Reply to the Pentagon and Ray
Modified: 10:34:05 AM
A "letter from a soldier" was forwarded to me with a request that I reply to the list of "good things happening in Iraq" that he touted. So I did.
A letter was forwarded to me from some people asking what I thought. It’s a letter from Ray Reynolds, a medic in the Iowa Army National Guard, serving in Iraq, complaining about the “very poor job” the media has made of “covering everything that has happened.” It proceeds to give a “list of the things that has happened in Iraq recently” and asks recipients to pass it on to their friends so they “can rest at night knowing something is happening in Iraq that is noteworthy.”
It’s strongly reminiscent of an e mail that went round a few months ago with the subject line, “The Good News”, containing excerpts from a speech by Rumsfeld or Powell or one of those, each sentence beginning with, “Since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1st…” followed by some benefit that had supposedly accrued to the Iraqi people in the aftermath of that event.
It’s also strongly reminiscent of the “letters” that started going around soon after that declaration, which were forwarded over the internet and published on the front pages of local newspapers in the signatories’ home towns, that were later exposed as having been commissioned, often written, by commanding officers. In many cases the soldier concerned had only signed the bottom of a standard letter.
That’s not to say this medic didn’t write the letter himself to accompany the Pentagon’s list of good things. I don’t know. But at the end he challenges “anyone, anywhere, to dispute me on these facts.” Alright then. I will. I’ll start with the stuff about schools, because I’ve been spending a bit of time in schools with the circus and the twinning project.
Firstly this:
>* Girls are allowed to attend school.
Yes. Girls are allowed to attend school. And the point is what? Girls were also allowed to attend school before the war, and college and university. Young women studied for masters degrees and PhDs and went on into good jobs. For sure, in some rural areas, girls left school early and still do – a cultural issue which isn’t going to be quickly changed, but in the cities and towns, girls have been going to school for decades. The statement is not false: I would not challenge Ray on the fact that girls are allowed to go to school, but it seems intended to imply that this is something new since the war and that appears to me dishonest.
>* School attendance is up 80% from levels before the war.
I don’t have official figures but the teachers in the schools I spent time in said that a lot of children, especially girls, have dropped out of school since the war because of the security problems with both the journey to school and the schools themselves. Poverty and the need for the children to contribute to the family’s income and psychological problems associated with trauma and stress are also raising the drop out rate according to several head teachers around the country.
I don’t know which “levels before the war” Ray is referring to. Perhaps he means the day before the war, when the schools closed down and just a few kids went to say goodbye to each other, not knowing how long it would be before they could go back. Education was free and compulsory before the war, but since the sanctions were imposed, that was not the reality as children started to drop out because of poverty.
An Iraqi friend and his English wife once described to me the changes in Iraq from the nationalisation of the oil industry which funded the social programmes like education as well as the war wit Iran and the building of Saddam’s palaces, when children started wearing shoes and going to school, stopped begging on the streets, up to the sanctions, where the children stopped going to school and started begging, barefoot, on the streets again.
Still I would like to see the evidence that says school attendance is up, let alone by such an enormous proportion, from any genuine level before the war.
>* Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur.
Is there any evidence that there were weapons stored in those schools?
The renovation of schools has been one of the big abuses of Iraqi “reconstruction money”. A lot of contracts have gone to Bechtel, a multinational company linked to the US government. It takes contracts commonly in the region of $75,000 and immediately subcontracts for two thirds or three quarters of that price, creaming off a few thousand dollars for no work whatsoever. The sub contractor then subcontracts again and the work is eventually done for a fraction of the money, often poorly.
A friend in Nasariya explained that at a local school the new fence fell down, injuring two girls, soon after the “renovation”, which mainly consisted of painting the walls, with poor quality paint and brushes so there were bristles stuck to the walls.
Among the schools I worked in with the circus there was barely one with windows intact, working toilets and plumbing, adequate classroom furniture and so on. A lot of them were in poor areas where the help would be most needed but where it has been least given.
