Guns or roses
Where are the flowers garlanding our army of liberation? Why no dancing in the street?
David
Aaronovitch
Sunday March 30, 2003
The Observer
So where are my crowds waving
flowers? I imagined them, even if I never predicted them, imagined them partly
in response to how the Iraqi people were being imagined (or not imagined at all)
by others. "If I were an Iraqi," I wrote a few weeks ago, "living under probably
the most violent and repressive regime in the world, I would desire Saddam's
demise more than anything else."
Perhaps that was a stupid thing to say, even if it was no more
stupid than so many things that have been said on all sides. Stupid, because it
was unconsciously designed to iron out the many conflicts in human loyalties and
to evade the contradictions inherent in invading a country in order to liberate
it. That sentence evokes the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Czech Velvet
Revolution, determined crowds gathering to change history. Statues are toppled
and everyone but the Stasi or the Securitate or the Mukhabarat is happy. Or
maybe the image it suggests is of Paris in 1944, women hugging GIs and an
explosion of flags and bunting. People and societies, though, are more
complicated than that.
We know from human contacts in Saddam's Iraq, from exiles, from
the people in liberated northern Iraq, from such clandestine survey work as has
been possible and from the 1991 rebellions, that opposition to Saddam is no
figment of the Western imagination. We can speculate that as long as the regime
remains untouched in some areas and partly intact in others, opposition forces
will mostly be too frightened to emerge.
It is hard to comprehend just what it is like to live among
people who will use you or your children as human shields, press-gang your young
sons into suicidal raids, fire mortars at you if you attempt to escape and who
undertake peremptory executions in streets and squares. Rise up? Once maybe, not
twice.
And then there are the many Iraqis directly compromised by their
association with the regime. In his book, Republic of Fear, Kanan Makiya, the
exiled Iraqi intellectual, said that to understand the peculiar violence of the
Iraqi state, one has to realise that hundreds of thousands of perfectly ordinary
people were implicated in it. 'Even Saddam Hussein's torturers and elite police
units who do the dirtiest work are, by and large, normal,' he wrote. No flowers
there.
But there is something more than all this, something more even
than resentment or anger caused by coalition missiles and the sight of dead
children being dug out of bombed shops. Within many Iraqis, there must be an
intense, almost unbearable ambivalence towards the idea of being freed by an
outsider.
It is one thing, after all, to be liberated from someone else,
but it is quite another to be liberated from yourself.
An ordinary Iraqi has grown up with the Terror, and very many
will have family experiences of death or torture at the hands of the regime or
its agents. But they have also been raised with all those images of Saddam:
Saddam the wise, Saddam the kind, Saddam the soldier, Uncle Saddam. These are,
in a sense, their images, too. You may tell someone to turn left at the train
station; an Iraqi may guide a visitor by reference to the giant poster of Saddam
with the Kalashnikov.
And, if you are an Iraqi, Saddam represents the only order you
know, one that protects you and the beloved motherland (you have been told all
your life) from imperialists, Zionists, traitors and Persians. Perhaps, if you
were sufficiently gullible, you would blow yourself up for this idea of the
nation.
Everyone still in Iraq who is not in prison is somehow
complicit. To be alive means that you didn't protest when they executed your
neighbour, or that you came on to the street to shout: "Long Live Saddam!" when
the militia told you to. You will have done a hundred things out of fear and the
regime will thereby have mixed your blood with its own.
Even those who consciously and bravely oppose Saddam may well
harbour an immense resentment against invaders. Last week, I sought out a book
written by a Serbian woman called Jasmina Tesanovic. An opponent of Slobadan
Milosevic, Tesanovic wrote a diary during the run-up to the Kosovo war and
throughout the subsequent bombing of Serbia.
The Diary of a Political Idiot is a collection of those entries
and it reveals terror, resignation, courage, hatred of the regime and - very
often - a degree of moral confusion about how the war started and who was to
blame.
But it is Tesanovic's attitude towards the liberators that is
most interesting. Before a single bomb has dropped, she writes: "We perceive
American help as helping the self-image of the American nation. In many ways we,
both [as] victims and aggressors, know that Americans are right. We would all
like to be Americans, but it's impossible."
Later on, bombs in the wrong places are seen not as a sign of
human frailty, but of a terrifying insouciance. She complains: "Foreigners are
deciding our fate without much knowledge or goodwill, but with energy and
anger." She adds: "I don't watch the news anymore. I hate all sides equally."
Two feminist friends even tell her that they will take up guns if there's a
ground war and fight, though she doesn't say against whom. And if an urbane
dissident intellectual like Tesanovic can feel this, what may be going on in the
slums of Saddam City right now?
All this suggests that, in a war that lasts any length of time,
the population can find itself bound up with its hated government in a kind of
Stockholm syndrome. Hostage and captor, they both face the power of the
liberator together. The minor functionaries of the regime - the corner
policeman, the informer, the woman who does the typing for the local Baath party
secretary - experience the same explosions. And, unlike the Americans and the
British, these people are recognisably your own. They are linked to you.
Intimately linked. It is one of those minor anti-war myths that
Saddam and his dictatorship were somehow actually created by the West. Makiya
makes no such excuses. "The regime," he wrote more than a decade ago, "is a
totally indigenous phenomenon, imposed by no outside force, wholly a product of
the culture that sustains it."
In other words, if you are an Arab, you bear some responsibility
for it, just as we in the West must do for, say, colonialism. No wonder many
Jordanians find it possible to demonstrate against the deaths of dozens of
civilians killed by coalition forces, whereas the streets of Amman have been
empty through the long years when the Baathists have been killing tens of
thousands of civilians. Now, the very act of outside liberation brutally
emphasises the shame and weakness of Arab politics.
Things change and wars end. I hope we are at the low point of
this conflict, but suspect that there is worse to come. Even so, I believe there
will be a post-Saddam Iraq, and that slow flowers can then bloom. For some,
there will remain a hatred for what we wagers of war have done, but others will
forgive us more easily. At the end of her diary, written after the bombing has
stopped but well before the fall of Milosevic, Jasmina Tesanovic, who has
cuddled her daughter against the sound of the falling bombs, predicts that
things in Serbia won't go back to the way there were. "So maybe," she says,
"it's been worthwhile." And then, with foreign troops on their way to Kosovo, she concludes: "I feel
fine. I feel less isolated. Let them all come, let our histories mix - anything
as long as they don't build a wall."
