ERBIL IRAQ KURDISTAN: 76 Year old Najiba Mansoor an Assyirian displaced by the war with ISIS and Peshmaga fighters sleeps on her makeshift bed in an abandoned construction site in the Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil. I showed Najiba this image on the back of my camera and she burst into tears
"Is that all I have left now a filthy mattress and my broken wheel chair, no no no how did this happen"
Image Copyright: Sebastian Rich/AII rights reserved
The long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan cannot be explained as the work of a few 'bad apples'.
Set up to investigate alleged human rights abuses of Iraqis by British troops in the aftermath of a firefight in 2004 and costing over £22 million, the al-Sweady public inquiry is set to report in the autumn.
Citing a lack of evidence, in March lawyers representing Iraqi families withdrew their claim that British troops had killed unarmed Iraqis they had captured and brought back to their army base in southern Iraq.
However, while the headline allegation has been dropped, the inquiry has unearthed some shocking behaviour.
One British soldier testified that his sergeant fired around 30 rounds into a "pile" of Iraqi bodies: "He put a full magazine of bullets into both bodies that had been twitching but he also fired into the bodies of the other dead gunmen in the ditch. The bodies of the two twitching gunmen stopped twitching."
The soldier went on to note that he witnessed two other soldiers punch and kick Iraqi prisoners, with one of them stamping on the head of a dead Iraqi several times.
Faced with these types of allegations the British government and military have repeatedly tried to downplay their significance, effectively labelling the perpetrators as "bad apples."
As the then armed forces minister Bill Rammell said in 2009: "Only a tiny number of individuals have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards."
However, the cold facts suggest a far less comforting reality. In 2010 the army’s most senior legal adviser in Iraq revealed that at least eight Iraqis had died in British custody since the invasion in 2003.
Included in this shameful number is Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel worker who was beaten to death in September 2003 while being held by the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. It also includes Tarik Mahmud, who reportedly died in a helicopter while a captive of the RAF Regiment.
In Iraq the British army was using what are known as the five techniques of interrogation — hooding, stress positions, noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink — even though they had been banned by the Heath government in 1972.
In January 2005, photos showing abuse of Iraqis at Camp Breadbasket were released. These showed soldiers from the 1st Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers mistreating Iraqi prisoners, including British soldiers forcing Iraqis to strip bare and simulate oral and anal sex.
A year later the News of the World released a video from 2004 showing several soldiers from the 1st Battalion The Light Infantry beating unarmed teenage Iraqis who they had captured during a proteIn 2010 investigative journalist Ian Cobain reported on abuse allegations at interrogation centres under the command of the Intelligence Corps that hundreds of Iraqis passed through.
According to Louise Thomas, a former member of the Ministry of Defence inquiry team set up to look into the allegations, videos of the interrogations show prisoners being abused, beaten, humiliated and threatened.
After watching footage of around 1,600 interrogations Thomas, a former police officer, said: "I saw a really dark side of the army. The videos showed really quite terrible abuses."
By 2012 Cobain was reporting that the Ministry of Defence had paid out £14 million in compensation to 400 Iraqis who had complained they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces. So rather than "a few bad apples," it is clear the abuse was widespread, perpetrated by members of several regiments.
The abuse must have directly involved hundreds of soldiers with a much greater number — thousands, surely — likely aware of the mistreatment.
And it’s important to remember the examples of mistreatment listed above are just the main stories the media has reported on.
"The abuses uncovered are only the tip of the iceberg," David Buck, a member of Veterans for Peace UK who served in the British Army in Iraq, told me."A lot will have gone on that has been covered up, brushed under the carpet and kept amongst themselves never to be spoken about."
So why did British soldiers abuse Iraqi prisoners?
Much of the debate in the mainstream media about causes and solutions has focused on legal and cultural reforms.
