corrente

As you may have heard, Riverbend has posted for the first time since early August.

With her usual searing honesty, she reports her reaction to seeing a bootleg video of "Farhenheit 911" and tells us what 9/11 means to her as an Iraqi, living through this hellish American occupation that for over a year and a half now has predicated the terms under which Iraqis will live. Yes, non-Iraqi jihadists have had a part in all this, but we created the conditions of chaos, and the porous borders that have let them use Iraq as a forward position from which to wage their Jihadist war against the west, and not incidentally thereby demonstrate the impotence of the world's greatest superpower. Our President seeks to camouflage that woeful set of facts by pretending it's all part of the plan; "Bring 'em on," he says, better we fight them in Iraq than here, oh, and, by the way, we're to be congratulated for the blessings of liberty we're bringing to Iraqis.

Writing on September 15th, Riverbend tells us about a few of those blessings:

The last few days, Baghdad has been echoing with explosions. We woke up to several loud blasts a few days ago. The sound has become all too common. It’s like the heat, the flies, the carcasses of buildings, the broken streets and the haphazard walls coming up out of nowhere all over the city… it has become a part of life. We were sleeping on the roof around three days ago, but I had stumbled back indoors at around 5 am when the electricity returned and was asleep under the cool air of an air-conditioner when the first explosions rang out.I tried futilely to cling to the last fragments of a fading dream and go back to sleep when several more explosions followed. Upon getting downstairs, I found E. flipping through the news channels, trying to find out what was going on. “They aren’t nearly fast enough,” he shook his head with disgust. “We’re not going to know what’s happening until noon.”

Try for a moment to imagine yourself, at night, in your own bedroom, in your house or apartment, in your own town or city, not being surprised anymore by bombs exploding, or attacks from the air: imagine your own life, and the lives of the people who matter to you, being lived in a world where walls are haphazard, streets are broken, and buildings are carcasses, and no real end in sight to the violence of this war that isn't a war, because the President of someone else's country keeps proclaiming that this army of strangers he's sent to liberate you knows what's best for you, will stay in your country until that President of someone else's country "succeeds" in making your country what he thinks it ought to be, because "failure," despite all the failed promises of reconstruction of a functioning infrastructure, "is not an option," though killing and maiming increasing numbers of Iraqis clearly is.

Of course we can't really imagine that reality, not even those of us who were against this invasion from the first, though not against holding Saddam to account, on the matter of WMD and on the matter of his violation of the human rights of Iraqis. What distinguishs us from Bush & co and its battalion of keyboard tough guy idealists, so gung ho for a war and occuapation they wouldn't be caught dead fighting in, or reporting on first hand, is that it doesn't even occur to the likes of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, David Brooks or Wm. Kristol, that any reality other than the one in their own heads is worth trying to imagine.

The increasingly invaluable Spencer Ackerman makes the point in his TNR blog, "Iraqued," in a post about hearing Paul Wolfowitz addressing a group of visiting Iraqi dignitaries at a evening affair just last week; Ackerman compares two examples of Wolfowitz's "now-signature rhetorical mixture of delusion, arrogance, and platitude." with his reputation as a true paragon of neo-con idealism. (link, subscriber only)

Our plan for Iraq is what Iraqis can do for Iraq. Your future is in your hands.

It's wonderful to see Iraq standing up on its own two feet, taking its rightful place in the international community. ... We can't tell you how to solve your problems in your country. ... There are going to be extraordinary days ahead, and difficult days as well, both positive and negative.

Ackerman comments:

If you thought he couldn't get any more dismissive with other people's lives, he did: "Iraqis probably understand the challenges more than Americans." You think? If President Bush is allowed to continue his non-strategy in Iraq, the Iraqis listening to Wolfowitz last night stand a very good chance of being murdered by insurgents, like Izzedine Salim of the Iraqi Governing Council was. Wolfowitz stands a very good chance, by contrast, of returning to an endowed chair at a think tank. Just minutes before he spoke, I chatted with a top official of Iraq's Interior Ministry, who through an interpreter complained with astonishing candor about the U.S.'s inability to arm and equip police officers, whose morale he called "low." The Iraqi government, he said bluntly, was much weaker than the various insurgencies consuming the country.

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....on the question of postwar Iraq, the intelligence community has understood the situation on the ground exponentially better than Wolfowitz. His method of dealing with difficult questions is to dismiss those who ask them. Consciously echoing Bush's convention-speech reference to a 1946 New York Times dispatch about occupied Germany--which he took completely out of context--Wolfowitz bragged about finding a line from Life magazine in 1947 that said "Yes, America got rid of Nazism, but maybe the cure is worse than the disease."

