What other instances have there been of a prominent intellectual
saying "I was wrong" like David Rieff has? I can't think of any.
Doug
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831
The Independent - 18/03/2006
After three years, after 150,000 dead, why I was wrong about Iraq
A melancholic mea culpa
A few weeks ago, a small moment a little line of text underlined for me
how far life in Iraq has slumped. As I was reading a story, the ticker-tape
on the BBC News website casually stated: Car bomb in Baghdad; 50 dead.
There were no accompanying details. When these Iraqi suicide-massacres
started to happen in Iraq, I would nervously call my friends out in Baghdad
and Basra and Hilla to make sure they were okay. But I soon realised this
was antagonising them, driving every bomb further into their skulls
should they store a standard text No, not killed in suicide bomb today
message and send it out three times a day? So I swallowed hard, waited, and
the next day, I looked through all the newspapers for details. Nobody
mentioned it. Suicide-slaughters the size of 7/7 are now so common they
dont even bleed into News in Brief.
So after three years and at least 150,000 Iraqi corpses, can those of us
who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein for the Iraqis sake still
claim it was worth it? (I am assuming the people who bought the obviously
fictitious arguments about WMD are already hanging their heads in shame).
George Packer, a recalcitrant Iraq-based journalist who tentatively
supported the invasion, summarises the situation in the country today:
Most people arent free to speak their minds, belong to a certain group,
wear what they want, or even walk down the street without risking their
lives. In many regions including the British controlled South power
has been effectively ceded to fascist militias who take over schools and
hospitals, intimidate the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo
sharia courts that issue death sentences, repeatedly try to seize control
of the holy shrines, run criminal gangs, firebomb liquor stores, and are
often drunk themselves. Their tactics are those of fascist bullies.
So when people ask if I think I was wrong, I think about the Iraqi friend
hiding, terrified, in his own house who said to me this week, Every day
you delete another name from your mobile, because theyve been killed. By
the Americans or the jihadists or the militias usually you never find out
which. I think of the people trapped in the siege of a civilian city,
Fallujah, where amidst homes and schools the Americans indiscriminately
used a banned chemical weapon white phosphorous that burns through skin
and bone. (The Americans say they told civilians to leave the city, so
anybody left behind was a suspected jihadi an evacuation procedure so
successful they later used it in New Orleans.). I think of the raw numbers:
on the largest estimate from the Human Rights Centre in Khadimiya
Saddam was killing 70,000 people a year. The occupation and the jihadists
have topped that, and the violence is getting worse. And I think yes, I
was wrong. Terribly wrong.
The lamest defence I could offer one used by many supporters of the war
as they slam into reverse gear is that I still support the principle of
invasion, its just the Bush administration screwed it up. But as one
anti-war friend snapped at me when I mooted this argument, Yeah, who would
ever have thought that supporting George Bush in the illegal invasion of an
Arab country would go wrong? Shes right: the truth is that there was no
pure Platonic ideal of The Perfect Invasion to support, no abstract idea we
lent our names to. There was only Bush, with his cluster bombs, depleted
uranium, IMF-ed up economic model, bogus rationale and unmistakable stench
of petrol, offering his war, his way. (Expecting Tony Blair to use his
influence was, it is now clear, a delusion, as he refuses to even frontally
condemn the American torture camp at Guantanomo Bay).
The evidence should have been clear to me all along: the Bush
administration would produce disaster. Lets look at the major
mistakes-cum-crimes. Who would have thought they would unleash widespread
torture, with over 10,000 people disappearing without trial into Iraqs
secret prisons? Anybody who followed the record of the very same people
from Rumsfeld to Negroponte in Central America in the 1980s. Who would
have thought they would use chemical weapons? Anybody who looked up Bushs
stance on chemical weapons treaties (he uses them for toilet paper) or
checked Rumsfelds record of flogging them to tyrants. Who would have
thought they would impose shock therapy mass privatisation on the Iraqi
economy, sending unemployment soaring to 60 percent a guarantee of ethnic
strife? Anybody who followed the record of the US towards Russia,
Argentina, and East Asia. Who could have known that they would cancel all
reconstruction funds, when electricity and water supplies are still below
even Saddams standards? Anybody who looked at their domestic policies.
