Truthdig

Hizb Allah, Party of God

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 19:06:00 -0400

Over one million Lebanese gathered in a vast square in a southern Beirut suburb on Sept. 22 to celebrate their country’s largely successful campaign against Israel. Seyid Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hizballah, risked his life by appearing in public after Israeli leaders had sworn to kill him, and spoke to his adoring supporters in Lebanon and around the world.

Many children were given the day off from school, and buses ferried supporters from all over Lebanon for the victory celebration. Lebanon had endured 33 days of war, and not only was the Shia Hizballah movement undefeated, it had achieved a near parity of casualties with the Israeli military -- a first in the history of Arab-Israeli wars. In an Arab world whose leaders were dictatorial, mendacious and corrupt, who made false promises and were beholden to the United States, Nasrallah was renowned for his integrity and for maintaining his movement’s defense of Lebanon at all costs. It had made him the most popular leader in the Arab world.

Women, children and men waved the flags of Lebanon and Hizballah from outside the windows and sang in jubilation as they waited in traffic. Also on display were the flags of Palestine and Palestinian movements, Lebanese Christian movements, the Communist Party, Sunni and Druze movements, as well as secular nationalists. Although many of the celebrants were men with beards or women whose hair was covered, many were not. There were youths in trendy attire, girls in tight jeans with hair exposed and who had turned their Hizballah T-shirts into stylish form-fitting fashion statements.

Stuck in the crowds with my seven-months-pregnant American wife, we opted for a better view from the balcony of an apartment building above the crowds. When the singing of Hizballah songs and the Lebanese and Hizballah anthems had ended and Nasrallah began his speech, the women on the balcony with us shrieked as though at a rock concert and ran into the living room to confirm on the television screen that it was indeed him. They waved their arms and started to cry, and a frisson of emotion ran through the men in the room.

Nasrallah not only spoke to his natural constituents, the Lebanese Shia, but he also singled out the inhabitants of Palestine, Syria, Iran, Kuwait and Bahrain. He told his audience that they were sending a political and moral message to the world that Lebanon’s resistance was stronger than ever. Their victory was a victory for every oppressed, aggrieved and free person in the world, he said, and an inspiration for all who rejected subjugation or degradation by the United States. He mocked Arab leaders for not using their oil resources as a strategic weapon, for prohibiting demonstrations, for not supporting the Palestinians and for kowtowing to Condoleezza Rice. He extended his people’s hearts, grief and empathy for the Palestinians who were being bombed and killed daily, and whose homes were being destroyed while the world, and in particular the Arab world, was silent.

Surveying this massive crowd of boisterous people -- the men and women, the teenagers and the small children, celebrating their identity and their steadfastness together with music -- I knew this was not the stuff of religious fundamentalism or terrorism. I was struck by how the reality of Hizballah differed from its distorted image in the West. For although Hizb Allah, the Party of God, is undoubtedly of Shia origin, it is in fact a secular movement, addressing real temporal issues, its leaders speaking in a nationalist discourse, avoiding sectarianism and religious metaphors. They participate in politics, compromising and negotiating, and do not seek to impose Islamic law on others. Proof of this is readily available in Hizballah strongholds, where many of their followers are secular, supporting Hizballah because it represents their political interests and defends them.

Throughout the country, women in chadors walk beside scantily clad beauties. Along Lebanon’s highways, or what is left of them, billboards celebrating Hizballah’s “divine victory” over Israel share advertising space with posters depicting half-naked women wearing jeans or lingerie. Hizballah may have preferences, but unlike the authoritarian leaders of the Taliban or Saudi Arabia, it does not impose them.

Nor has the movement shown a long-standing inability to reconcile with its enemies. Most strikingly, in 2000, after Israel’s withdrawal from the Lebanese territory it was occupying, the thousands of Shia and Christian collaborators suddenly found themselves vulnerable to retribution and street justice from understandably aggrieved Lebanese. On strict orders from Hizballah, however, the vast majority were not touched. Rather they were handed over to the Lebanese army, dealt with by the Lebanese government and imprisoned and amnestied prematurely, in a move that offended many Lebanese. Nevertheless, today they can be spotted in towns in the south; everyone knows who they are, and they remain unharmed. Hardly the actions of a violent fundamentalist terrorist organization.

And what was so unreasonable about Hizballah’s demands? The movement insisted it wanted Lebanese prisoners to be freed by Israel, all of Lebanon’s territory to be evacuated by Israel, and for the Lebanese army, which had never defended Lebanon, let alone its south, to come up with a national defense plan. Thirty years of proven Israeli brutality and 60 years of Lebanese government neglect of the south gave Hizballah a raison d’etre its leadership insisted it did not want.

And unlike many of his counterparts in Iraq, Nasrallah is ingenuously urging a course of national unity in Lebanon. During his Sept. 22 speech, he went out of his way to use the rhetoric of Lebanese nationalism while condemning sectarianism. In previous speeches Nasrallah had declared that he was fighting for the umma, the world Muslim community, which is vastly Sunni. He charmed the Lebanese in a recent television interview when he looked his female interviewer in the eyes, allowed her to interrupt him and smiled with her, practically flirting. His posters can be found in Iraq, Palestine, Egypt; his name is spoken with pride in Saudi Arabia. In Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, I recently saw shops named in his honor, and heard a local cleric compare the conflict the cleric’s Islamic court militias were facing with Ethiopia and U.S.-backed warlords to Hizballah’s conflict with the American-supported Israelis.

The details of that conflict are instructive, because in it I again saw the tragic error inherent in the Bush administration’s policy of viewing the entire Muslim world through the “war on terror” prism, rather than judging each conflict on its own. In Somalia, it is widely believed that the CIA is funding a slew of unpopular and criminal warlords against a popular Islamic militia movement (which the CIA neither confirms nor denies, of course). This suspected U.S. support comes despite the fact that most analysts believe the militias are not harboring any significant terrorists nor are they likely to set up a Taliban-style regime in the country. As a result, the perception in Somalia is that the U.S. has allied itself with warlords who are terrorizing the populace in an attempt to stamp out a popular Islamic uprising.

It is this same distorting war-on-terror prism that has led the Bush administration to view resistance fighters in Iraq as mere terrorists -- as opposed to elements of a popular movement made up of Sunnis and Shias with real grievances against an oppressive and increasingly onerous occupation. As a result, the inhabitants of entire towns and provinces have been branded as terrorists and “anti-Iraqi forces” -- and treated as such. When I was visiting Falluja in the spring of 2004 it was clear that the vast majority of the defenders of that city were locals who believed they were fighting in self-defense against a foe that sought to destroy their city and oppress them. They were nationalists, fighting against foreign occupation. Their city of 300,000 was virtually destroyed -- turned into the proverbial parking lot. Falluja became legendary in the Muslim world for its resistance to occupation and for its martyrs -- much like the people of south Lebanese villages such as Aita al Shaab, who boast of their willingness to die for their ideals and of their sumud, or steadfastness.

During his Sept. 22 speech Nasrallah paid tribute to their sumud, but he also spoke of national unity, insisting that the resistance had prevented civil war from recurring in Lebanon. He called for the Lebanese state to become strong, just, capable and free of corruption. When the state became able to protect Lebanon, the resistance would give up its weapons, he promised. Hizballah was not a totalitarian movement, he insisted, and he was not a ruler -- nor would his sons be.

Support for Hizballah transcends economic class divides and the divide between religious and secular Shias. Hizballah is one of the few movements in Lebanon addressing substantive issues that transcend sectarian identity -- issues like corruption, social justice, rejection of America’s new Middle East project, resistance to Israeli occupation, and support for the oppressed Palestinians.

Hizballah now has strong allies and supporters among most of Lebanon’s Christians (who make up some 40% of the population); it also enjoys the support of most of the 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanese camps. Indeed, the war has only increased Hizballah’s supporters. I spoke to Sheikh Maher Hamoud, a powerful Sunni leader in Sidon, who told me that although he had objected to many of Hizballah’s positions before the war, he had supported them during the war and had no disagreements with them now. Hizballah’s victory was a victory for Lebanon, Arabs and all Muslims, he said, adding that “our pride was restored.” I spoke to Joseph Moukarzel, owner of the newspaper Addabour, and a leading organizer of the March 14 movement that was Hizballah’s main opponent in Lebanon. “I was for taking Hizballah’s weapons before the war, and I still am,” he told me, “but in the war I had two choices, to be with Hizballah or to be with Israel. I chose Hizballah. Hizballah was David and Israel was Goliath.”

Followers of other Lebanese sects -- Greek Orthodox, Maronite, Sunni, Druze -- merely follow their leaders because of their positions, not because of their ideas. Hizballah is a people’s movement, having emerged in 1982 as an inchoate umbrella group representing the marginalized and oppressed and cultivating a culture of resistance to oppression and injustice.

