In the heady days of the Second Iraq War, when the West seemed to be winning Bush’s “war on terror,” Westerners laughed at Baghdad Bob, more formally known as Mohammed “no tanks” Saeed Al-Sahhaf, Saddam’s minister of information. Al-Sahhaf’s cocksure pronouncements of Iraqi military victory against US “coalition” forces — always made with an air of studied casualness — had then a hilarity about them that spawned endless jokes.
But that was then. This is now.
And now, Al-Sahhaf seems almost prescient in his predictions about how the war would progress. He was incredulous when asked about Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s predicitions, made by way of their unimpeachable source, Ahmad Chalabi, that Iraqis would welcome US troops with flowers, kisses, and candy: “We will welcome them with bullets and shoes,” he assured reporters. And the West laughed. But that was then. This is now.
When asked how Iraqi officials would handle the coalition invaders, Baghdad Bob cordially replied, “They are most welcome” to enter Iraq. “We will butcher them.” The West sneered.
But that was then. This is now. And after two years of suicide bombings and car bombings and the occasional, horrific kidnappings and beheadings, one has to wonder who’s living less in reality — Baghdad Bob, or Chevy Chase Cheney, also known as Dick Cheney, America’s vice president? “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency,” Cheney averred this week about Iraq. With 140 car bombings and 60 suicide bombings in May alone, one wonders whether President George Bush isn’t the only top US political executive who never reads the newspapers.
The Bush administration hoped to reduce these figures by Operation Lighting, geared to shatter the insurgency through setting up checkpoints, instigating massive arrests, and then catching insurgents as they fled through the checkpoints. A good plan, in theory, as Pentagon plans always are. But Operation Lightning didn’t take into account the many insurgents who’d rather stand and die than flee. And so it surprised Americans when the insurgents turned and, as the Los Angeles Times observed, “target(ed) the very checkpoints set up to ensnare them” with no fewer than five suicide bombings in six hours.
If US casualties are down in Iraq, it’s largely because few Americans dare venture outside highly protected areas. The problem’s the same as Al-Sahhaf observed when the West had not yet stopped laughing at him: “How can you lay siege to a whole country? Who is really under siege now? Baghdad cannot be besieged.” Is Al-Sahhaf having the last laugh? “Washington,” driven by “the insane little dwarf, Bush,” Al-Sahhaf warned back then, “has thrown their soldiers on the fire.”
American voters were so sensitive to this issue in the last presidential election that Bush vigorously sought to pull together Iraqi police and somewhat diverse groupings of Iraqi “defense forces” supposedly only “backed” by Americans and coalition soldiers. “I think we may well have some kind of presence over there for a period of time,” Chevy Chase Cheney reportedly mused, implying that Iraqis would now run their own show. But insurgents merely shifted targeting Americans to targeting those Iraqis considered Quislings. One raises an eyebrow remembering Al-Sahhaf’s remark that invading Americans rarely left their tanks and “refused to do battle with us. They are just going places.” Indeed, Iraqis now see Americans bunker down behind the thick, guarded walls of their Green Zone. Meanwhile, Iraqis just seeking jobs or, even better, paychecks, often lose their lives.
And when Americans do leave their safety zone, such as in Operation Lightning, the results are curious indeed. “At 4 a.m. today, American soldiers attacked my house from all directions,” Sunni Iraqi Mohsen Abdul-Hamid, head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, declared. “They blew up doors and took me and my three sons. They blindfolded me and put me in a helicopter and took me someplace. They interrogated me all day. Then they let me go.” America’s response? “Coalition forces regret any inconvenience,” the Pentagon remarked.
If Baghdad Bob were speaking, we’d all be laughing. But that would have been then. This is now. Now — almost a year after the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke; weeks after the supposedly false news reports about flushing the Qur’an down the toilet at Guantanamo sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan; and days after the tabloid press published demeaning photographs of Saddam Hussein shirtless in his underwear — all clear violations of the Geneva Conventions. So it is with a certain chill that one remembers Al-Sahhaf’s remarks on the coalition forces and those who lead them: “These are not ordinary human beings. They are criminals....both by nature and training. Big institutions in this imperial state, in this evil US empire, prepare their politicians to become criminals.”
Americans and those who support them need to see that these things are no laughing matter.
Not then, and not now.
