The occupation of Iraq

Bobbie at PolitX has a problem with those who call for a end to the occupation of Iraq:

Now, you can argue all you like about the reasons for going to war. Were there WMDs? We haven’t found them, but Saddam was doing his best to make us think they were there. Were we lied to? Difficult question. Were we knowingly lied to? I think it’s unlikely. Discussing these can go on all day, but in the end they don’t get us anywhere. We need to look at the problem in hand.

Now that the war is ostensibly over, and the occupiers should be looking. What do the Stoppers want?
All coalition troops to immediately pull out of Iraq? That would leave the country in a bigger hole than ever, prone to bandits, civil war and wannabe dictators. Surely only an agenda-driven fool could support such action?

A progressive, pragmatic left must realise that what’s done is done. Stamping feet and throwing tantrums is no good now: what will most help the people of Iraq is if we take this chance to help mould and foster democracy in the country – take this chance to be part of the process, not outside it.

At first glance this looks reasonable. Only at first glance, though. The problem with this analysis is that it supposes that Bush ‘n co actually care for the people of Iraq, that they are rational competent people actually wanting to built a better Iraq. More offensively it supposes that democracy can be imposed from above, that Iraq has no chance to develop into a democracy on its own, without outside interference.

This is dangerous nonsense. Historical evidence shows that it is in fact the other way around. Every time either the UK or the US interfered in Iraq, it has lead to dictatorship and repression. The UK “liberated” the country from the Ottaman Empire, only to form its own protectorate kingdom, first having to guess the unruly natives. The US was the country that actually put that dangerous madman psychopath dictator Saddam Hussein in power and gave him the resources to once again gas Iraqi people.

So why should it be any different this time? Should we trust the high moral standards of mister Bush and Blair, who lied and lied to get this war started and are lying still about why they did?

I think not.

Bobbie’s fears are reasonable ones, but the country already is prone to “bandits, civil war and wannabe dictators” –most of the latter now serving on the socalled Iraqi National Council. The occupation is only making matters worse. To equate calling an end to it with “stamping feet and throwing tantrums” is just grossly offensive.

Satellite age McCarthyism

This article says what I think about the socalled “evidence” coming out of Iraq that anti-war Labout MP George Galloway was in pay of Saddam Hussein, that France and Russia provided intelligence to Iraq during the war or that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were in league: it’s bullshit.

April 29, 2003—After the United States and Britain were shown to be providing bogus and plagiarized “intelligence” documents to the UN Security Council that supposedly “proved” Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, the world’s media is now being fed a steady stream of captured Iraqi “intelligence” documents from the rubble of Iraq’s Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters.

Welcome to the new digital and satellite age McCarthyism. Phony documents are “dropped” into the hands of a right-wing London newspaper owned by Conrad Black. They are amplified by Black’s other holdings, including the Jerusalem Post and Chicago Sun-Times. The story is then picked up by the worldwide television outlets of News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, and General Electric and echoed on the right-wing radio talk shows of Clear Channel and Viacom. Political careers are damaged or destroyed. There is no right of rebuttal for the accused. They are guilty as charged by a whipped up public that gets its information from the Orwellian telescreens of the corporate media.

Excuses, excuses

It was entirely predictable that when the news of the looting of the National Museum of Iraq broke, the usual idiots would start making excuses for the coalition’s inaction. Let’s take a look at them.

  • The liberation of 24 million people is more important than guarding some pottery.
    It isn’t an either/or question. This socalled “liberation” does not require the destruction of musea.
  • It was a choice between guarding the museum and guarding the hospitals.
    They didn’t guard the hospitals either. Nor was Iraq’s main nuclear site.

  • There weren’t enough soldiers to stop the plundering, they were needed to deal with the last strongholds.

    But there were enough to guard the ministry of oil, the ministry of interior and irrigation.
  • We didn’t know this would happen.
    Au contraire. There were plenty of warnings. Even if there hadn’t been any warnings, anybody with half a brain should’ve realised that looting would followed the fall of Saddam’s regime, as surely as night follows day and planned for it.

  • Why aren’t you condemming the looters? It’s not the coalition’s fault they started plundering!

