🚀 go-pugleaf

"Tim Murphy" <info@cinox.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:<c5f3f1$nis$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>...
> 10.4.2004
> http://www.gush-shalom.org/
> 
> Bitter Rice (2) Or: The March of Folly
> 
Uri Avnery about Iraq - a year after.
> 
> The following passage may look familiar:
> 
> "On the fourth day of the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon, I crossed
> the border at a lonely spot near Metulla and looked for the front, which
> had already reached the outskirts of Sidon. I was driving my private
> car, accompanied by a woman photographer. We passed a dozen
> Shiite villages and were received everywhere with great joy. We
> extracted ourselves only with difficulty from hundreds of villagers,
> each one insisting that we have coffee at their home. On the previous
> days, they had showered the Israeli soldiers with rice.
> 
> "A few months later I joined an army convoy going in the opposite
> direction, from Sidon to Metulla. The soldiers were now wearing
> bulletproof vests and helmets, many were on the verge of panic.
> 
> "What had happened? The Shiites had received the Israeli soldiers
> as liberators. When they realized that they had come to stay as
> occupiers, they started to kill them.
> 
> "When the Israeli troops entered Lebanon the Shiites were a down-
> trodden, powerless community, held in contempt by all the others.
> After a year of fighting the occupiers, they became a political and
> military power. The Shiite Hizbullah is the only military force in the
> Arab world that has beaten the mighty Israeli army."
> 
> End of passage. I wrote it in an article called "Bitter Rice",
> which appeared on March 22, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq,
> and which started with the words: "Beware of the Shiites. The troubles
> of the occupation will start after the fighting is over"
> 
> Barbara Tuchman died too soon. Otherwise she could add a
> chapter about this war to her book "The March of Folly".
> 
> It should be remembered that Tuchman was very strict in the
> choice of her examples. It was not enough that a government acted
> foolishly. In order to gain a place in her book, two additional
> conditions had to be met: that the results of the folly could be
> foreseen, and that there was indeed someone who warned in advance of
> these results.
> 
> (For example: the British king George III lost America because of a
> number of foolish acts. This could have been foreseen, and, indeed, the
> British politician and author Edmund Burke warned of them at the time.)
> 
> What is happening now in Iraq was completely predictable. It is an
> exact repeat of all that happened to us in Lebanon. Otto von Bismarck
> once remarked: "A fool learns from his experience. A wise person
> learns from the experience of others." If so, how to define President
> George W. Bush, who is not even able to learn from his own
> experience?
> 
> If I have already quoted myself, I may as well do it again. On
> February 8, 2003, in an article entitled "The Smell of War", I wrote:
> "This is not a war about terrorism. This is not a war about weapons of
> mass destruction. This is not a war about democracy in Iraq. This is a
> war about something elseThere is a strong smell of oil in the air."
> 
> At the time, this sounded like defamation. Today it is already
> clear beyond doubt that the American invasion had nothing to do with
> either the "war on terrorism", nor with weapons of mass destruction, nor
> with the crimes of Saddam Hussein or with democracy. This has been
> proven and documented beyond all doubt, most recently by the
> testimony of Richard Clarke, who has been Bush's man in charge of
> the "war against terrorism". From the moment Bush entered the White
> House, he and his handlers pursued one aim in the Middle East: to
> occupy Iraq.
> 
> The Bushes are oilmen. Among the big-money people who helped
> to put the two Bushes, Sr. and Jr., into the White House, oilmen
> played a leading role. They have decided that the American Empire
> needs to get its hands on the vast oil reserves of Iraq and to establish
> a permanent military base in the middle of the oil region, between the
> oil of the Caspian Sea and the oil of the Persian/Arabian Gulf.
> 
> The neo-con fanatics, most of whom are right-wing Zionists, added
> to this another objective: to eliminate the Iraqi threat to Israel,
> before freeing Israel of the Syrian and Iranian threats. But this was a
> secondary aim. It would not have succeeded in dominating American
> policy without the decisive impact of Dick Cheney and the other Bush
> handlers, who wanted to establish direct American military control over
> most of the earth's oil.