>* Textbooks that don't mention Saddam are in the schools for the first
time in 30 years.
The new curriculum has not yet been written. There was an intention to reprint the old text books with the Saddam pictures removed and a few offending pages taken out but there were problems with the awarding of the contracts and in fact most of the contracts were never awarded. Consequently teachers all over the country are still using the remaining old textbooks, with the Saddam pictures and unwanted pages torn out. There are not enough text books to go around so the kids are sharing between too many and there are no other teaching materials, at least in the many schools I’ve been in, so all the teachers can do is lecture the children.
> >* The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from
ships faster.
… by SSA Marine, formerly Stevedoring Services of America, yet another US company brought in to do work which could be given to Iraqi companies. The company has a terrible record on labour rights and that’s been reflected in the experience of Iraqis working at the port, with the management making strenuous efforts to keep out the press and international organisations and suppressing unionisation among the dock workers in breach of international labour law and uman rights conventions.
> >* 100% of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35% before the war.
I’m sorry but this is just not true. I’ve no idea what proportion of hospitals were open before the war. Many were not fully staffed, because under the sanctions there was too little cash in the economy to pay public sector workers.
Many hospitals are still short of qualified nurses because most of the nurses prior to the 1991 war were foreigners, who left before that war and didn’t return because under the sanctions they couldn’t earn a proper wage.
Hospitals are operating without enough cleaners, sometimes one cleaner for two floors, so the patients’ relatives are helping to clean the floors and jobs like disinfecting the curtains don’t get done at all.
There aren’t enough senior doctors so in a lot of hospitals, junior doctors are working without proper supervision, having to contact seniors by telephone for advice and opinions, which have to be delivered without actual contact with the patient.
As well, doctors are having to rely on international aid agencies to provide them with a lot of the medicines they need because the Ministry of Health and the US administration is failing to adequately supply them with medicines and equipment.
In addition, in areas of conflict, US and other troops have been closing down civilian hospitals. This happened in Sadr City / Thawra, in Falluja, in Najaf. I got a message yesterday that the main hospital in Najaf has been closed down by US troops, from one of the doctors down there, who said the main hospital has 600 beds, and all the rest of Najaf’s hospitals have a combined total of 350. I can’t explain this. Even if they claim they fear the hospital will be used by fighters, they cannot legally or morally close down the civilian hospital.
In addition to this apparent collective punishment through the hospitals, US soldiers have been shooting at civilian ambulances. There are many many testimonies from doctors who were working in ambulances that this happened and I know it to be true because it also happened to me when I was working in an ambulance.
> >* Students are taught field sanitation and hand washing techniques to prevent the spread of germs.
> >* Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations.
I’m not clear what the Pentagon and Ray are trying to imply here. I’m sure the students are taught about health issues and given vaccinations, but these things happened before the war as well. Unicef had a huge immunisation programme running before the war, going door to door, centred on the public health centres. They use this unclear phrasing wich states what the current situation is but gives no indication as to what change this represents from life in the months and years before the war, never mind before the sanctions. It also gives no indication of who is making the improvement if any is claimed: who is vaccinating the children? The Ministry of Health, or international aid agencies?
> >* Sewer and water lines are installed in every major city.
Again, it’s not clear how this has changed. Prior to the sanctions, sewer and water systems were commonplace. Many of the pipes were damaged in the 1991 war and couldn’t be replaced for years because the pipes were put on hold by the sanctions committee of the Security Council, lest the sewage pipes should be turned into the fabled “supergun”. Pardon me, but there’s only one thing you can fire out of a sewage pipe.
Not far from where I live, there is a lake of sewage in the street. This doesn’t go away even when it hasn’t rained for weeks, but when it does rain, sewage flows in the street all over the place. I couldn’t comment with any confidence on the comparative capacity now and at the undefined period ‘before the war’ as below…
> >Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq.
>* The country now receives 2 times the electrical power it did before the war.