It was this culture of resistance that led to Hizballah’s surprise victory in what is now being called in Lebanon “the Sixth War” with Israel. (A note on my usage of “surprise victory”: If war is politics by other means, then Israel failed to achieve its stated political goals of disarming Hizballah and pushing it north of the Litani River; so too did it fail to achieve its unstated goals of cleansing the south of all Shias and intimidating Lebanese and Palestinian resistance -- two failures that even Israel’s own generals are beginning to admit. Hizballah, on the other hand, not only survived the war intact, and with relatively few casualties, but it inflicted relatively heavy casualties on the Israeli military and achieved greater popularity than it ever had -- winning the hearts of Muslims around the world, and many non-Muslims in Lebanon.)

On Sept. 17 I attended a memorial service for some of Hizballah’s dead soldiers in the small town of Aita al Shaab, a mere few hundred meters from the Israeli border. Aita al Shaab has suffered numerous attacks from Israel since 1970, but in this last war 85% of the town was destroyed. Only 100 Hizballah soldiers fought in Aita al Shaab, and 60 of them were local. The vast majority were not professional soldiers. The nine local martyrs who died in the 33 days of war were typical of Hizballah’s soldiers. They were a high school history teacher, a high school principal, a sweets shop owner, two high school graduates about to start university for engineering, a university student home on summer break. They were restaurant waiters, farmers, car mechanics, bakers. They had completed Hizballah’s boot camp and training and returned to their normal lives, occasionally going for refresher courses, much like our Army reserves or National Guard.

The people of Aita al Shaab blamed America as much as they did Israel for the war that had been waged against them. In the memorial service Hizballah representative Nawaf al Musawi spoke of “the American, British and Israeli war against Lebanon.” Even little children were aware of Condoleezza Rice’s comments about the birth pangs of the new Middle East, and 7-year-old Sajah Bajouk mocked Rice and John Bolton, playing on words and changing “the new Middle East,” or al sharq al awsat al jadid, to “the new Dirty East,” or al sharq al awsakh al jadid.

Most of Hizballah’s soldiers in the most recent war were between 18 and 25 years old and had never fought before. Somehow these 100 fighters in Aita al Shaab held the town, never surrendering it to the Israeli military. Many of the town’s old people stayed behind to cook and care for Hizballah’s soldiers. Other people left their homes and shops open for them. The town was Hizballah. And the entire town gathered on Sunday, Sept. 17, to mourn its dead and celebrate its victory. Hundreds of black-clad women made their way up a dirt road from the newly constructed martyr’s cemetery where the nine Hizballah soldiers and the nine civilian war dead had been buried. Many tearfully carried large framed pictures of their lost men.

After the ceremony, thousands of prepackaged meals of rice and meat were provided for the townspeople. Aita al Shaab’s people reaffirmed their support for Hizballah and resumed rebuilding their lives. As one hears so many times in Lebanon, the entire south is Hizballah; and Israel knew this, hence its war was against the people of the south. But they can’t all be terrorists, can they? Israel claims it gave a 48-hour warning to civilians, ordering them to leave the south or face death. Under international law, however, civilians never lose their immunity, and, besides, it is well known that in some instances Israel gave no warnings of its impending attacks on civilian areas (in the Bekaa Valley, for example).

When climbing amid the ruined schools, fuel stations, shops, homes, roads and bridges of southern Lebanon or driving through village after village flattened and pulverized by the terror that rained down, it is clear that the civilian population was deliberately targeted. Over 1 million cluster bombs were dropped, and 40% of them did not explode. They remain in the south, waiting for children to play with them, for farmers to step on them, a gift that keeps on giving. The agricultural fields on which the south depends for its economy are destroyed. Then as now, Israel knows what it and America continue to deny: Hizballah is the people, and hence the only way to push Hizballah north of the Litani River as Israel stated it wanted to do was to cleanse the south of Shias and make sure it was too dangerous, and economically impossible, for them to return. But the Shias of Lebanon pride themselves on their steadfastness, and their culture of resistance to oppression. They cannot be so easily dislodged. At fighting’s end, they returned and ensconced themselves in the ruins, trusting Hizballah to provide and reward them for their loyalty.

The media has fast forgotten Lebanon: Americans are distracted by what former Rep. Mark Foley wrote to congressional pages; many Muslims worldwide are more concerned with whether or not the pope insulted Islam than with who is actually killing Muslims. As the 1 million Lebanese refugees who fled Israeli terror return to sift through the rubble of their lives, they will be sidestepping cluster bombs and trusting that Hizballah will house and shelter them from the fast-approaching winter. As we Americans mourn our losses in the Sept. 11 attacks and in the subsequent war on terror (which has now cost more American lives than were lost in the attacks that provoked it), it is worth wondering: What exactly is terrorism? And if it is the infliction of violence on civilians for political reasons, then who are the terrorists?

Springtime for Kurdistan

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:39:00 -0400

Sometimes one entity has to die for another to be born.

In the Balkans alone, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire enabled the creation of ethnic-national territories, but it was close to a century later that the Yugoslav federation violently dissolved and Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia finally emerged as modern nation-states. As for the Ottoman’s eastern realm, it is said that if Arabs had drawn the maps after World War I, Iraq would never have existed anyway. But undoing British cartographic ineptitude had to wait decades for the Iraqi murder-suicide that began with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and now is culminating in the current civil war precipitated by the ineptitude of Britain’s imperial successor, America. Slowly and methodically, new lines are being hardened on the region’s map, and a nation only amorphously labeled in Ottoman times is being born: Kurdistan.

Peter Galbraith, veteran ambassador and advisor to the Kurds, writes in his new book The End of Iraq that all Kurds he has dealt with want an independent state. There are two ways to see Kurdistan today: through the eyes of the older or younger generation. By necessity, the latter’s vision will prevail. So let us come to terms with one simple causal truth regarding Iraq’s future: Because 100% of Kurdistan’s youths (and 95% of citizens voting in a referendum last year) want independence, it will eventually happen. The task of the older generation is to make sure that independence is acceptable to Kurdistan’s neighbors and America without taking any longer than it has to.

The Kurds, one prominent local told me, live by the saying, “If you don’t plan it, it can’t go wrong.” Without making any sudden moves, Kurdistan is emerging as a series of micro-decisions which favor the autonomy of the Kurdistan region of Iraq over deference to the central government in Baghdad. This is State-Building 101. Somewhat like Quebec or Taiwan, the Kurdistan Regional Government now has its own ministries for agriculture, development, education and investment. Only Kurdish is spoken, and only the Kurdish flag flies in Kurdistan; the Iraqi flag -- which continues to symbolize the unity of Arab tribes -- is unofficially forbidden. Politically incorrect lapel pins uniting the Kurdistan and British (and American) flags are distributed at events. The region’s top chief, Masoud Barzani, carries the title of president of the Kurdistan region. The peshmerga guerrillas have evolved into a united 100,000-man force with new military and police academies to train this voluntary Kurdish national army, yet another foundation of sovereignty creeping under the radar. These are not merely trappings of autonomy. They are habits of statehood being codified on a daily basis. Micro-sovereignty is complete; remaining for the future are Kurdistan passports, United Nations membership and a new currency (or rather to get one back, as the Kurds used their own currency for 11 years until the “Bremer dinar” and then the Iraqi dinar were reintroduced).

The closer that Iraq’s Sunni-Shia rivalry edges toward state collapse, the more one is forced to wonder why the Kurds, long deserving of statehood, aren’t granted it to preserve their island of stability. Trapped between Turkish, Arab and Persian civilizations, Kurds have been abused for centuries by their neighbors. Little remains of the 3,000-year-old citadel in Erbil where Alexander the Great clashed with the Persians. The Kurdish national movement gained strength after the Ottoman partition, during which Sulaymaniah became a Kurdish administrative center, but in the inter-war period Kurds were not even recognized as a people in neighboring states (in Turkey they were considered “mountain Turks”). Today, the Middle East’s largest minority spans Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq, with more ethnic Kurds in Turkey (15 million to 20 million) than in all the other states combined. With Syria and Iran under international scrutiny, Turkey restrained by its EU aspirations, and Iraq crumbling by the minute, the only thing restraining the Kurds is America and the Kurds’ leverage in Iraq’s federal structure, in which they presently control the presidency and other key posts in the foreign ministry, army and other agencies. Kurdistan is able to retain the legitimacy of being part of Iraq rather than being an unrecognized Kurdish rump state and thus receive large volumes of donor assistance through Baghdad, all the while using its share of federal revenues to build self-sustaining, independent institutions

Prominent calls have risen for a Bosnia-style Iraqi federation of three semiautonomous regions, most recently by U.S. Sen. Joe Biden. If a stable, federal Iraq pulls through over the next two years, national unity will have prevailed but Kurds will have achieved maximal constitutional protections, even an advantageous position together with the Shia parties.

