Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  That Monday, Aziz had been scheduled to open an international conference of largely left-wing politicians and intellectuals who had converged on Baghdad to proclaim their solidarity with Iraq's defiance. But soon after the delegates read in the shabby English-language newspaper published daily by the information ministry that Saddam had been in non-stop session with the national leadership, an announcement was made that the conference was postponed. It was a tip-off that something big was afoot.

  The next day, the world learned that Iraq, in a formal letter from Sabri to Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, had agreed to the weapons inspectors' unconditional return. Aziz had spent much of the weekend in longdistance consultation with Sabri and Annan, helping to draft the letter. It described the inspectors' return as “the indispensable first step toward an assurance that Iraq no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction.” Mr. Bush reacted by dismissing the announcement's significance, but all Baghdad took the letter as a 180 degree turn, and seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.

  When the international conference opened that afternoon, Aziz made a cryptic allusion to the New York meetings, the only reference to Iraq's change of position. The delegates responded with effusive speeches thanking Saddam for his wisdom. Later, I learned that Saddam had personally monitored every moment of the New York talks before yielding to the Arab insistence on his acceptance of the inspectors. His decision did not, of course, end the story. After September, with backing from France and the Arab states, Aziz's clients, Saddam waged a rear guard action in the Security Council over the terms of the return. In late November, the inspectors arrived in Baghdad, initiating what was expected to be months of work. Saddam had won a respite from the threat of war, though it was surely not enough to lift Tariq Aziz's foreboding about the fate of his life's mission. As we now know, his foreboding was proven sadly prophetic.

  … we support the aspirations of the people to build a future based on democracy and to regain their sovereignty.

  AND THAT REQUIRES … ANY FOREIGN OCCUPATION … t? END.

  —Scott McClellan, White House press

  secretary, March 4, 2005, evidently

  oblivious to the obvious parallel between

  the situation of Iraq and that of Lebanon, to

  which he was referring

  We have had enough of his nonsense We don't accept that a non-Iraqi should try to enforce his control over Iraqis, regardless of their sect – whether Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, or Kurds.

  —Sheik Ahmad Khanjar, leader of the Albu

  Ali clan in Ramadi, Iraq, August 2005,

  on the attempt by al-Zarqawi to provoke

  sectarian strife in Iraq

  ENDURING INJUSTICE:

  IRAQ AND THE CURRENT POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: On July 28, 2005, Secretary Rumsfeld explained why he was so adamant that the new “Iraqi government” should get on with writing its constitution: “We have troops on the ground,” he said. “People get killed.” Yes, they do, Mr. Secretary: the price of imperial occupation and forcible “nation-building.”

  Col. de Grand Pré's essay answers the question that the secretary's remarks beg: troops on the ground get killed because they're not wanted in the country they're occupying. Who it is that doesn't want them is the subject of the Colonel's essay; why they are fighting follows as a plain enough conclusion. The press and the administration are taking great pains to portray our Iraqi opponents as “dead-enders” and “Islamist fanatics,” in order to “prove” that those on the other side do not offer legitimate resistance but merely wreak terrorist havoc.

  Neutral observers disagree. One unlikely voice in the debate is that of an Italian, Simona Torretta. She and her colleague from an aid group, “A Bridge to Baghdad,” were seized by rebels on September 7, 2004, yet the experience didn't affect her point of view in the slightest. “I said it before the kidnapping and I repeat it today,” she told Corriere della Sera in an interview published on October 1, 2004. “I am against the kidnapping of civilians,” she said, but “you have to distinguish between terrorism and resistance. The guerrilla war is justified ”

  An Italian judge also made a name for herself by defending the right to resistance, even by means we might consider somewhat “over the top.” According to Reuters (April 21, 2005), Clementina Forleo caught some flack earlier this year “by dropping charges against suspected Islamic militants accused of helping to recruit suicide bombers for Iraq – saying the alleged crimes amounted to foreign guerrilla activity …. “Her ruling pointed out, based on “conventional international doctrine,” that “the differentiating factor [between guerrilla activity and terrorism] does not appear to be the instrument used, but the target in one's sights”; “terrorists” fail to distinguish between civilian and military targets. Foreign guerrilla activity, however, targets “a foreign occupying army or against a state structure held by the combatants as illegitimate.” Reminiscent of the Bush-administration approach to such impertinence, her Reforms Minister called the ruling “stomach turning”; the Communications Minister said she was “extremely wrong”; and the Justice Minister opened an investigation looking for “negligence.”

  To Forleo's credit, she is suing them for defamation.

  CHAPTER

  38

  Nemesis and Name-Calling:

  Who Are the Iraqi Rebels?

  ………

  Col. Donn de Grand Pré, USA (ret.)

  “'Insurgency' is one of the most misleading words. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq, won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us. That would be an insurgency. But we are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because we won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it, and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned.”