…but I can say with certainty that the electricity is still erratic and has been for the last 6 months since I got back here. It’s hot now and the power is on for two or three hours at a time, off as much as it is on, cut without warning and with no real pattern that enables us to plan things around the lights and air conditioning. When we haven’t got electricity, some of the time we don’t have running water either.
A big part of the problem is that the power plants were built by French and Russian companies and their control as now been handed to US companies which are not allowed to buy replacement parts from those countries, as a punishment for their refusal to join in the war. That alone hampers the efficiency of the power generators. It seems the agenda is to sow that the current plants can’t be repaired and that US companies will have to be contracted to build new ones.
See Dahr Jamail’s report on Bechtel and water issues on Public Citizen, a Washington based website or get the link from the start of his blog, via www.newstandardnews.net
> >* Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time ever
Oh yes. The telephones. A lot of the landline network is still not functioning after all the exchanges were bombed during the war. Phones were allowed and common before the war, but mobiles and satellite phones were not. The mobile phone network now exists, although it’s hopeless: it’s frequently impossible to make or receive calls, sometimes for hours on end. A lot of international calls just never get through at all. The cost of phones and lines are out of range for most Iraqis and credit can only be bought in dollars, not Iraqi Dinars.
The Iraqnas only work in Baghdad, not even on the outskirts and the phones on the southern networks only work in their respective areas, so if you travel around the country you either can’t use your phone or you have to have another one for the other network. Within each area there’s a monopoly, so there’s no way to have a phone if you want to boycott the overpriced and incompetent network you’re on.
> >* Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets.
> >* Over 100,000 Iraqi civil defense police are securing the country.
>Over 80,000 Iraqi soldiers are patrolling the streets side by side with US soldiers.
Around forty percent of the new army has quit, deserted, refused to fight or taken action against the US, according to one of the US army’s own spokespeople. I wouldn’t dispute the number of ICD police, but “securing the country” is an interesting way to describe what they’re doing. That’s not to question their commitment, but the country is a very long way from “secure”. The Iraqi Police in my experience are very friendly, polite people who drive around in fours and fives in pick ups and avoid trouble whenever they can because they haven’t got adequate back up.
Another big security problem is the impossibility of telling a genuine checkpoint from a fake one. The Iraqi police, ICDC and army haven't been properly equipped so that although the IPs all wear the same blue shirts and armbands, they’re often out in jeans and trainers. Likewise the ICDC wear combat uniforms and whatever shoes they choose. One of the main ways international aid agencies are advised to tell a fake checkpoint is by the uniforms – it’s easy enough to fake an armband, but standardised boots, ideally imported and difficult to get in-country, are much harder to copy or steal. This has been the cause of a lot of thefts.
>* An interim constitution has been signed.
The constitution, the Governing Council, the new flag are almost universally unpopular, the latter viewed as a superficial irrelevance when so many needs remain unfulfilled. The Governing Council are seen as puppets, “here for the prizes,” corrupt, a criminal, in Chalabi’s case, even among people who don’t oppose the occupation per se.
As well, people are beginning to realise that “power” is not to be handed over to them at the end of June, so the Pentagon and Ray are on thin ice when they try to flag things like the interim constitution as a political achievement. Many Iraqi people are concerned that the form of federalism now created (rather than the idea of federalism itself) exacerbates divisions and sets up problems for the future.
> >* Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place.
But the fact remains that the bodies elected are largely without power and will continue to be so even after the “power handover”. Ask most people what they want, what they need, and it’s not elections but security. The CPA funds certain activities and one of their favourites is “democratisation”. To this end they’ve opened several Women’s Centres which teach democratisation, i.e. they tell women why it’s important for them to vote. They’ve found little favour among the Iraqi women because it’s just not a priority.
>* The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August.
Hooray!!
To quote someone I met, returning to his home in Falluja after several weeks seeking refuge in Baghdad from the fighting, “Let them take our oil. Let them take it and go and leave us in peace. Just let us live in peace.”