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And that reference reveals something significant about Wolfowitz, Bush, and the supposed intellectual fault lines within the administration. There is a conceit in right-wing circles--a conceit shared by both Pat Buchanan and Bill Kristol--that the administration neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz are somehow "different" from President Bush. In fact, three years after September 11, they are exactly alike in both program and intellectual style: dogmatic yet adrift, and relentlessly deceitful.

Tuesday, dogma adrift and relentless deceitfulness were in rare form, on display first at the UN, where the President didn't even try and pretend that he meant anything he was saying, whether it was the fiction that the he stood with the people of Iraq who want nothing more than a continuation of the current situation, or the fiction that Prime Minister Allawyi was the real head of a real Iraqi government that expresses the real desires of most Iraqis. But it was the President's performance in the joint press conference with Allawi that struck me as the high point of the day.

PRESIDENT BUSH: A couple of opening statements. We'll answer -- I'll answer a couple of questions from the U.S. media, AP and Reuters, and I'll answer a question from the Iraqi media, as well.

First, Mr. Prime Minister, it's been my delight to visit with you. I appreciate your courage. I appreciate your leadership. I am -- I share the same confidence you share that Iraq will be a free nation, and as a nation, our world will be safer and America will be more secure. We look forward to working with you, sir. I'm proud that you have -- you and your administration have stood strong in the face of the terrorists who want to disrupt progress in Iraq.

Today -- yesterday an American citizen was beheaded. We express our heartfelt condolences. We send our prayers to the Armstrong family. We also stand in solidarity with the American that is now being held captive, while we send our prayers to his wife. These killers want to shake our will --

PRIME MINISTER ALLAWI: Yes.

PRESIDENT BUSH: They want to determine the fate of the Iraqi people. We will not allow these thugs and terrorists to decide your fate, and to decide our fate. As your election draws closer, I'm confident the terrorists will try to stop the progress by acts of violence. And I appreciate your will, and I appreciate your strength. And we'll stand with you, Mr. Prime Minister. Welcome.

PRIME MINISTER ALLAWI: Thank you very much. I would like to pay my condolences really to the people who lost their lives in defending -- fighters of freedom and democracy. The barbaric action of yesterday really is unbelievable. It demonstrates how much these criminals are wanting to damage our worth across Iraq, as well as in the civilized world.

We in Iraq appreciate tremendously the courage President Bush took in deciding to wage war to destroy Saddam. The atrocities and tyranny and -- atrocities that have been committed when Saddam was around was unbelievable. We show a lot of -- hundreds of thousands of mass graves in Iraq.

The war now in Iraq is really not only an Iraqi war, it's a war for the civilized world to fight terrorists and terrorism. And there is no route but the route of winning, and we are going to prevail and we are going to win, regardless of how much damage they are going to make and cause in Iraq and elsewhere.

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PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you, sir. Scott.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. You've answered some of Senator Kerry's criticisms in the last couple days about your Iraq policy. A couple of Republicans have raised some questions, as well, in the last couple days. Senator Hagel said that, "sharp analysis of our policies is required. We didn't do that in Vietnam, to the point where we finally lost." Senator McCain, you're not being "as straight as we would want him to be," about the situation in Iraq. What do you say to them?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Both Senators you quoted strongly want me elected as President. We agree that the world is better off with Saddam Hussein sitting in a prison cell. And that stands in stark contrast to the statement my opponent made yesterday when he said that the world was better off with Saddam in power. I strongly disagree. It is in our interests that we deal with Prime Minister Allawi. It's in our interests that we work toward a free society in Iraq. And I believe we'll have a free society in Iraq, and I know that a free society in Iraq makes America safer and the world better off.

My opponent has taken so many different positions on Iraq that his statements are hardly credible at all.

Who is from the Iraqi media?

Q Mr. President, how do you evaluate Mr. Allawi's visit to America? And in what way -- how can we -- what the result will be reflected on the situation of Iraq, as a result of this visit?

PRESIDENT BUSH: edit

This is an important visit because the Prime Minister will be able to explain clearly to the American people that not only is progress being made, that we will succeed. The American people have seen horrible scenes on our TV screens. And the Prime Minister will be able to say to them that in spite of the sacrifices being made, in spite of the fact that Iraqis are dying and U.S. troops are dying, as well, that there is a will amongst the Iraqi people to succeed. And we stand with them. It's also an important visit for me to say to the people of Iraq that America has given its word to help, and we'll keep our word.

Who is the Reuters man here?