“If... .”

Mention the scenario of Iraq’s self-destruction providing a fait accompli for Kurdistan’s independence, however, and watch smiles creep across Kurdish faces. After Saddam razed their villages, gassed their people and stole their livelihoods, the Kurds’ present schadenfreude and condescension toward Iraq’s plight seem natural. Baghdad is a four-letter word here.

***

The history and culture of Kurdistan, situated along the eastern Taurus and central Zagros mountain ranges, date back to the Seljuk era. Kurds are an Indo-European people speaking an Indo-Iranian language. The only thing Kurds have in common with their Arab neighbors is the Sunni faith, but even here they represent the opposite extreme from the Sunnis to their south. Kurds are viscerally afraid of extremism. Within hours of my arrival in Erbil, a Kurdish government representative politely suggested I shave my week-old beard, fearing my appearance would arouse suspicion. With the exception of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which waged a guerrilla war in and against Turkey through the 1980s and 1990s, Kurdish fundamentalism has been so restrained by the authorities as to become an oxymoron. Particularly since the assassination of their deputy prime minister (and many others) in 2004 by a Yemeni extremist, Kurds are on high alert. One of the first targets for the Kurdish peshmerga upon Saddam’s ouster was the radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which is now cornered and near strangulation near the Iranian border. Along the frontier with Iraq, peshmerga troops steadfastly guard against any undesired infiltration. Arabs and Arabic speakers are subjected to immediate racial profiling. Kurds are so (rightly) insecure about their national security that loyalty to the state supersedes even the family. “They are not my relatives until they are cleared at the border,” a well-educated Erbil resident told me.

It is no surprise that Kurds want independence from any future Iraqi state, whether democratic or monstrous. Saddam used chemical weapons against the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, and after his defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, he completely severed all institutional, cultural and educational ties to Kurdistan. Many Kurds were barred from admission to Iraqi universities, so today many don’t even speak Arabic. The peshmerga of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) came down from the mountains, and their commander, Jalal Talabani, once marked for death by Saddam, began building the PUK half of post-Saddam Kurdistan and now occupies his nemesis’ office. The Kurds’ minimum demands for a highly decentralized, federal Iraqi republic will ensure that Iraq will, at best, be a very weak state, particularly if the Shia parties grant themselves the same autonomy. Iraq simply cannot have a strong center, for the main parties would then evidently prefer it not exist at all. In other words, it faces a dilemma similar to that of the Yugoslavia of the late 1980s, unwittingly on the brink of civil war.

Just a cursory comparison with Iraq demonstrates the fact that sustained reconstruction is impossible without security. It’s hard to capture how un-Iraqi Kurdistan is, a realization which lends immediate, strong sympathy for the cause of Kurdish statehood. Should not the single island of stability in the region be preserved? On the same day in late March that former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared that Iraq was being torn by civil war, I had tea with Abdul Kader Mustafa, editor of the popular and independent Barzan newspaper, who giddily confessed that he feels born again each day he is back in Kurdistan after three decades’ exile in the United States. The next day, at a ceremony on a former Iraqi military base marking Kurdish, American, British and Korean (South Korea’s 3,000 troops make up the regional component of coalition forces) friendship, the presence of hulking, armed-to-the-teeth American contractors could not have seemed more superfluous. There have been almost no foreign deaths in Kurdistan since the American invasion three years ago. Over dinner at a Turkish restaurant in Sulaymaniah, Iraq’s deputy minister for culture lamented that Baghdad was not safe enough to pursue any major cultural restoration. In Sulaymaniah, however, the public library has been splendidly renovated, with even a charming, Rodin-like sculpture garden in front. Large developments of modern homes are taking shape in the middle of town, with no security protection whatsoever.

Because of the first Iraq war and the U.S.-patrolled no-fly zones, Kurds have had a 15-year head start over the rest of Iraq in recovering from Saddam’s reign of terror. They are aided in many ways by their non-Arab culture. Whereas Arab citizens are accustomed to rentier entitlement regimes, Kurds are rapidly becoming entrepreneurial and market-oriented. After their own brutal civil war, Kurds now practice a tolerance and nonviolent governance simply absent in any of the Arab neighbors. While churches are being destroyed elsewhere in Iraq, Kurds are building them, and in Sulaymaniah, once one-fourth populated by Jews, synagogues are reappearing as well. Built on a former Iraqi army base, the city’s Azaadi (“Freedom”) Park has a London-style Speaker’s Corner next to a memorial bearing the names of Kurds executed there by the Baathist regime in 1963. Still, Arab Iraqis are welcome to seek work there and flee the uncertainties of the rest of Iraq. There is also a certain innocence that comes with near-total isolation. The Kurds’ incredible hospitality literally brings new meaning to the term “kindness of strangers.”

Yet the Kurdistan Regional Government is having a hard time disassociating itself from Iraq, of which it is still a federal unit. ATM machines are absent because foreign banks still won’t commit to long-term investments there, and foreign mobile phones can’t roam anywhere in the region. The KRG recently decided to launch a website, The Other Iraq, to showcase Kurdistan’s solid opportunities in construction, oil and gas and agriculture, and has attracted a steady but still minor flow of European and Asian companies. (Hint: The region could use a postal service.) Kurdistan, not Jordan or Lebanon, is the natural base for Western companies and contractors operating in Iraq. Kurds have at least won the battle to not be called “northern Iraq” -- which is as insulting to the Kurds as calling Scotland “northern Britain” is to the Scottish. Even Saddam Hussein recognized Kurdistan as an autonomous province in 1970, and Kurdistan is the only such entity in Iraq’s new constitution. The return of expatriates is a lead indicator of the Kurds’ success to date. Unlike brain-draining Syria, Iran and Iraq, Kurds are bringing their money and talent back home to serve the Kurdistan project. Many are conversant in German; if Kurds from Germany can do a fraction for Kurdistan what Turks from Germany have done for Turkey, Kurdistan has a bright future indeed. Other expat Kurds are concentrating on building a new American-style university in Sulaymaniah, with plans to open doors within three years and have regularly visiting American faculty.

The lobby of the Erbil International Hotel (also known locally as the “Sheraton”) exudes a cosmopolitan vibe, night and day. Cabinet ministers regularly meet with locals and each other there, pouring over investment proposals, greeting foreign delegations and fielding questions from journalists. They have no time for formality or pretense. “We were always taken advantage of because we were asleep,” Falah Mustafa Bakir, a senior minister in the Barzani government, told me. “Now we have to be awake round-the-clock.”

Iraqi Kurdistan is now the freest and most productive of all Kurdish-populated regions, and has become the melting pot for the region’s Kurds and a hub from which resistance to subjugation in particularly Iran and Syria is planned. Syrian Kurdish men in particular have fled en masse to study in Sulaymaniah, where they can freely associate and make plans to return home and agitate for greater rights.

But to measure Kurdistan’s merits purely on the basis of comparison to the frightening mayhem of Iraq would be a straw-man approach. Kurdistan needs to accelerate its political development if it is to convincingly distinguish itself from its politically regressive neighbors. With Kurdistan no longer divided and ruled by Saddam, the two ruling parties -- or rather families -- Barzani’s KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) and Talabani’s PUK, still divide and rule Kurdistan. They have mafia-like control over business interests in the region and high-level stakes in Baghdad itself. A rivalry between the parties has meant that the two cellphone operators in Kurdistan remain incompatible, utterly corrupt nonsense for a population so small. More fundamentally, they have resisted efforts for the formation of new parties such as the “People’s Front,” maintaining a patronage duopoly which dictates the terms of elections. Anger at both parties is simmering, as demonstrated by the gains made by the Kurdistan Islamic Union Party in the most recent elections. Anger at PUK and KDP corruption recently boiled over in Halabja, where hundreds of demonstrators torched the very monument inaugurated by Colin Powell two years ago to commemorate the victims of Saddam’s chemical gas attack in 1988.

Ultimately, the remaining task of consolidating Kurdistan’s position vis-à-vis more powerful and manipulative neighbors will require that its leaders stick together and cooperate. With the exception of America -- and more recently Israel, which prefers that Iraq remain weak -- Kurds still realize that they have, as their saying goes, “no friends but the mountains.”

Because America continues to officially seek a united Iraq, little news of Kurdistan’s unique success makes the headlines. But as America’s standing hits new lows among Iraqis and remains high in Kurdistan, its need for a reliable, secular ally in the region may force it to concede even greater autonomy to the Kurds, perhaps in exchange for support for Washington’s increasingly confrontational policies on Syria and Iran.