Ray concludes by telling readers not to believe for a second that these people don’t want US troops here. I’m unclear which people he’s referring to. Don’t believe for a second that there’s a unanimous Iraqi opinion. But a significant development, I think it’s fair to call it an ongoing trend, is the alienation of those who were and should be the US’s main Iraqi allies, those who were most brutalised by Saddam. The killing of civilians in Sadr City / Thawra, the frequent house raids, the closure of the hospital have turned the area, which at least to some extent welcomed the US troops, into “the black zone”.
Ray says he has met many, many Iraqi people who want the troops there. I have met many, many who don’t and a few who do and a whole spectrum in between. Part of the problem that has been created by the US administration here is that decisions are made by people who don’t walk the streets of Iraq. The majority of the foreigners working in the Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) don’t leave the boundaries of the “Green Zone”. Many of those making the policy in the education sector have never visited an Iraqi school, for instance.
I’ve had e mails from soldiers serving in Iraq who never get to leave their bases or the Green Zone, who read my writing for information about what’s happening beyond their bases, and fair play to them for wanting to know, because there are others who are not interested at all. I had another e mail, very similar to this one, a few months ago, with a little introduction from whoever forwarded the e mail to whoever forwarded it to me, saying “This guy seems to have a pretty good handle on things…” and proceeded to quote meaningless figures about electricity generation that contributed nothing at all to the reader’s understanding how ow life was for ordinary Iraqis.
Finally Ray says he is “very disgusted by the way this period of rebuilding has been portrayed” in the media. Of course we would all like to see our own view on things put forward, me included. We would all like to be told what we want to hear. But I’ll tell you a story that illustrates a bit how the media works here.
Just after I came back from Falluja I was invited by a friend who works with CNN to come out with them for something. They’d been more or less cooped up in their hotel / bureau for weeks. Their only reports from Falluja were coming from reporters embedded with the military, so their footage was literally from the point of view of the US soldiers, usually shot over one of their shoulders. Fair enough, it was hard to get into Falluja and their stringers in the town had fled with their families or were otherwise indisposed – maybe pinned in their homes like the rest of the civilians left in the town.
So we interviewed the man from the Red Crescent and then headed out to meet some families who had fled Falluja and were squatting a half-completed building. On the way through Shuala, within sight of the long term squatter camp that the circus worked in regularly, there was a burnt out military vehicle at the roadside. It had been there a while. It wasn’t smoking, had been comprehensively stripped, probably happened during the fighting in Shuala before my first trip to Falluja, more than a week earlier.
Still the security man ordered the driver to turn the car around and go back to the Red Crescent. They weren’t staying there. Why not, I asked. Wasn’t that enough for me, he demanded. The burnt out vehicle hadn’t even registered with me, just part of the scenery, an every day sight. What was it going to do? Jump up and chase us? I suppose that’s why he’s CNN’s security adviser and I’m not – one of the reasons anyway. So we went back to the Red Crescent and nothing happened in Iraq that day, not in the media anyway.
I know, I know, it’s different if you’re a multinational corporation with insurance premiums to pay and pension obligations and if you’re making decisions on safety on someone else’s behalf and I know, because I cuddled his friends for hours, that CNN have already lost someone in this conflict. But another Iraqi friend who works for the BBC has been frustrated that the correspondents were barely leaving their compound, waiting for Reuters to come back and tell them where the explosion was.
That’s before you even start on that dread dictator, The News Agenda. During the war, the first house bombed was a big story, the second a bit of a story and the third and the fiftieth and the hundred-and-eighth unreported and unseen. It’s the same now. As soon as something becomes commonplace, it’s not news, however appalling.
Only now, when the world has seen The Photos, do the big networks want to hear about the thousands of stories the Christian Peace Team and others have recorded from former detainees who were abused and tortured by US prison staff in Abu Ghraib and the airport, though those stories have been publicly available for months. Likewise there were dozens of doctors coming out of Falluja with stories like mine about US soldiers shooting at their ambulances but it was only when a white English woman told the story that it became ‘news’.