For example, Phil Shiner, the lawyer who has done more than anyone to bring attention to British abuse in Iraq, made a number of suggestions last year: "Introduce a new fitness-for-service test for all would-be soldiers (as with British police, soldiers must be able to pass a straightforward test on the relevant law)… address the loss of moral compass so evident in the behaviour of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, rewrite the relevant rules of engagement for various conflict situations so that the golden thread of legal compliance shapes all acts of force, bin the UK’s interrogation policy, introduce a lawful one and train those responsible to use it correctly."
These proposals are all well and good but the long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan suggests the problem is far deeper and requires action that gets to the root of the issue.
For Joe Glenton, an Afghan veteran and the author of Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return To The War On Terror, the problem goes back to recruitment and training.
"The UK military virtually depends on what, by polite societal standards, are bad apples," he explains.
"It looks for rough kids who are desperate, poorly educated, with limited prospects. It then socially engineers them through the process known as Basic or Phase 1 Training to make them tribal, aggressive and skilled at violence."
Military training and military life also engenders a strong "us -versus-them" group mentality, which is only heightened when troops are deployed to an unfriendly foreign land and start taking casualties.
Time and again those alleged to have brutalised prisoners have talked about their anger after one of their friends has been killed or injured by the enemy.
In addition, soldiers, like the general public, are subject to war-time propaganda that demonises and dehumanises the enemy."Soldiers have the mindset that they are superior to the population of the country they occupy … they see them as subhuman, their lives are irrelevant," Buck explains.
Glenton links this sense of superiority to the fact of the occupation itself.
"You cannot effectively occupy a particular people by force and at the same time view those people as your equal," he argues . "You simply have to think of them as lesser. At best, as primitive feckless creatures to be marshalled for their own good — at worst as alien, treacherous, uppity niggers or similar. That is what occupation looks like."
Conservative MP Rory Stewart, previously the Coalition Provisional Authority deputy governorate co-ordinator in Maysan province in Iraq, agrees with Glenton that the central problem was the military occupation itself.
"The problem wasn’t the way that this was implemented, the problem was that we were there at all," he noted about British forces in Iraq in a BBC Radio 4 documentary last year.
The problem was so deep that if we hadn’t made those mistakes we would have made other mistakes. It was a wrecked intervention from the beginning, from the very moment we arrived on the ground." More
Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press.
The media that failed woefully in their coverage of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are the media that we are supposed now to believe are giving us the unvarnished truth in Syria.
The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition have been hard-core jihadi fighters. Whatever the real issues at stake, the interventions have been presented as primarily humanitarian, in support of popular forces against dictators and police states. Despite apparent military successes, in none of these cases have the local opposition and their backers succeeded in consolidating power and establishing stable states.
More than most armed struggles, the conflicts have been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television and radio journalists played a central role. In all wars there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions even about the identity of the victors and the defeated. In 2001 reports of the Afghan war gave the impression that the Taliban had been beaten decisively even though there had been very little fighting. In 2003 there was a belief in the West that Saddam Hussein’s forces had been crushed when in fact the Iraqi army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home. In Libya in 2011 the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine-guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, which was mostly brought about by Nato air strikes. In Syria in 2011 and 2012 foreign leaders and journalists repeatedly and vainly predicted the imminent defeat of Bashar al-Assad.
These misperceptions explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001 I was able to drive – nervously but safely – from Kabul to Kandahar, but when I tried to make the same journey in 2011 I could go no further south on the main road than the last police station on the outskirts of Kabul. In Tripoli two years ago hotels were filled to capacity with journalists covering Gaddafi’s fall and the triumph of the rebel militias. But state authority still hasn’t been restored. This summer Libya almost stopped exporting oil because the main ports on the Mediterranean had been seized by mutinying militiamen, and the prime minister, Ali Zeidan, threatened to bomb ‘from the air and the sea’ the oil tankers the militiamen were using to sell oil on the black market.
