[Imc-beirut] Iraq Dispatches: Living Under the Bombs

[iraq_dispatches at dahrjamailiraq.com]

** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
** http://dahrjamailiraq.com **


    February 03, 2005


      Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on Life under the Bombs in Iraq:

Here is a lead from Tom Engelhardt who manages a fine website 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>, followed by a link to a recent piece from 
Dahr Jamail:

There is something thoroughly inspiring when people, under the threat of 
death, turn out to vote in a country that has become an armed camp. The 
urge of a long oppressed people to take back their lives, to act, is 
always moving and powerful. Certainly, the Iraq vote, as presented in 
the media here in the U.S., has also provided a boost to the Bush 
administration at home at a useful moment. "It ought to give heart to 
the American people that the effort we've made to help the Iraqi people 
get to this day was well worth it -- that the Iraqi people have 
justified the faith we put in them," commented National Security Advisor 
Stephen J. Hadley. (As in Vietnam, though, such boosts in the midst of a 
disastrous war are unlikely to be long lasting.)

The meaning of the vote in Iraq is another question entirely. It's not 
just a matter of the actual turnout -- how high in Shiite and Kurdish 
Iraq, how low in Sunni areas of the country, or what the irregularities 
were -- but of what exactly Iraqis were turning out for. Were they, for 
instance, voting not for George Bush's version of freedom, but to end 
the American occupation itself, as unembedded reporter Dahr Jamail 
suggests at his blog? Was it to grasp that will o' the wisp, a land that 
will not be a "republic of fear" in a place where "the only 
institutions… with real power are the US and UK military," as BBC 
reporter Rageth Omaar recently suggested in the British Guardian? Was it 
to end centuries of Sunni dominance and establish Shiite dominance (and 
so possibly cause a civil war); or, in Kurdish areas of the north, to 
establish the basis for future independence (and a possible Turkish 
intervention)?

And then there's that other question: Whatever Iraqis thought they were 
voting for at polling places where, due to security concerns, most 
didn't even know the names of the candidates, what exactly are they 
going to get from this election? Was it even possible, as Brian Whitaker 
asked in the Guardian, to achieve anything like a genuine democracy when 
the Bush administration has paid so little "attention to the slow and 
laborious business of creating the civil institutions that make 
elections meaningful"? Or was it, as Pepe Escobar suggested in the Asia 
Times, a means of further embedding American power in the country? 
("[O]nly the naïve may believe that an imperial power would voluntarily 
abandon the dream scenario of a cluster of military bases planted over 
virtually unlimited reserves of oil.") Or might the Bush administration 
not even mind a post-election descent into something approaching civil 
war, as James Carroll of the Boston Globe suggested in a devastating 
column on the election and George Bush?

And what will be possible for a future Iraqi government in a land still 
occupied by a foreign army and a foreign power whose "advisers" are now 
emplaced in every important ministry, whose bases or "enduring camps" 
are now gargantuan, permanent structures, whose officials control much 
of the money that will be available to any new administration which will 
also face a fierce home-grown insurgency not about to go away any time 
soon? Still, Iraqis at the polls represented at least one modestly 
hopeful face of Iraq. (Tomdispatch will carry more reports on the 
election in the near future.)

Over a week ago, President Bush offered an official American face to the 
world when, in his inaugural speech, he plunked for the messianic global 
spread of "freedom" (as defined by his administration), essentially by 
force of (or the threat of) arms. But how different the face of America 
we see and the faces we turn to the rest of the world.

Two Faces of America

Just the other day, on the front page of the New York Times, reporters 
David Johnston, Neil A. Lewis, and Douglas Jehl revealed that federal 
appeals court judge Michael Chertoff, the Bush administration's designee 
for head of the Homeland Security Department, spent parts of 2002-03 -- 
he was then the head of the Justice Department's criminal division -- 
advising the Central Intelligence Agency "on the legality of coercive 
interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture 
statute." More specifically, among the techniques he evidently 
green-lighted because they did not involve "the infliction of pain" (as 
narrowly defined in pretzled torture memos developed in the office of 
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales), he indicated that one technique 
"C.I.A. officers could use under certain circumstances without fear of 
prosecution was strapping a subject down and making him experience a 
feeling of drowning." Water torture is, of course, an ancient 
interrogation technique and was used by numerous oppressive regimes in 
the last century. It now goes under the rubric of "waterboarding" (which 
sounds much like the harmless daredevil sport of surfboarding).

Read Dahr Jamail's Piece <http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2166>


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