Well, it didn’t take long for the latest Iraq fantasy to start falling apart. The so-called “Anbar Awakening”, trumpeted by General David Petraeus as such an amazing success, 
is every bit the fraud you might have expected by this point. It took some intrepid reporting by people like Big Noise Films (featured on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!) to get a closer look at what is actually happening in that unhappy province, and it isn’t pretty. But then, ethnic cleansing never is. It seems some of the enlightened tribal leaders with whom we are now “allied” led an effort to drive more than 14,000 Shi’ite families out of Anbar and into some pretty miserable looking shantytowns on the outskirts of Baghdad – maybe 130,000 people in all expelled from their homes by the very people we’re glad-handing. Did our people know of this? A little hard to imagine they didn’t, since in one of the communities featured in the Big Noise report, the U.S. military group was headquartered in an abandoned Shi’a family household.
Here are the reports…
I must admit, I felt a little more than suspicious (irony) when the U.S. commander on the ground in the Big Noise piece referred to some of these ex-insurgents as “freedom fighters.” Last time we used that terminology was in reference to our terrorist armies in Afghanistan and Central America during the Reagan years. Of course, the reality of Iraq is much more complex than our government is willing to admit. Many of the people in Anbar played both sides of the conflict from the very beginning, alternately working for the U.S. occupation and fighting with the insurgents. (Patrick Graham’s report in the June 2004 Harper’s is enlightening on this point.) When the situation deteriorated into the current hell-disaster, it likely became a harder fence to cross over. The “Anbar Awakening” is something like a return to what was happening in those early days. Still plenty of killing going on – it’s just distributed a bit differently. And, of course, the poorest Iraqis are taking the biggest hits.
From Bush’s perspective – and that of a good many other people in American political culture – that in itself wouldn’t keep Iraq from being a success of sorts. Leaders of both the Republicans and the Democrats claim to be looking for signs of “progress”, meaning the emergence of effective leadership in Iraq that is both hostile to neighboring Iran and more generally compliant with our priorities in the region. Note that I didn’t say “popular” – that’s never really been the standard for success. They only reluctantly agreed to elections in 2004 when Ayatollah Sistani insisted upon it. In his own ham-fisted way, Bush underlined this fact at his news conference the other day, complaining that everyone is asking “Where is Mandela?” Aside from the peculiar fact that junior appears to think Nelson Mandela is dead, Bush is telegraphing his administration’s lack of enthusiasm for the emergence of a truly popular Iraqi leader, as well as its skepticism that such a person exists. (Let’s also forget the fact that, remarkable as he is, Mandela was kept alive by a massive popular movement that was itself the catalyst for change, and not always in a peaceful way.)
In any case, the Bush team (and Harry Reid) would really prefer Saddam – that is, pre-Kuwait Saddam, friend to the west, hated by his own people. That’s what puts the “suck” in success.
luv u,
jp