Libya’s descent into anarchy was scarcely covered by the international media since they had long since moved on to Syria, and more recently Egypt. Iraq, home a few years ago to so many foreign news bureaux, has also dropped off the media map although up to a thousand Iraqis are killed each month, mostly as a result of the bombing of civilian targets. When it rained for a few days in Baghdad in January the sewer system, supposedly restored at a cost of $7 billion, couldn’t cope: some streets were knee-deep in dirty water and sewage. In Syria, many opposition fighters who had fought to defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves.
It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term ‘war reporter’, though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat. But irregular or guerrilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but that it requires interpretation. In 2003 television showed columns of Iraqi tanks smashed and on fire after US air strikes on the main highway north of Baghdad. If it hadn’t been for the desert background, viewers could have been watching pictures of the defeated German army in Normandy in 1944. But I climbed into some of the tanks and could see that they had been abandoned long before they were hit. This mattered because it showed that the Iraqi army wasn’t prepared to fight and die for Saddam. It was a pointer too to the likely future of the allied occupation. Iraqi soldiers, who didn’t see themselves as having been defeated, expected to keep their jobs in post-Saddam Iraq, and were enraged when the Americans dissolved their army. Well-trained officers flooded into the resistance, with devastating consequences for the occupying forces: a year later the Americans controlled only islands of territory in Iraq.
War reporting is easier than other types of journalism in one respect because the melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to camera, with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him, knows his report will feature high up in any newscast. ‘If it bleeds it leads,’ is an old American media adage. The drama of battle inevitably dominates the news, but oversimplifies it by disclosing only part of what is happening. These oversimplifications were more than usually gross and deceptive in Afghanistan and Iraq, when they dovetailed with political propaganda that demonised the Taliban and later Saddam as evil incarnate, casting the conflict – particularly easy in the US in the hysterical atmosphere after 9/11 – as a black and white struggle between good and evil. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition were ignored.
By 2011 the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to journalists in Baghdad and Kabul if not necessarily to editors in London and New York. But by then the reporting of the wars in Libya and Syria was demonstrating a different though equally potent form of naivety. A version of the spirit of 1968 prevailed: antagonisms that predated the Arab Spring were suddenly said to be obsolete; a brave new world was being created at hectic speed. Commentators optimistically suggested that, in the age of satellite television and the internet, traditional forms of repression – censorship, imprisonment, torture, execution – could no longer secure a police state in power; they might even be counter-productive. State control of information and communication had been subverted by blogs, satellite phones and even the mobile phone; YouTube provided the means to expose in the most graphic and immediate way the crimes and violence of security forces. More
Indefinite detention of the innocent and guilty alike, without any hope of charges, trial, or release: this is now the American way. Most Americans, however, may not care to take that in, not even when the indefinitely detained go on a hunger strike.
That act has certainly gotten Washington’s and the media’s collective attention. After all, could there be anything more extreme than striking against your own body to make a point? Suicide by strike? It’s the ultimate statement of protest and despair. Certainly, the strikers have succeeded in pushing Guantanamo out of the netherworld of non-news and onto front pages, into presidential news conferences, and to the top of the TV newscasts. That, in a word, is extraordinary. But what exactly do those prisoners, many now being force-fed, want to highlight? Here’s one thing: despite the promise he made on entering the Oval office, President Obama has obviously not made much of an effort to close the prison, which, as he said recently, “hurts us, in terms of our international standing... [and] is a recruitment tool for extremists.”
If Congress has been thoroughly recalcitrant when it comes to closing Guantanamo, the president’s idea of what shutting down that prison meant proved curious indeed. His plan involved transferring many of the prisoners from Cuba, that crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002, to a super-max-style prison in Illinois (“Gitmo North”). That would mean, of course, transferring indefinite detention from the offshore world of extraordinary rendition, black sites, and torture directly into the heart of the American justice system. Obama himself has indicated that at least 50 of the prisoners can, in his view, never be released or tried (in part because confessions were tortured out of some of them). They would be kept in what he, in the past, politely termed “prolonged detention.”