Q Right here, Mr. President, thank you. Why do you think the CIA's assessment of conditions in Iraq are so much at odds with the optimism that you and Prime Minister Allawi are expressing at the moment?

PRESIDENT BUSH: The CIA laid out a -- several scenarios that said, life could be lousy, like could be okay, life could be better. And they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like. The Iraqi citizens are defying the pessimistic predictions. The Iraqi citizens are headed toward free elections. This government has been in place for a little over two months, and the Iraqi citizens are seeing a determined effort by responsible citizens to lead to a more hopeful tomorrow. And I am optimistic we'll succeed.

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One thing is for certain. My discussions with Prime Minister Allawi reconfirm to me that the world is much better off with Prime Minister Allawi and his government in power. And any statement to the contrary is wrong. The idea somehow that the world would be better off with Saddam Hussein in power is an absurd notion.

That last, the waving of Saddam's bloody shirt in the face of anyone who questions the decision to go to war or the prosecution of the occupation is the President's security blanket, habitually clutched at to ward off all questions raised about the worsening situation in Iraq. And didn't he sound like a petulant child when brushing aside the CIA's own estimate of the dire security situation in Iraq? Just "guessing?" In 2002, when we'd had no human intelligence resources on the ground in Iraq since 1998, the Bush administration spoke with one voice to reassure us that the intelligence claims which confirmed Saddam's Iraq as a gathering threat were certain, you could take them to the bank, or slam dunk them through the nearest hoop. Now that we've had all kinds of human resources on the ground in Iraq for a year and a half now, our intelligence estimates are just guesses. Is a puzzlement.

In the context of Kerry's strong speech on Iraq this Monday, and the equally clear and strong position he articulated in Tuesday's press conference, Bush and Cheney's attempts to reduce all questions about Iraq to whether the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein under lock and key lacked their usual punch. Saddam in jail, big plus. Iraq on the brink of becoming a failed state, much bigger minus. Bush/Cheney ought to be able to recognize a cost/benefit analysis when they see one.

Based on Allawi's performance on Tuesday, in which each of his pronouncements mirrored exactly Bush administration talking points, I would predict that his address this morning to a joint session of Congress will display his readiness to be used by the Bush administration as part of its campaign for re-election.

For a dose of reality, read, if you haven't already, this compelling portrait from the Observer of a Sunni insurgent who initially welcomed the American overthrow of Saddam .

Intelligence experts in Iraq talk of three main types of insurgent. There is the Mahdi Army of Shia Muslims who follow the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and have led recent resistance to coalition forces in northern Baghdad, the central shrine city of Najaf, and Basra, the southern port under British control. There is also 'al-Qaeda' - non-Iraqi militants who have come to Iraq to wage jihad. And finally the 'former regime loyalists', who are said to want the return of Saddam Hussein or, if that is impossible, his Baath party.

Abu Mujahed, worryingly for the analysts, fits into none of these easy categories. For a start, he was pro-American before the invasion. 'The only way to breathe under the old regime was to watch American films and listen to their music,' he said. He had been a Bon Jovi fan.

Some of Mujahed's expectations were wholly unrealistic, but it wasn't disappointment that fed his disillusionment.

He spoke of how his faith in the US was shaken when, via a friend's illicitly imported satellite TV system, he saw 'barbaric, savage' pictures of civilian casualties of the fighting and bombing. The next blow came in the conflict's immediate aftermath, as looters ran unchecked through Baghdad.

'When I saw the American soldiers watching and doing nothing as people took everything, I began to suspect the US was not here to help us but to destroy us,' he said.

Abu Mujahed, whose real name is not known by The Observer, said: 'I thought it might be just the chaos of war but it got worse, not better.'

He was not alone and swiftly found that many in the Adhamiya neighbourhood of Baghdad shared his anger and disappointment. The time had come. 'We realised. We had to act.'

Read the rest and you'll find Mujahed's reality is nowhere represented in what our President or "their" Prime Minister had to say this week. And note, too, that nowhere did the President seem to understand that Prime Minister Allawi's claim of sovereignity comes exclusively from us, there having been no elections as yet in Iraq.

