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CounterPunch
January
6, 2003
Baghdad Before
by TIM LLEWELLYN
The Iraqis are awaiting a solution, however it
may be delivered, from out of whatever alien landscape. The
Iraqi people have no control over any function of their lives
except that of sheer survival. They can no more organize themselves
to rid the nation of Saddam Hussein and the extraordinary network
of power and solidarity he has built for himself over 34 painstaking
and brutal years than they can appeal to the better nature of
the new Imperium in Washington and ask to be considered as members
of a deserving human race.
I can put it no better than in the words
of an Iraqi intellectual, a political animal licensed to speak,
but perhaps, in the circumstances, better left unnamed: "
The Iraqi people are resigned and frightened but they are not
panicking. We are getting used to this. No-one cares about
us or listens to us, neither the Anglo-American alliance nor
the regime here in Baghdad. If there is some answer they are
looking for it is in the field of religion. Karl Marx said '
religion is the spirit of a spiritless world.' We Iraqis are
living in a spiritless world. There is no more interest in our
human rights in Baghdad than there is in London. Nothing remains
for us except metaphysics."
It seems a despairing quotation. But
it is factual rather than despairing. The Iraqi citizen is bound
up so closely in the process of sheer survival and caring for
his family that he has little time left to repine or to speculate.
Whether for better or for worse, the solace of religion-"metaphysics",
as my friend puts it--has gradually begun to stand in for the
more pragmatic and practical politics practiced in this country
since the British forged it out of the three post-Ottoman provinces
of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra 80 years ago.
Although the Iraqi Government and the
various NGOs engaged in trying to sustain a basis of life for
Iraq's 22 million people try to put a brave face on matters--life
has improved marginally since the oil-for-food program began
to take some effect towards the end of the 20th century, and
it is important for the sake of Iraqi pride and self-esteem that
the nation does not eternally present itself as victim and mendicant--the
underlying reality of life is grim and reduced.
If it were not for the food ration, now
distributed in two-monthly parcels across the nation, by Saddam's
Government in main-frame Iraq and by the United Nations in the
"protected" areas of Kurdistan, Iraq would collapse
into sub-Saharan or South Asian levels of starvation and disease.
The food ration, acquired at government centers by the production
of coupons, for a few cents, supplies the Iraqi people--all of
them-with the bulk of their energy and protein. Some choose
to barter bits of it, but for 70 per cent of the population,
according to the NGO CARE, it is the center; the pillar of their
survival. The size of the food ration has increased since for
the oil-for-food program began to take effect, three to four
years ago.
But it is important to remember that
this is welfare. Iraq has no economy of its own. What oil it
exports produces funds that are taken and administered by others.
Those funds, politically organized and distributed by foreign
powers who are unlikely to have Iraq's interests primarily at
heart, are very largely used to pay for Iraq's meager supply
of food and medicine. Whatever the level of earnings, the United
Nations sanctions committee and the individual governments concerned
in any contract, decide how Iraq's welfare is allotted and spent.
In the margin, perhaps $2bn to $2.5bn US a year, Saddam's smuggled
and nod-and-a-wink exports to Turkey and Jordan provide funds
the Government can use as it sees fit: arms, mosques, education,
computer technology. (Iraq has in the past year gained access
to the internet.)
Iraq was, 12 years ago, before the Gulf
War, earning up to $13 bn a year. Even after the depredations
of the war with Iran, it remained a state whose provision of
welfare was massive and efficient. The UN graded Iraq on a par
with Greece in terms of standard of living and human expectation.
These were not just measures of diet and health, though these
were exemplary, but of education and personal fulfillment. Arabs
came to Iraq to better themselves. The system of political
rule was primitive, brutal and cynical--and, in its tight circle,
corrupt. But Iraq in general was not a corrupt or corrupted
society. The people had accepted a deal for themselves that
the British had invented for the state they created in 1922:
obey and be rewarded; disobey and be punished. Saddam Hussein
took this philosophy to extreme lengths as he built his power
base during the 1970s, but for most Iraqis what his apparatus
delivered in terms of education, literacy, health, comfort and
respect among Middle Eastern neighbors was worth the cost.
After all, Iran (pre- and post-1979),
Syria, and Saudi Arabia, were hardly pluralistic models of freedom
of thought and movement, and the perks of oil wealth were distributed
among the population with much less creativity than Saddam's
functionaries brought to bear.
In 2002, Iraq is on a par with Mali;
despite a much-vaunted slowing of the increase in child mortality,
Iraq's rate of increase is so phenomenal--160 per cent since
1990--that it can hardly be adequately displayed on a UNICEF
bar chart. Between 4,000 and 5,000 children under five die in
each month--mostly of simple infectious diseases that had either
been eradicated or were easily cured 20 years ago--who would
not die if the circumstances of mid-1990 obtained now. One in
three Iraqi girls of school age do not attend school any more,
staying home to be "mother" to their families as their
real mothers go out to work to help sustain the household.
Since the mid-1980s the literacy rate
of women has been reduced from more than 80 per cent to just
over 40 per cent.
Sanctions have brought Iraq to the point
where a school teacher earns about $3.00 a month--as against
a semiskilled laborer who can make up to $15.00 a day.
An aid worker asked me this simple question:
"What does this mean for the future of women in Iraqi society,
a society where until 15 years ago they played an increasingly
vital role in civil society. And how would you like to try to
persuade a teenage son to be a doctor rather than a laborer?"
In the gap this creates, Islam becomes an answer more than an
option.