  —Seymour Hersh

  THE IRAQI “RESISTANCE” is probably something of a mystery to most Americans, and this is largely thanks to the uninformative nature of our spineless media. Now some might think it “clever” to invade a country and then pretend that those who oppose the invasion by force of arms don't represent the people who have just been conquered, that they represent, rather, “a hatred of democracy,” and are “people who hate freedom” and practice “terrorism.” It might also be “clever” to witness, on a daily basis, dozens of attacks on the occupying military forces and still insist that those attacks are the crazy “fringe” antics of misfits, jihadis, and “extremists” rather than the operations of a clandestine paramilitary force operating in defense of its country.

  The problem with this vision of the situation in Iraq, however, is that it is not credible. Indeed, the facts of the case are all to the contrary, and only a willful denial of reality, or sheer delusion, permits it to be maintained. It stems from the ideological premise that the “American way” is so obviously superior that only misfits and “extremists” would presume to oppose it by force of arms. Complicit in furthering this viewpoint are the media and other “professional” commentators at think tanks and elsewhere. The terrorist targets of Bush's “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), such as al-Qaeda and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – both of which are blown out of all proportion by the mainstream media – are also convenient allies, too, in the effort to portray the Iraqi resistance as something other than what it is.

  The facts, as we will see, contradict this “official” vision of the resistance in Iraq. In spite of continual insistence that “we're not fighting the Iraqi people,” the truth of the matter is that we are – along with their deposed, legally recognized government. Continued denial of the situation cannot and does not bode well for American prospects of “success” in Iraq – and there is no indication that things will change anytime soon.

  Spinning Fact to Fit Ideology

  The media problem

  A classic illustration of the inadequacy of the media's approach to the Iraqi resistance was provided by
a piece that ran in the Christian Science Monitor called “Coming to Terms with the Guerrillas in Their Midst.” The author, Ruth Walker, provided – no doubt unwittingly – an important insight into the thinking of the Bush administration, and the way the American press, the Republic's Fourth Estate, reports that thinking in lockstep march.

  Referring to a Donald Rumsfeld Pentagon press conference on June 30, 2003, she relates that the Defense Secretary bristled at the notion that the Iraq war was “a guerrilla war.” He explained:

  I guess the reason I don't use the phrase “guerrilla war” is because there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world.1

  Even then, such an argument was less than credible, but it was part of the pattern of what passes for thinking in the Bush administration.

  But back to Ruth Walker. She explains how the CSM staff – and by extension all mainstream hacks – anguished over the choice of words to describe the Iraqis fighting the American occupation. The word eventually settled upon was, of course, “insurgent,” a term deemed “neutral” – as if the spilling of blood and brains could be written in neutral terms. It was chosen from a list of candidates. “Guerrilla” was unacceptable because it had taken on shades of Che Guevara; “rebel” was equally inappropriate because it conjured up images of good ol' Johnny Reb; and “militant” didn't make the grade because it seemed too politically radical, although an isolated exception has been made for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

  Yet the most peculiar conclusion was found in the penultimate paragraph where Walker wrote:

  “[R]esistance” is a term that popped up briefly in our newsroom a few months ago for consideration as a possible designation for the insurgents in Iraq. “Resistance,” as the dictionary puts it, is “the organized underground movement in a country fighting against a foreign occupation, a dictatorship, etc.”1

  Any person who has followed the Iraq debacle will not fail to appreciate that “resistance” is exactly the word to use, and yet it was deemed “too positive” by our “objective” press. “We decided it wasn't the right word,” Walker said. “[Associations with the French Resistance during World War II make it too positive a term, we concluded.”2

  So the term chosen for the resistance was based not upon objective definition – indeed, what could be a more accurate way to refer to the Iraqi resistance than as an “organized underground movement … fighting against … foreign occupation” – but rather upon a sense of what might be “too positive” a portrayal of Iraqis fighting American occupation: a portrayal of them as fighting for a legitimate goal rather than for a retrograde, “un-American,” “anti-freedom” agenda. The choice speaks volumes about the reluctance of the American press to speak the truth and challenge Bush-administration rhetoric.

  Coincidentally, Norman Solomon made just that observation in a regular “Media Beat” column for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He wrote: “When misleading buzzwords become part of the media landscape, they slant news coverage and skew public perceptions.”3 He went on to ask: when is an Iraqi not an Iraqi? When he is actively fighting the American occupation. Solomon pointed out that all the main papers were constantly referring to things like “pitched battles between insurgents and American and Iraqi forces.” In other words, those fighting alongside American troops merit the term “Iraqi forces,” while those fighting the forces of Baghdad's puppet regime are variously “insurgents,” “terrorists,” or “former regime elements.” Solomon says that an accurate terminology is possible,

  but the Bush administration – striving to promote the attitude that only U.S.-allied Iraqis are actual Iraqis worthy of the name – is eager to blur exactly what good reporting should clarify. And America's major media outlets are helpfully providing a journalistic fog around a central fact: the U.S. government is at war with many people it claims to be liberating.1

  Towing the party line

  The penchant for repeating ideological dogma is not limited to the journalists who play along with the administration position, seeking to gain “access” to relevant officials and headline-grabbing stories. Numerous think-tank “thinkers” also pontificate on matters political to a tune piped by administration officials, along with a whole range of other hacks, politicians, experts, and sundry cheerleaders for the war. All are more or less complicit in portraying the Iraqi rebels as “terrorists” because these cheerleaders “believe” in the ideology they publicize. For them that ideology is a blinding vision, which prevents them from seeing the truth of a situation over their dogmatic interpretation of it.