So yeah, like you, Ray, I’ve got some issues with the way the situation in Iraq has been reported, with the unquestioning acceptance of the US government and Pentagon line by most of the US media and the acquiescence of too much of the UK media in the equivalent British government versions of events.
And Ray, if you want to discuss the situation of ordinary people in Iraq, I’m happy to talk about that with you.
It’s strongly reminiscent of an e mail that went round a few months ago with the subject line, “The Good News”, containing excerpts from a speech by Rumsfeld or Powell or one of those, each sentence beginning with, “Since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1st…” followed by some benefit that had supposedly accrued to the Iraqi people in the aftermath of that event.
It’s also strongly reminiscent of the “letters” that started going around soon after that declaration, which were forwarded over the internet and published on the front pages of local newspapers in the signatories’ home towns, that were later exposed as having been commissioned, often written, by commanding officers. In many cases the soldier concerned had only signed the bottom of a standard letter.
That’s not to say this medic didn’t write the letter himself to accompany the Pentagon’s list of good things. I don’t know. But at the end he challenges “anyone, anywhere, to dispute me on these facts.” Alright then. I will. I’ll start with the stuff about schools, because I’ve been spending a bit of time in schools with the circus and the twinning project.
Firstly this:
>* Girls are allowed to attend school.
Yes. Girls are allowed to attend school. And the point is what? Girls were also allowed to attend school before the war, and college and university. Young women studied for masters degrees and PhDs and went on into good jobs. For sure, in some rural areas, girls left school early and still do – a cultural issue which isn’t going to be quickly changed, but in the cities and towns, girls have been going to school for decades. The statement is not false: I would not challenge Ray on the fact that girls are allowed to go to school, but it seems intended to imply that this is something new since the war and that appears to me dishonest.
>* School attendance is up 80% from levels before the war.
I don’t have official figures but the teachers in the schools I spent time in said that a lot of children, especially girls, have dropped out of school since the war because of the security problems with both the journey to school and the schools themselves. Poverty and the need for the children to contribute to the family’s income and psychological problems associated with trauma and stress are also raising the drop out rate according to several head teachers around the country.
I don’t know which “levels before the war” Ray is referring to. Perhaps he means the day before the war, when the schools closed down and just a few kids went to say goodbye to each other, not knowing how long it would be before they could go back. Education was free and compulsory before the war, but since the sanctions were imposed, that was not the reality as children started to drop out because of poverty.
An Iraqi friend and his English wife once described to me the changes in Iraq from the nationalisation of the oil industry which funded the social programmes like education as well as the war wit Iran and the building of Saddam’s palaces, when children started wearing shoes and going to school, stopped begging on the streets, up to the sanctions, where the children stopped going to school and started begging, barefoot, on the streets again.
Still I would like to see the evidence that says school attendance is up, let alone by such an enormous proportion, from any genuine level before the war.
>* Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur.
Is there any evidence that there were weapons stored in those schools?
The renovation of schools has been one of the big abuses of Iraqi “reconstruction money”. A lot of contracts have gone to Bechtel, a multinational company linked to the US government. It takes contracts commonly in the region of $75,000 and immediately subcontracts for two thirds or three quarters of that price, creaming off a few thousand dollars for no work whatsoever. The sub contractor then subcontracts again and the work is eventually done for a fraction of the money, often poorly.
A friend in Nasariya explained that at a local school the new fence fell down, injuring two girls, soon after the “renovation”, which mainly consisted of painting the walls, with poor quality paint and brushes so there were bristles stuck to the walls.
Among the schools I worked in with the circus there was barely one with windows intact, working toilets and plumbing, adequate classroom furniture and so on. A lot of them were in poor areas where the help would be most needed but where it has been least given.
>* Textbooks that don't mention Saddam are in the schools for the first
time in 30 years.
