🚀 go-pugleaf

in article 319ccc4b.0404150134.274af8e4@posting.google.com, murk at
playboi@gentlemansclub.de wrote on 4/15/04 2:34 AM:

> janix@women-at-work.org (ex) wrote in message
> news:<5947eb58.0404131110.652b21aa@posting.google.com>...
>> "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
>>> 
> ri 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.
>>> 
>>> -----------
excellent post; you bring some very real questions to light in a very
logical manner.