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NEWS & LETTERS,
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2003
Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry
Iraq: contradictions of occupation
The death in a firefight with U.S. occupation troops of
Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s sons and two of the Ba’athist
regime’s top leaders, will surely lessen the current of fear that lingers over
post-Ba’athist Iraq. While Uday’s crimes were the more spectacular
ones--kidnapping and rape of numerous women, torture of the national soccer team
when it lost--Qusay was in fact the bigger criminal. Although he kept a low
profile, it was Qusay who after the 1991 uprising supervised the revenge
killings and the draining of the marshes of southern Iraq, in which 100,000 met
their deaths. More recently, he had thousands of regime prisoners tortured and
massacred. Referring to Saddam Hussein, still on the run, the human rights
lawyer Esam Saadi declared: “The evil crow’s two wings have been cut off.” As we went to press, this victory for the U.S. occupation
forces had not lessened the almost-daily killings of U.S. soldiers in the Sunni
Muslim triangle northwest of Baghdad, long a Ba’athist stronghold. More
ominously for the U.S. occupiers, ordinary Iraqis, while glad to learn of the
demise of Qusay and especially Uday, laced their expressions of satisfaction
with resentment against the U.S. occupation. Inside the U.S., support for the war and the occupation has
also plummeted, with some soldiers and their families demanding that the troops
be brought home. One such report was run in Georgia’s AUGUSTA CHRONICLE of
July 12, hardly a pacifist publication. Sgt. David Uthe complained bitterly of
doing guard duty in 120-degree heat for a multinational corporation tied to Vice
President Dick Cheney’s Halliburton firm: “The main reason we’re still
here is to support Brown and Root,” he declared. Two days earlier, the Bush
administration announced that the occupation was costing $3.9 billion a month,
twice previous estimates. Bush’s belated admission that he included a false
report about Iraq’s nuclear program in his January State of the Union Address,
has also increased opposition to the occupation, especially in Britain. On July 13, after substantial pressure from below, the U.S.
finally got around to appointing a somewhat representative 25-member Governing
Council for Iraq, whose members ranged from Shi’ite clerics to Kurdish leaders
and to the heads of the Communist Party and the Iraqi Women’s Organization.
However, other tendencies, most prominently the young fundamentalist Mullah
Moktada al-Sadr, have declared that the Council is unrepresentative. So far,
Sadr seems to represent a minority of the Shi’ite community, but his power is
growing. Due to fundamentalist pressure as well as rampant criminal assaults
that have targeted them, most Iraqi women have been forced to don conservative
Islamic clothing or to stay off the streets altogether, a tremendous
retrogression in what has been one of the Middle East’s most secular
countries. Anti-globalization activist Medea Benjamin summed up the
contradictory quality of the present situation in a July 10 eyewitness report
for Alternet: “Iraqis are just only now discovering new found freedoms like
freedom of speech, assembly and association. We accompanied workers at the
Palestine Hotel who went on strike and successfully got rid of an abusive
general manager. We walked with women from a newly formed women’s group
demanding their rights and a say in the new government.... “But despite these positive openings, most of the people we meet say their lives were better before.... Before, at least women were not afraid to walk the streets. Many ask, ‘How come the Americans were so prepared and competent when it came to making the war but so utterly unprepared and incompetent when it comes to rebuilding?’” |
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