Center for International Policy

American intentions all too clear to Iraqis
By Jim Mullins
September 2, 2004

As the declared motives for President Bush's rush to war on Iraq dissolve, one by one, in the glaring light of truth, it becomes clear that his claim that we went to Iraq to bring freedom and liberation to a people suffering from a brutal dictatorship is similarly devoid of reality.

The Bush administration rejected State Department and CIA intelligence on Iraq, favoring instead information from the neocons' Pentagon Office of Special Plans, which relied on discredited exile informants and cherry-picked intelligence. It compounded the error by ignoring a State Department study that outlined a strategy for Iraqi reconstruction that would have preserved Iraqi institutions and industry.

Instead the 400,000-man army and other police systems were disbanded; professionals and technocrats with Baath Party membership -- a condition of employment -- were fired; and the newly privatized economy was given over to foreign investment under wide-open conditions that Iraqi entrepreneurs were powerless to combat. The result: massive unemployment and an exponential upsurge in crime and insurgency, funded in large part by Iraqis deliberately shut out of the economy.

At first the insurgency was confined to the Sunni triangle, with the battle of Fallujah a defining moment. Fallujah had been bombed and 200 civilians killed in the 1991 Gulf War, and memories of that atrocity and draconian sanctions were still simmering in April 2003 when the U.S. Army occupied a Fallujah school. Peaceful demonstrators were fired on by U.S. Army forces, killing 17 and wounding scores more.

The U.S. Army was then confronted with a hostile 300,000 population inflamed by more killings and by reports, as early as August 2003, of Fallujans being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. When the Army was replaced by Marines who began breaking down doors and arresting old men and women, hatred rose to a point that when four American contractors drove into Fallujah on March 31, an angry crowd killed and mutilated them.

U.S. Marine response was massive bombing of the neighborhoods where the assailants reportedly lived, resulting in over 600 deaths and utter destruction. The city hospital was blocked from entry and the soccer field became a mass grave. Snipers killed some 200 more Iraqis in the days following. Of the estimated 800 Iraqis massacred, 500 were women and children.

Thousands of Shiites left Baghdad to bring food and medicine to the Sunni Iraqis in Fallujah. The two otherwise hostile religious groups came together in a common bond of opposition to the American occupation. Fallujah is now off limits to U.S. military personnel.

Najaf's 800,000 Shiites had welcomed the Americans at the beginning of the invasion. Relegated to second-class citizenship and not dependent on the state as were the Sunnis, they quickly elected neighborhood councils, kept the lights on and garbage picked up, and maintained law and order.

Muqtada al-Sadr did the same in Sadr City, a 2.5 million-Shiite slum, organizing council elections and municipal functions and keeping a lid on the crime enveloping Sunni Baghdad. But when al-Sadr offended Paul Bremer, he closed Sadr's newspaper, arrested his colleagues and enforced an old -- now withdrawn -- arrest warrant.

Muqtada al-Sadr retreated to Najaf and began an insurgency that spread to other Shiite cities. Repeating the Fallujah mistake, Marines called in to pacify Najaf provoked an exchange with Sadr's militia by invading a no-go zone around Sadr's home, breaking an ongoing cease-fire. Full-scale fighting broke out near the Shiites' holiest shrine and in the 5-square-mile cemetery -- where a million faithful from all over the world are buried.

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani led thousands of Shiites on a nonviolent march on Najaf and brokered a peace. Najaf lies in ruins and U.S. forces must evacuate, as in Fallujah.

Bremer's policies have stalled resconstruction in its tracks; foreign investors are leaving in droves, fearful for their investment and lives. Eight billion dollars in Iraqi Governing Council funding has disappeared. Shiites, promised a democratic election by June 30, which they could have won with their 65 percent majority, find the constitutional election postponed until 2006. Chaos and anger multiplies.

Iraqis are fully aware of American intentions. The people that birthed Western civilization refuses to go quietly into colonial subjugation.

Jim Mullins is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a resident of Delray Beach.