Here’s a second thing the strikers undoubtedly wanted to highlight and it's even harder to take in: Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned. All 86 have been cleared for release -- years late, often after brutal interrogation experiences sometimes involving torture. The problem: there is nowhere to release them to, especially since the majority of them are Yemenis and President Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring any prisoner to Yemen.
Then there are the prisoners who may indeed have done something criminal in regard to the U.S., but had confessions tortured out of them which won't hold up in court. They are among the ones who will never be brought to trial, but never cleared for release either. In other words, indefinite detention, something anathema to the American justice system, will for the conceivable future be us. The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling. No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state.
We know one thing: no one, not George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, or other top officials involved in setting up such a global system of injustice, sweeping up the innocent with the guilty, and subjecting them to horrors without end (including now force-feeding) will ever be brought to justice in an American court, nor will anyone involved in the system of rendition, torture, or abuse. In the Obama years, while indefinite detention remained a grim American reality, the government, as TomDispatch regular and former State Department officer Peter Van Buren himself experienced, honed other methods for punishing those it was unhappy with, especially whistleblowers of all sorts.
One of those methods might be called “indefinite suspension.” Instead of not being charged, you are charged repeatedly and dragged endlessly -- your life in a state of suspension -- through various bureaucratic judicial processes, the actual courts, and endless appeals thereof, so that even if sooner or later you come out the other side exonerated, you will still have been punished for your “crimes.” Let Peter Van Buren explain this mockery of "justice."
Homeland Insecurity: Seven Years, Untold Dollars to Silence One Man By Peter Van Buren
The meaning of Halabja - Article Highlights 25 MARCH 2013
Halabja is a name etched in the history of chemical warfare. There are few documented instances of deliberate chemical weapons attacks against civilian communities; the one that Saddam Hussein's forces made against the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja 25 years ago is the largest. Human Rights Watch recorded more than 3,200 immediate fatalities, with many more Kurdish citizens exposed to clouds of poisonous gas. Since the March 16, 1988 assault, thousands of people have succumbed to injuries suffered then, as well as to exposure-related health problems, including secondary infections that overwhelm compromised immune systems. Children are born with genetic defects or die prematurely because genetic damage is being passed down the generations.
In two years, the world will commemorate the centennial of modern chemical warfare. Just as the Belgian city of Ieper -- where the German Imperial Army introduced the first gas attacks during World War I -- is indelibly linked to its chemical past, Halabja stands as an international symbol for the many chemical attacks during the 1980 to 1988 Iran–Iraq war and the genocidal campaigns that Iraq conducted then against its Kurdish minority. In the immediate aftermath, Iran went to great lengths to publicize the bombing of Halabja, so the world would finally take notice Iraq's violations of humanitarian law.
Despite the powerful pictures of mothers and elderly men having dropped dead in their tracks, still clutching infants, and of the discolored, bloated bodies of children, Iran has had difficulty accepting Halabja -- located some 15 kilometers inside Iraq -- as a symbol of the pain it suffered from chemical weapons attacks.
From the end of 1983 onward, Iran's soldiers were regularly exposed to Iraqi chemical attack. Unprotected and ill-prepared for chemical warfare until the war's final year, they suffered many casualties from mustard gas, tabun, and sarin; many died prolonged, painful deaths. Iran still must tend to tens of thousands of people exposed to toxic chemicalsduring the war.
One attack was especially indiscriminate. On June 28, 1987, Saddam's air force struck the northern Iranian town of Sardasht. Almost three quarters of the 12,000 inhabitants were exposed to mustard gas; half of those exposed required medical treatment. Some 130 people, overwhelmingly civilians, died. Iran has since pressed for Sardasht to be internationally recognized as a memorial to the victims of chemical warfare, just as Halabja has been.
The story of Halabja is a tale of two cities and a struggle over symbols.