What Kurds want most in the post-Iraq settlement is Kirkuk. The oil-rich city was a central point of contention with the Kurds as Iraq was formed in 1921, and judging from the two-hour-long litany of complaints given to an audience of card-carrying PUK members by their man on the ground there, the situation remains far from resolved. Saddam’s campaign to isolate the Kurds meant they had no major power stations, railways, airports or refineries. Though there are oil deposits elsewhere in Kurdistan, its autonomy is unsustainable without a major industrial center. The Kurds have already demographically reversed Kirkuk’s violent Arabization under Saddam, but they will have to wage a nonviolent, democratic campaign to become the masters of its oil fields through a referendum scheduled for 2007. If they can complete a refinery for Kirkuk oil in its outskirts in the next five years, the last foundation for independence would be in place.

But as a landlocked country, Kurdistan cannot amount to much more than a Middle Eastern Bolivia without reassuring its neighbors that it has no regional ambitions beyond claiming Kirkuk. Though the ideal united Kurdistan state, the dream of mid-20th century Kurdish hero Mustafa Barzani, would stretch from the Syrian city of Afrin through Iraq’s Badra district to the Ilam region of Iran, Kamal Fuad, an elder statesman in the PUK Politburo, makes clear that “our responsibility stops at Hamri mountain,” which lies 100 kilometers south of Kirkuk and constitutes a natural land boundary with the rest of Iraq. Mosul, which was the Ottoman and then Baathist administrative center for northern Iraq, holds no interest for Kurdish leaders.

Few neighbors want a strong Iraq to emerge from the ashes, and even fewer seem to want a strong Kurdistan encroaching on their borders. The Turkish government, for example, has shown little sympathy in closing its border to Kurdish oil refined in Turkey and needed back in Kurdistan, leading, ironically, to long lines for petrol throughout Kurdistan and the common sight of plastic gas containers being sold on the roadside. But in one of the most hopeful examples of globalization trumping geopolitics, it is Turkish companies applying the most pressure on their government to back down. As the master construction engineers of the region, Turkish contractors are speedily building both of Kurdistan’s international airports, as well as tunnels, flyovers and ring roads. Interestingly, the Turkish government’s recent steps to recognize Kurdish rights, combined with its concerns over the pan-Kurdish rhetoric of Kurdistani satellite television, have led it to launch two “moderate” Kurdish-language satellite stations of its own, a net plus for Kurdish identity.

Ultimately, having Kurds remain as minorities in the neighboring states -- rather than entirely consolidating into Iraqi Kurdistan -- would serve Kurdistan’s interests. Minority status helps to build international pressure for greater rights. For example, in the wake of the recent Kurdish protests across Turkey, particularly in Diyarbakir in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, a Kurdish TV station plans to open a case before the European Court of Human Rights against Turkey for restricting its airtime and content. Minorities straddling Kurdistan’s borders will also preserve trade relations. The smuggling of fuel, tea, sugar, and drugs has for centuries linked the markets of Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan -- with Kurdistan right in the middle. The famed Hamilton Road along the Zagros range (built by New Zealand engineer A.M. Hamilton in 1928-32) can once again be the modern artery for this branch of the Silk Road. The Zagros mountainscape is pinch-yourself magnificent, the site of thousands of impromptu family picnics throughout the week of Nowrouz, the Zoroastrian-derived celebration of spring. Kurdish women in colorful, flowing gowns and men in their baggy peshmerga suits with matching headdresses and cummerbunds dance in the markets and hills like a scene from a Bollywood movie.

If geopolitics has an end state, it is when borders, populations, resources and interests find equilibrium. In Palestine and Kurdistan, new quasi-states are emerging in response to a need to correct the mistakes of the post-Ottoman settlement as well as the more modern imperative to transcend the rigid state system altogether. Kurds will undoubtedly have, in some form, all the freedoms they deserve. They should get them sooner rather than later.

Ugly Americans in Iraq

adminn — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:41:51 -0400

Editor's note: This oral history is composed almost entirely of e-mail correspondences that Rosen received from a soldier, who wished to remain anonymous.

About the soldier: He served in Iraq during 2003 and 2004 as part of a Special Forces unit whose job, as he told Rosen, was to "hunt enemies and destroy their networks" -- to go after "former masterminds and leaders of Saddam's Baath Party." His targets soon morphed into members of "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" and insurgents -- "a broad term that extended to criminals, influential gangs, bomb-making masterminds and generally pissed-off Arabs across the Sunni Triangle laid off by CPA Order #2 -- which dismissed all Baath Party members."

The soldier left the Army in May 2005 but can be recalled in case of a "national emergency." He joked to Rosen that "the day we invade Iran or North Korea is the day that I become a Canadian citizen."

Rosen met the soldier in Washington, D.C., during the spring of 2006 and struck up a friendship, "feeling a bond," in Rosen's words, "that all who have served in Iraq in some way must feel."

About the soldier's wish to remain anonymous, he wrote the following to Rosen:

If my friends from the army even knew I was corresponding with a journalist, I'd probably lose a lot of respect. I am bound by legal contract and personal loyalty to protect the operational security (OPSEC) of my former unit. Because of the sensitivity of their work, their insane burden in Iraq (I still have friends in the military), and the oath of my contract, it is illegal for me to discuss many things -- units we work with, equipment, locations, technology, and activity within the country, etc. Furthermore, as I was raised in the community of special operations, I am skeptical almost to the point of paranoia about talking to anyone about Iraq outside of my former unit and family. There is a good reason for this -- namely: Loose lips sink ships.

Nir Rosen's account of the soldier's oral history begins below.

My friend wanted to begin his recounting of his time in Iraq by discussing "the character of the American men fighting this war." He joked that "it might be a shock to some of the architects of this war that our fighters don't read magazines like The Weekly Standard or The New Republic or give a rat's ass about where our occupation in Iraq is headed." He continued: "The reason most of them signed up for service (me included) was to get some action, destroy Al Qaeda and come home with a body count to brag about at a local bar. Who gives a fuck about the rest? I think it can be best summed up in a conversation I overheard at my recruitment station. When one kid was asked why he joined the infantry, he didn't have any doubts: 'I enlisted to kill towelheads.'"

"The very nature of special operations and the infantry is to kill and/or capture dangerous people, destroy shit and prevent attacks. Creating rapport with the local population isn't really part of the vocabulary -- especially if the local population is as insanely dangerous as Iraq. In the eyes of many fellow soldiers who signed up because of 9/11, and because of the Bush administration's portrayal of Iraq as part of the 'war on terror,' many of the guys fully believed that they were in a hunt [for] men responsible for the blood bath in lower Manhattan." My friend added that regardless of where soldiers are, "be that a foreign country or a local bar in a military town, they usually wear out their welcome anywhere they go -- they've perfected the skill."

My friend stressed that "our officers took extra special care to fully explain the Rules of Engagement (ROE) in formal briefings to men in my company, and over the course of 140 missions they practiced professional restraint with their actions. But there is also a golden explicit rule with everything you do in war: Make sure that your ass comes home alive. This necessitates aggressive infantry platoon behavior on the part of the U.S. military that ultimately results in something quite the opposite of our stated goals: 'building democracy' and winning 'hearts and minds.' While we were largely successful in hunting the men we were pursuing, my personal impression was that we probably created two times more insurgents than we caught, not to mention the communities we greatly angered with our raids. Our actions were a direct contribution to, as [allied commander] Gen. George Casey said in September 2005, an occupation that is 'fueling the insurgency.' "

He told me a story about his platoon's return to the U.S. after its second deployment to Iraq, when its members went to see the premiere of the film Team America. Made by the creators of television's South Park, Team America was a comical marionette action flick about a jingoistic fire team whose utter recklessness was matched by their righteous yahoo attitude that America must preserve the very fabric of civilization. No film has more accurately depicted our presence in Iraq; it was a looking glass and it instantly became a platoon favorite. There is a classic scene in the movie where Team America's overbearing red, white and blue helicopter lands on top of a bazaar in the Middle East, crushing an Arab's cashew stand. The side of the helicopter read: "We Protect, We Serve, We Care." That scene hit so close to home, it was scary. Later in the movie, in a high-speed chase against terrorists, a missile gets misfired and destroys the Sphinx (in Egypt). "The movie theater, packed with guys from my platoon, was howling with laughter. We even sarcastically recited lines from the theme songs 'Freedom Isn't Free' and 'America, Fuck Yeah' before and after missions on our third tour in the winter of 2005. By then the disconnect between the lofty rhetoric of our leaders and the crap we dealt with on the ground couldn't have been greater. The mentality of soldiers in Iraq is compounded by a group of factors -- wrecked relationships, senselessly drawn-out deployments, sex/alcohol deprivation, and getting mortared on a nightly basis, to name a few." He added that "Iraq is a scary fucking place. Every hard-hitting thing we did there was due in large part to our fear of that place."