> 
> This aim has been achieved. Iraq was conquered. 135 thousand US
> soldiers uphold the occupation regime, with the addition of a few troops
> of the satellite countries, such as Poland, the Ukraine, the UK, El-
> Salvador and Italy. A small (and not very intelligent) official named
> "L. Paul Bremer 3rd", no less, has become Governor of the new colony,
> and he intends to "hand over sovereignty" to an Iraqi government he
> himself has appointed.
> 
> That is to say, sovereignty over garbage collection and hospitals,
> but definitely not over the really important functions, which will be
> firmly in the hands of American "advisors". For this purpose, the
> biggest US Embassy in the world is being built in Baghdad: over 3000
> officials, who will control every aspect of government in the country.
> 
> That reminds one of the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain in France.
> The Iraqis themselves will be reminded of the British colonial power
> structure in their country, which operated through an Arab "king".
> 
> As far as the Americans are concerned, this could last forever. Not
> for a year, not for two years, but for decades, like the Israeli
> occupation of the Palestinian areas. But, unlike the Israelis, they call
> this "nation building" and "establishing the first democracy in the Arab
> world".
> 
> George Orwell would have enjoyed it.
> A minor factor was overlooked: the Iraqi people. But one really
> cannot think about everything, can one?
> When the armed resistance started, the Americans comforted
> themselves with talk about "remnants of the Saddam regime", or
> "terrorists", perhaps foreign agents of Osama Bin-Laden. More than
> any other colonial regime, the Americans find it difficult to accept the
> most simple fact in the world: that an occupied people will arise
> against its occupier. And really, what have the Iraqis to complain
> about, after the idealistic Americans, out of the kindness of their
> hearts, liberated them from the evil Saddam?
> 
> Now the Americans are considering whether to bring in more
> troops. The politicians ask the generals: how many more soldiers do
> you need in order to control Iraq? And the generals ponder in all
> earnest: 10 thousand more? 20 thousand more? If there had been one
> serious person among them, he would have answered: "Even 500
> thousand will not be enough. When a whole people rises, foreign
> soldiers are helpless."
> 
> The Americans were ready for the Sunnis to be dissatisfied. They
> had been ruling the Iraqi state since it was founded by the British
> after the first World War, and were going to lose their supremacy. But
> the Shiites? After all, in the "democracy" that the Americans were about
> to establish, the Shiites could expect a major share in power. But the
> Shiites do not want to receive "power" in a country that stays
> occupied.
> 
> Even before the war, we warned (don't worry, I am not going to
> quote myself a third time!) that it was well-nigh impossible to maintain
> a state of three mutually hostile peoples: the Sunnis, the Shiites and
> the Kurds. That is still true today. But perhaps a miracle is happening
> now: Shiites and Sunnis are fighting together against the occupation.
> Who knows, the common struggle may just, and for the first time,
> forge a real Iraqi nation and prevent a bloody civil war along the road.
> Let us hope so.
> 
> Now the Americans are caught in a trap of their own making. Even
> if they wanted to leave Iraq (which they certainly do not!), they would
> be unable to do so. As the Hebrew saying goes, they can neither
> swallow it nor spit it out.
> 
> There is really nothing they can do. They will sink ever deeper
> into the quagmire, kill and be killed, destroy and be destroyed, with
> ever growing brutality, in a kind of a new desert Vietnam. In the hourly
> news on Al Jazeera, it is already difficult to distinguish between our
> soldiers in Ramallah and the American soldiers in Falluja. What is
> happening to us will happen to them, only on a larger scale.
> 
> How will this similarity influence Bush and his people? They might
> say: One quagmire is enough. Let's get out of one of them. Let us
> compel Sharon to make, at long last, an agreement with the
> Palestinians, instead of babbling about "unilateral disengagement",
> which will probably never happen anyhow.
> 
> But Bush and the Bushites could also say: If we are so much alike,
> let us embrace Sharon even more closely. Such a reaction would find
> its well-earned place in "March of Folly 2".
> 
> That might be even a good thing, allowing these two gentlemen the
> pleasure of leaving the stage together.
> 
> -----------