The new curriculum has not yet been written. There was an intention to reprint the old text books with the Saddam pictures removed and a few offending pages taken out but there were problems with the awarding of the contracts and in fact most of the contracts were never awarded. Consequently teachers all over the country are still using the remaining old textbooks, with the Saddam pictures and unwanted pages torn out. There are not enough text books to go around so the kids are sharing between too many and there are no other teaching materials, at least in the many schools I’ve been in, so all the teachers can do is lecture the children.
> >* The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from
ships faster.
… by SSA Marine, formerly Stevedoring Services of America, yet another US company brought in to do work which could be given to Iraqi companies. The company has a terrible record on labour rights and that’s been reflected in the experience of Iraqis working at the port, with the management making strenuous efforts to keep out the press and international organisations and suppressing unionisation among the dock workers in breach of international labour law and uman rights conventions.
> >* 100% of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35% before the war.
I’m sorry but this is just not true. I’ve no idea what proportion of hospitals were open before the war. Many were not fully staffed, because under the sanctions there was too little cash in the economy to pay public sector workers.
Many hospitals are still short of qualified nurses because most of the nurses prior to the 1991 war were foreigners, who left before that war and didn’t return because under the sanctions they couldn’t earn a proper wage.
Hospitals are operating without enough cleaners, sometimes one cleaner for two floors, so the patients’ relatives are helping to clean the floors and jobs like disinfecting the curtains don’t get done at all.
There aren’t enough senior doctors so in a lot of hospitals, junior doctors are working without proper supervision, having to contact seniors by telephone for advice and opinions, which have to be delivered without actual contact with the patient.
As well, doctors are having to rely on international aid agencies to provide them with a lot of the medicines they need because the Ministry of Health and the US administration is failing to adequately supply them with medicines and equipment.
In addition, in areas of conflict, US and other troops have been closing down civilian hospitals. This happened in Sadr City / Thawra, in Falluja, in Najaf. I got a message yesterday that the main hospital in Najaf has been closed down by US troops, from one of the doctors down there, who said the main hospital has 600 beds, and all the rest of Najaf’s hospitals have a combined total of 350. I can’t explain this. Even if they claim they fear the hospital will be used by fighters, they cannot legally or morally close down the civilian hospital.
In addition to this apparent collective punishment through the hospitals, US soldiers have been shooting at civilian ambulances. There are many many testimonies from doctors who were working in ambulances that this happened and I know it to be true because it also happened to me when I was working in an ambulance.
> >* Students are taught field sanitation and hand washing techniques to prevent the spread of germs.
> >* Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations.
I’m not clear what the Pentagon and Ray are trying to imply here. I’m sure the students are taught about health issues and given vaccinations, but these things happened before the war as well. Unicef had a huge immunisation programme running before the war, going door to door, centred on the public health centres. They use this unclear phrasing wich states what the current situation is but gives no indication as to what change this represents from life in the months and years before the war, never mind before the sanctions. It also gives no indication of who is making the improvement if any is claimed: who is vaccinating the children? The Ministry of Health, or international aid agencies?
> >* Sewer and water lines are installed in every major city.
Again, it’s not clear how this has changed. Prior to the sanctions, sewer and water systems were commonplace. Many of the pipes were damaged in the 1991 war and couldn’t be replaced for years because the pipes were put on hold by the sanctions committee of the Security Council, lest the sewage pipes should be turned into the fabled “supergun”. Pardon me, but there’s only one thing you can fire out of a sewage pipe.
Not far from where I live, there is a lake of sewage in the street. This doesn’t go away even when it hasn’t rained for weeks, but when it does rain, sewage flows in the street all over the place. I couldn’t comment with any confidence on the comparative capacity now and at the undefined period ‘before the war’ as below…
> >Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq.
>* The country now receives 2 times the electrical power it did before the war.
…but I can say with certainty that the electricity is still erratic and has been for the last 6 months since I got back here. It’s hot now and the power is on for two or three hours at a time, off as much as it is on, cut without warning and with no real pattern that enables us to plan things around the lights and air conditioning. When we haven’t got electricity, some of the time we don’t have running water either.
