The White House Iraq Is Not Reality

The White House portrayal of events in Iraq ignores the growing power of militias with strict Islamist agendas of a kind once associated with Iran under the late Ayatollah Khomeini.
That was clear in a leaked cable signed by the US Ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad and sent to the State Department on June 6. It offered a bleak portrait of daily life. Its contents conflicted with the rhetoric of President Bush and British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, after their recent, surprise visits to Baghdad. They declared that the situation was steadily improving with the appointment of two key Iraqi government ministers and the death of Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Days after Zarqawi was killed in a safe house, the Pentagon claimed it had found documents that showed the insurgency was in trouble but there were doubts in some quarters about the authenticity of the documents.
No such doubts were expressed about the leaked cable from US Ambassador Khalilzad. It depicted a different Iraq through the experiences of Iraqis working for the US embassy within the heavily-fortified Green Zone in Baghdad. Under a heading “Women’s Rights” it pointed out that Iraqi females were being harassed by unknown groups if they refused to conform to strict Islamic dress codes that demanded females wore a head covering and did not use cell phones. The cable added that, one of the Iraqi government departments - the Ministry of Transportation – was forcing females to wear a veil at work. What the memo did not say was that this was the same government President Bush claimed could lead Iraq in a new direction.
Iraqi male staff said it was now dangerous to wear shorts in public or to allow children to play outdoors in shorts and that people who wore jeans were attacked. Most Iraqi staffers were scared to travel to work or to let people know they worked for the embassy. They feared being kidnapped on their way to the Green Zone because there were “spotters” who travelled neighborhoods trying to identify strangers.
In one part of the cable there was a particularly disturbing section in which it was revealed that Iraqi employees no longer trusted Iraqi guards on duty at the Green Zone. Some of the guards appeared to be militiamen and taunted them when they passed through a checkpoint. One employee begged the Embassy to get her Press credentials because guards held up her work card and announced that she was a US embassy employee. It was the kind of display she said could get her killed.
Some Iraqi employees were too frightened to even tell family members they worked for the US because loose talk about their jobs might reach militias. In most areas of Baghdad it was risky moving around because Sunnis and Shia districts were in the hands of the militias. They barricaded streets and provided security and were also in charge of water, electricity and gas supplies. At gas stations it was not unusual for someone to wait 12 hours to fill a car and the power supply was erratic at best. That had created a thriving black market with ever rising costs for fuel and basic necessities.
The US ambassador’s cable stressed that Iraqi personnel had complained of a policy of ethnic cleansing in the areas where they lived and that Shias, as well as Sunnis, often blamed the US occupation for their plight. The embassy was so concerned about the safety of its Iraqi staffers it shredded documents related to their identities. Presumably, that was to avoid information about them falling into the hands of members of the Iraqi security forces guarding the Green Zone which houses the largest CIA station in the world. It also has centers that deal with intelligence and Special Forces operations. If, as the cable claims, there is serious concern about concealing the identities of US employees within the heavily fortified Green Zone, there is every reason to believe security at the Green Zone is unreliable. In that case why are Iraqis guarding a part of Baghdad where the US does much of its secret counter-insurgency planning?
In March this year, some Iraqi staff asked if the embassy had made provisions to look after them in the event of a US pull-out. While it would seem natural that Iraqi personnel would be worried about their future, the fact they sought assurances in March could imply they saw pull-out plans at that time. If so, that would further indicate the ambassador’s cable was intended to convey a deteriorating situation to Washington in which the US might have to evacuate its staff from the Green Zone.
If all this was not a depressing enough picture of Iraq, the US death toll that reached 2,504 with the torture and murder of two young soldiers captured by insurgents and the charging of three US soldiers with the murder of three Iraqis. And, in the weeks ahead Marines may well face charges over the deaths of more than two dozen Iraqi men, women and children at Haditha.
In the midst of the chaos and the bleak projections for the Iraq occupation, the trial of Saddam Hussein faded from the headlines until June 19 when trial prosecutor, Jaafar al-Moussawi, demanded the death penalty for the former Iraqi dictator and two of his co-accused, one of them his former intelligence chief and half brother, Barzan Ibrahim. The prosecutor’s comments came as the trial wound down after eight months of legal chaos in which the first judge resigned because he could not control the trial, three defense lawyers were murdered and Saddam and his co-defendants boycotted parts of the proceedings. Saddam’s third defense lawyer was killed days after the prosecutor made his comments. The lawyer lived in Baghdad and his killers drove his body in a pick-up truck round Sadr City, the part of Baghdad controlled by militias loyal to the firebrand Shia cleric, Moqtada el-Sadr.
Saddam and his co-defendants are charged with direct involved in the arrest of hundreds of Shias, some of them women and children, in Dujali township in 1982, following an attempt on Saddam’s life. Many were tortured and 148 men and boys were slaughtered and buried in a mass grave. The prosecutor in an outburst that brought the trial back into the headlines said Saddam and his co-accused were spreading corruption on earth. He claimed Saddam not only authorized the arrests but kept himself informed of everything that subsequently transpired. His brother-in-law, Ibrahim, who was in charge of the secret police, personally supervised the round up of victims and participated in torture in which electric shocks were used.
Saddam’s lawyers and Saddam himself argued that the regime was entitled to react to the attempt on his life and the stories of torture and mass killing were fabrications. If Saddam is sentenced to death before the end of the summer Shias will rejoice but Sunnis will see it as a blow against them. For Sunnis, Saddam was one of their own who ensured them power and privilege and brought terror to the Shia majority. Hid death could energize the Sunni insurgency, creating even more problems for the US occupation.