| 08 May 2004 | Saturday | 17 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425 |
Torture of Abu Ghraib inmates
As violence escalates in Iraq, killing dozens of US soldiers and hundreds of civilians, putting the reconstruction of the country on the back-burner, pressure is mounting on President Bush and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to find a way to salvage the luckless oil-rich Arab country.
More American troops have died in April's battle for two Iraqi small towns than the total US death toll in the rapid conquest of the entire country last year. So far, 751 American military men have died and more than 10,000 Iraqis are estimated to have been killed since the invasion began.
"It has dramatized the vulnerability of the status quo," says former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, "and punctured the illusion that the campaign in Iraq was a liberation."
A senior US military official has warned that there is no end in sight to the Iraqi resistance and predicts that violent attacks will continue through national elections scheduled for January.
According to a Washington Post report, the US army has sought an additional $6 billion for Iraq operations on top of the $87 billion that Congress allocated for this year.
Iraq continues to be a boiling cauldron. The Iraqi attacks have escalated from roadside bombs to well-coordinated assaults on American forward positions. The resistance fighters are using arms concealed in cemeteries. In recent weeks, American supply lines have been interrupted, foreigners kidnapped and hundreds of Iraqis killed.
The security crisis has interrupted reconstruction work which has added to the difficulties being encountered by the Iraqis. Hundreds of foreigners working for the US Agency for International Development and some American firms have been withdrawn to the Jordanian capital of Amman.
This has further increased the number of unemployed Iraqis. Several foreign firms have moved their staff to the safer Kurdish part of Iraq. The postponed Baghdad Trade Fair will now take place in Turkey.
The security situation has become so uncertain as to make many Iraqis hesitate in cooperating with the coalition forces for fear of being on the losing side.
In less than six months, President Bush will be seeking re-election. As his approval ratings slip, his prospects are generally being considered uncertain. If American soldiers continue to die, his popularity is likely to slip further.
No one knows it better than the policymakers in Washington that if the bloodshed continues and the security situation does not improve markedly in the coming weeks, Iraq may well cost George W. Bush the forthcoming elections.
That is why Washington's first priority at the moment is to ward off the grim prospect of a long and bloody haul in Iraq. And the only way to do this is to get the United Nations involved in Iraq.
In ordinary circumstances, UN involvement in Iraq should not have encountered any serious obstacle. But the problem is that Washington wants to continue to control Iraq behind a UN facade.
President Bush has asked UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to choose an interim government that will take over on July 1. But the transfer of "sovereignty" to the interim government will be cosmetic since the Americans want to continue to pull many of the strings by putting some curbs on the Iraqis' ability to control the armed forces and pass new laws.
This may not be acceptable to some permanent members of the Security Council, particularly France. UN special envoy Brahimi is trying to dispel the impression that he is a front man for the United States.
He recently told the Security Council that the "security situation in Iraq was and remains bad". He was very critical of the killings of civilians by US forces and the attack on a mosque's minaret which he described as "a source of shock and dismay". But the Iraqis, in general, are not happy to see a foreigner, though an Arab (Brahimi is Algerian), select their new rulers.
But the most interesting spectacle is provided by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, a native of Ghana who completes his second five-year term in December 2006. He is engaged in a delicate balancing act.
While reminding the US that its hegemonic policies are not acceptable to the international community, he also has to recognize the geopolitical reality of a unipolar world where directly challenging US aims could not only damage his career but also the institution he represents.
He reportedly not only acquiesced in to enormous US pressure to appoint Lakhdar Brahimi as UN Special Envoy to Iraq but also endorsed the American political agenda for that country.
On the other hand, Mr Annan has been dragging his feet over the appointment of a special representative for Iraq to succeed the late under-secretary general, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad last August. Also, he has refused to return his international staff to Iraq because of the worsening security situation.