My friend explained that over the course of his three deployments to Iraq he discovered what he described as a "breakthrough method of communicating in foreign languages. It was so cutting-edge that Rosetta Stone [the language-training program] doesn't even know about it. It goes something like this: The louder you yell at an Arab in English, the more the Arab will understand you. I've seen this done by my brothers-in-arms on a hundred-plus occasion. Hell, even I did it. And let me be the first to exclaim that it works wonders. The language barrier has done irreversible damage to our entire occupation.

"On the rare occasions that we've had men who speak the language with us, it has yielded key information -- in one case it almost resulted in the capture of a high-value target. I can't begin to imagine the kind of miscommunication damage we could have avoided had we had interpreters during two of our three deployments. Nothing adds to the disconnect between U.S. soldiers and the Iraqi populace like absolute miscommunication. We are astronauts and they are Martians, plain and simple. The average soldier looks like Buzz Aldrin, loaded with enough high-tech gear to land him on the set of a sci-fi flick. Every night we descend unexpectedly upon Mars from helicopters. Under the cover of darkness we prowl across mud-hut villages on the search for wanted Martians that communicate with each other in weird, harsh sounds. As a matter of fact, the glow on our eyes created from our night observation devices earned us a nickname by Sunni Arabs across Al Anbar; they called us the 'men with green eyes.' "

Many of his missions in the Anbar province of western Iraq involved "ground insertion," which meant that "we had to shoot our vehicles through multiple narrow streets to hit the objective. I remember one night vividly breaking the rear-view [mirrors] of every car parked on both sides of the street for three blocks, because our Stryker vehicle couldn't be accommodated on the road. When we reversed the vehicle after a wrong turn, we backed right into a Red Crescent van, putting a four-foot dent into the side of the ambulance and shattering its rear lights. Every time we went out, vehicular damage onto Iraqi-owned cars was always common in urban terrain."

One evening his unit thought it had a breakthrough of "actionable intelligence," he told me. "Some leading figures in the insurgency were believed to be at a meeting in a farmhouse off the Euphrates River -- some six officials in total. The mission was treated with an abnormal level of planning. We rolled out with a large group of men, using both ground and air assets. When reaching the objective, men in the house burst out running in multiple directions. Brought just for that scenario was an attack dog trained to stop insurgents from getting away. Trained to attack the arms, he was sent to catch one of the fleeing men. By the time the guy returned, his arm was so torn up, it looked like it had been shot by an AK-47 7.62-millimeter round. We rushed the man back for immediate medical assistance. An American doctor sewed his arm back together. After a thorough investigation, it was concluded that all six men had no intelligence value. Our interrogators smelled a rat, so they brought the accuser into the room of the men we captured. From what I heard, they were livid. 'He is a car thief! He is a criminal!' Apparently he was from a rival tribe and had a feud.

"They were taken back to their home, courtesy of the U.S. 'Oops, We Fucked Up' cab company. They dropped off all of the captured men and the accuser at the same location. After all of the time and resources spent on that one, street justice was given its time to take care of that one. This would be one of the few cases that I was aware of when the innocent men were given reparations -- medicine for the arm and $500, a decent sum by Iraqi standards."

The only ice cream my friend ever had in Iraq was when his unit raided an ice cream parlor run by two suspected resistance fighters in a major Sunni city. "After grabbing them in a daytime raid in front of hundreds at a local souk," he told me, "we dumped enough of their ice cream to feed our entire platoon in one of our assault packs. By the time we got back to base, most of it had melted. A hole at the bottom of the pack made to let out water was flowing out with a stream of white vanilla cream onto the sand. It must have been 110 degrees. We ate what we could and couldn't stop laughing about what had transpired."

My friend described a "highly planned mission that utilized many military assets... over 200 special forces went on a head hunt against a high-value target in the heart of Al Anbar." The mission occurred at 1 p.m. on a Friday, prayer time in the Muslim world. "What essentially transpired was the seizure of two central mosques right in the middle of prayer time -- our target was believed to be in one of the mosques. Two other platoons were in charge of taking over three surrounding blocks of families 'sympathetic' to the insurgency. When we rolled up to the central mosque, you could see hundreds of pairs of shoes and sandals lined out by the front door. By the time my platoon had raided a local house, which including the standard demolition of a locked gate door with a linear charge, we launched into the family's two-story house with three fire teams. Our entrance included accidentally stepping all over the family's freshly prepared lunch of salad and kabobs -- Arabs typically eat on the floor. After kicking down every door, busting open every cabinet and flipping over every mattress, unearthing every prayer rug and breaking every lock in the house in the search for weapons and bombs, we proceeded to detain a 15-old-kid ('male of active age,' i.e. possible insurgent) and tossed him in our Humvee while his mom cried and pleaded with us that he was innocent (at least that's what I thought she said -- none of us had an Arabic vocabulary besides 'Shut up' 'Stop or I'll shoot' and 'Get the fuck out of my face').

"It required a unique form of telepathic genius to understand the people we were liberating if you didn't understand Arabic, and none of us possessed that skill. After our block was pacified, we linked up down the road at the central mosque. By that point another platoon had very clearly disrupted prayer service, as testified by hundred of Sunni Arab men standing on the front landing of the mosque giving us what I could only refer to as the 'Arab look of death.' Another team herded a line of stumbling blindfolded and handcuffed men like cattle into one of our vehicles. By that time at least 20 of us had our weapons pointed at the Muslim congregation, not taking any chances. A fire team across the road was jumping over a nearby wall and breaking into a backyard shed. Two F-16s flew in figure eights overhead, buzzing the city and reminding any cavalier haji (our affectionate term for Arab citizen) that day to think twice before they act.

"We detained some 15 men, including the target's brother (the main target was apparently a no-show that day). We rolled out staring at a thoroughly humiliated community on their most sacred day. Their home doors blown off their hinges, some of their teenage children stolen by Kafirs, and in the house that I raided, a hard-earned lunch kicked across the dirty floor. We would later return to the same neighborhood three times during that deployment, looking for the same guy. Each time, doors were blown off their recently repaired hinges, house glass was broken, car tires were slashed, the few interior possessions found in the houses were thrown around, damaged and destroyed. But still, we couldn't find the guy we were looking for. We would go on to conduct a follow-on mission on that specific day, raiding a building reported to house 'eight hard-core Syrian fighters.' We blew down the door with electrical charging tape to find a broken Kawasaki dirt bike. We also went down the road to an elementary school (school was out that day) that was reported to be an arms cache for the insurgency, and our orders were to raid the entire building. After breaking into one room only to find school books, one of our officers ... called back the mission and decided any further damage to the school was folly, given the apparent effort to win 'hearts and minds' across Iraq."

One summer evening my friend's unit targeted a sheik who was reportedly a mastermind of the resistance. The sheik lived in a mansion behind a tire store, my friend recalled. "He reportedly had the material and spiritual support of the surrounding area. Thus, the objective of our mission would be not just to capture the sheik, but to capture every male in the entire neighborhood for intelligence about the sheik. I was in the fire team whose objective was to raid the house next door to the sheik's. Approaching the house, we tried to enter in text-book fashion -- using something called the 'hooligan tool' to break the lock on the front door.

"After two unsuccessful tries, we used a steel rammer, which did nothing but break the glass on the door. Then we went with Plan C -- we turned the door handle on the door next to the one we were trying to break. The door was unlocked. Our two teams then flowed in, full of yelling to add to the shock value of our dynamic entry. 'Get the fuck down,' 'Shut the fuck up,' 'Don't move,' etc. Of the four rooms in the house, two were full of women and children, the other a kitchen, and the fourth, a middle-aged man and a senior citizen. Three of our men rushed the man while the old man on an oxygen tank starting hitting a couple of us with his cane. The old man was quickly dropped to the floor, next to his oxygen tank, while we zip-tied his arms and legs. This wasn't out of personal preference, but we were trying to control the situation. I walked out the blindfolded middle-aged man, who was weak and fell to his knees, trembling and mortified. His wife and two daughters were crying hysterically. I can only guess that they thought I was going to execute him. I wish I knew enough Arabic to tell him that things would be OK if he was innocent -- but honestly, why should I be confident enough to say that? Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been thrown in detention facilities across the country with incompetent oversight and filtering processes. Even if I did know Arabic, I probably wouldn't want to tell him the honest truth: 'Sir, after you leave here, I'm sorry, but I have no fucking idea what's going to happen to you.'"