The legacy of Halabja. At the end of the 1980s, negotiations on the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) were sputtering. The United States had just started production of then-new binary artillery shells that would, when fired, deliver the nerve gas sarin. Revelation of the Halabja attack injected impetus and urgency into the treaty negotiations and forced nations across the world to focus on terminating chemical weapons programs. Despite Western concerns about the size of the Soviet chemical arsenal and its purpose in Warsaw Pact military doctrine, almost all European NATO members vehemently opposed any plans to have binary munitions or their components pre-positioned on their territory. National political debates forced the US Army to withdraw its forward-deployed chemical munitions from West Germany in 1990.
In 1989, because Iraq had so blatantly violated international law, French President François Mitterrand convened an international conference in Paris to restore the authority of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Western complicity in Iraq's chemical warfare -- through the sale of chemical precursors and relevant equipment, arms shipments, and political and intelligence support of Iraqi war operations -- had seriously undermined the protocol, the only legal instrument banning chemical weapons use then in existence.
The meeting was eventful. While Iraq was given all the consideration of a party to the Geneva Protocol, Kurdish representatives were denied a platform to address the delegates. Iran was furious about the continuing refusal to hold Iraq responsible PDF for six years of chemical warfare, claiming a moral high ground for having never retaliated in kind, despite its right to do so under then-existing international law. More
Detainees captured by SAS and SBS squads subjected to human-rights abuses at detention centre, say British witnesses.
British soldiers and airmen who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.
Personnel from two RAF squadrons and one Army Air Corps squadron were given guard and transport duties at the secret prison, the Guardian has established.
And many of the detainees were brought to the facility by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.
Codenamed Task Force 121, the joint US-UK special forces unit was at first deployed to detain individuals thought to have information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Once it was realised that Saddam's regime had long since abandoned its WMD programme, TF 121 was re-tasked with tracking down people who might know where the deposed dictator and his loyalists might be, and then with catching al-Qaida leaders who sprang up in the country after the regime collapsed.
Suspects were brought to the secret prison at Baghdad International airport, known as Camp Nama, for questioning by US military and civilian interrogators. But the methods used were so brutal that they drew condemnation not only from a US human rights body but from a special investigator reporting to the Pentagon.
A British serviceman who served at Nama recalled: "I saw one man having his prosthetic leg being pulled off him, and being beaten about the head with it before he was thrown on to the truck."
On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a number of former members of TF 121 and its successor unit TF6-26 have come forward to describe the abuses they witnessed, and to state that they complained about the mistreatment of detainees.
The abuses they say they saw include:
• Iraqi prisoners being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels.
• Prisoners being subjected to electric shocks.
• Prisoners being routinely hooded.
• Inmates being taken into a sound-proofed shipping container for interrogation, and emerging in a state of physical distress.
It is unclear how many of their complaints were registered or passed up the chain of command. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said a search of its records did not turn up "anything specific" about complaints from British personnel at Camp Nama, or anything that substantiated such complaints.
Nevertheless, the emergence of evidence of British involvement in the running of such a notorious detention facility appears to raise fresh questions about ministerial approval of operations that resulted in serious human rights abuses.
Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time, insisted he had no knowledge of Camp Nama. When it was pointed out to him that the British military had provided transport services and a guard force, and had helped to detain Nama's inmates, he replied: "I've never heard of the place."
The MoD, on the other hand, repeatedly failed to address questions about ministerial approval of British operations at Camp Nama. Nor would the department say whether ministers had been made aware of concerns about human rights abuses there. More
Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History
I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long time.
The Madness of King George
It’s easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.
By then, the U.S. “reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts -- at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned -- we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.
In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.
Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or... um... grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked.
In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn't a success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show.
In the dark humor of that moment, we christened the place the PotemkinChicken Factory. In between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to rise with the rooster’s cry each morning some camera crew came out for a visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success. Robert Ford, then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America's rugged shadow ambassador to Syria, said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed in Iraq. General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project. Some of the propaganda, which proclaimed that “teaching Iraqis methods to flourish on their own gives them the ability to provide their own stability without needing to rely on Americans,” is still online (including this charming image of American-Iraqi mentorship, a particular favorite of mine).