The UN Secretary General has not concealed his frustration over the situation developing in Iraq. Last week, he was candid enough to tell reporters: "I will never see a UN peace-keeping force under a UN representative (in Iraq)," although he said a multinational force was a possibility.
Recently, he told a US television programme: "The (UN Security) Council will probably authorize a multinational force to remain in Iraq to help create a secure environment" after June 30. The Security Council is expected to discuss the composition of such a multinational force in the coming weeks.
Interestingly, the Iraqi occupation has brought to light a new economic reality which is transforming the face of warfare in the 21st century. The four Americans killed and mutilated in Fallujah last month were soldiers of a sort, though not "American" soldiers. They worked for a corporation, Blackwater Security Consulting, which supplies military personnel on a contract basis.
According to a Guardian report, the privatized military industry has "several hundred companies operating in over 10 countries in six continents, and over $100 billion in annual global revenue."
At the moment, to help maintain security, there are 20,000 international mercenary soldiers in Iraq, equal to 15 per cent of the official American military presence of 130,000 soldiers.
These soldiers of fortune are not there to fight for democracy but because they are handsomely paid to be there. Actually, they are being paid out of the money earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction.
According to recent government estimates, about one quarter of the $18 billion budgeted for reconstruction will be paid to those who perform military operations of one sort or another.
Despite its oft-repeated declarations supporting Iraqi sovereignty, independence and democracy, India is allowing its citizens to serve as mercenary soldiers in Iraq.
According to recent press reports, hundreds of Indian ex-servicemen, including retired officers, up to the level of divisional commanders, are being recruited by private security agencies for deployment in Iraq to help the American occupation forces. Reports of casualties amongst these mercenaries, following the recent flare-up of violence, have caused a storm in India.
As far as the UN is concerned, it will not be easy for it to play the role of a saviour in Iraq. By now it is clear that America is in Iraq not to create democracy, hasten economic development or fight terrorism. It has gone there to create a long-term military and political base to protect the flow of Middle East oil.
The task before the Security Council will be to find a way which may help harmonize American interests with Iraqi aspirations, a tall order indeed. The redeeming feature is that because of the forthcoming presidential election, Mr Bush is in a weak position.
If the key members of the Security Council - France, Russia and China - stand firm, as they did before the Iraqi invasion last year, there is a glimmer of hope that the UN might salvage Iraq.
The writer is a former ambassador.
Torture of Abu Ghraib inmates
Just when things could not get any worse in Iraq, they do. The Washington Post's disgusting new pictures on Thursday presage as many more horror stories as there are civilians randomly killed and people imprisoned or disappeared without explanation.
Desperate families outside jails, waving bits of paper with names and begging for news, have had their pleas ignored for a year by the powers that invaded on a promise to bring the rule of law and human rights.
The systematic torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is so poisonous in its symbolism that not even America's mortal enemies could have devised such a PR coup.
Sexual abuse and humiliation of naked Muslim prisoners, urinated on and sodomised, and orders from US intelligence to "soften up" victims in Saddam's old torture chamber almost defies belief.
Except it doesn't. Atrocities are entirely predictable wherever absolute power holds the utterly helpless in secret: that is a universal law of human nature.
In peace, that is as true of old people, the mentally ill and children in institutions hidden from view. In war, degraded captives bring out an instinctive disgust, contempt and violence in the captors who degrade them.
That is why habeas corpus was the founding principle of British justice, even before Magna Carta, banning the holding of people uncharged, unseen without trial.
"Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people," said President Bush plaintively. Indeed, but it is in the nature of the circumstances that Bush has authorized for holding 10,000 prisoners without trial, many in unknown, secret prisons.
"That's not the way we do things in America," he says. Indeed, it is only the way America does things when it goes abroad; the American constitution protects its own citizens. The self-blinding American myth is that a "freedom-loving nation" built on the ideals of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could never do such things.
But it was Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, Robert Cooper, who elevated double standards into a doctrine, declaring human rights are only for the civilised: "Among ourselves we keep the law but when operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle."