Let us remember too, since it is devilishly difficulty to keep track of the mountain of mis-judgements made by this administration in Iraq, that the sole reason there are elections scheduled for January is that the Ayatollah Sistani vetoed the original Bremer/Bush plan by demonstrating his ability to put a hundred thousand protesting Iraqis in the street to demand direct elections to chose a interim government. Remember, too, that the only source Sistani was willing to believe about the non-feasibility of elections being held sooner than January of 2005 was the UN and Kofi Anan, and that Sistani was only willing to agree to the appointment of an interim government that would receive sovereignity from Bremer's coalition authority prior to elections if the UN played a prime role in the selection. And let us also not forget that the sudden revamping of the Brenner/Bush plan this summer to include an earlier than planned turnover of soverenity to an Iraqi government was the precise policy that both the UN and the non-coalition European countries were insisting was a necessary first step to get other countries to offer help on the ground in Iraq. So, in the end, Bush did a switcheroo, known in some quarters as a flip flop, but too late for American taxpayers, the American military on the ground in Iraq, or the Iraqi people to get the extra benefit from it that was available if Bush were ever able to listen to anyone outside his own small circle of advisors.

(BTW, I'm working on another post that will offer a talking points list arranged chronologically of all the mistakes made by Bush & co in Iraq from the point of the statue of Saddam coming down, so if any readers have suggestions, please email, or leave them in comments.)

Listen for a moment to the ambivalence of that Sunni insurgent, who, remember, has taken up arms against the American occupation:

Last week US military casualties in Iraq passed the 1,000 mark, most killed since the end of the war by the actions of men like Abu Mujahed. The former engineering student said he does not know how many his group has killed: 'It is impossible to say what has been hit. I could boast of killing maybe 25, but to be honest we don't know,' he said. 'Maybe only five or six.'

'I know the soldiers have no choice about coming here and all have a family and friends,' he added. His justification for the struggle was an inconsistent mix of political and economic grievances and wounded pride: 'We are under occupation. They bomb the mosques, they kill a huge number of people. There is no greater shame than to see your country being occupied.'

He dismissed the interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, as 'the Americans' Barbie doll' but then says that if everyone had 'full bellies' no one would fight.

'Iraqis' top priority is to provide a good living for their families. I take home less than 250,000 ID (£100) a month and I have four children. I have to pay the rent, doctor's bills, my wife needs something, my house needs something. And a kilo of chicken costs 2,500 ID.'

'The US or the UK are not my enemy. I know that any individual US or UK citizen is very good, but we will keep fighting the occupying forces. We have no choice.'

It shouldn't have been that difficult to give a man like this, a Sunni who despised Saddam, a different choice, maybe two or three different choices. John Kerry is saying it isn't too late.

As I finish this post, I'm listening to Allawi this morning addressing congress. Wow, is he ever in Bush's pocket. Or perhaps its the other way around. And now in the Rose Garden, Bush is saying that the electrical grid in Iraq is fully functioning at pre-war levels. Am I missing something? Did I just hear our President tell a straight-up easily verifiable lie? Readers, please advise in comments.

I fear that Allawi is Bush's kind of guy; tough, resolute, mendacious, and an idealist about democracy and human rights, which is to say, he, like Bush, enjoys the sound of his own soaring rhetoric, while both men are relatively indifferent to the messy actuality of creating and preserving the institutions required to implement the rhetoric here on earth.

The best discussion I've read about Allawi is by Andrew Cockburn and can be found at Salon. Herewith, a sample:

May 29, 2004 There could be no more perfect evidence of the desperation among U.S. officials dealing with Iraq than the choice of veteran Baathist and CIA hireling Iyad Allawi as prime minister of the "sovereign" government due to take office after June 30. As one embittered Iraqi told me from Baghdad on Friday: "The appointment must have been orchestrated by Ahmed Chalabi in order to discredit the entire process." He was not entirely joking, given the fact that Chalabi joined the rest of the Governing Council in voting for Allawi despite their long and vicious rivalry.

Though he is Shiite, Allawi was once upon a time an active Baathist, a member of Saddam Hussein's political party, and is thought to enjoy much support among the officer corps of the old Iraqi army, and by extension among many former Baathists and influential Sunni. Indeed, there are reports that the reason Ahmed Chalabi, the neoconservative favorite, urged his friends in the White House to dissolve the army last year -- a decision now acknowledged to be the most disastrous of the occupation -- was Chalabi's fear of the support enjoyed by his rival (and cousin -- everyone in Baghdad is related) within the military.

Allawi cut his political teeth as a strong-arm Baathist student organizer before being dispatched by the party to London to run the Iraqi Student Union in Europe. Apart from the Iraqis he dutifully monitored, other Arab students with whom he came in contact were of considerable interest in Saddam's Baghdad, since they tended to be drawn from elite circles in the Middle East. They were also of more direct value to Allawi personally, garnering him a fruitful array of connections in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, which he then used with great effect in various business enterprises in the region. By the late 1970s he had become wealthy.