We weren’t stupid, mind you. In fact, we all felt smart and clever enough to learn to look the other way. The chicken plant was a funny story at first, a kind of insider’s joke you all think you know the punch line to. Hey, we wasted some money, but $2.2 million was a small amount in a war whose costs will someday be toted up in the trillions. Really, at the end of the day, what was the harm?
The harm was this: we wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to advance American goals. We did so by spending our time and money on obviously pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean water, regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, “At our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory ‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential services such as water and power.” How could we help stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”
By 2009, of course, it should all have been so obvious. We were no longer inside the neocon dream of unrivaled global superpowerdom, just mired in what happened to it. We were a chicken factory in the desert that no one wanted.
Time Travel to 2003
Anniversaries are times for reflection, in part because it’s often only with hindsight that we recognize the most significant moments in our lives. On the other hand, on anniversaries it’s often hard to remember what it was really like back when it all began. Amid the chaos of the Middle East today, it’s easy, for instance, to forget what things looked like as 2003 began. Afghanistan, it appeared, had been invaded and occupied quickly and cleanly, in a way the Soviets (the British, the ancient Greeks…) could never have dreamed of. Iran was frightened, seeing the mighty American military on its eastern border and soon to be on the western one as well, and was ready to deal. Syria was controlled by the stable thuggery of Bashar al-Assad and relations were so good that the U.S. was rendering terror suspects to his secret prisons for torture.
Most of the rest of the Middle East was tucked in for a long sleep with dictators reliable enough to maintain stability. Libya was an exception, though predictions were that before too long Muammar Qaddafi would make some sort of deal. (He did.) All that was needed was a quick slash into Iraq to establish a permanent American military presence in the heart of Mesopotamia. Our future garrisons there could obviously oversee things, providing the necessary muscle to swat down any future destabilizing elements. It all made so much sense to the neocon visionaries of the early Bush years. The only thing that Washington couldn’t imagine was this: that the primary destabilizing element would be us.
Indeed, its mighty plan was disintegrating even as it was being dreamed up. In their lust for everything on no terms but their own, the Bush team missed a diplomatic opportunity with Iran that might have rendered today’s saber rattling unnecessary, even as Afghanistan fell apart and Iraq imploded. As part of the breakdown, desperate men, blindsided by history, turned up the volume on desperate measures: torture, secret gulags, rendition, drone killings, extra-constitutional actions at home. The sleaziest of deals were cut to try to salvage something, including ignoring the A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani nuclear proliferation in return for a cheesy Condi Rice-Qaddafiphoto-op rapprochement in Libya.
Inside Iraq, the forces of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict had been unleashed by the U.S. invasion. That, in turn, was creating the conditions for a proxy warbetween the U.S. and Iran, similar to the growing proxy war between Israel and Iran inside Lebanon (where another destabilizing event, the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli invasion of 2006, followed in hand). None of this has ever ended. Today, in fact, that proxy war has simply found a fresh host, Syria, with multiple powers using “humanitarian aid” to push and shove their Sunni and Shia avatars around.
Staggering neocon expectations, Iran emerged from the U.S. decade in Iraq economically more powerful, with sanctions-busting trade between the two neighbors now valued at some $5 billion a year and still growing. In that decade, the U.S. also managed to remove one of Iran’s strategic counterbalances, Saddam Hussein, replacing him with a government run by Nouri al-Malaki, who had once found asylum in Tehran.
Meanwhile, Turkey is now engaged in an open war with the Kurds of northern Iraq. Turkey is, of course, part of NATO, so imagine the U.S. government sitting by silently while Germany bombed Poland. To complete the circle, Iraq’s prime minister recently warned that a victory for Syria's rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own country and will create a new haven for al-Qaeda which would further destabilize the region.