The Bush administration was primarily motivated by a desire to secure
strategic access to one of the worlds major sources of oil. The 9/11
massacres by Saudi hijackers had reminded them that their favourite
client-state the one run by the torturing House of Saud was vulnerable
to an internal Islamist revolution that would snatch the oil-wells from
Haliburton hands. They needed an alternative source of Middle East oil,
fast. I obviously found this rationale disgusting, but I deluded myself
into thinking it was possible to ride this beast to a better Iraq. Reeling
from a visit to Saddams Iraq, I knew that Iraqis didnt care why their
dictator was deposed, they just wanted it done, now. As I thought of the
ethnically cleansed Marsh Arabs I had met, reduced to living in a mud hut
in the desert, I thought that whatever happens, however it occurs, it will
be better. In that immediate rush, I like most Iraqis failed to see
that the Bush administrations warped motives would lead to a warped
occupation. A war for oil would mean that as Baghdad was looted, troops
would be sent to guard the oil ministry, not the hospitals a bleak
harbinger of things to come.
But it is easy for me to repent at leisure. Just as the opponents of the
war would never have faced Saddams torture chambers, I am not hiding in my
home, rocking and clutching a Kalashnikov. Millions of Iraqis are, and many
thousands more did not live to see even that future because of the
arguments of people like me.
And so, after the melancholic mea culpas from almost everyone but Blair and
Bush, what? Iyaad Allawi the man the Americans tried to impose as Prime
Minister until a massive programme of peaceful civil disobedience
spearheaded by the Ayatollah Sistani made elections unavoidable says a
low-level civil war has already begun. There has been a worrying trend
among some right-wing commentators to blame the Iraqis: we though you guys
would be a Czechoslovakia, but if you insist on being a Yugoslavia, fine.
There have even been evil whispers that Iraq needs a Saddam to hold it
together. But this is not a grassroots civil war a la Rwanda or the
Lebanon, where neighbour hacks to pieces neighbour. It is a top-down civil
war, fought by a minority of militias, all of whom (apart from the
jihadi-Zarquawi crowd, who are a very small minority) claim to fight in the
name of keeping Iraq together. Until 2003, over 20 percent of Iraqi
marriages were across the Sunni-Shia divide is husband now going to turn
on wife, and mother on son?
It is very hard to see a solution, but I believe the threads of one are
visible. The polls show that most of these violent militias draw their
support from the fact that they oppose the foreign troops, not from the
fact that they massacre fellow-Iraqis. So the best way to drain their
support and dampen the inertia towards civil war is to withdraw the
troops now. Iraqis can see this very clearly: a poll recently conducted by
the Ministry of Defence (hardly an anti-war source) found that 80 percent
of Iraqis want out immediately so they can deal with the remaining
jihadists and anti-democratic fundamentalists themselves. (In a revealing
mirror-image, a Zogby poll of US troops in Iraq found that 72 percent
believe the occupation should end within the year. This will soon be a
surreal war where the unwilling occupy the unwilling.)
Yes, there is a danger that withdrawal will create a power vacuum exploited
by militias, but that is the reality on the ground already. It is
unquestionably time to leave Iraq but will the Bush administration
surrender Iraqs oil, after spending $200bn to grab it, just because the
Iraqi people and their own troops want them to?
POSTSCRIPT: There's been a collosal response to this article and I'm still
picking through the e-mails. Over fifty from Iraqis, of which some
mournfully agree, although this e-mail was more typical:
"Your article in the Independent today, 20/3/2006, was really disappointing
to all of your admirers. You let them down. You changed your mind and
switched from pro-war to join the anti-war campaigners, means that you gave
in bowed to the aggressors. So instead of blaming the terrorists for this
mass killing in Iraq at the hand of the terrorists, you put the blame on
Bush and Blair for liberating Iraqi people from the worst dictator in
history. If your new stance is right, then it was wrong to stand up against
Hitler in the WW II, because that war caused humanity 55 million
casualties. So it was better not oppose the Axis sates. Is that fair? Is
this is the justice that we are looking for? If the tyrants were left to do
as they like because of the possible revenge from their followers, then our
glob will be place for the tyrants only and the whole planet population
will be living like sheep.
Abdulkhaliq Hussein"
