🚀 go-pugleaf

"Tim Murphy" <info@cinox.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:<c5f37f$ngf$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>...
April 12th 2004
> Sidney Morning Herald
> http://www.smh.com.au/
> 
> How GI bullies are making enemies of their Iraqi friends
> 
> by
> 
> Paul McGeough (in Baghdad)
> 
> Iraqis who detested Saddam and welcomed the invasion are uniting against a
> new perceived oppressor - the US.
> 
> It should have been a weekend of celebration - the first anniversary of the
> toppling of Saddam Hussein and the first chance in decades for millions of
> Iraqi Shiites to join the Arbi'een pilgrimage to the southern shrine city of
> Kerbala - their holiest day which had been outlawed by Saddam.
> 
> Instead, the country is in convulsions and it seems the Americans have
> already lost the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds.
> 
> The Tigris River was like glass beneath an empty corn-blue sky as we set out
> for the Mother of All Battles Mosque to talk to Sunnis and Shiites, who,
> after centuries of enmity, were working together, packing trucks for a
> humanitarian convoy to besieged Falluja.
> 
> We were approaching an overpass when suddenly there were multiple explosions
> and a towering pillar of smoke. Ammunition was going off in the blazing
> wreck of a US tank on the highway below. The rest of the US convoy had fled,
> but one of the insurgents had hung back to observe their handiwork.
> 
> When we slowed to ask a man on the bridge what had happened, he jumped into
> a car that went off at speed, saying: "I'm from Falluja. Now I go back to
> continue fighting."
> 
> Under the next overpass, 37-year-old Sallah Hashosh was selling lambs for
> the feast that marks Arbi'een. But business was poor. People were too
> frightened to leave their homes. Clutching a fat-tailed, woolly lamb that he
> reckoned should fetch $A60, he confessed to being confused.
> 
> "I didn't expect this. It was good that Saddam fell, but unless the
> Americans go, all Iraqis will fight. We are becoming one nation."
> 
> We were on the road to Falluja, so it was reasonable to conclude these were
> reflections of a Sunni. But the sheep-seller was a Shiite.
> 
> In the last week the Americans have managed what the Iraqis have been unable
> to achieve in a year - a sense of national unity. But the glue is outrage
> and anger as Iraqis who have stood back from Washington's attempt to remake
> the country have found voice and weapons to challenge the US occupation.
> 
> The Americans have isolated themselves by mistakenly believing they could
> challenge the Mehdi Army of the radical Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr at the same
> time as it mounted a punishing attack on the vexing Sunni city of Falluja,
> west of Baghdad.
> 
> The Iraqi Governing Council, the ineffectual body Washington stacked with
> friendly exiles, turned against the US for the first time; many in the new
> Iraqi police force fled their posts; an entire battalion of the new Iraqi
> army is said to have refused to join the assault on Falluja.
> 
> By some estimates, as many as 25 per cent of the new Iraqi security forces,
> on which the US is depending to impose law and order after June 30, has quit
> or simply melted away.
> 
> It was one thing for the Americans to be killing small numbers of Sunni
> insurgents, but when the guns were turned on majority Shiites last week and
> the Iraqi death toll in Falluja was being counted in hundreds, Iraqis said
> "enough".
> 
> To Western eyes, the Iraqi tactics are appalling - particularly the butchery
> of US security contractors and hostage-taking - but they required a smarter
> response from the US.
> 
> On Thursday last week, the US commander, Ricardo Sanchez, was dismissive
> about negotiating with the Falluja insurgents, yet in the face of actual and
> threatened resignations by IGC members, he caved in.
> 
> With the end of the religious commemoration at Kerbala yesterday, the
> Americans say they will embark on a new assault on elements of the Mehdi
> Army still in control of sections of the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa. They
> also intend to arrest Sadr on a murder warrant, a move many Iraqis warn will
> stoke the revolt.
> 
> Hachim Hassani, an Iraqi Islamic Party alternate ICG delegate, said: "The
> coalition has opened too many fronts in Iraq, alienating a large swath of
> the population. The Iraqi people now equate democracy with bloodshed."
> 
> But the most stinging rebuke came from a man on whom the Americans thought
> the could rely - the highly-respected Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign
> minister of Iraq who is so close to Washington that three months ago he was
> given the honour of escorting the First Lady, Laura Bush, to the State of
> the Union address.
