Liberating the people of Iraq by massacring them aljazeerah.info

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Liberating the people of Iraq by massacring them

An Arab press review, Daily Star, 3/28/03

As the invasion of Iraq enters its second week, the mounting toll of civilian casualties not only outrages commentators in the Arab world but increasingly convinces them that the Americans and British are going to find it harder to achieve their war aims than they imagined.
“Fifty people killed by cluster bombs in Basra. Over 600 dead in Najaf. Tens of bodies in the Baghdad market yesterday, scores more in Nasseriya the day before. And we’re still at the beginning of the war, meaning we’ve yet to see all its American and British filth,” writes Abdelwahhab Badrakhan in the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.
“They are ‘liberating’ Iraq via massacres, the same way the Baathist regime took control of it. And the Iraqis, who are being promised salvation from this regime, are also being pledged a foreign occupation of their soil and their homeland”
Yet so-called “coalition” military briefers remain obsessed with the idea that “their forces will be greeted with roses” as though they were friendly UN peacekeepers, hence the outrage they express at the Iraqi resistance they are encountering.
They only realized the error they made when they raised the Stars and Stripes over Umm Qasr and gloated at TV images of Iraqi soldiers surrendering after they began seeing pictures of their own dead and captured. “In any case, these pictures shattered the myth of a ‘clean’ war. Even those who might have heeded the American leaflets calling on them to surrender found they had been deceived,” Badrakhan writes.
“And they are not the only ones being duped in a war that was based from the outset on a set of deceptions,” he says. In Basra, under siege by British forces and facing a humanitarian catastrophe, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon “forgot” that the city had been pounded with cluster bombs, and “accused the regime’s forces of shelling local civilians.
“The British have now been assigned the task of taking the city, and are hoping for a repeat of the 1991 uprising. The city wants to rise against the tyrannical regime, of course, but it won’t do so at the press of a button by Geoff Hoon so that his men can enter it and govern it. The British have lost their senses. There’s no consideration for the circumstances and conditions inside the city. They want there to be a civil massacre, and they want it now.
“But that other genius, Donald Rumsfeld, has advised the Basris not to revolt. Which advice should they heed, American or British?”
The pan-Arab daily Al-Quds al-Arabi writes that the “steadfastness of the Iraqis has taken aback the Americans and their allies, together with the Arab leaders. They all banked on a swift collapse and even quicker surrender, but what happened was completely different.”
The paper says America’s strategy appears to have been thrown into confusion. “One day they say their goal is to occupy Basra, and another day they say they don’t want to occupy the cities but to head straight for the main address, Baghdad. But it seems that getting there will neither be speedy nor easy.”
Their advance on the capital must be meeting fierce resistance and sustaining setbacks, which they do not admit. Otherwise they would have been at the city gates by now “even if they had been traveling on mule-back.”
Al-Quds al-Arabi says the clearest evidence that the war has largely been going Iraq’s way to date, despite its obvious military inferiority, is the way officials in George W. Bush’s administration have been burying their earlier predictions of a quick war.
The predicament of Tony Blair’s government is even worse, with mounting British casualties fuelling domestic opposition to the war and raising fresh doubts about its justice, true motives, and what British interest is served by it, amid talk of differences between Blair and Bush.
“It is Iraq’s impressive steadfastness that is shuffling all the cards and overturning all the political and military equations. And it is growing by the day, despite the fact that the war is still in its early stages, while the countdown has begun to the collapse of the morale of the British and American troops taking part in it,” Al-Quds al-Arabi says.
A news analysis published in the Oman daily Al-Watan says the biggest US mistake appears to have been misreading the Shiite opposition in Iraq. This opposition consists of several groups, it says, including:
l Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim’s Tehran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), with its Iranian-based guerrilla army. Despite sitting on the opposition leadership committee formed under American auspices in the Kurdish capital Arbil, it declared on the second day of the war that it would not join in it and considers it to be an act of aggression and invasion.
l The Islamic Daawa Party, which has a strong underground presence in Iraq.
l The Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by Ahmed Chalabi, who used to be America’s closest ally in the Iraqi opposition and was tipped to be made head of a post-Saddam administration. But he has now fallen out of favor, and is accused of having provided the Americans with self-serving misleading information.
l The newly formed Iraqi Hizbullah, whose emergence has raised questions about its links with its Lebanese counterpart. The latter has become increasingly involved in the Iraqi issue in recent weeks, with its leader Hassan Nasrallah first proposing a Taif-style reconciliation conference between the Iraqi government and opposition, and then calling for armed resistance against the Americans.
Al-Watan says that while the Iraqi Shiite opposition is united in condemning the US invasion and won’t take part in it, it is still unclear how it will resist. Its stance is one of “negative neutrality,” opposed both to Baghdad and Washington, “but giving precedence to strategic and national considerations, which implies giving the external threat precedence over the internal one, and means that Iraqi Shiites are increasingly likely to turn to fighting American forces if Saddam Hussein holds out.”
