Who said this and when? “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient that the public knows... We are today not far from a disaster.” Answer: TE Lawrence (of Arabia fame) in The Sunday Times in August, 1920.
And every word of it is true today. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We were lied to about the links between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11, 2001. We were lied to about the insurgents — remember how they were just “dead-enders” and “remnants”? And we were lied to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire country was steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying powers or of the government of satraps that they have set up in their place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections next month.
Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East. My own calculations suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day. How does this happen? Is there a suicide-bomber supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we done to create this extraordinary industry?
And American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the towns and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-Marine Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian board that he and his fellow Marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms up. “We killed the man,” Massey said. “We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle.” Massey assumed that the dead Iraqis didn’t understand the hand signals to stop. On another occasion, according to Massey, Marines — in reaction to a stray bullet — opened fire and killed a group of unarmed protesters and bystanders. The defector from the 82nd Airborne, Jeremy Hinzman, told the court that “we were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists... to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling”.
All this, of course, is part of the “withholding of information”. It took months before the Abu Ghraib torture and abuses were made public — even though the International Red Cross had already told the American and British authorities. It took months, for that matter, for the British government to respond to the outrageous beatings — and one killing — carried out on defenseless Iraqis in Basra, first exposed by The Independent.
Still we are not told how many civilians were killed in the American attack on Fallujah. The Americans’ claim that they killed more than 1,000 insurgents — only insurgents, mark you, not a single civilian among them — is preposterous. Still we are not free to enter the city. Nor, given the fact that the insurgents still appear to be there, is it likely that anyone can do so. Why are American aircraft still bombing Fallujah, weeks after the US military claimed to have captured it?
It is impossible to reflect on the year in Iraq without realizing just how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian struggle affects the entire Middle East. Iraqis watch the Palestinian battle with great earnestness. And I doubt very much if the suicide bomber would have come of age so quickly in Iraq without the precedent set by the suicide bombers of Palestine and, before them, of Lebanon.
It is this precedent-setting capacity of events in the Middle East — not the mythical “foreign fighters” of George Bush’s fantasy world — that is costing America so much blood in Iraq. When Ariel Sharon tries to prevent Palestinian statehood, Iraqis remember that his closest ally is represented in Iraq by an army which most of them regard as occupiers. When US forces learn their guerrilla warfare techniques from the Israelis — when they bomb houses from the air, when they abuse prisoners, when they even erect razor-wire round recalcitrant villages — is it surprising that Iraqis treat the Americans as surrogate Israelis? We shouldn’t need the evidence of ex-Marine Massey to show us how brutal the occupying armies have become — and how irrelevant Iraq’s “interim” government truly is.
Who would have believed, in 2003, as US forces drove into Baghdad, that within two years they would be mired in their biggest guerrilla war since Vietnam? Those few of us who predicted just that — and The Independent was among them — were derided as naysayers, doom-mongers, pessimists. Iraq is now proving all over again what we should have learned in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: Arabs have lost their fear. It has been a slow process. But a quarter of a century ago, they were a submissive society and they did as they were told. The Israelis even used a “Palestinian police force” to help them in their occupation. Not any more. The biggest development in the Middle East over the past 30 years has been this shaking off of fear. Fear — of the occupier, of the dictator — is something that you cannot re-inject into people. And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.
Iraqis are just not prepared to live in fear any more. They know they must depend on themselves — our betrayal of the 1991 rising against Saddam proved that — and they refuse to be frightened by their occupiers. It was we who warned them of the dangers of civil war, even though there never has been a civil war in Iraq. As a people, they watched Westerners turn up by the thousand to make money out of a country that had been beaten down by a corrupt dictatorship and UN sanctions. Is it any surprised that Iraqis are angry? The American columnist Tom Friedman, in one of his less messianic articles, posed a good question before the 2003 invasion. Who knows, he asked, what bats will fly out of the box when we get to Baghdad? Well, now we know. So we should repeat Lawrence’s chilling remark — without the quotation marks and the date 1920. We are today not far from a disaster.