  The first and most notable fruit of this blindness is a profound hypocrisy. It is seen and heard most everywhere, a cheap attempt to portray Iraqis opposed to the occupation – whether fighting or not – as something other than legitimate adversaries or people opposed in principal (with every right to be so) to the prospect of forced “Americanization.”

  Rumsfeld demonstrated this hypocrisy from the outset, referring to our opponents in the initial invasion as “terrorist death squads.”2 Edward Luttwak, the “renowned strategist” at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), demonstrated it in a pre-war op-ed pointing out that Saddam's forces consisted of “untrained civilians with small arms they scarcely know how to use,” few who “could actually fight with enough skill to inflict casualties,” and others who “will no doubt scatter as soon as they come under fire.” Saddam's Fedayeen, according to Luttwak, were “poorly trained villagers.”3 Either Luttwak believed his own rhetoric then – which the facts of two years' worth of guerrilla war have clearly disproved - or his stance was simply a useful element of Bush's plan to lead America into war by convincing her people that it would indeed be a “cakewalk.” Now that the “insurgency” is giving us a run for our money, we hear from the same range of hacks and “experts” that, rather than the work of the “Iraqi people,” attacks on “coalition forces” are the work of “dead enders” and “former regime elements” like Ba'athists, members of the Special and Republican Guard, the Intelligence Services, and even the Fedayeen! Never mind that it's actually the same people being discussed; at once both incompetent (before the war) and dastardly (afterwards). How quickly the pre-war condescension shifts to shock, dismay, and feigned moral outrage that our “terrorist” and “extremist” opponents “won't fight fair”! The only thing worse than contradictions of this sort are those that appear in one single bit of “journalism” simultaneously, like the warning – coming over two years after Luttwak's – from chief neocon ideologue Max Boot, who cautioned1 against building up the enemy “into 10-foot-tall supermen” and suggested that “we realize how weak they actually are,” and then admitted that “the Iraqi uprising will [not] be quickly or easily defeated” and that “coalition military forces cannot hope to achieve a military victory in the near future”!

  How to make sense of this nonsense? Two issues seem to be at play here. One is the assumption that anyone in Iraq possessing the temerity to oppose the “American experiment” in the Middle East is already a terrorist ideologically – this is why Boot says that headlines chronicling the ongoing conflict are really “about the rebels' reign of terror“ (emphasis mine); why Bush says that “[o]ur mission in Iraq is … hunting down the terrorists;”2and the new “Prime Minister” of Iraq refuses even the Christian Science Monitor compromise, insisting on calling the Iraqi fighters “terrorists.”3

  To maintain this interpretation, the facts and statistics are selectively highlighted and interpreted to fit a blatantly ideological portrayal of what's actually going on in Iraq – namely, the opposition of a few deadbeats to “democracy,” “progress,” and “freedom.” This is, of course, reminiscent of the way information was “cherry-picked” to get us into this catastrophic war in the first place. Bogeymen such as al-Zarqawi and isolated attacks on civilians become the total embodiment of what we're fighting in Iraq, notwithstanding the evidence – which we'll look at
later – that al-Zarqawi's role is seriously overplayed (and that's putting it mildly!), and that the bulk of the rebels have repeatedly condemned strikes against non-military or illegitimate targets.

  The second issue at play is a healthy dose of good ol' American excep-tionalism, which translates our successes into the triumph of justice and simple failures into our victimization. Luttwak's op-ed was entitled “Saddam Street Fighters Will Be No Match for Allies' Elite” from precisely this standpoint: where we're likely to win it's portrayed as a righteous vindication of our “elite” technological (and, implicitly, moral) superiority. Saddam's men “[lack] the skill to hold their ground,” he said, a presumptuous comment if ever there was one, because no army decimated by a dozen years of crippling sanctions would square off face to face against the Pentagon's half-trillion-dollar war machine. Yet when Saddam's men do “hold their ground,” even if it's accomplished by “poking out from behind trees,” it's nothing other than a “reign of terror”!

  This American exceptionalism is best illustrated by considering what we would do if the situation were reversed. Had the Soviets paratrooped into Georgia, you can bet that every man, woman, and child would have grabbed shotgun and pitchfork to drive out the Bolsheviks. We boast of having done the same thing to the British, who were appalled that we refused to obey the “laws of war” and confront squads of redcoated marksmen with neat and disciplined lines of “poorly trained villagers” (to use Luttwak's inspiring image). Hollywood at least got this right: the heroes of both Mel Gibson's The Patriot and the well-known Red Dawn didn't “fight fair”; they hid in the mountains, wore civilian clothes or casual militia garb, and their tactic of choice was the ambush. When we do it, though, it's just another proof of what Rumsfeld recently said about America: it's “the last best hope on earth.”1