Yup, FUBAR.
Via Eric Alterman's blog, I see that The Guardian has the latest bit of investigative journalism on Iraq, specifically from the western town of Haditha where their reporter went more or less undercover to get the report:
A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel.
That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been revealed. They are the sole authority, running the town's security, administration and communications.
A three-hour drive north from Baghdad, under the nose of an American base, it is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to.
...
A year ago Haditha was just another sleepy town in western Anbar province, deep in the Sunni triangle and suspicious of the Shia-led government in Baghdad but no insurgent hotbed.
Then, say residents, arrived mostly Shia police with heavyhanded behaviour. "That's how it began," said one man. Attacks against the police escalated until they fled, creating a vacuum filled by insurgents.
Alcohol and music deemed unIslamic were banned, women were told to wear headscarves and relations between the sexes were closely monitored. The mobile phone network was shut down but insurgents retained their walkie-talkies and satellite phones. Right-hand lanes are reserved for their vehicles.
From attacks on US and Iraqi forces it is clear that other Anbar towns, such as Qaim, Rawa, Anna and Ramadi, are to varying degrees under the sway of rebels.
...
The court caters solely for divorces and marriages. Alleged criminals are punished in the market. The Guardian witnessed a headmaster accused of adultery whipped 190 times with cables. Children laughed as he sobbed and his robe turned crimson.
...
Tribal elders said they feared but respected insurgents for keeping order and not turning the town into a battleground.
They appear to have been radicalised, and condemned Sunni groups, such as the Iraqi Islamic party and the Muslim Scholars' Association, for engaging in the political process.
The constitution talks, the referendum due in October, the election due in December: all are deemed collaboration punishable by death. The task now is to bleed the Americans and destabilise the government. Some call that nihilism. Haditha calls it the future.
The article also talks about the repeated US raids on the town to drive the insurgents out, after which the insurgents promptly return, the town reaccepts them, and they set things back up the way they like. There's also the usual show of the US military denying the more brutal forms of murder and public corporal punishment going on (this was the same area where 14 marines were killed when guerillas flipped over their vehicle a couple of weeks ago), but you know there's a better than even chance that they're just lying again.
I wonder who exactly is willing to argue this is more "evil" in some objective sense than the Baathist regime was. Martial law imposed arbitrarily by gun-wielding elites. Public flayings and disembowellings. The total regulation not just of sex but of the messy bits of gender. The handing out of homemade DVDs featuring vigilante torture and execution to children. Charles Taylor did that sort of thing. Did Saddam Hussein? Maybe he did (I don't know), but at some point you're down to arguing about whether police-state totalitarianism (absent an active holocaust) is worse than the warlord-anarchy version of society. I haven't lived under either system, thank God, but my gut feeling is (absent an active holocaust) I'd prefer the former.
And the rebels don't need to organize into a genuine army and political hierarchy and topple the new government in Baghdad, or even bring on a conventionally recognizable civil war, to make their country into a Lord of the Flies-type hellhole (though Juan Cole gives a pretty grim overview of how bad a conventional civil war really would be, which he thinks is a strong possibility if the US exits the region too quickly). They just need, like insurgencies all across the Third World need, enough local control and to inspire enough intrigue mixed with national ambivolence toward the government to keep themselves viable.
And they've got it, at least in Haditha. The town accepts them and by default their philosophy. Does a significant portion of Haditha's population prefer things now to what they were before the US invasion? The article doesn't probe the question. But the town's leadership seems to think, at least in practical terms, that it's better off with the visciously anti-Baghdad Sunni rebels running the show than it would be resisting them and claiming solidarity with the ethos of the Green Zone. I don't judge the position; I have no idea what I'd think in their place, what tradeoffs I'd want to make. (And it's ridiculous to expect village Iraqis to share my opinions and priorities anyway.) But you can't impose "democracy" or libertarian "freedom" on a people who are willing to submit to martial law administered by an almost unrecognizably retrograde militia in return for basic protection and stability. You just can't.
And, if the Iraq disaster proves anything it's that that, absent a genocide like in Darfur or the need to respond to an act of war like in Afghanistan, this negativity ought to be the guiding principle for engaging (or not) in international conflicts. What is tragically impossible, what goes against huge chunks of the history of civilization, what's bound to leave us horrified at what society can revert to and how power really works when communities haven't worked things out over time for themselves, should simply not be attempted.