Cockburn goes into detail about Allawi's fascination with "the intrigue of intelligence operations," which led to the always paranoid Saddam's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Allawi, and his subsequent career as an anti-Saddam exile, which has included a long rivalry with Chalabi.

The most interesting as well as depressing information Cockburn supplies is about the machinations of both Chalabi and Allawi, in concert with Bremer and the US to prevent the nomination of the UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi's first choice as interim Prime Minister, Hussein Shahristani.

Shahristani, a devout Shiite, would have been an inspired appointment. A man of extraordinary courage and integrity, he once told Saddam Hussein to his face that Iraq should not build a nuclear weapon. Predictably, he was tortured and put on trial for espionage, in the course of which he blithely insulted Saddam's parentage. He spent 10 years in solitary confinement in Abu Ghraib. "I probably survived execution because I was there on the direct orders of Saddam," Shahristani once told me. "And he simply forgot to sign my death warrant." He escaped disguised as a prison guard during the 1991 war after suborning a trusty who unlocked his cell and helped him flee.

Finding refuge in Iran, Shahristani refused to move on to comfortable exile in the West, preferring instead to stay in Iran and organize aid for otherwise friendless Iraqi refugees as well as the resistance inside Iraq itself. His unshakable independence eventually drove the Iranians to force him to move to London.

Returning to Iraq immediately after the war, Shahristani eschewed the trappings of power and cash rewards sought by other returning exiles and even refused to enter the U.S. Green Zone headquarters on the grounds it was occupied territory. He soon earned the trust and respect of Ayatollah Sistani. But that was not enough to protect him from self-interested intriguers like Allawi, Chalabi, and the representatives of the Islamist parties SCIRI and DAWA.

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The United Nations, charged with coming up with the new government, was taken by surprise by Allawi's selection. U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said he "respects" the decision and is willing to work with Allawi, according to U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard. But the world body was less than effusive about the choice.

Me too. How could the Bush administration not see the greater value to the United States and what we say we hope to accomplish in Iraq of Shahristani over Allawi?

I'll talk about Kerry's speech about Iraq in a separate post, but for some idea of why his proposals may not be as utopian and impractical as they sound in the context of how the Bushies have handled the occupation of Iraq, take a look at this essay by Salim Lone, a surviving member of the UN delegation to Iraq in 2003. The essay, "I Lived to Tell the Tale: It wasn't Last Year's Bomb but American Policy which Destroyed the UN's Hopes in Iraq," details the way in which the Bush administration had already undercut the ability of the UN to be of use in creating an intelligent occupation that might have succeeded to the benefit of both the US and the Iraqi population, even before that terrible bomb of August killed 22 members of the delegation, including the incomparably valuable, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The vicious terrorist attack a year ago today surprised no one working for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN secretary general's special representative. Indeed, the UN chiefs of communication in Iraq had met that morning to hammer out a plan to counter the intensifying perception among Iraqis that our mission was simply an adjunct of the US occupation.

Little did the Iraqis know that the reality was quite the opposite: by August, the UN mission had grown very distant from the Americans. The intense early relationship that Sergio, the world's most brilliant negotiator of post-conflict crises, had fashioned with Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, had already fractured. Contact was intermittent now that Bremer's coalition provisional authority (CPA) could deal directly with the Iraqis whom it had appointed, with Sergio's help, to the governing council. General dismay over occupation tactics aside, Sergio had already parted company with Bremer over key issues such as the need for electoral affirmation of a new constitution, and the arrest and conditions of detention of the thousands imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison.

The low point came at the end of July last year, when, astonishingly, the US blocked the creation of a fully fledged UN mission in Iraq. Sergio believed that this mission was vital and had thought the CPA also supported it. Clearly, the Bush administration had eagerly sought a UN presence in occupied Iraq as a legitimizing factor rather than as a partner that could mediate the occupation's early end, which we knew was essential to averting a major conflagration.

Sergio had nevertheless continued to squeeze whatever mileage he could from what he called the "constructive ambiguity" of a terrible postwar security council resolution; one that sent UN staff into the Iraqi cauldron without giving them even a minimal level of independence or authority. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was this resolution that rang the death knell for the UN in Iraq. Having heroically resisted American pressure to authorize the war, security council members decided to show goodwill to the "victors". "A step too far" was how an Iraqi put it to me on my second day in Baghdad.

So it wasn't the "terrorists" who made a meaningful UN presence impossible in postwar Iraq, "little did the Iraqi's know," even less did Americans know about any of the reality Lone is talking about.

Read the whole thing; it's one of the most important pieces I've read about what went wrong with postwar Iraq. As if we didn't know.