A big part of the problem is that the power plants were built by French and Russian companies and their control as now been handed to US companies which are not allowed to buy replacement parts from those countries, as a punishment for their refusal to join in the war. That alone hampers the efficiency of the power generators. It seems the agenda is to sow that the current plants can’t be repaired and that US companies will have to be contracted to build new ones.
See Dahr Jamail’s report on Bechtel and water issues on Public Citizen, a Washington based website or get the link from the start of his blog, via www.newstandardnews.net
> >* Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time ever
Oh yes. The telephones. A lot of the landline network is still not functioning after all the exchanges were bombed during the war. Phones were allowed and common before the war, but mobiles and satellite phones were not. The mobile phone network now exists, although it’s hopeless: it’s frequently impossible to make or receive calls, sometimes for hours on end. A lot of international calls just never get through at all. The cost of phones and lines are out of range for most Iraqis and credit can only be bought in dollars, not Iraqi Dinars.
The Iraqnas only work in Baghdad, not even on the outskirts and the phones on the southern networks only work in their respective areas, so if you travel around the country you either can’t use your phone or you have to have another one for the other network. Within each area there’s a monopoly, so there’s no way to have a phone if you want to boycott the overpriced and incompetent network you’re on.
> >* Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets.
> >* Over 100,000 Iraqi civil defense police are securing the country.
>Over 80,000 Iraqi soldiers are patrolling the streets side by side with US soldiers.
Around forty percent of the new army has quit, deserted, refused to fight or taken action against the US, according to one of the US army’s own spokespeople. I wouldn’t dispute the number of ICD police, but “securing the country” is an interesting way to describe what they’re doing. That’s not to question their commitment, but the country is a very long way from “secure”. The Iraqi Police in my experience are very friendly, polite people who drive around in fours and fives in pick ups and avoid trouble whenever they can because they haven’t got adequate back up.
Another big security problem is the impossibility of telling a genuine checkpoint from a fake one. The Iraqi police, ICDC and army haven't been properly equipped so that although the IPs all wear the same blue shirts and armbands, they’re often out in jeans and trainers. Likewise the ICDC wear combat uniforms and whatever shoes they choose. One of the main ways international aid agencies are advised to tell a fake checkpoint is by the uniforms – it’s easy enough to fake an armband, but standardised boots, ideally imported and difficult to get in-country, are much harder to copy or steal. This has been the cause of a lot of thefts.
>* An interim constitution has been signed.
The constitution, the Governing Council, the new flag are almost universally unpopular, the latter viewed as a superficial irrelevance when so many needs remain unfulfilled. The Governing Council are seen as puppets, “here for the prizes,” corrupt, a criminal, in Chalabi’s case, even among people who don’t oppose the occupation per se.
As well, people are beginning to realise that “power” is not to be handed over to them at the end of June, so the Pentagon and Ray are on thin ice when they try to flag things like the interim constitution as a political achievement. Many Iraqi people are concerned that the form of federalism now created (rather than the idea of federalism itself) exacerbates divisions and sets up problems for the future.
> >* Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place.
But the fact remains that the bodies elected are largely without power and will continue to be so even after the “power handover”. Ask most people what they want, what they need, and it’s not elections but security. The CPA funds certain activities and one of their favourites is “democratisation”. To this end they’ve opened several Women’s Centres which teach democratisation, i.e. they tell women why it’s important for them to vote. They’ve found little favour among the Iraqi women because it’s just not a priority.
>* The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August.
Hooray!!
To quote someone I met, returning to his home in Falluja after several weeks seeking refuge in Baghdad from the fighting, “Let them take our oil. Let them take it and go and leave us in peace. Just let us live in peace.”
Ray concludes by telling readers not to believe for a second that these people don’t want US troops here. I’m unclear which people he’s referring to. Don’t believe for a second that there’s a unanimous Iraqi opinion. But a significant development, I think it’s fair to call it an ongoing trend, is the alienation of those who were and should be the US’s main Iraqi allies, those who were most brutalised by Saddam. The killing of civilians in Sadr City / Thawra, the frequent house raids, the closure of the hospital have turned the area, which at least to some extent welcomed the US troops, into “the black zone”.