While it may surprise the Americans, who imagined the Shiites were waiting to greet them as liberators, this stance is the product of extensive consultations among Shiite leaders in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Al-Watan suggests. They culminated in talks between the leaders of Syria and Iran in Tehran, as a result of which a common position was agreed and SAIRI’s plans to send its forces into Iraq were suspended.
Al-Watan stresses that the anti-invasion stance of the Shiite opposition is not only due to the mistrust fostered by the Americans’ betrayal of the 1991 Shiite uprising. It also reflects dismay at the way the US treated the Shiite opposition during the buildup to the war, and its refusal to offer any guarantees about its role in the post-Saddam period. This ambiguity fuelled suspicions that Washington only wants to use the opposition to assist it in the war, and then discard it in favor of American military rule or an Iraq plagued by Shiite-Sunni sectarian rivalry and conflict, which the Americans would use to strengthen and justify their control of the country, its politics and its oil.
“A third consideration is the disastrous consequences an American occupation would have for Iraq’s future and that of the region, especially Iran and Syria, far exceeding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Accordingly, the Shiite opposition’s interest in being rid of his regime is no longer paramount. It has been superseded by its interest in getting rid of the American occupation, or at least limiting the damage and fallout from it, or undermining it and forcing it to enter into a compromise with the opposition and its regional backers,” Al-Watan says.
The Beirut daily As-Safir features an exclusive interview with Syrian President Bashar Assad in which among other things he speaks out forcefully against the war on Iraq and implies that the regime’s opponents should rally to the country’s defense.
In his lengthy conversation with publisher Talal Salman, Assad says he is not surprised by the intensity of the resistance being mounted against the invasion, likening it to Lebanon’s experience under Israeli occupation, and saying that far from provoking a refugee exodus, it has prompted many Iraqi expatriates to return to defend their homeland.
“The US and Britain will not be able to control all of Iraq,” he forecasts. “There will be much fiercer resistance. This shows the falsehood of the claim made by some Arab officials who, deliberately or unwittingly, wanted to see or portray things differently.”
The Syrian leader repeats his earlier criticisms of unnamed Arab states for colluding in the aggression, and failing to heed the call not to allow the US to use their bases, and warns of the popular backlash this will cause.
“There is very strong resistance from the army and people in Iraq. But if the American plan succeeds, and we hope it won’t succeed and doubt it will succeed, in any case there will be Arab popular resistance to the occupation, and it has begun,” Assad says.
He suggests the backlash may not be confined to “the aggressor and occupiers, if there is to be an occupation,” but could “extend to those who lent verbal or material support to this war,” and perhaps even to the “Arabs sitting on the fence.”
Assad also acknowledges the threat posed to Syria by the war, and the prospect of it being one of the countries that could be targeted by the US, largely on behalf of Israel, after Iraq. “The threat is there so long as Israel is there, aggression is being mounted against an Arab country, and there is a war on our border. If you don’t worry in circumstances like these, then you’re not looking at reality or you cannot see it,” he says, adding: “Worry does not mean fear, but preparing for confrontation.”
But Assad also stresses that the threat of aggression against his country “does not mean they’ll be able to carry it out.”
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, whose performance throughout the Iraq crisis has brought him under attack in the Arab press, comes under further criticism for suggesting the UN should help alleviate the humanitarian distress caused by the invasion while dodging the politics of the issue.
Following his call on the Security Council to give the UN an aid mandate in Iraq, Jordanian columnist Jareer Marqa contrasts the way Annan has been discharging the duties of his office with the approach of his distinguished predecessor Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in 1961 while trying to halt the war that colonial forces had triggered in Congo.
The latter, he writes in the Amman daily Al-Rai, “demonstrated that the secretary-general of the UN is not just an international employee, but trustee of the UN Charter, a firm defender of international legality and fighter for peace and security for all the world’s peoples.”
Annan, in contrast, has abandoned the responsibilities of his post on at least two occasions: When he pulled the plug on the UN inquiry into the war crimes committed by the Israeli Army in Jenin last year, and when he kept quiet about the US and Britain’s blatant violation of international law and their war of aggression against Iraq.
“Indeed, he facilitated the start of the invasion by pulling UN arms inspectors and personnel out of Iraq, instead of strengthening their presence in order to deter it,” Marqa charges.
And Annan implicitly rubber-stamped the Anglo-American objective of “regime change” by suspending the oil-for-food program without Security Council authorization, “and began discussing his post-Saddam role as though he were an employee of the US State Department,” he writes.
“Annan must know that he bears a special moral responsibility for the blood that is being shed in Iraq, and the hunger, thirst and destruction that he has permitted to take place,” Marqa remarks.
“He must not await the outcome. He has a duty to rectify his approach and adopt a public stance that is consistent with the UN Charter.”
If he fails to do that, “the world will mourn the demise of the post of UN secretary-general more bitterly than it grieved at the plane crash that killed Hammarskjöld.”

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