There is a disastrous lack of basic medicines;
the water is foul and polluted; sanitation is at its living edge:
walk into a school lavatory or a hospital lobby and you will
be knocked back by the stench. Outside Baghdad, and in some
of its poorer suburbs, like the vast Saddam City, power cuts
are endemic. Thus an enfeebled society, lacking the basic constructs
of a normal life, sees these lacks compounded. It is not that
Iraqis cannot cope with this, but, as a UNICEF worker said to
me, "you have to remember where they started from."
Self-respect is at a premium, and when self-respect is stamped
down, as is now becoming evident in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, desperation sets in.
A member of the national assembly, a
university president and an adviser at the Foreign Ministry all
stressed what I had managed to take in myself, watching Iraqis
trying to cope with the business of daily life: "Humiliation.
The West is trying to humiliate us."
Whether it is the rash of cybercafes
in Baghdad--I peeped over the shoulder of a man downloading the
latest software from the internet, and saw youngsters playing
the most frighteningly intelligent computer games--or the new
racks of hardware at the Baghdad University of Technology, or
the laborers cheerily bringing in the corn harvest, Iraqis are
determined that their ingenuity, brains and spirit will not be
seen to be reduced by what they see as a sustained assault on
them, and their Arab neighbors, by a punitive America.
"It will take more than 12 years
of sanctions to cut us down," said a university lecturer.
But sanctions have done more than push
ordinary Iraqis to the edge of survival. It has made them not
only weak, and in a large sense unquestioning of their own political
leadership, it has made them even more dependent on their government
than they were 10 years ago. The attempted humiliation endemic
in physical life, the removal of hope and ambition, the squandering
of a generation, is now enhanced by the arbitrary bombing raids
of the USAAF and the RAF. I saw the results of one attack within
a kilometer of the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf. I suppose the allies
are careful enough not to hit the mosque itself--the last people
to attack it were the forces of Saddam in 1991--but if they are
that accurate, why go near it with such force? A family of seven
were killed.
As the Iraqis will tell you, candidly,
it is not as if the fighter-bombers cruising in from Incirlik
and Kuwait have ever been in any danger themselves.
So, a society on its uppers perceives
itself as maintaining its dignity in the face of outside menace,
attempted humiliation, the exercise of uncaring and merciless
power.
"We Iraqis like foreigners,"
a political scientist told me, "but we have never liked
being run by them." (It occurred to me that in Britain
these days almost the exact reverse is true.)
There is little Iraq can do to defend
itself against an organized American onslaught, whether it takes
the form of an intensified Operation Desert Fox, of December
1998, or a more sustained invasion bringing foreign troops to
the heart of Baghdad. There can be few Iraqis who believe that,
in the end, the invaders would not prevail, although at great
cost on all sides.
But the key phrase is, "in the end."
The Iraqis are pleased with themselves that Saddam, at last
showing the erudition he so notably lacked in 1980 and 1991,
has called the American bluff. Iraq, so far, has been so devastatingly
welcoming to the Hans Blix team as to be almost guilty of irony--not,
as far as anyone knows, grounds for " material breach."
By this device the Iraqis are buying the time they need and
the opportunity for invasion America sees ebbing away. Co-operation
has a capital 'C'.
In 1991, a Foreign Ministry adviser told
me, the Iraqis also thought that " co-operation" would
work. The Americans made it clear, however, that as fast as
Saddam yielded his weaponry, nothing would suffice. As long
as he was there, the details of the United Nations Security Council
resolutions counted for nothing. That mentality and that perception
still command in Baghdad and Washington. Cut it how one may,
the West continues to make it clear that Saddam has to go.
Anyone who has studied Iraqi history
and watched the way in which, even before 1958, its rulers gained
and sustained power will be reluctant to believe that Saddam
Hussein and scores of thousands of loyal, dependent and ruthless
supporters will disappear into the void like Idi Amin, or embark
on flights to sanctuary like earlier Iraqi leaders. If, as the
forces of the outside world or their representatives move in
for the kill, Saddam Hussein does not deploy some last surprise,
then he is not the man who supervised the creation of modern
Iraq and survived, so far and at his own hand, its near destruction.
April Glaspie, the last US Ambassador
to Iraq, once gave me a telling-off for suggesting in a dispatch
to the BBC ( in 1988 ) that many Iraqis had a sneaking regard
for Saddam Hussein, despite his blunders, his cruelty and his
almost psychopathically dysfunctional family. Three years later,
she might have been right: in the post-Kuwait era the Iraqis
saw him for the externally illiterate politico that he was, author
of two national disasters.
Fortunately for Saddam, the West, with
its inconsistent policies, lack of focus, dismissal of any Iraqi
and/or Arab interests and heavy-handed pursuit of puritanical
punishment of a helpless people, has reconstituted him as the
only power in the land. It would be foolish to say he is popular;
but the administrators of sanctions, the purveyors of Western
moralizing, the supporters of Israel, the bombers of Najaf and
Mosul, have restored him to a kind of credibility.
None of the West's opposition figures
can match him.
An Iraqi academic told me: "I can
travel out of Iraq. When I go to London they come to me and
say, ' why are you staying in Baghdad, earning $100 a month?
Here, just one appearance with us on TV, telling the world how
it is in Iraq, and you would have money, a Mercedes, a flat in
Kensington or Georgetown what's the matter with you?'
"I think that approach, the financial
approach, to betray your country, is not one I wish to contemplate.
And it says absolutely everything about the Iraqi opposition
that the US and the UK are funding."
Tim Llewellyn
was the BBC Middle East Correspondent based in Beirut, 1976-80,
and in Nicosia, 1987-92. He has covered all the major stories
in the Middle East in the past quarter-century, including the
Palestinian question, the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian Revolution,
the Gulf War, the Lebanese Civil War and both Israeli invasions
of Lebanon. He is now a freelance writer and broadcaster on Middle
East affairs, living in London. He can be reached at: llewellyn@counterpunch.org.
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