"After consolidating the detainees we got the orders to clear the surrounding structures. After running with two fire teams across a typical Iraqi backyard farm, we used a shot gun to blast open the door lock. Unbeknownst to us, we were about to score a major intelligence victory in the war on terror: a den of 40 smelly goats. We immediately took one casualty on that raid -- a goat got hit in the ass with one of the buckshots. If our raid on 20 homes wasn't yet successful in waking up everyone in the neighborhood, then that pissed-off goat sure did the job. We had to seek cover on the rear side of the building as another team 'leapfrogged' to an adjacent house. In all of our distraction, the goats poured out of their den. When we eventually left the objective, I saw the group of goats wandering down the main highway that we had taken on our way to the sheik's crib. We just had conducted a raid of liberation. I was reminded of one of Gen. [Anthony] Zinni's early warnings about Iraq: 'There are congressmen today who want to fund the Iraqi Liberation Act, and let some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London gin up an expedition. We'll equip a thousand fighters and arm them with 97 million dollars' worth of AK-47s and insert them into Iraq. And what will we have? A Bay of Goats, most likely.' Just add 130,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars to the equation and the statement still stands."

"Acting on intelligence and orders beyond our control, we succeeded that night in sending a father of four off to who knows where, losing his livestock livelihood that barely made ends meet, detaining five others guilty of living in that neighborhood and finding no sheik. Before departing, I remember a wild dog staring at me in the eye as he consumed the flesh of a fellow dead dog. Our presence didn't seem to faze him. On the way back from this glorious mission, we came onto an unexpected surprise. To our great amusement, in the middle of desert nowhere (the closest village was eight miles away); we found two men engaged in passionate homosexual intercourse on top a sand dune. I don't think they were expecting any extra company. I guess nowhere was safe in Al Anbar from the U.S. occupation."

My friend quipped that "infantry soldiers have never been known for their raw talent in mathematics." Therefore the explosives charges made by soldiers sometimes exceed the bare minimum necessary to blow off a door handle. "In one case," he told me, "I watched a charge succeed in blowing a door five feet across a living room. Being as the suspect was about to open the door after hearing the ruckus on his doorstep, he went airborne as well. And the steel door landed on top of him. Like in a scene out of the movie Heat blood and puss flowed down both of his ears on the trip back to base."

During the summer, my friend's unit temporarily inhabited one of Uday Hussein's palaces on the Tigris River. "It was fully furnished with gold-leaf furniture," he said, "working bidets and a nice swimming pool. As the story goes, he had women walk in circles by the pool and he chose which one to rape for the evening. We just used the pool to forget about the fact that we were in Iraq. That summer our tanning sessions by the pool were often interrupted by mortar attacks on our compound. Apparently the chain of command threatened a scorched-earth policy on the surrounding farm communities if they didn't put a stop to whoever was doing it. We also did our part by directing warning shots at local fishermen floating slowly down the Tigris River and staring at the compound. If they didn't get the point the first time, we shot closer to their boat. They would get the message and start rowing like Vikings on speed until they were out of our eyesight. It was only in our self-interest to keep all unwanted activity away from our bases. By the summer of 2004, all trust had fully dissipated."

My friend was rare in that he had somehow overcome the necessary brainwashing soldiers undergo and was able to critically assess his role in Iraq. "In hindsight," he said, "I have often asked myself what my reaction would be like if I were on the opposite end of this equation. After years of living under a harsh dictatorship, 150,000 soldiers of Sharia show up and offload into Georgetown from boats on the Potomac River after shelling the Capitol. They have a simple mission, they say: transplanting Islamic enlightenment in the decadent land of Kafir. They take over the D.C. Mall and throw a wall around the Smithsonian buildings; they call it the 'Halal Zone.' The White House becomes the embassy of Iraq. Some asshole like John Walker Lindh (Ahmed Chalabi), who has lived in the Middle East while the U.S. suffered under dictatorship, is Iraq's favorite child for taking over the peacock throne of the U.S. My house gets raided and my mother patted down by hygiene-deficient Wahhabis, so I go to Georgetown to force the humiliation off my mind. A group of wiry majahedin show up at Haagen Daaz while I'm enjoying a cone of cookies and cream -- a rare moment of bliss in a country going to shit -- and grab the owners while taking their ice cream. I return to my home, after walking through one foot of raw sewage water, to turn on the radio and hear the Arab 'viceroy' declare in a fatwa that all Christian values should be erased from our governing culture. Meanwhile my dad is laid off from his paycheck for the crime of serving in the U.S. Army to provide for his struggling family." My friend concluded that "without much doubt in my mind, if I were an Iraqi under the U.S. occupation, I'd be an insurgent."

I sympathized with what must have been his painful realization that he had inadvertently committed crimes. "All the way up to my third deployment I was an avid reader of a lot of foolish writing on the war," he said. "I believed in the mission because I had to -- after all, what soldier wants to die for an unworthy cause? I wanted to believe in the propaganda and I willfully avoided things that harshly rubbed against my hope that we were sacrificing for a good cause. When you put your life on the line every night, you don't have the luxury to be skeptical or even critical. In certain ways, I feel embarrassed about my belief that this was once a noble mission, but I have the honesty to admit that I was wrong. I deployed to this war with many great assumptions about our national leadership: I assumed that the WMD intelligence case wasn't a cherry-picked house of cards, I assumed we had a plan for the aftermath of the invasion, I assumed our leaders had a greater understanding of the character of Iraq outside the mouths of Ahmed Chalabi and Kana Makiya. I assumed, I assumed, I assumed."

"As a soldier trained exclusively to fight, destroy and capture," my friend said, "I was no more different than any of the rest of the men in my platoon who viewed Iraq as a broken country, loaded with assassins and inhospitable people. Hardly any of us spoke Arabic, which added to the dehumanization of the people (or should I say, 'targets') that we hunted and disrupted on a nightly basis; during my time there we conducted over 140 missions. We were always decent to the men we captured, but a raid by definition can never be a humanitarian act. I could never escape the impression from our heavy-handed insertions into hundreds of family homes that our presence only fueled more and more hatred. Every night we returned to base, the adrenaline rush faded and everything in hindsight looked like a black comedy. You couldn't escape the fact that our actions only fueled the insurgency. For every insurgent or jihadist we caught, we created two times as many future fighters. And that is the tragedy -- good men inadvertently pissing off an entire population. As our fearless leaders walked into this debacle without a plan, you can rest assured that few at the top ever considered the historical meaning of occupation to Arab civilization. Also, the White House fixation on figureheads like Zarqawi, which bolstered the Al Qaeda/Iraq smokescreen, ensured that our myopic obsession with foreign fighters blinded us to the understanding that 90% of the insurgency was home-grown."

The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds

adminn — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 19:35:10 -0400

Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as "sea changes" that would "break the back" of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention. A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War's My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.

In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.

Americans, led to believe that their soldiers and Marines would be welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people, have no idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis who endure it. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it might feel like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success in Iraq as a journalist is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father's Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, blend into crowds, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja's worst neighborhoods.

I also benefited from being able to speak Arabic -- in particular its Iraqi dialect, which I hastily learned in Baghdad upon my arrival and continued to develop throughout my time in Iraq.

My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the "gook" of the war in Iraq. I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this haji (me) had done to get arrested by them. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, "That's the biggest fuckin' Iraqi (pronounced eye-raki) I ever saw." A soldier by the gun said, "I don't care how big he is, if he doesn't stop movin' I'm gonna shoot him."

I was lucky enough to have an American passport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting: "Don't shoot! I'm an American!" It was my first encounter with hostile American checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak American English or carry a U.S. passport, and often entire families were killed in their cars when they approached American checkpoints.

In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September 2004, 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation and said that most of them had died violently, mostly in American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisans of the war, it seems perfectly plausible to me based on what I have seen in Iraq, having spent most of the postwar period there. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the "good news" and go along with the official story.

My first direct encounter with American Marines was from the Iraqi side. In late April 2003, I was attending the Friday prayers in a Sunni bastion in Baghdad. Thousands of people were praying and the devout flooded out of the mosque and laid their prayer rugs on the street and the square in front of it. A Marine patrol rounded a corner and walked right into hundreds of people praying on the street and listening to the sermon, even approaching the separate section for women. Dozens of men rose and put their shoes on, forming a virtual wall to block the armed Marines, who seemed unaware of the danger. The Marines did not understand Arabic. "Irjau!" "Go back!" the demonstrators screamed, and some waved their fists, shouting "America is the enemy of God!" as they were restrained by a few cooler-headed men from within their ranks. I ran to advise the Marines that Friday prayers was not a good time to show up fully armed. The men sensed this and asked me to tell their lieutenant, who appeared oblivious to the public relations catastrophe he might be provoking. He told me: "That's why we've got the guns."

A nervous soldier asked me to go explain the situation to the bespectacled staff sergeant, who had been attempting to calm the situation by telling the demonstrators, who did not speak English, that the U.S. patrol meant no harm. He finally lost his temper when an Iraqi told him gently, "You must go." "I have the weapons," the sergeant said. "You back off."

