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Recent
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April
10, 2003
Zoltan
Grossman
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the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
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The Night After
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The Telltale Signs of Empire
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Bush and Rummy's Drunken Drive-by
David Krieger
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Robert
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The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
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Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
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Nately's Old Man
Steve
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Website
of the Day
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April
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Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
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Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
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Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
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America's Sovereign Right to Do
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Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
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Ray
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Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
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Steve
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Dr. Phil in the Trenches
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FERC and Wall Street: Conversations
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Linda Heard
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask "Why?"
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Faruqui
Wallowing in Hypocrisy
Wallace
Gagne
Baghdad Babble
Harry
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Report from the Protests at the Bush/Blair
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I Understand There's a Boy in
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David
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War and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
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America is Not a Role Model
Diane
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Robert
Fisk
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Wars and the Color Line
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April
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The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
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William
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War Web Log 04/04
April
3, 2003
Uri
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Can You Hear the Silence?
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April 14,
2003
Gunboat Democracy
This is Only
the Beginning
by
URI AVNERY
A depressing thought: the Iraq war proves that
in the year 2003 AD, the world has not essentially changed since
2003 BC. A military power can attack a weak nation, conquer its
territory and plunder its resources. There is no world law, no
world moral order. Might is right.
The weapons are of the 21st century,
but they serve 19th century aims. This is a classical colonial
war. Iraq is becoming an American colony, to remain so for a
long time.
The pretexts come from the old colonialist
phrase-book. A country is conquered in order to "liberate"
the natives from their cruel tyrants. Their resources are stolen,
in order to raise their standard of living, give an (elementary)
education to their  children, keep a colonial administration
that will teach them democracy.
This is also a divine mission. The missionaries
always come with the army, and sometimes even precede it. The
cross and the canon, religion and oppression, the church and
the plunder of resources go very well together.
For the poet laureate of the era, Rudyard
Kipling, that was the "white man's burden". But when
colonialism retreated, it left behind a social, cultural and
economic desert, which persists in the "third world"
to this day.
To shoot a lame duck.
The triumphalism of America, Britain
and Israel is a little misplaced.
The only super-power in the world has
attacked a little country of 26 million people, starved for years
by sanctions. A mighty and well-fed army, equipped with the most
sophisticated arms the world has ever seen, confronted an army
that has been largely disarmed before the fighting even started.
The powerful air force that controls the skies without opposition
was sent against a country whose air defenses have been bombed
for years beforehand.
In a modern war, control of the air is
the decisive factor. Sixty years ago, when the air force and
its weapons were much more primitive, Field Marshal Rommel told
Hitler that the Allies' domination of the skies made it impossible
for the German army to maneuver and bring in reinforcements.
Therefore, he said, his army would be unable to defeat the Anglo-American
forces once they succeeded in securing a bridgehead on the French
coast. If we don't destroy them in the first few hours, he told
Hitler, the battle is lost. The Fuehrer did not listen to his
advice, and the results are well known.
If this was true then for the mighty
Wehrmacht, it was true now a thousand times for the battered
Iraqi forces. From the first minute on, no Iraqi tank could appear
in the open without being destroyed from the air. No division
and no company could occupy a position, let alone move, without
the missiles and bombs pounding it to dust. Decent hunters do
not shoot at sitting ducks. But that is exactly what happened
in Iraq.
Not long ago I said, quoting the Bible,
that the Americans should not boast before the war is finished.
This is true after the war, too. There is nothing to boast about.
Tommy Franks will not go down in history as one of the great
leaders of armies, next to Alexander and Napoleon. If the Iraqis
held on for 21 days, that itself was an achievement.
A stupid brute.
Saddam Hussein can take no credit for
that achievement. As it turns out, he was not only a brutal
and cruel dictator, but a stupid one to boot.
Clearly, he had never read a serious
book about strategy, and did not receive good advice from his
generals. That is one of the troubles of dictators, dating back
to Biblical times, when Absalom, King David's rebellious son,
rejected the good advice of Ahithophel: generally the dictator
does not listen to advice, and the advisors tend to tell the
dictator only what he wants to hear.
From the Iraqi point of view, it would
have been right to avoid battle in the open desert, where a modern
army has an immense advantage, and to draw the invaders into
the cities. But for that purpose, Saddam had to dispose his army
inside the cities and prepare for a Stalingrad-like defense.
Instead, he exposed his elite Republican Guard outside Baghdad,
in the open, where they were systematically destroyed by the
US airforce. Inside the city itself nothing was prepared, no
plan, no command structure, no adequate arms. It fell like a
rotten apple. Neither the American generals nor the commentators
expected this. Neither did I.
Saddam had his chance to go down in history
as the leader of a glorious, if hopeless, last stand. But now
his appropriate memorial is the decapitated bronze statue that
starred on television.
The dis-information
force.
This war was waged simultaneously in
two arenas: in the field and on television. There was hardly
any resemblance between the two.
Television was an accompaniment to previous
wars. But in this war, television has become an integral part
of the war itself, one of its major battlefields, if not the
most important one.
From now on, TV is a component of the
armed forces, along with the army, the navy and the airforce.
Like them it is directed by the command structure.
Much thought and effort was devoted to
this arm. General Myers, the No.1 soldier in Washington, and
General Franks, the commander of the actual campaign, personally
took part in the action. (It was a stroke of genius to put a
black general into the center of the picture.)
