In These Times
November 12, 2004
Fallujah 101
A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying.
By Rashid Khalidi
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from
which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have
been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The
Baghdad communiquŽs are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have
been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody
and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our
imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure.
We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian
and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing
an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully
wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the
responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only
upon the request of the civil authorities."
T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920
There is a small City on one of the bends of the Euphrates that
sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It's on an ancient trade
route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province of what is today
Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and Mosul to the north.
It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and Amman. This city
is a crossroads.
For millennia people have been going up and down that north-south
desert highway. The city is like a seaport on that great desert, a
place that binds together people in what are today Saudi Arabia,
Syria, Iraq and Jordan. People in the city are linked by tribe,
family or marriage to people in all these places.
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the
late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi ideas-those of a man
named Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab-took root in this city more than
200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call
fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for
10 generations.
This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920, before T. E.
Lawrence wrote the above passage, the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer
who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col.
Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was
killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His
death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis
and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to
their control, the British used massive air power, bombing
indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari's grandson, today a prominent Iraqi cleric, helped to
broker the end of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah in April of this
year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated tribal, religious and
national aspects of Iraq's history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world anew in the Middle
East. It is waging a war in a place where history really matters.
A change for the worse
The United States has been a major Middle Eastern power since 1933,
when a group of U.S. oil companies signed an exploration deal with
Saudi Arabia. The United States has been dominant in the Middle East
since 1942, when American troops first landed in North Africa and
Iran. American troops have not left the region since. In other words,
they have been in different parts of the Middle East for 62 years.
The United States was once celebrated as a non-colonial, sometimes
anti-colonial, power in the Middle East, renowned for more than a
century for its educational, medical and charity efforts. Since the
Cold War, however, the United States has intervened increasingly in
the region's internal affairs and conflicts. Things have changed
fundamentally for the worse with the invasion and occupation of Iraq,
particularly with the revelation that the core pretexts offered by
the administration for the invasion were false. And particularly with
growing Iraqi dissatisfaction with the occupation and with the images
of the hellish chaos broadcast regularly everywhere in the world
except in the United States-thanks to the excellent job done by the
media in keeping the real human costs of Iraq off our television
screens.
The United States is perceived as stepping into the boots of Western
colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from Morocco to Iran.
The Bush administration marched into Iraq proclaiming the very best
of intentions while stubbornly refusing to understand that in the
eyes of most Iraqis and most others in the Middle East it is actions,
not proclaimed intentions, that count. It does not matter what you
say you are doing in Fallujah, where U.S. troops just launched an
attack after weeks of bombing. What matters is what you are doing in
Fallujah-and what people see that you are doing.
Fact-free and faith-based
Most Middle East experts in the United States, both inside and
outside the government, have drawn on their knowledge of the
cultures, languages, history, politics of the Middle East-and on
their experience-to conclude that most Bush administration Middle
East policies, whether in Iraq or Palestine, are harmful to the
interests of the United States and the peoples of this region. A few
of these experts have had the temerity to say so, to the outrage of
the Bush administration and its supporters, who are committed to what
I would call a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East
policymaking.
These experts predicted that it would be difficult to occupy a vast,
complex country like Iraq, that serious resistance from a major part
of the population was likely, and that the invasion and occupation
would complicate U.S. relations with other countries in the region.
It is clear today that all of these fears were well founded.
After 20 months of occupation, the United States continues to make
the important decisions in Iraq. Instead of control being exercised
through the Coalition Provisional Authority, it takes place through
the largest U.S. embassy in the world and its staff of more than
3,000. You can be sure that should the Iraqis try to end the basing
of U.S. troops, or try to tear up the contracts with Halliburton and
other U.S. companies, or take any other steps that displease the Bush
administration, they would be brought up short by the U.S. viceroy,
a.k.a. Ambassador John Negroponte.
We, and even more so the Iraqi government and its people, are trapped
in a nightmare with no apparent end, in part because those experts
who challenged neoconservative fantasies about U.S. troops being
received with rice and flowers simply were not heeded. They warned
that it is impossible to impose democracy through force in Iraq. Mao
Tse Tung said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun;
he did not say democracy does. And it doesn't.
The stench of hypocrisy rises when the United States, a nation
supposedly com-mit-ted to democratization and reform, does not
hesitate to embrace dictatorial, autocratic and undemocratic regimes
like those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and now even Libya, simply
because they act in line with U.S. security concerns or give
lucrative contracts to U.S. businesses. The United States claims to
be acting in favor of democracy, yet embraces Qaddhafi! People in the
Middle East notice this gap between word and deed-even if Americans
don't notice the things being done in our name.
The United States, in fact, has a far from sterling record in
promoting democracy in the Middle East. Initially it started off on a
better footing. It opposed colonial rule and -promoted
self-determination, as in President Wilson's Fourteen Points after
World War I. But when the United States returned to the Middle East
after World War II, it soon supported anti-democratic regimes simply
because they provided access to oil and military bases.
If you look carefully, what the Bush administration seems to mean by
democracy in the Middle East is governments that do what the United
States wants.
Conquer and plunder
Middle Eastern economics is another area about which we hear very
little in our media. Americans may not be aware of it, but the
wholesale theft of the property of the Iraqi people through
privatization was prominently reported all over the Middle East. A
recent case involved the handover of Iraqi Airways to an investor
group headed by a family with close ties to the Saddam Hussein
regime. The airline is worth $3 billion, because in addition to
valuable landing slots all over Europe and a few tattered airplanes,
Iraqi Airways owns the land on which most of the airports are built.
Such cases, and there are many, cause deep anger against the United
States, and evoke bitter resistance to pressures for economic
liberalization that people in the region interpret as the looting of
their country's assets.
These privatization measures arouse deep suspicion in the Middle
East, because of fears that the region's primary asset, oil, may be
next.
Here, too, history is all-important. Since commercial quantities of
oil were discovered in the Middle East at the turn of the 20th
century, decisions over pricing, control and ownership of these
valuable resources were largely in the hands of giant Western oil
companies. They decided prices. They decided how much in taxes they
would pay. They decided who controlled the local governments. They
decided how much oil would be produced. And they decided everything
else about oil, including conditions of exploration, production and
labor.
In those seven decades the people of the countries where this wealth
was located obtained few benefits from it. Only with the rise of OPEC
and the nationalization of the Middle East oil industries and the oil
price rises in the '70s did the situation change. Sadly, it was the
oligarchs, the kleptocrats and Western companies that benefited most
from the increased prices.
Fears that they will lose their resources shape much of the
nationalism of the peoples of the Middle East. And events in Iraq
only enhance these fears.
By invading, occupying and imposing a new regime on Iraq, the United
States may be following, intentionally or not, in the footsteps of
the old Western colonial powers-and doing so in a region that within
living memory ended a lengthy struggle to expel colonial occupations.
They fought from 1830 to 1962 to kick out the French from Algeria.
From 1882 to 1956 they fought to get the British out of Egypt. That's
within the lifetime of every person over 45 in the Middle East.
Foreign troops on their soil against their will is deeply familiar.
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