"Let's get the fuck out!" one Marine shouted to another as the tension increased. I was certain that a shove, a tossed stone or a shot fired could have provoked a massacre and turned the city violently against the American occupation. Finally the Marines retreated cautiously around a corner as the worshipers were held back by their own comrades. It could have ended worse, and a week later it did when 17 demonstrators were killed by American soldiers in Falluja, and several more were killed in a subsequent demonstration, a massacre that contributed to the city's support of the resistance.

I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.

I still feel guilt over my complicity in crimes the one time I was embedded, in the fall of 2003. (I spent two weeks with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment stationed in Husaybah, an Iraqi town near the Syrian border that is a suspected entry point for foreign insurgent fighters.) Normally, I like to think, if I witnessed an act of bullying of the weak or the elderly, or the terrorizing of children, I would interfere and try to stop it. After all, a passion for justice is what propelled me into this career. It started when I arrived in the main base in the desert. Local Iraqi laborers were sitting in the sun waiting to be acknowledged by the American soldiers. Every so often a representative would come to the soldiers to explain in Arabic that they were waiting for their American overseer. The soldier would shout back in English. Finally I translated between them. One soldier, upset with an Iraqi man for looking at him, asked him: "Do I owe you money? So why the fuck are you looking at me?"

After a week, the Army unit I was living with went on a raid targeting alleged Al Qaeda cells. Included were safe houses, financiers and fighters as well as alleged resistance leaders such as senior military officers from elite units of the former Iraqi army. All together there were 62 names on the wanted list. A minimum of 29 locations would be raided, taking out the "nervous system" of the area resistance "and the guys who actually do the shooting."

The raids began at night. The men descended upon villages by the border with Syria in the western desert. After half an hour of bumpy navigating in the dark the convoy approached the first house and the vehicles switched their lights on, illuminating the target area as a tank broke the stone wall. "Fuck yeah!" cheered one sergeant, "Hi honey I'm home!" The teams charged over the rubble from the wall, breaking through the door with a sledgehammer and dragging several men out. The barefoot prisoners, dazed from their slumber, were forcefully marched over rocks and hard ground. One short middle-aged man, clearly injured and limping with painful difficulty, was violently pushed forward in the grip of a Brobdingnagian soldier who said, "You'll fucking learn how to walk." Each male was asked his name. None matched the names on the list. A prisoner was asked where the targeted military officer lived. "Down the road," he pointed. "Show us!" he was ordered, and he was shoved ahead, stumbling over the rocky street, terrified that he would be seen as an informer in the neighborhood, terrified that he too would be taken away. He stopped at the house but the soldiers ran ahead. "No, no, it's here," yelled a sergeant, and they ran back, breaking through the gate and bursting into the house. It was a large villa, with grape vines covering the driveway. Women and children from within were ordered to sit in the garden. The men were pushed to the ground on the driveway and asked their names. One was indeed the first high-value target. His son begged the soldiers, "Take me for 10 years but leave my father!" Both were taken. The children screamed 'Daddy, Daddy!' as the men were led out and the women were given leaflets in Arabic explaining that the men had been arrested.

Home after home met the same fate. Some homes had only women; these houses too were ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers. Men were dragged on the ground by their legs to be handcuffed outside. One bony ancient sheik walked out with docility and was pushed forcefully to the ground, where he was wrestled by soldiers who had trouble cuffing his arms. A commando grabbed him from them, and tightly squeezed the old man's arms together, lifting him in the air and throwing him down on the ground, nearly breaking his fragile arms.

As her husband was taken away, one woman angrily asked Allah to curse the soldiers, calling them "Dogs! Jews!" over and over. When his soldiers left a home, one officer emerged to slap them on the back like a coach congratulating his players during halftime in a winning game. In a big compound of several houses the soldiers took all the men, even the ones not on the list. A sergeant explained that the others would be held for questioning to see whether they had any useful information. The men cried out that they had children still inside. In several houses soldiers tenderly carried out babies who had been left sleeping in their cribs and handed them to the women. When the work at a house was complete, or at the Home Run stage (stages were divided into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Home Run and Grand Slam, meaning ready to move on), the soldiers relaxed and joked, breaking their own tension and ignoring the trembling and shocked women and children crouched together on the lawns behind them.

Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic "zip ties" sat in the back of the truck for hours, without water. They moved their heads toward sounds, disoriented and frightened, trying to understand what was happening around them. Any time a prisoner moved or twitched, a soldier bellowed at him angrily and cursed. Thrown among the tightly crowded men in one truck was a boy no more than 15 years old, his eyes wide in terror as the duct tape was placed on them. By daylight the whole town could see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket were stopped at gunpoint, ordered to the ground, cuffed and told to "Shut the fuck up" as their basket's contents were tossed out and they were questioned about the location of a suspect.

The soldier guarding them spoke of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. "If they got something to tell us I'd rather they be scared," he explained. An Iraqi policeman drove by in a white SUV clearly marked "Police." He too was stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid was complete. From the list of 34 names, the troop I was with brought in about 16 positively identified men, along with 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 08:30 the Americans were done and started driving back to base. As the main element departed, the psychological operations vehicle blasted AC/DC rock music through neighborhood streets. "It's good for morale after such a long mission," a captain said. Crowds of children clustered on porches smiling, waving and giving the passing soldiers little thumbs up. A sergeant waved back. Neighbors awakened by the noise huddled outside and watched the convoy. One little girl stood before her father and guarded him from the soldiers with her arms outstretched and legs wide.

In Baghdad, coalition officials announced that 112 suspects had been arrested in a major raid near the Syrian border, including a high-ranking official in the former Republican Guard. "The general officer that they captured, Abed Hamed Mowhoush al-Mahalowi, was reported to have links with Saddam Hussein and was a financier of anti-coalition activities, according to intelligence sources," a military spokeswoman said. "Troops from the 1st and 4th squadrons of the Third Armored Cavalry cordoned off sections of the town and searched 29 houses to find 'subversive elements,' including 12 of the 13 suspects they had targeted for capture," she said.

That night the prisoners were visible on a large dirt field in a square of concertina wire. Beneath immense spotlights and near loud generators, they slept on the ground, guarded by soldiers. One sergeant was surprised by the high number of prisoners taken by the troop I was with. "Did they just arrest every man they found?" he asked, wondering if "we just made another 300 people hate us." The following day 57 prisoners were transported to a larger base for further interrogation. Some were not the suspects, just relatives of the suspects or men suspected of being the suspects.

The next night the troop departed the base at 0200, hoping to find those alleged Al Qaeda suspects who had not been home during the previous operation. Soldiers descended upon homes in a large compound, their boots trampling over mattresses in rooms the inhabitants did not enter with shoes on. Most of the wanted men were nowhere to be found, their women and children prevaricating about their locations. Some of their relatives were arrested instead. "That woman is annoying!" one young soldier complained about a mother's desperate ululations as her son was taken from his house. "How do you think your mother would sound if they were taking you away?" a sergeant asked him.

Three days after the operation, a dozen prisoners could be seen marching in a circle outside their detention cells, surrounded by barbed wire. They were shouting "USA, USA!" over and over. "They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we made 'em talk somethin' we liked to hear," one of the soldiers guarding them said with a grin. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they had to raise their voices. A first sergeant quipped that the ones who were not guilty "will be guilty next time," after such treatment. Even if the men were guilty, no proof would be provided to the community. There would be no process of transparent justice. The only thing evident to the Iraqi public would be the American guilt.

In November 2003 a major from the judge advocate general's office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process told me that there were at least 7,000 Iraqis detained by American forces. Many languished in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposed the English language on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed. Some were termed "security detainees" and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they were still a "security risk." Most were innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant colonel familiar with the process told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, there would be a court-martial, which would imply that the U.S. was occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or liberation. Two years later, 50,000 Iraqis had been imprisoned by the Americans and only 2% had ever been found guilty of anything.

* * * * *

The S2 (intelligence) section in the Army unit I was with had not proved itself very reliable in the past -- a fact that frustrated soldiers to no end. "You get all psyched up to do a hard mission," said one sergeant, "and it turns out to be three little girls. The little kids get to me, especially when they cry."

The reason for the lack of confidence in S2 was made clear by the case of a man called Ayoub. I accompanied the troop when it raided Ayoub's home based on intelligence S2 provided: intercepted phone calls, in which Ayoub spoke of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons.

On the day of the raid, tanks, Bradleys and Humvees squeezed between the neighborhood walls. A CIA operator angrily eyed the rooftops and windows of nearby houses, a silencer on his assault weapon. Soldiers broke through Ayoub's door early in the morning and when he did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with nonlethal ordinance, little pellets exploding like gunshot from the weapons grenade launcher. The floor of the house was covered in his blood. He was dragged into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against a garden fence. Ayoub's frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with an immense soldier to spare her son's life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier's hand and kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along with Ayoub's four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide in terror, clutching each other as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two CDs with Saddam and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called "The Crimes of Saddam," are common on every Iraqi street, and as their title suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters; however, the soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt.

