Salah Salim Ali11 maart 2008 – 15:44

Figures and the timing of agendas are as important in politics as they are in economics and everyday life activities. In Iraq, they tell us a lot about the persistence of violence and the increasingly aggravating situation that amounts to a full-fletched civil war. Figures on money, oil, body counts, allocations and appointments to key offices tell of a growing but latent social dissatisfaction that would at any moment trigger strife that would send the whole region into chaos.
It goes without saying that the USA has caused most of the tragedies in Iraq, starting with its rash invasion. There are numerous deadly mistakes the USA committed in Iraq. Among these are the following Ten:

1. The USA misconceptions of Iraqi society, Arabs’ psychology and Muslim world-view. The USA enforced a sort of prefab democracy on a society soaked to the bone in stereotype time-honoured traditions. Iraqis are aware of the real motives behind USA aggression. They keep wondering: if America had finally decided to come to liberate Iraq in March 2003, why, then, did it impose blockade which went on for more than ten years on us? For liberation doesn’t entail or subsume the destruction of the infra-structure, cultural institutions and the psychology of the people to be liberated! Only the poor, the oppressed and the intellectuals suffered from the USA blockade and aggression while war-mongers, smugglers and thieves thrived in Iraq.

2. The USA policy-makers were on the wrong track too when they were led to believe that Iraqis were all dissatisfied with Saddam or were all against him. Saddam has built hospitals, schools and factories, improved transport and constructed dams. His parental policy and party Favourism, however, have created a vast social and intellectual polity including special army and security units which enjoyed undreamt of privileges, good pay and luxury. The moment Americans entered Iraq, they embarked on bossing, killing andarresting suspect Iraqis, watching them out, hunting them down and buffing them away under the threat of guns' muzzles, almost after the British manner when Britain occupied India more than two and a half centuries ago.

3. The USA occupation authority sent Iraq’s army and other military and security configurations home depriving more than 3 million Iraqis from the means of living, which amounts to declaring a civil war in Iraq. The USA in this foolhardy has made resistance for Iraqis an honourable obligation, a welcome duty and must for survival.

4. Iraqis have always been proud of their past victories and army and are themselves militant in mentality, perspective and temperament. To declare that Iraq’s army is defeated, not Saddam’s regime is a downright ego-humbling experience for a people born worriers and boost of seven successive military civilizations which for centuries had mastered the whole Near East including Israel.

5. Besides the everyday intentional and arbitrary killing of innocent civilians, the way the Americans deal with Iraqis such as frizzing and arresting women, forcing prisoners to go naked in Abu Ghreib and exposing their nakedness in the media to the world to fulfill the curse of Nahum on Nineveh, and the rape of an underage girl in Haditha indicates another significant aspect of American disregard of human life and disrespect of the moral standards which had both ignited and justified violence that is wrecking Iraq every moment.

6. The USA has given most top offices to either the Kurds or the Shiites. Some of whom are illiterate and some lack the qualifications for the offices they hold, forgetting that Iraqis abhorred party nepotism during Saddam’s reign! The question is: what is the difference between democracy and one-party rule then?

7. The USA has never fulfilled any of the promises it voiced before the aggression: neither electricity, nor the general living standard has improved. There were, during Saddam’s reign, no fuel crises, no assassinations of authors, academics and talented people, security prevailed and people used to enjoy their spring, summer and even fall and winter staying out at night. Now, fear reigns supreme all over Iraq. Borders are still out of control and the government lacks competent security forces and the Iraqi current lollipop Intelligence is instrumental to Iran and the USA. America does not give its yes-men much freedom or authority to build up their own system.

8. People feel badly embittered closely watching American double-standard policy on all levels: what America did in reward to its supporters and heroes such as Sadat, Shah Iran and Saddam, has not equally and deservedly done to the corrupt gulf Emirs, Saudi Arabia’s sword dancers and other oil tycoons who support the USA against the will of their own people, fueling dissidence and hatred. It supports Iraqi Kurds but blesses Turkey’s offensive against Turkey’s Kurds; it gives free rein to Israel to kill while it bridles Muslim resistance in Lebanon and Palestine to defend itself. It confounds Islam with terrorism neglecting, at the same time, the rights of Muslims in their lands, the right of Lebanese, Iraqis and Palestinians to resist and fight for freedom and liberation. No wonder then that the repressed majority of Arab young people will resort to extreme violence and seek a charismatic leader in Osama bin Laden, Hassan Nasr Allah or Ismail Haniyah to fight for salvation, dignity and liberation from what is felt slavery by shallow, permissive andblasphemous USA which preaches an American dream but enforces a nightmare. No one would replace light by darkness unless this sort of darkness is coming out of a black midnight sun like that of Paul Eluard or Derrida, which the USA rancid machine doesn’t admit in any skies!

9. Another grave mistake the USA made in Iraq was its adoption of the domino principle which led her to believe that shifting a brick in the wall of the Middle East will affect the whole region and democracy will spread as if by infection or contagion forgetting that what applies to dominos cannot apply to history and what is mechanically correct could by no means be biologically viable! The Middle East is not a collection of domino pieces. It is rather a wall where Syria, Iran and Turkey constitute strong, authentic and defiant boulders.
Iraqis see their land reduced, their water resources depleted, even their very cultural and economic wealth seeping out of their homeland and hands. How could they, then, not resort to violence? The irony becomes flagrant when it comes to the needless proposal of changing the Iraqi flag which is the most perceived and generally accepted symbol of sovereignty. If local flags are to be flown in different parts of Iraq, America would have done nothing for the unification of a mutilated nation. Rather parochial Chauvinism will replace Centralism, disintegration will replace integration and heterogeneity will replace homogeneity. In other words, hatred and anarchy will prevail. America would have done nothing then!

10. “The strew that will break the camel’s back” as an Iraqi proverb puts it, is American blindness in bringing Iran into Iraq. Iran is viewed by all Sunni Iraqis, and by a good portion of Shiite Iraqis, as a historical and stereotype enemy. Tipping the balance of power in the gulf will only increase the Gulf state dependence on the USA and increase the USA benefit from the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia selling them weapons for paranoia, but it will strengthen obscuritanism in Iran, lay the infant at Europe’s weak countries’ doorstep, and nourish hatred everywhere in the Middle East. People do not like these governments and the possibilities of further violence are forever increasing.

Salah Salim Ali
Iraqi writer