Patrick Cockburn on story of driver's travails, $3000 cab rides, and lakes of sewage as metaphors for Iraq's destruction during five years of brutal, relentless occupation
The Independent (U.K.) correspondent Patrick Cockburn has a lot to say about the truth of Iraq that we did not hear in the President's State of the Union message, and that we do not read in the Pentagon press releases published in the New York Times under the Michael Gordon byline.
This, which has made the rounds of the papers and wires the last couple of days, is an example of news about the "improving" situation typically we are fed:
UN hints at Iraq refugee returns
BBC Feb 16 2008 - Limited numbers of refugees have already returned
The UN's top refugee official has hinted that security in Iraq may soon have improved enough for some of the 4m Iraqi refugees to begin returning home.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, told the BBC the UNHCR and Iraqi government were planning an assessment of conditions.
Some 2m Iraqis have fled abroad, while another 2m are displaced inside Iraq.
In December, the UNHCR said the situation in Iraq was "not yet conducive to large-scale return".
Cockburn has some insight about what "returning" means in two different pieces:
Exiled Iraqis too scared to return home despite propaganda push
Monday, 11 February 2008
To show that Iraq was safe enough for the two million Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan to return, the Iraqi government organised a bus convoy last November from Damascus to Baghdad carrying 800 Iraqis home for free.
As a propaganda exercise designed to show that the Iraqi government was restoring peace, it never quite worked. The majority of the returnees said they were returning to Baghdad, not because it was safer, but because they had run out of money in Syria or their visas had expired.
There has been no mass return of the two million Iraqis who fled to Syria and Jordan or a further 2.4 million refugees who left their homes within Iraq. The latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees show that, on the contrary, the number of people entering Syria from Iraq was 1,200 a day in late January "while an average of 700 are going back to Iraq from Syria".
If that is not enough to throw some serious doubt over the picture painted in the U.S. by officials and the media, there is this extensive Cockburn piece, that includes a harrowing tale about a "returned" Iraqi refugee, a man Cockburn knows well:
Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
To judge from the talk in Washington, the 'surge' that put 30,000 more US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story. - Patrick Cockburn - Friday, 15 February 2008
People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to check with their commander. "I believe," Bassim said afterwards, "that if Patrick had an American or an English passport [instead of an Irish one] they would have killed us all immediately."
In the following years, I saw Bassim less and less. He is a Sunni, aged about 40, from west Baghdad. After the battle for Baghdad between Shia and Sunni in 2006, he could hardly work as a driver as three-quarters of the capital was controlled by the Shia. There were few places where a Sunni could drive in safety outside a handful of enclaves....
Cockburn recounts the man's failed attempt to get himself and his family to Sweden. You'll just have to go there to read the gut wrenching details.
Cockburn does report that what "foreigners and Iraqis alike" say about Baghdad today is that it is "getting better." He writes, however, that, "Perky pieces in the foreign media breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have been murdered a year ago," do not allow for the possibility that the real situation may for the moment be in between the "newsroom" predilections of "War Rages" and "Peace Dawns".
So, how is Bassim fairing in "improving" Baghdad? Cockburn writes,
The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.
Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce....
Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere.
Lovely.
But here is the most telling, most devastating rejoinder to the Bush narrative in Cockburn's entire piece:
For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad.
Still, there is the perception of more security and the daily body count is significantly lower than it has been over much of the last 18 months. The 30,000 extra troops present over much of the last year have helped reduce the death rate in Baghdad, at the costs just described. But here is what is really important about Baghdad: The "surge" troops "have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006."
Cockburn spends quite a few paragraphs accounting for the perception of more security in Sunni areas of greater Iraq by describing radically shifting alliances, a phenomenon quite apart from any effect of extra American "surge" troops and one that casts ominous clouds over the future:
The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government.
In noting that the U.S. has purchased a truce with people very recently among its blood enemies, Cockburn here says just about the same thing as what Dahr Jamail reported around the time of the State of the Union, which I posted about HERE and HERE.
We'll hear a lot of official-sponsored media noise over the next month about how wonderful five years of occupation has been from for the people of Iraq, and some of what Cockburn predicts will be "rancorous debate" about the "success or failure of the 'surge' and the US war effort."
But Cockburn has already evaluated the bottom line: "Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the 'surge'." Cities are "drowning in sewage" that in one part of Baghdad "has formed a lake so large that it can be seen 'as a big black spot on Google Earth'."
Prospects are not good for Iraqis like Cockburn's driver. Cockburn concludes, "For millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq."