Oh, Here’s Another Crisis You Might Want to Notice (3): Iraq

The "crisis" tag might be a bit surprising, given that the end-of-year media line is how swimmingly everything is going in Iraq. There has been a lot of attention to a report from Iraq Body Count putting civilian casualties in 2008 at between 8315 and 9028, a reduction of 2/3 from the death tolls in 2006 and 2007 (though, unnoted by almost all accounts, only slightly below civilian casualties for 2003 and 2004).

CNN has joined in the feel-good celebrations today with the story that US military deaths in Iraq are down from 906 to 309 this year. The news service recites the official line, ""The people of Iraq are tired of violence, and they are assisting the security forces; the government is improving its ability to govern and to apply the rule of law."

While any decrease in deaths is to be welcomed, the attachment of these figures to the emergence of Iraq under the wise occupation of the US military needs to be recognised as an ongoing public-relations gambit. We've recited the political, economic, and security complications on many occasions, so let's leave it to Juan Cole to put the case in a superb end-of-year column:



Top Ten Myths about Iraq, 2008

1. Iraqis are safer because of Bush's War. In fact, conditions of insecurity have helped created both an internal and external refugee problem:

At least 4.2 million Iraqis were displaced. These included 2.2 million who were displaced within Iraq and some 2 million refugees, mostly in Syria (around 1.4 million) and Jordan (around half a million). In the last months of the year both these neighbouring states, struggling to meet the health, education and other needs of the Iraqi refugees already present, introduced visa requirements that impeded the entry of Iraqis seeking refuge. Within Iraq, most governorates barred entry to Iraqis fleeing sectarian violence elsewhere.'

2. Large numbers of Iraqis in exile abroad have returned. In fact, no great number have returned, and more Iraqis may still be leaving to Syria than returning.

3. Iraqis are materially better off because of Bush's war. In fact, a million Iraqis are "food insecure" and another 6 million need UN food rations to survive. Oxfam estimated in summer, 2007, that 28% of Iraqi children are malnourished.

4. The Bush administration scored a major victory with its Status of Forces Agreement. In fact, The Iraqis forced on Bush an agreement that the US would withdraw combat troops from Iraqi cities by July, 2009,and would completely withdraw from the Country by the end of 2011. The Bush administration had wanted 58 long-term bases, and the authority to arrest Iraqis at will and to launch military operations unilaterally.

5. Minorities in Iraq are safer since Bush's invasion. In fact, there have in 2008 been significant attacks on and displacement of Iraqi Christians from Mosul. In early January of 2008, guerrillas bombed churches in Mosul, wounding a number of persons. More recently, some 13,000 Christians have had to flee Mosul because of violence.

6. The sole explanation for the fall in the monthly death rate for Iraqi civilians was the troop excalation or surge of 30,000 extra US troops in 2007. In fact, troop levels had been that high before without major effect. The US military did good counter-insurgency in 2007. The major reason for the fall in the death toll, however, was that the Shiites won the war for Baghdad, ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Sunnis from the capital, and turning it into a city with a Shiite majority of 75 to 80 percent. (When Bush invaded, Baghdad was about 50/50 Sunni and Shiite). The high death tolls in 2006 and 2007 were a by-product of this massive ethnic cleansing campaign. Now, a Shiite militiaman in Baghdad would have to drive for a while to find a Sunni Arab to kill.

7. John McCain alleged that if the US left Iraq, it would be promptly taken over by al-Qaeda. In fact, there are few followers of Usamah Bin Laden in Iraq. The fundamentalist extremists, if that is what McCain meant, are not supported by most Sunni Arabs. They are supported by no Shiites (60% of Iraq) or Kurds (20% of Iraq), and are hated by Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan, who would never allow such a takeover.

8. The Iraq War made the world safer from terrorism. In fact, Iraq has become a major training ground for extremists and is implicated in the major bombings in Madrid, London, and Glasgow.

9. Bush went to war in Iraq because he was given bad intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. In fact, the State Department's Intelligence & Research (I & R) division cast doubt on the alarmist WMD stories that Bush/Cheney put about. The CIA refused to sign off on the inclusion of the Niger uranium lie in the State of the Union address, which made Bush source it to the British MI6 instead. The Downing Street Memo revealed that Bush fixed the intelligence around the policy. Bush sought to get up a provocation such as a false flag attack on UN planes so as to blame it on Iraq. And UN weapons inspectors in Feb.-Mar. of 2003 examined 100 of 600 suspected weapons sites and found nothing; Bush's response was to pull them out and go to war.

10. Douglas Feith and other Neoconservatives didn't really want a war with Iraq (!). Yeah, that was why they demanded war on Iraq with their 1996 white paper for Bibi Netanyahu and again in their 1998 Project for a New American Century letter to Clinton, where they explicitly called for military action. The Neoconservatives are notorious liars and by the time they get through with rewriting history, they will be a combination of Gandhi and Mother Teresa and the Iraq War will be Bill Clinton's fault. The only thing is, I think people are wise to them by now. Being a liar can actually get you somewhere. Being a notorious liar is a disadvantage if what you want to is get people to listen to you and act on your advice. I say, Never Again.