Ayoub was brought out and pushed onto the truck. He gestured to his shrieking relatives to remain where they were. He was an avuncular man, small and round -- balding and unshaven with a hooked nose and slightly pockmarked face. He could not have looked more innocent. He sat frozen, staring numbly ahead as the soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub's injured hand and chuckled to his friends, "It ain't my hand." The truck blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.

Several hours later, a call was intercepted from the Ayoub whom the Americans were seeking. "Oh shit," said the S2 captain, "[we've got] the wrong Ayoub." The innocent father of six who was in custody actually was a worker in a phosphate plant the Americans were running. But he was not let go. If he was released, there would be a risk that the other Ayoub would learn he was being sought. The night after his arrest a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family and report he was fine but would not be home for a few days. "It was not the wrong guy," the troop's captain said defensively, shifting blame elsewhere. "We raided the house we were supposed and arrested the man we were told to."

When the soldiers who had captured Ayoub learned of the mistake, they were not surprised. "Oops," said one. Another one wondered, "What do you tell a guy like that, sorry?" "It's depressing," a third said. "We trashed the wrong guy's house and the guy that's been shooting at us is out there with his house not trashed." The soldier who shot the nonlethal ordinance at Ayoub said, "I'm just glad he didn't do something that made me shoot him [with a bullet]." Then the soldiers resumed their banter.

A few days later, the Army did a further analysis of the phone calls that had originally sent them in search of a man named Ayoub. In the calls, Ayoub had indeed spoken of proceeding to the next level and obtaining land mines and other weapons. This had rightfully alarmed the Army's intelligence officers. But at some point an analyst realized that Ayoub was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons; he turned out to be a kid playing video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.

* * * * *

The Procrustean application of spurious information gathered by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating them. The S2 captain could barely hide his disdain for Iraqis. "Oh he just hates anything Iraqi," another captain said of him, adding that the intelligence officers do not venture off the base or interact with Iraqis or develop any relations with the people they are expected to understand. A lieutenant colonel from the Army's civil affairs command explained that these officers do not read about the soldiers engaging with Iraqis, sharing cigarettes, tea, meals and conversations. They read only the reports of "incidents" and they view Iraqis solely as security threat. The intelligence officers in Iraq do not know Iraq.

In every market in Iraq hundreds of wooden crates can be found piled one atop the other. Sold for storage, upon further examination these crates reveal themselves to be former ammunition crates. For the past 25 years Iraq has been importing weapons to feed its army's appetite for war against Iran, the Kurds, Kuwait and America. When empty, the crates were sold for domestic use. The soldiers with the Army unit I was with assumed the crates they found in nearly every home implicated the owners in terrorist activities, rather than the much simpler truth. During the operation described here I saw one of the soldiers find such a crate overturned above a small hole in a man's backyard. "He was trying to bury it when he saw us coming," one soldier deduced confidently. He did not lift the crate to discover that it was protecting irrigation pipes and hoses in a pit.

Saddam bestowed his largesse upon the security services that served as his Praetorian Guard and executioners. Elite fighters received Jawa motorcycles. Immediately after the war, Jawa motorcycles were available in every market in Iraq that sold scooters and motorcycles. Some had been stolen from government buildings in the frenzy of looting that followed the war and was directed primarily against institutions of the former government. Soldiers of the Army unit I accompanied were always alert for Jawa motorcycles, and indeed it was true that many Iraqi paramilitaries had used them against the Americans. On a night the troop had received RPG fire, its members drove back to base through the town. When they spotted a man on a Jawa motorcycle they fired warning shots. When he did not stop they shot him to death. "He was up to no good," the captain explained.

On Nov. 26, 2003, after two weeks of brutal daily interrogations by military intelligence officers, Special Forces soldiers and CIA personnel, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses whose arrest I had witnessed, died in a U.S. detention facility. Twenty-four to 48 hours before that, he had been interrogated and beaten by CIA personnel. The Army's Criminal Investigation Division began looking into Mowhoush's death that same day. The next day an Army news release stated that he had died of natural causes. "Mowhoush said he didn't feel well and subsequently lost consciousness," according to the statement, " ... the soldier questioning him found no pulse and called for medical authorities. A surgeon responded within five minutes to continue advanced cardiac life support techniques, but they were ineffective." On Dec. 2, 2003, an Army medical examiner's autopsy said the general's death was "a homicide by asphyxia," but it was not until May 12, 2004, that the death certificate was issued, with homicide as the cause. The Pentagon autopsy report in May said he had died of "asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression" and that there was "evidence of blunt force trauma to the chest and legs." Mowhoush was one of several Iraqis whose death certificates were not issued until May of 2004, long after their deaths.

American soldiers had no mission and viewed Iraqis as "the enemy" through a prism of "us and them." An officer returning from a fact-finding mission complained of "a lot of damn good individuals who received no guidance, training or plan and who are operating in a vacuum." Inside the G2, or intelligence, section of the Army's civil affairs headquarters in Baghdad, on a bulletin board I saw an anecdote meant to be didactic. It told of American soldiers suppressing Muslim Filipino insurgents a century before. They dipped bullets in pig's blood and shot some Muslim rebels, to send a warning to the others. A Latino civil affairs officer, fed up with Iraqis, explained that the only solution was to shut down Baghdad entirely. Military civil affairs officers are supposed to provide civil administration in the absence of local power structures, minimize friction between the military and civilians, restore normalcy and empower local institutions. One brigade commander explained to a civil affairs major that "I am not here to win hearts and minds; I am here to kill the enemy." He failed to provide his civil affairs team with security, so it could not operate.

One morning in Albu Hishma, a village north of Baghdad cordoned off with barbed wire, the local U.S. commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened. In Baquba, two 13-year-old girls were killed by a Bradley armored personnel carrier. They were digging through trash and the American rule was that anybody digging on road sides would be shot.

The 4th Infantry Division was especially notorious in Iraq. Its soldiers in Samara handcuffed two suspects and threw them off a bridge into a river. One of them died. In Basra, seven Iraqi prisoners were beaten to death by British soldiers. A high-ranking Iraqi police official in Basra identified one of the victims as his son. It is common practice for soldiers to arrest the wives and children of suspects as "material witnesses" when the suspects are not captured in raids. In some cases the soldiers leave notes for the suspects, letting them know their families will be released should they turn themselves in. Soldiers claim this is a very effective tactic. Soldiers on military vehicles routinely shoot at Iraqi cars that approach too fast or come too close, and at Iraqis wandering in fields. "They were up to no good," they explain. Every commander is a law unto himself. He is advised by a judge advocate general who interprets the rules as he wants. A war crime to one is legitimate practice to another. After the Center for Army Lessons Learned sent a team of personnel to Israel to study that country's counterinsurgency tactics, the Army implemented the lessons it learned, and initiated house demolitions in Samara and Tikrit, blowing up homes of suspected insurgents.

It is hard to be patient when mosques are raided, when protesters are shot, when innocent families are gunned down at checkpoints or by frightened soldiers in vehicles. It is hard to be patient in hours of izdiham, or traffic jams that are blamed on Americans closing off main roads throughout Baghdad. The Americans close roads after "incidents" or when they are looking for planted bombs. Their vehicles block the roads and they answer no questions, refusing to let any Iraqi approach. Cars are forced to drive "wrong side," as Iraqis call it, with near fatal results. Iraqis have become experts in walking over the concertina wire that divides so much of their cities: First one foot presses the razor wire down, then the other steps over. They are experts in driving slowly through lakes and rivers of sewage. They are experts in sifting through mountains of garbage for anything that can be reused.

It is hard to relax when the soldier in the Humvee or armored personnel carrier in front of you aims his machine gun at you; when aggressive white men race by, running you off the road as they scowl behind their wraparound sunglasses; when soldiers shoot at any car that comes too close. Iraqis in their own country are reminded at all times who has control over their lives, who can take them with impunity.

An old Iraqi woman approached the gate to Baghdad international airport. Draped in a black ebaya, she was carrying a picture of her missing son. She did not speak English, and the soldier in body armor she asked for help did not speak Arabic. He shouted at her to "get the fuck away." She did not understand and continued beseeching him. The soldier was joined by another. Together they locked and loaded their machine guns, chambering a round, aiming the guns at the old woman and shouting at her that if she did not leave "we will kill you."

The explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels is hated by the Iraqi security guards as well as the American soldiers who stand there because it, like the rest of us who live in the area, is subject to olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb, forcing them to close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days.

Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.