That is a self-defeating way to bring civilised values to those whose hearts and minds are the real battleground of "the war on terror". So, although the British foreign terror suspects held without trial have lawyers and are reviewed regularly by a court of law, the need for transparent justice is why they must all be brought to trial or let go.
Vera Baird, the MP and QC, finds no reason why the procedures she has used during gangster trials for protecting secret sources and disguising witnesses would not hold good for protecting any risky security sources in these cases.
Invading armies always commit atrocities - often not revealed until years later. Where they can no longer discriminate friend from foe in a sea of alien faces, they are bound to kill indiscriminately.
Warning bells rang when, even after the regime fell, UK and US forces still refused to count civilian deaths. Few of us who argued against this war imagined things would be this bad.
As the president begs Congress for another $25bn in the shadow of this chaos, the rubble of neo-conservative strategy lies all about him. The dream that this expedition would herald a new era of democracy across the Middle East is dead on his lips.
Essential contractors have quit as insurance brokers declare Iraq the most dangerous place in the world to business. A Gallup poll in Baghdad, taken just before the torture pictures appeared, showed only 10% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the US.
In a majestic lecture on Thursday night at the LSE, Professor Fred Halliday, a foremost Arab expert, described the full seriousness of what he called this "crisis of our times".
What gives special power to Halliday's analysis is this: with Iraqi connections dating back to before Saddam, and having seen at close quarters the horror of that regime, he did not oppose intervention.
WMD was always a dubious excuse, he argues, but Saddam's defiance of UN resolutions was justification, especially his refusal to implement human rights and democracy contained in resolution 688 in 1991.
But now, he says, "the USA has destroyed the goodwill it initially enjoyed" in the days after Saddam fell. Now "the situation is quite literally out of control", with no coherent policy. Paul Bremer in his bunker leaves the initiative to military commanders who have no sense of politics or diplomacy.
The US has alienated its allies across the region with its reckless endorsement of Sharon and helped to awaken a transnational army of jihadis. Its traditional allies, "the corrupt, weak dictatorships of the region", have been left angry and vulnerable. The "shock and awe" of American global dominance turning into a daily spectacle of ineptitude and failure.
Halliday puts what shreds of hope he retains in the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi, as the last chance to avoid total conflagration and the triumph of extremists. But he doubts Washington now is capable of listening to Brahimi. The US now needs the UN, but still refuses to bow sufficiently to the only hope left of rescue.
The neo-conservative dream of total American hegemony without need of allies or international law has been exposed as impossible as well as undesirable. All this causes much smirking satisfaction in the more rabid anti-American camp. But the effect of an Iraq meltdown could have ominous global repercussions.
A US retreat into isolationism is no answer. The US is only superpower: the UN and the world have as much need of it as ever for humanitarian interventions. For example: Human Rights Watch today publishes a damning report on Sudan, where government-backed militias in Darfur are accused of ethnically cleansing an entire district - the Arabs expelling, burning, killing and raping hundreds of thousands of Africans from fertile lands.
Watching the TV pictures, the impulse is to cry out: "Do something, someone!" But who? The UN? On Monday Sudan was elected to the UN Commission on Human Rights, put there the African regional group. Cuba and Zimbabwe have also just been elected, and Libya chaired the commission last year. No wonder the US walked out.
But for all its need of reform, the UN is all there is, and Brahimi is Iraq's last best hope. If Tony Blair wants to save what is left of his fearful Iraq error, now is the time for him to put loud pressure on Bush to guarantee the UN a central role after the June 30 handover, with command over the military, and drawing in Turkey and Arab nations under a UN banner.
All prisoners must be handed over to UN authority to be dealt with transparently under international law. Otherwise Blair should warn that Britain will follow Spain, Bulgaria and Poland in ordering a withdrawal of troops. Demanding a UN hand over is his last chance to do the right thing. -Dawn/The Guardian Service