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CounterPunch
March 6,
2003
Promises, Promises
Bribing the
Way to War
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Irbil, Iraq.
The first checkpoint outside Iraqi government
control at Girda Rasha on the road north from Kirkuk is a grim
spot. Kurdish security men living in a few filthy cabins on the
desolate plain carefully check the cars of people arriving in
Kurdistan from all over Iraq.
It is as good a place as any to find
out what Iraqis are thinking about in the weeks before a war
they know is going to change their lives.
"Nobody will dare tell you anything
in Baghdad," a shopkeeper from the capital told me. "If
he does, the Mukhabarat [secret police] will take him away and
you will never find the body." Despite the freezing rain,
many people I met showed relief in their faces because they had
just passed safely through the last Iraqi checkpoint, often with
the help of a small bribe. Most were afraid of giving their names
because family members still lived in Baghdad-controlled areas.
Two points came across very strongly.
The majority of Iraqis welcome the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
by the U.S. not because they have any  great trust in American motives but because
of the misery of their lives over the last quarter-century. "It
doesn't matter who gets rid of him," said a man from Baghdad.
"The important thing is that there should be a change."
Speaking to the travelers also brought
home to me the extraordinary diversity of Iraqi society. An Iraqi
proverb says, "Two Iraqis, three sects." The Sunni
Arabs of Baghdad and northern Iraq have always dominated government,
usually at odds with the Shiite Arab majority in the capital
and the south and the Kurds in the far north. In addition, Iraqis
often have strong tribal loyalties or may belong to the Turkoman,
Assyrian or Chaldean minorities. This mosaic of differing ethnic
or religious loyalties means that every Iraqi city or town has
its own complicated politics.
Both the desire to be rid of Hussein
and the diversity of Iraqi politics have important implications
for U.S. policy in Iraq.
Obviously it is good news, from the American
point of view, that Iraqi society does not identify with Hussein.
But this also means that Iraq post-Hussein will be very unlike
Japan and Germany after defeat in World War II. Most Japanese
and Germans had supported their defeated rulers and were open
to their societies being remodeled by outsiders. Iraqis believe
that Hussein and his regime lasted so long only because of covert
U.S. and European support.
The complexity of Iraqi society also
makes the country a peculiarly lethal minefield for an occupying
foreign power, whatever its intentions.
Here in northern Iraq, over the last
month the prospect of war has raised two issues that affect millions
of people. The first is the threat of a Turkish military occupation
of a swath of territory in northern Kurdistan. Akram Mantik,
the governor of Irbil, the largest Kurdish city, said to me,
"Turkish interference is our biggest problem, bigger even
than Saddam."
Turkey wants to become a major player
in the affairs of northern Iraq. It says it will support the
local Turkoman minority and wants to limit, if not end, the de
facto independence of the Iraqi Kurds who fought their way free
of Hussein's control a decade ago. It would also like to prevent
a half-million Kurds deported or forced to flee by Hussein from
returning to their homes and becoming the majority in the oil
province of Kirkuk and elsewhere.
The Bush administration has been trying
to get the Turks, Kurds and Iraqi opposition on board by spraying
promises about how they will all get what they want after the
war. Here in Kurdistan, it felt like an election campaign last
week as U.S. officials offered postdated checks to Turks and
Kurds in return for their immediate support.
Not all these checks will be honored.
Some Iraqis are bound to feel betrayed by any postwar settlement.
Many are too exhausted by the disasters of the last 20 years
to protest too much. But the U.S. may also find that not all
of Iraq's problems can be attributed to Hussein.
Patrick Cockburn
is a visiting fellow at the Center for, Strategic and International
Studies in Washington and co-author with, Andrew Cockburn of
"Out
of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein" (HarperCollins,
1999). He can be reached at: patrick@counterpunch.org
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