Gaza: The Futility of the Israeli War

As Israeli military operations enter a fourth day, our colleague Rami Khouri has published this thoughtful, incisive analysis of why Israeli military operations against Gaza are likely to leave the country less rather than more secure:

Punishing Gaza in Vain

BEIRUT -- God punished the arrogance and hubris of the Hebrews in the Old Testament by making them wander the wilderness for 40 years before allowing a later, more humble, generation to enter Canaan. The current generation of Israeli Jews is not as proficient at learning these 40-year lessons, it seems, to judge from Israel’s current ferocious attack on Gaza.



It was exactly 40 years ago to the day -- December 28, 1968 -- that Israeli commandos raided Beirut airport and destroyed 13 Lebanese civilian aircraft, in retaliation for a Palestinian attack against an Israeli airliner in Athens. Israel aimed to inflict a revenge punishment so severe that it would shock the Arabs into preventing the Palestinians from fighting Israel.

Today, 40 years and countless attacks and wars later, Israel again uses massive retaliatory and punitive force to pummel the Palestinians of Gaza into submission. Hundreds of Palestinians have died in the first 24 hours of the Israeli attack, and several thousand might die by the time the operation ends. For what purpose, one wonders?

The past 40 years offer a credible guide, if anyone in Israel or Washington cares to grasp the historical record instead of merely wallowing in a cruel world of political lies and deceptions. Israel’s use of its clear military superiority against Palestinians, Lebanese and other Arabs has consistently led to five parallel, linked, and very predictable results:

1. Israeli power has momentarily shattered Palestinian and Arab military and civilian infrastructure, only to see the bludgeoned Arabs regroup and return a few years later -- with much greater technical proficiency and political will to fight back. This happened when the Palestinians, who were driven out of Jordan in 1970, eventually re-established more lethal bases in Lebanon; or when Israel destroyed Fateh’s police facilities in the West Bank and Gaza a few years ago, and soon found themselves fighting Hamas’ capabilities instead.

2. Israel’s combination of military ferocity, insincerity in peace negotiations, and continued colonization has seen “moderate” groups and peace-making partners like Fateh slowly self-destruct, to be challenged or even replaced by tougher foes. Fateh has given way to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and to militant spin-offs from within Fateh like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Hizbullah emerged in Lebanon after Israel invaded and occupied south Lebanon in 1982.

3. Israel’s insistence on militarily dominating the entire Middle East has seen it generate new enemies in lands where it once had strategic allies -- like Lebanon and Iran. Israel once worked closely with some predominantly Christian groups in Lebanon, and had deep security links with the Shah of Iran. Today -- the figurative 40 years later -- Israel sees its most serious, even existential, threats emanating from Hizbullah in Lebanon and the radical ruling regime in Iran.

4. The massive suffering Israel inflicts on ordinary Palestinians transforms a largely docile population into a recruiting pool for militants, resistance fighters, suicide bombers, terrorists, and other warriors. After decades of Israeli policies of mass imprisonment, starvation, strangulation, colonization, assassination, assault and terror tactics against Palestinians, the Palestinians eventually react to their own dehumanization by turning around and using the same kind of cruel methods to kill Israeli soldiers and civilians.

5. Israeli policies over decades have been a major -- but not the only -- reason for the transformation of the wider political environment in the Arab world into a hotbed of Islamism confronting more stringent Arab police states. The Islamists who politically dominate the Arab region -- whether Shiite Hizbullah, or Sunni Hamas or anything else in between -- are the only Arabs since the birth of Israel in 1948 who have proved both willing and able to fight back against Zionism.

All these trends can be seen in action during the current Israeli attack against Gaza: Palestinian and Arab radicalization, Islamist responses amidst pan-Arab lassitude, the continued discrediting of President Mahmoud Abbas’ government, and regional populist agitation against Israel, its U.S. protector, and most Arab governments. None of this is new. And that is precisely why it is so significant today, as Israel’s war on Gaza paves the way for a repetition of the five trends above that have plagued Israelis and Arabs alike.

The biblical 40-year time span between Israel’s attack on Beirut airport on December 28, 1968 and its war on Gaza on December 27, 2008 is eerily relevant. It is time enough for frightened and arrogant Israelis to learn that in all these years their weapons have promoted neither quiescence among neighboring Arabs, nor security along Israel’s borders. The exact opposite has happened, and it will happen again now.

Here’s something to ponder as the next 40-year period starts ticking down: The only thing that ever did bring Israelis and Arabs genuine peace was equitable, negotiated peace accords -- with Egypt and Jordan -- that treated Arabs and Israel as people who must enjoy equal rights to security and stable statehood.