Meanwhile, militarily burnt out, economically reeling from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lacking any moral standing in the Middle East post-Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sat on its hands as the regional spark that came to be called the Arab Spring flickered out, to be replaced by yet more destabilization across the region. And even that hasn’t stopped Washington from pursuing the latest version of the (now-nameless) global war on terror into ever-newer regions in need of destabilization.
Having noted the ease with which a numbed American public patriotically looked the other way while our wars followed their particular paths to hell, our leaders no longer blink at the thought of sending American drones and special operations forces ever farther afield, most notably ever deeper intoAfrica, creating from the ashes of Iraq a frontier version of the state ofperpetual war George Orwell once imagined for his dystopian novel 1984. And don’t doubt for a second that there is a direct path from the invasion of 2003 and that chicken plant to the dangerous and chaotic place that today passes for our American world.
Happy Anniversary
On this 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, Iraq itself remains, by any measure, a dangerous and unstable place. Even the usually sunny Department of Stateadvises American travelers to Iraq that U.S. citizens “remain at risk for kidnapping... [as] numerous insurgent groups, including Al Qaida, remain active...” and notes that “State Department guidance to U.S. businesses in Iraq advises the use of Protective Security Details.”
In the bigger picture, the world is also a far more dangerous place than it was in 2003. Indeed, for the State Department, which sent me to Iraq to witness the follies of empire, the world has become ever more daunting. In 2003, at that infamous “mission accomplished” moment, only Afghanistan was on the list of overseas embassies that were considered “extreme danger posts.” Soon enough, however, Iraq and Pakistan were added. Today, Yemen and Libya, once boring but secure outposts for State’s officials, now fall into the same category.
Other places once considered safe for diplomats and their families such asSyria and Mali have been evacuated and have no American diplomatic presence at all. Even sleepy Tunisia, once calm enough that the State Department had its Arabic language school there, is now on reduced staff with no diplomatic family members resident. Egypt teeters.
The Iranian leadership watched carefully as the American imperial version of Iraq collapsed, concluded that Washington was a paper tiger, backed away from initial offers to talk over contested issues, and instead (at least for a while) doubled-down on achieving nuclear breakout capacity, aided by the past work of that same A.Q. Khan network. North Korea, another A.Q. Khan beneficiary, followed the same pivot ever farther from Washington, while it became a genuine nuclear power. Its neighbor China pursued its own path ofeconomic dominance, while helping to “pay” for the Iraq War by becoming the number-one holder of U.S. debt among foreign governments. It now owns more than 21% of the U.S. debt held overseas.
And don’t put away the joke book just yet. Subbing as apologist-in-chief for an absent George W. Bush and the top officials of his administration on this 10th anniversary, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recentlyreminded us that there is more on the horizon. Conceding that he had “long since given up trying to persuade people Iraq was the right decision,” Blair added that new crises are looming. “You’ve got one in Syria right now, you’ve got one in Iran to come,” he said. “We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult. But I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle.”
Think of his comment as a warning. Having somehow turned much of Islam into a foe, Washington has essentially assured itself of never-ending crises that it stands no chance whatsoever of winning. In this sense, Iraq was not an aberration, but the historic zenith and nadir for a way of thinking that is only now slowing waning. For decades to come, the U.S. will have a big enough military to ensure that our decline is slow, bloody, ugly, and reluctant, if inevitable. One day, however, even the drones will have to land.
And so, happy 10th anniversary, Iraq War! A decade after the invasion, a chaotic and unstable Middle East is the unfinished legacy of our invasion. I guess the joke is on us after all, though no one is laughing.
Peter Van Buren, a retired 24-year veteran of the State Department, served in Iraq. A TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq, the Middle East, and U.S. diplomacy at his blog, We Meant Well. He is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He is currently working on a new book, The People on the Bus: A Story of the 99%.
Copyright 2013 Peter Van Buren
© 2014