> 
> That he spoke out was bad enough for American credibility here; but that he
> chose to do so on Al Arabiya, the Arab satellite TV channel so hated by the
> Pentagon, was open defiance.
> 
> Pachachi, an IGC member, invoked one of the constant Arab criticism of the
> Israel's collective punishment of whole Palestinian families or communities
> in the occupied territories, when he said: "It is not right to punish all
> the people of Falluja, and we consider these operations by the Americans
> unacceptable and illegal."
> 
> The upshot is that the Americans have made something of a national hero of
> Moqtada al-Sadr, and in the eyes of many Iraqis they have become a
> heavy-handed occupation force with its own designs for post-Saddam Iraq.
> 
> Still refusing to acknowledge a rising consensus among observers that it
> faces a broad-based nationalist movement, President George Bush insisted in
> a weekend radio address that "a small faction is attempting to . . . seize
> power", and his Baghdad spokesman, Dan Senor, railed against "two-bit thugs
> . . . despised by a majority of Iraqis".
> 
> But, while the Americans kill Iraqis in the numbers that they have taken to,
> they will have little or no support from Iraqis - no politician or religious
> leader can afford such an association. Personally many find it distasteful
> and if they were to support it publicly, they would go through their lives
> fearing a fate similar to that of the US security contractors in Falluja.
> 
> Unless the US can pull back, it risks having no Iraqi administration for
> what is largely a ceremonial return of sovereign power to Iraqis on June 30.
> There is still no agreement on the make-up of the proposed administration,
> and the events of the last week could leave the US alone at the negotiating
> table as it attempts to craft one.
> 
> The US is close to being as isolated in Iraq as the Firdos Square plinth
> from which US forces stage-managed the demolition of a statue of Saddam on
> April 9 last year. Few Iraqis were there to celebrate last year and none
> were in the square for the first anniversary.
> 
> Access was denied as part of a tight US security lockdown. US tanks prowled
> the square and loud-hailers were used to warn that those who approached the
> square could be shot on sight.
> 
> The only other weekend activity in the square was the arrival, almost to the
> hour of the anniversary of the statue coming down, of a team of US soldiers.
> 
> Despite the chaos across the city, it was deemed important enough for them
> to be sent to the square with a ladder to remove posters of Moqtada al-Sadr
> that Iraqis had hung from the obscure sculpture which has replaced Saddam on
> the plinth.
> 
> But just off the square, in a shuttered shop, there was a stunning measure
> of how the US has squandered Iraqi support.
> 
> The 56-year-old shopkeeper was too scared to give his name. Among his bolts
> of cloth and bottles of detergent, he talked about how this time last year
> his family's hopes were so high, but now they feared that things would just
> get worse.
> 
> The son of a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, he spoke of his two brothers
> who Saddam had executed as political prisoners, and then he gave his verdict
> on the occupation: "The invasion was a bad idea. Saddam was bad and Bush is
> bad - but we'd have Saddam back any day."
> 
> Sadeer, my driver in Baghdad, is leaning the same way.
> 
> When he arrived at the Palestine Hotel yesterday he was limping; the leg of
> his jeans was soaked in blood. The cut was small and we were able to bandage
> it, but George Bush had lost another Iraqi friend.
> 
> Sadeer, a 28-year-old Shiite, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the
> Americans and he takes his life in his hands by working for me. Iraqis are
> being executed just for being in the company of Westerners.
> 
> But his encounter with a bullying US soldier, who roughed him up as he came
> through the security cordon around the hotel, has pushed him into the
> nationalist Iraqi camp.
> 
> When the GI challenged him, Sadeer tried to explain in his limited English
> that he entered the hotel routinely. But he was barked at, shoved away and
> then belted on the foot with a rifle. He used to slow in traffic to greet
> the US troops. Now he has turned: "Americans bad for Iraq - too many
> problems."
> 
> Leaving the hotel on foot, we had to go through the same streets to get to
> his car. I tried to explain our movements to the officer in charge of a US
> tank unit, but we were greeted with a stream of invective.
> 
> As I thanked the officer for his civility and moved on, one of his men fell
> in beside me, mumbling. Asked to repeat himself, he exploded: "Don't you
> f---in' eyeball me."
> 
> Nodding to his officer and raising his weapon, he shrieked: "He has rank to
> lose. I don't. I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherf---er!"
> 
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> 
> http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/12/1081621847374.html
> 
> -----------