    The British encouraged looting
    in Bashra
    . Neither they nor the Americans did anything to stop the looting before it was far too
    late, even though they were begged to do so. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, as Robert Fisk
    points out, the coalition has the explicit responsibility to maintain order and prevent pillage. In other words, it is the coalition’s fault this happened. There’s no need to condemn the looters themselves, because all sane persons already agree that looting is bad. (Instapundit, on the other hand…)
  • Why aren’t you condemming Saddam?” Etc.
    Perhaps because Bagdhad is under control of coalition force and the Ba’ath regime has been overthrown?
  • A bit of plundering is harmless, it shows that Saddam no longer is in charge.

    Actually, no. Plundering just means other bastards with guns are stealing the wealth of Iraq.

If you are looking for what archeological finds were lost in this war, an attempt at a comprehensive
survey is available here. It doesn’t
make for pleasant reading.

More on the pillage of Iraq

Another troubling aspect of the plundering still going on in Iraq is that lots of vital official documents either will be or have been destroyed in the looting. Which means it becomes that much more difficult to find out the truth about Iraq’s NBC programmes. It also means it becomes harder to root out diehard Ba’athists, but since the party police in Bagdhad is being rehired anyway, this hardly seems like a consideration for Washington…

It’s hard to believe that the plundering wasn’t deliberately encouraged, even more so than the British already admitted to. After all, the more difficult it becomes to piece out the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the easier it is to accuse Syria of having them…

The warmachine needs to be fed; it would be a shame to have all those troops there and not use them. More and more it seems like the greatest paranoid fears of any sensible person (as well as the fondest wish of the warbloggers) are coming true: Iraq as the stepping stone to further military adventures in the Middle East, ending in total US domination. After Iraq, Syria, after Syria, Iran?

Looting and pillaging

Via John Quiggin comes the news that British soldiers were actually encouraging looters:

The British view is that the sight of local youths dismantling the offices and barracks of a regime they used to fear shows they have confidence that Saddam Hussain’s henchmen will not be returning to these towns in southern Iraq.

One senior British officer said: “We believe this sends a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.”

Armoured units from the Desert Rats stood by and watched earlier this week as scores of excited Iraqis picked clean every floor and every room of the Baath Party headquarters building in Basra after it had been raided by British troops.

Villas owned by the elite, army compounds, air bases and naval ports and even some of the regime’s former torture chambers and jails have been ransacked in the past week.

The results of which are now on view in Baghdad:

Iraqi mobs looted priceless antiquities from Baghdad’s premier cultural history museum on Friday –turning archaeologists’ worst nightmares into stark reality.

A dozen looters roamed undisturbed among broken and overturned statues that littered the ground floor of the sprawling National Museum of Iraq, according to Agence France-Presse. Two men were seen hauling away an ancient door frame. Empty wooden crates were scattered across the floor.

The museum housed more than 100,000 artifacts spanning 8,000 years, including irreplaceable sculptures, inscribed tablets and carved reliefs from a half-dozen cultures, including the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Upstairs, portions of the museum seemed to have been spared from Friday’s assault, and there was hope that the museum’s 30 senior archaeologists had moved the most important collections to safety before the war.

In the comments to the post Quiggin wrote about this, several people excused the British actions. Because they had only called for the looting of Baath party headquarters and similar remnants of Saddam’s regime, they were supposedly blameless for the more widespread looting that actually occurred. This is wrong in several ways.

Looting, even “symbolic” looting, just is not a good idea. It’s clear what the UK and US tried to do by allowing the toppling of Saddam’s statues, the plundering of Ba’ath offices and army barracks:
recreating what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 –but Iraq 2003 is nothing like East Germany 1989.
In East Germany, people freed themselves, a spontaneous revolt from below, there wasn’t the chaos of
invasion and the civil authorities were still present and able to keep order. In contrast, Iraq as a functioning state doesn’t exist anymore, there is nobody but the occupying forces to keep order and since they didn’t, things got more out of hand then they bargained for.

But apart from that, even allowing “symbolic” looting was stupid. Plundering the ill gotten gains of the
Ba’ath party faithful doesn’t help the country as a whole; it just means a redistribution of wealth
towards a new group of bastards with guns. What any responsible “liberators” would’ve done is make
sure that Ba’ath party resources would be available to actually help the country, e.g. to help pay for its rebuilding.

Instead, for the sake of symbolism hospitals, universities and musea have been stripped bare of anything valuable, while American and British soldiers looked on. Hey, at least the oil wells have been secured!