Tipping Point
Vengeance, after all, is liberation’s bloody doppelganger. The joyful populace garlands the liberating tanks with flowers, and festoons the lampposts and bridges with the strung-up corpses of snitches, sadists, and collaborators of the defunct regime.
But extremes of fury and joy are absent from Iraq.
And, for the Bush administration, it’s a problem deeper than a dearth of riveting visuals for Fox News.
Because it points out that a fundamental assumption of the neocons — that regime change would equal a transformation of Iraqi society — is deeply flawed.
If the Iraqis are unwilling to put their shoulder to the wheel on behalf of the occupation, then it truly is a quagmire — of inertia, disgust, and passivity — even more alarming than the continuing, deadly harassment of US and UK forces in the occupied territories.
This state of affairs must be inexplicable to true-blue neocons. For some reason, the inspiring and encouraging presence of the World’s Only Superpower has failed to unleash the tidal wave of entrepeneurism, opportunism, selfishness, and vengeance that would reshape Iraq into an oil-happy Texas-on-the-Tigris.
The official explanation: blame it on Saddam. The shadow of the mustachio’d one, scuttling around central Iraq like a frantic spider on a hot skillet, chills the hearts of the Iraqis.
Therefore the $25 million reward and the hope that apprehending Saddam — or, preferably broadcasting images of his bloody but recognizable corpse to a worldwide audience and forgoing the dangerous delay and embarrassment of a trial — will convince the Iraqis to consecrate their souls and energies to the goals of the occupation.
But killing one man won’t do it.
It is memory and nostalgia for Iraq’s past glories — and the sense that somehow they could be recaptured, if Iraqis were free to shape their own destinies — and not the fear of Saddam Hussein, that causes many ordinary Iraqis to regard our occupying power with resentment and sometimes outright resistance.
Bremer’s own moves, dissolving the Ba’ath party and, in a near suicidal display of ignorance, bravado, and confusion, disbanding the Iraqi army instead of reorganizing it, have infuriated America’s enemies without intimidating them.
Nor will the creation of a puppet interim government of warlords, quislings, and a few desperate or optimistic patriots flailing beneath Bremer’s fingertips erase the reality of two decades of devastation caused by three catastrophic wars, sanctions, dictatorship, and occupation largely enabled by American intervention, indifference, and neglect.
It will take years for Iraq to work its way out of its humanitarian, economic, social, and financial misery and view the government that the American overlords have imposed with any deep affection.
It is a telling and depressing sign that the first official act of the governing council — after a brave and ruthless purge of Ba’ath holidays from the Iraqi calendar — was to authorize a junket of Chalabi & Co. to New York. Its quixotic quest to obtain UN recognition for the interim government (and provide the legal basis for mortgaging Iraq’s oil reserves to finance the construction and extraction efforts of its suddenly cash-strapped American masters) will probably yield little more than an opportunity for Chalabi to reacquaint himself with the wine cellars and amusements of Gotham; inspire reams of execrable prose in the New York Times about the New Iraq’s Founding Fathers and Mothers; and win the weary contempt of millions of immiserated Iraqis.
If Bush and company are true practitioners of ruthless realpolitik — instead of shallow, wishful thinkers with more money and power than they deserve or the world can safely support — it’s time for them to abandon their hope and expectation that Iraqi society would be remade automatically by US invasion and occupation and the benevolent attention of George Bush flying over Baghdad in Air Force One like a hopeful gooney bird.
Something stronger than war, invasion, and occupation is needed to transform Iraq into the eager, oil-rich vassal we crave. Something even more horrible.
It’s time to turn to the true experts in subjugating societies.
What would Hitler do?
It is hard to legitimize an occupation unless the subject country decides to remake itself through a willful act of national violence against the old society, the departed regime, and its purported agents and unfortunate scapegoats. This is the tipping point — when newly-aroused feelings of hope, greed, passion, and anger overcome innate emotions of fear, mercy, decency, and indifference.
Hitler had the magic lever in his hands in Europe — anti-Semitism. In many of the countries he invaded, a useful and even decisive segment of the local population was happy to collude in a brutal pogrom against the Jews that destroyed the unity and legitimacy of the subjugated states.
Suitable victims are at hand in Iraq — the Sunnis. All that’s needed is to encourage the worst elements in Shi'ite society to take an active part in the extinction of Sunni privileges, property, and identity.
And since Hitler’s no longer around, we can turn to another practitioner, now unemployed and in detention at The Hague — Slobodan Milosevic.
Events in the Balkans have taught us how quickly a society can dissolve in an orgy of ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, fear, and bigotry. The result was the replacement of a large, politically and diplomatically independent Yugoslavia with a string of tiny, ethnically homogenous, morally compromised, economically weak, and politically impotent states eager to align themselves with the greater powers.
Bush can hope for nothing better for Iraq than to Balkanize it — divide and conquer, annihilate Iraq’s multi-ethnic, pan-Arab pretensions, shatter its self-image as a focus of Middle Eastern culture and aspirations through a brutal, demoralizing internecine massacre, and turn it into separate Kurd, Shi’ite, and Sunni satraps.
It should be a sobering lesson to would-be interventionists of whatever stripe that even wars prosecuted with the maximum of mercy, wisdom, and foresight — as the Iraq adventure manifestly was not — shatter societies instead of healing them. And the societies — not just their armies — must be destroyed completely: a job half done is a job undone. If you’re willing to dip your toe in blood, you better be ready to wade into it right up to your neck.
Thankfully Bush apparently lacks the will, intelligence, or the ruthlessness to carry this plan out. Instead of acknowledging the evil of the Iraq adventure and pursuing it to its logical, awful conclusion he is, as usual, at a loss and hiding his bewilderment behind tough talk and his perpetually furrowed brow. Phoenix-lite counterinsurgency ops and desperate gifts of propane and frozen chickens are not going to rescue the occupation from the political paralysis engulfing it.
Now the potential tipping points seem to be going against the Bush administration. Domestically, a majority of the country is waking up to the fact that our Iraq intel was stuffed and cooked like a Thanksgiving turkey. The Gulf War adventure is being scrutinized not only as an immense expenditure of human, financial, and political capital, but as a colossal waste of lives, money, and opportunity. The media, while pandering to Karl Rove in the headlines and over the fold, is starting to report skeptically under the fold and in the back pages. Barring some providential outrage from Osama bin-Laden, Bush can only pray he can cling to enough of his dwindling popular support over the next 14 months to escape no-term oblivion.
It would be ironic if the road back to American democracy led through Baghdad.
Or, to paraphrase George Bush on Goree Island, Senegal, the very people we invaded helped set America free.
Copyright 2003 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at halcyondays@attbi.com.
