrue to imagine that torture is the fastest way of obtaining information, he says.

  A career officer, Major Alexander spent 14 years in the US air force, beginning by flying helicopters for special operations. He saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, was an air force counter-intelligence agent and criminal interrogator, and was stationed in Saudi Arabia, with an antiterrorist role, during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Some years later, the US army was short of interrogators. He wanted to help shape developments in Iraq and volunteered.

  Arriving in Iraq in early 2006 he found that the team he was working with were mostly dedicated, but young, men between 18 and 24. "Many of them had never been out of the States before," he recalls. "When they sat down to interrogate somebody it was often the first time they had met a Muslim." In addition to these inexperienced officers, Major Alexander says there was "an old guard" of interrogators using the methods employed at Guantanamo. He could not say exactly what they had been doing for legal reasons, though in the rest of the interview he left little doubt that prisoners were being tortured and abused. The "old guard's" methods, he says, were based on instilling "fear and control" in a prisoner.

  He refused to take part in torture and abuse, and forbade the team he commanded to use such methods. Instead, he says, he used normal US police interrogation techniques which are "based on relationship building and a degree of deception". He adds that the deception was often of a simple kind such as saying untruthfully that another prisoner has already told all.

  Before he started interrogating insurgent prisoners in Iraq, he had been told that they were highly ideological and committed to establishing an Islamic ca
liphate in Iraq, Major Alexander says. In the course of the hundreds of interrogations carried out by himself, as well as more than 1,000 that he supervised, he found that the motives of both foreign fighters joining al-Qa'ida in Iraq and Iraqi born members were very different from the official stereotype.

  In the case of foreign fighters - recruited mostly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen and North Africa - the reason cited by the great majority for coming to Iraq was what they had heard of the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. These abuses, not fundamentalist Islam, had provoked so many of the foreign fighters volunteering to become suicide bombers.

  For Iraqi Sunni Arabs joining al-Qa'ida, the abuses played a role, but more often the reason for their recruitment was political rather than religious. They had taken up arms because the Shia Arabs were taking power; de-Baathification marginalised the Sunni and took away their jobs; they feared an Iranian takeover. Above all, al-Qa'ida was able to provide money and arms to the insurgents. Once, Major Alexander recalls, the top US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, came to visit the prison where he was working. Asking about what motivated the suspected al-Qa'ida prisoners, he was at first given the official story that they were Islamic Jihadi full of religious zeal. Major Alexander intervened to say that this really was not true and there was a much more complicated series of motivations at work. General Casey did not respond.

  The objective of Major Alexander's team was to find Zarqawi, the Jordanian born leader of al-Qa'ida who built it into a fearsome organisation. Attempts by US military intelligence to locate him had failed despite three years of trying. Major Alexander was finally able to persuade one of Zarqawi's associates to give away his location because the associate had come to reject his methods, such as the mass slaughter of civilians.

  What the major discovered was that many of the Sunni fighters were members of, or allied to, al-Qa'ida through necessity. They did not share its extreme, puritanical Sunni beliefs or hatred of the Shia majority. He says that General Casey had ignored his findings but he was pleased when General David Petraeus became commander in Iraq and began to take account of the real motives of the Sunni fighters. "He peeled back those Sunnis from al-Qa'ida," he says.

  In the aftermath of his experience in Iraq, which he left at the end of 2006, Major Alexander came to believe that the battle against the US using torture was more important than the war in Iraq. He sees President Obama's declaration against torture as "a historic victory", though he is concerned about loopholes remaining and the lack of accountability of senior officers. Reflecting on his own interrogations, he says he always monitored his actions by asking himself, "If the enemy was doing this to one of my troops, would I consider it torture?" His overall message is that the American people do not have to make a choice between torture and terror.

  Friday, 5 June 2009

  DECODING PRESIDENT OBAMA’S CAIRO SPEECH

  Islam and Obama's Muslim heritage

  Obama: "I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims."

  Cockburn: It is obviously in President Obama's interest to emphasise his diverse and partly Muslim ancestry. But what he says here carries the message that he is as different from George W Bush as it is possible to be. Remember also that Mr Obama's speech is partly an address to the American public, seeking to maximise support for policies such as withdrawal from Iraq and opposition to Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

  Afghanistan/Pakistan

  Obama: "Make no mistake: we do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We seek no military bases there. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can."

  Cockburn: This suggests that Mr Obama does not quite know what to do in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He says he would like to withdraw US troops but, in practice, he is more than doubling their number to 62,000. He does not spell out a policy here, other than to assert that the US cannot afford to lose.

  Iraq

  Obama: "I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq's sovereignty is its own. That is why I ordered the removal of our combat brigades by next August. That is why we will honour our agreement with Iraq's democratically elected government to remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by July, and to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012."

  Cockburn: This is one of the most concrete and important parts of the speech. It spells out that the US is leaving Iraq entirely and there will be no bases left behind. This is significant because US generals and commentators have periodically suggested some troops will remain behind into 2012. He goes out of his way to emphasise that the timetable he has laid out will be adhered to.

  This is key because it was the invasion of Iraq in 2003 more than anything else that provoked unprecedented hostility to the US in the Muslim world.

  Palestinians

  Obama: "For more than 60 years, they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own."

  Cockburn: This is stronger stuff than American presidents have said before, though Palestinians will find "dislocation" is an offensively tame word to describe how they were driven from their homeland. But they will be pleased to see their situation described as "intolerable".

  Israel's illegal settlements

  Obama: "The US does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements ... It is time for these settlements to stop. Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live and work and develop their society. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress."

  Cockburn: The condemnation of settlements appears to put Mr Obama on a direct collision course with the Israeli government. Israel holds that what is happening is the natural growth of existing settlements. Nobody else accepts this, but Israel may feel that there are enough settlers in the West Bank to prevent any Palestinian state being created.

  Search for peace

  Obama: "For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive ... but ... the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires."

  Cockburn: The most important sentence here is the last one. Mr Obama is intentionally giving a hostage to fortune which he will not be allowed to forget.

  Iran

  Obama: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against US troops and civilians. This history is well known. Rather than remain trapped in the past, I have made it clear to Iran's leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question, now, is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build."

  Cockburn: Obama's administration does not quite know what to do about Iran and its nuclear programme, but wants to lower the political temperature. This is in sharp contrast to President George W Bush. Mr Obama also probably does not want to give political ammunition to anti-American radicals in the Iranian presidential election.

  Democracy

  Obama: "I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in rec
ent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq ... America does not presume to know what is best for everyone ... But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose."

  Cockburn: It is difficult for Mr Obama to be more specific because it is the Arab autocracies which have been America's closest allies in the Middle East after Israel.

  Women's rights

  Obama: "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. Now let me be clear: issues of women's equality are by no means simply an issue for Islam. In Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia, we have seen Muslim-majority countries elect a woman to lead "