A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel.
That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been revealed. They are the sole authority, running the town's security, administration and communications.
A three-hour drive north from Baghdad, under the nose of an American base, it is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to.
...
A year ago Haditha was just another sleepy town in western Anbar province, deep in the Sunni triangle and suspicious of the Shia-led government in Baghdad but no insurgent hotbed.
Then, say residents, arrived mostly Shia police with heavyhanded behaviour. "That's how it began," said one man. Attacks against the police escalated until they fled, creating a vacuum filled by insurgents.
Alcohol and music deemed unIslamic were banned, women were told to wear headscarves and relations between the sexes were closely monitored. The mobile phone network was shut down but insurgents retained their walkie-talkies and satellite phones. Right-hand lanes are reserved for their vehicles.
From attacks on US and Iraqi forces it is clear that other Anbar towns, such as Qaim, Rawa, Anna and Ramadi, are to varying degrees under the sway of rebels.
...
The court caters solely for divorces and marriages. Alleged criminals are punished in the market. The Guardian witnessed a headmaster accused of adultery whipped 190 times with cables. Children laughed as he sobbed and his robe turned crimson.
...
Tribal elders said they feared but respected insurgents for keeping order and not turning the town into a battleground.
They appear to have been radicalised, and condemned Sunni groups, such as the Iraqi Islamic party and the Muslim Scholars' Association, for engaging in the political process.
The constitution talks, the referendum due in October, the election due in December: all are deemed collaboration punishable by death. The task now is to bleed the Americans and destabilise the government. Some call that nihilism. Haditha calls it the future.
The article also talks about the repeated US raids on the town to drive the insurgents out, after which the insurgents promptly return, the town reaccepts them, and they set things back up the way they like. There's also the usual show of the US military denying the more brutal forms of murder and public corporal punishment going on (this was the same area where 14 marines were killed when guerillas flipped over their vehicle a couple of weeks ago), but you know there's a better than even chance that they're just lying again.
I wonder who exactly is willing to argue this is more "evil" in some objective sense than the Baathist regime was. Martial law imposed arbitrarily by gun-wielding elites. Public flayings and disembowellings. The total regulation not just of sex but of the messy bits of gender. The handing out of homemade DVDs featuring vigilante torture and execution to children. Charles Taylor did that sort of thing. Did Saddam Hussein? Maybe he did (I don't know), but at some point you're down to arguing about whether police-state totalitarianism (absent an active holocaust) is worse than the warlord-anarchy version of society. I haven't lived under either system, thank God, but my gut feeling is (absent an active holocaust) I'd prefer the former.
And the rebels don't need to organize into a genuine army and political hierarchy and topple the new government in Baghdad, or even bring on a conventionally recognizable civil war, to make their country into a Lord of the Flies-type hellhole (though Juan Cole gives a pretty grim overview of how bad a conventional civil war really would be, which he thinks is a strong possibility if the US exits the region too quickly). They just need, like insurgencies all across the Third World need, enough local control and to inspire enough intrigue mixed with national ambivolence toward the government to keep themselves viable.
And they've got it, at least in Haditha. The town accepts them and by default their philosophy. Does a significant portion of Haditha's population prefer things now to what they were before the US invasion? The article doesn't probe the question. But the town's leadership seems to think, at least in practical terms, that it's better off with the visciously anti-Baghdad Sunni rebels running the show than it would be resisting them and claiming solidarity with the ethos of the Green Zone. I don't judge the position; I have no idea what I'd think in their place, what tradeoffs I'd want to make. (And it's ridiculous to expect village Iraqis to share my opinions and priorities anyway.) But you can't impose "democracy" or libertarian "freedom" on a people who are willing to submit to martial law administered by an almost unrecognizably retrograde militia in return for basic protection and stability. You just can't.
And, if the Iraq disaster proves anything it's that that, absent a genocide like in Darfur or the need to respond to an act of war like in Afghanistan, this negativity ought to be the guiding principle for engaging (or not) in international conflicts. What is tragically impossible, what goes against huge chunks of the history of civilization, what's bound to leave us horrified at what society can revert to and how power really works when communities haven't worked things out over time for themselves, should simply not be attempted.
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