The aim is to engender in the mind of
the home audience, world public opinion and perhaps even in the
mind of the enemy a picture of the war that has no connection
with reality. That is easy, because there is no more mendacious
instrument than television. He who controls it, controls the
picture of reality, and thereby the mind of the viewer.
For example: in order to support the
claim that the aim of the war was to "liberate" the
Iraqi people, it was essential to show the Iraqi population welcoming
the liberators with joy. Television delivered the goods.
Nothing easier: simply fill the frame
with a hundred jumping and shouting people, in order to create
the impression the a whole country is jumping and shouting. Nobody
will ask: Who the hell are they? Where did they come from? Who
called them together? Did they get anything in return? Aren't
they, by chance, the same people who jumped and shouted a few
days ago "with our soul and blood we will redeem you, Saddam?"
And where are the other 5 million inhabitants of Baghdad? What
do they think and feel?
During five very long hours all Western
TV stations (and Al Jazeera as well) concentrated on showing
a crowd of Iraqis trying to bring down a giant statue of Saddam
in the center of Baghdad. A discerning eye could notice that
the crowd was no more than a hundred people, certainly half of
them journalists. The statue-smashers acted manifestly for the
camera. But television-wise, that was "the Iraqi people".
This picture will remain fixed in the mind of the world as the
defining image of the "liberation".
Only Thomas Friedman, a very arrogant
and very patriotic observer, independently interviewed Iraqis
and reported that they indeed were glad to be rid of Saddam,
but that they viewed the Americans as foreign invaders who should
leave at once. Nothing of this kind was seen on CNN.
In the Iraqi campaign, every Western
(and, of course, Israeli) journalist was a soldier with a job
to do under the command structure. The point was reached that
Donald Rumsfeld, in a Washington briefing, directly ordered the
American journalists in Iraq to interview Iraqis and get stories
from them about Saddam's atrocities. Sure enough, within hours
such stories came pouring in.
Joseph Goebbels would be bursting with
envy. George Orwell would not be surprised.
Gunboat Democracy.
How will things develop from here on?
It has been said that it is hard to prophesy, especially about
the future.
One thing is certain: the Americans did
not conquer Iraq in order to leave. They intend to remain there
for a long time, even if they succeed in setting up a puppet
government. They came to control the oil sources and the Arab
region, and for these purposes they will stay on.
But even if they should wish to leave,
they would not be able to do so. Without an American dictatorship
taking the place of Saddam's, Iraq would fall apart. The old
ethnic, religious, regional and tribal divisions would only deepen
if an American-appointed puppet government were to establish
"democracy".
Western democracy developed over centuries
in organized communities with solid community values. Only a
fool would think that it could be imposed from above, by force,
on a society organized on quite different lines, by family and
clan, and with quite different values. A real Arab democracy,
when it comes about, will surely different in nature and appearance
from the Western kind.
The mob-rule that found its expression
in the orgy of violence and looting under the auspices of the
US army, including the looting of hospitals, is a bad omen indeed.
(It is the height of chutzpah, when the US commanders, who have
destroyed the civilian infra-structure, say that law and orders
must be restored by the Iraqis themselves. Thus, millions are
abandoned to anarchy.)
The animosity between the Kurds and the
Turks in the north, as well as the connection between the Shiites
and nearby Shiite Iran in the south, will cause the occupiers
many headaches. After some months of quiet (if at all), they
may be faced with a Hizbullah-style guerilla war.
Will that prevent an American invasion
of Syria and/or Iran? Perhaps it will, perhaps, on the contrary,
it will push the Americans towards new adventures, in order to
distract attention from the results of the this one.
And Ahmad, what does
he think?
In order to foresee what's coming, I
ask myself: what would I have thought and felt, if I had been
an Arab? If I were, for example, Ahmad, a young Arab student
at Cairo University, what would I feel at this moment?
First of all, humiliation. Once more
a magnificent Arab hero has turned out to be a toy soldier, talking
big and failing the first test. Once more an Arab army has mostly
given up without a fight. (By comparison, a growing admiration
for the Palestinians, who have been standing up to the mighty
Israeli military machine for more than two years, who have sacrificed
more than 2000 people and whose youth stand in line to sacrifice
their lives.)
On top of the humiliation on the field
of battle, the humiliation in the political field. A foreign
invader has marched into the center of the Arab world and taken
control of its resources, and the great Arab nation is paralysed,
unable to react. Its cowardly leaders hold on to their seats
and accept handouts from the occupier. Who will save us?
There is no nationalist Arab force able
to offer a solution to the millions of young people from Casablanca
to Kuwait city. No new Nasser enflames their imagination. But
there is a religious Muslim force that provides comfort, answers,
identity and self-respect. It also provides a weapon for removing
the invaders and compelling the West to listen to Arab aspirations:
terrorism.
Saddam never used terrorism. Nothing
outside Iraq interested him, except if there was a to enlarge
its territory. He was completely occupied with survival. The
American pretense of having attacked Iraq in order to rout terrorism
was a blatant and deliberate lie. And now, Ahmad thinks, after
the last of the Arab armies has shown its impotence in the face
of American might, there remains only the alternative of guerilla
war and terror attacks.
Yesterday's
Features
Zoltan
Grossman
The Perils of Occupation: the Easier
the Victory, the Harder the Peace
Uri
Avnery
The Night After
Wayne Madsen
The Telltale Signs of Empire
David Krieger
Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
Abbas
Jeremy
Brecher
What Can the World Do Now That Tanks Prowl Baghdad?
Robert
Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
A Patriot Attack on America
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
Website
of the Day
The
Third Page
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