Ray says he has met many, many Iraqi people who want the troops there. I have met many, many who don’t and a few who do and a whole spectrum in between. Part of the problem that has been created by the US administration here is that decisions are made by people who don’t walk the streets of Iraq. The majority of the foreigners working in the Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) don’t leave the boundaries of the “Green Zone”. Many of those making the policy in the education sector have never visited an Iraqi school, for instance.
I’ve had e mails from soldiers serving in Iraq who never get to leave their bases or the Green Zone, who read my writing for information about what’s happening beyond their bases, and fair play to them for wanting to know, because there are others who are not interested at all. I had another e mail, very similar to this one, a few months ago, with a little introduction from whoever forwarded the e mail to whoever forwarded it to me, saying “This guy seems to have a pretty good handle on things…” and proceeded to quote meaningless figures about electricity generation that contributed nothing at all to the reader’s understanding how ow life was for ordinary Iraqis.
Finally Ray says he is “very disgusted by the way this period of rebuilding has been portrayed” in the media. Of course we would all like to see our own view on things put forward, me included. We would all like to be told what we want to hear. But I’ll tell you a story that illustrates a bit how the media works here.
Just after I came back from Falluja I was invited by a friend who works with CNN to come out with them for something. They’d been more or less cooped up in their hotel / bureau for weeks. Their only reports from Falluja were coming from reporters embedded with the military, so their footage was literally from the point of view of the US soldiers, usually shot over one of their shoulders. Fair enough, it was hard to get into Falluja and their stringers in the town had fled with their families or were otherwise indisposed – maybe pinned in their homes like the rest of the civilians left in the town.
So we interviewed the man from the Red Crescent and then headed out to meet some families who had fled Falluja and were squatting a half-completed building. On the way through Shuala, within sight of the long term squatter camp that the circus worked in regularly, there was a burnt out military vehicle at the roadside. It had been there a while. It wasn’t smoking, had been comprehensively stripped, probably happened during the fighting in Shuala before my first trip to Falluja, more than a week earlier.
Still the security man ordered the driver to turn the car around and go back to the Red Crescent. They weren’t staying there. Why not, I asked. Wasn’t that enough for me, he demanded. The burnt out vehicle hadn’t even registered with me, just part of the scenery, an every day sight. What was it going to do? Jump up and chase us? I suppose that’s why he’s CNN’s security adviser and I’m not – one of the reasons anyway. So we went back to the Red Crescent and nothing happened in Iraq that day, not in the media anyway.
I know, I know, it’s different if you’re a multinational corporation with insurance premiums to pay and pension obligations and if you’re making decisions on safety on someone else’s behalf and I know, because I cuddled his friends for hours, that CNN have already lost someone in this conflict. But another Iraqi friend who works for the BBC has been frustrated that the correspondents were barely leaving their compound, waiting for Reuters to come back and tell them where the explosion was.
That’s before you even start on that dread dictator, The News Agenda. During the war, the first house bombed was a big story, the second a bit of a story and the third and the fiftieth and the hundred-and-eighth unreported and unseen. It’s the same now. As soon as something becomes commonplace, it’s not news, however appalling.
Only now, when the world has seen The Photos, do the big networks want to hear about the thousands of stories the Christian Peace Team and others have recorded from former detainees who were abused and tortured by US prison staff in Abu Ghraib and the airport, though those stories have been publicly available for months. Likewise there were dozens of doctors coming out of Falluja with stories like mine about US soldiers shooting at their ambulances but it was only when a white English woman told the story that it became ‘news’.
So yeah, like you, Ray, I’ve got some issues with the way the situation in Iraq has been reported, with the unquestioning acceptance of the US government and Pentagon line by most of the US media and the acquiescence of too much of the UK media in the equivalent British government versions of events.
And Ray, if you want to discuss the situation of ordinary people in Iraq, I’m happy to talk about that with you.