Myth, truth, and lies in Iraq

Robert Fisk:

I have not met anyone in Iraq - save for those who lost their loved ones to his thugs - who cares any more about Saddam. He is yesterday's man, a thing of the past. To conjure up this monster again is an insult to the people of Baghdad - who have more fears, more anxieties and greater mourning to endure than any offer of bread and circuses by the Americans can assuage.

Yet in the outside world - the further from Iraq, the more credible they sound - George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will repeat that we really have got democracy on its feet in Iraq, that we overthrew the tyrant Saddam and that a great future awaits the country and that new investments are being planned at international conferences (held far away from Iraq, of course) and that the next bombings in Europe, like the last ones, will have nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with Iraq.

The show must go on and I know, when I return to Beirut or fly to Europe, Iraq will not look so bad. The Mad Hatter will look quite sane and the Cheshire Cat will smile at me from the tree....

...But in Baghdad, the Iraqis I talk to are not convinced. It is to their eternal credit that those who live in the hell of Iraq still care about the Palestinians, still understand what is really happening in the Middle East, are not fooled by the nonsense peddled by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. "What is this 'evil ideology' that Blair keeps talking about?" an Iraqi friend asked me this week. "What will be your next invention? When will you wake up?"

This is a central part of the dilemma -- wake up to what? The US doesn't know what to wake up to. Yes, the reality is the Green Zone and the rest of suffering Iraq outside the Green Zone. As Riverbend has written, the Green Zone is a foreign land in the middle of Baghdad. Further, it represents the shell of ostensive democratic procedure, a palace in which the fate of Iraqis plays out in all mystery to them. Hardly democratic. One could say that this is how it has to be in a situation of anarchy, and one makes comparisons to the American founders deciding the fate of a nation. But at some point the shell has to be filled with real content, real substance. Iraqis, from most accounts, appear to understand that the Green Zone will decide on a replacement for Saddam Hussein and very possibly a worse one. Stories on the ground, as this one from Khalid, suggest that the replacement is ordinary, a political maneuver on the part of the US to extract itself from a disastrous adventure, but one that won't necessarily make life any better outside the GZ. A civil war is no longer the American war is the administration's developing line.

There's a reality to post-conflict reconstruction. Democracy doesn't appear overnight. The best-face -- and belated -- excuse for the American invasion and occupation was democracy. But the means was invasion / occupation, a conflict started by the Bush administration that hasn't reached "post-conflict" status. It also shows to us the American administration's peculiar take on democracy. While we can discuss a broad range of notions of democracy, and particular countries will always develop their own versions to meet their particular material conditions, this administration has one notion of democracy and it's the same one that it is creating within the US. That is, a centralized, consolidated Athenian style of exclusive democracy ("citizens" were men only, and of a particular kind). But, more importantly, it's one where a superminority of the wealthy and powerful elite decide what's best for everybody else, and where what's best for everybody else just so happens to coincide with what's best for the elite superminority. Because, after all, they might give you a job in the end. Trickle down! And when you're suffering from day to day, even a job where you risk getting blown up at any moment is better than nothing.