The March Of Folly

The following passage may look familiar:

"On the fourth day of the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon, I crossed theborder at a lonely spot near Metulla and looked for the front, which had already reached theoutskirts of Sidon. I was driving my private car, accompanied by a woman photographer. We passeda dozen Shiite villages and were received everywhere with great joy. We extractedourselves only with difficulty from hundreds of villagers, each one insisting thatwe have coffee at their home. On the previous days, they had showered the Israeli soldiers withrice. A few months later I joined an army convoy going in the opposite direction,from Sidon to Metulla. The soldiers were now wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, many were onthe verge of panic. What had happened? The Shiites had received the Israeli soldiers asliberators. When they realized that they had come to stay as occupiers, theystarted to kill them.

"When the Israeli troops entered Lebanon the Shiites were a down-trodden,powerless community, held in contempt by all the others. After a year of fighting the occupiers,they became a political and military power. The Shiite Hizbullah is the only military force inthe Arab world that has beaten the mighty Israeli army."

End of passage. 

I wrote it in an article called "Bitter Rice", which appearedon March 22, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, and which started with the words:"Beware of the Shiites. The troubles of the occupation will start after the fighting isover…" Barbara Tuchman died too soon. Otherwise she could add a chapterabout this war to her book "The March of Folly".

It should be remembered that Tuchman was very strict in the choice of her examples. Itwas not enough that a government acted foolishly. In order to gain a place in her book, twoadditional conditions had to be met: that the results of the folly could be foreseen, and thatthere was indeed someone who warned in advance of these results.

(For example: the British king George III lost America because of a number offoolish acts. This could have been foreseen, and, indeed, the British politician and authorEdmund Burke warned of them at the time.) What is happening now in Iraq was completelypredictable. It is an exact repeat of all that happened to us in Lebanon. Otto von Bismarckonce remarked: "A fool learns from his experience. A wise person learns fromthe experience of others." If so, how to define President George W. Bush, who is not evenable to learn from his own experience?

If I have already quoted myself, I may as well do it again. On February 8, 2003,in an article entitled "The Smell of War", I wrote: "This is not a war aboutterrorism‏.‏ This is not a war about weapons of massdestruction‏.‏ This is not a war about democracy inIraq‏. ‏This is a war about something else…There is a strong smellof oil in the air."

At the time, this sounded like defamation. Today it is already clear beyond doubt thatthe American invasion had nothing to do with either the "war on terrorism", nor withweapons of mass destruction, nor with the crimes of Saddam Hussein or with democracy. This hasbeen proven and documented beyond all doubt, most recently by the testimony ofRichard Clarke, who has been Bush's man in charge of the "war againstterrorism". From the moment Bush entered the White House, he and his handlerspursued one aim in the Middle East: to occupy Iraq.

The Bushes are oilmen. Among the big-money people who helped to put the twoBushes, Sr. and Jr., into the White House, oilmen played a leading role. They have decided thatthe American Empire needs to get its hands on the vast oil reserves of Iraq and to establish apermanent military base in the middle of the oil region, between the oil of theCaspian Sea and the oil of the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The neo-con fanatics, mostof whom are right-wing Zionists, added to this another objective: to eliminate the Iraqi threatto Israel, before freeing Israel of the Syrian and Iranian threats. But this was a secondaryaim. It would not have succeeded in dominating American policy without thedecisive impact of Dick Cheney and the other Bush handlers, who wanted to establish directAmerican military control over most of the earth's oil.

This aim has been achieved. Iraq was conquered. 135 thousand US soldiers uphold theoccupation regime, with the addition of a few troops of the satellite countries, such as Poland,the Ukraine, the UK, El-Salvador and Italy. A small (and not very intelligent) official named"L. Paul Bremer 3rd", no less, has become Governor of the new colony, andhe intends to "hand over sovereignty" to an Iraqi government he himselfhas appointed.

That is to say, sovereignty over garbage collection and hospitals, but definitely notover the really important functions, which will be firmly in the hands of American"advisors". For this purpose, the biggest US Embassy in the world is being built inBaghdad: over 3000 officials, who will control every aspect of government in the country.

That reminds one of the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain in France. The Iraqisthemselves will be reminded of the British colonial power structure in their country, whichoperated through an Arab "king". As far as the Americans are concerned, this couldlast forever. Not for a year, not for two years, but for decades, like the Israeli occupationof the Palestinian areas. But, unlike the Israelis, they call this "nationbuilding" and "establishing the first democracy in the Arab world".George Orwell would have enjoyed it.

A minor factor was overlooked: the Iraqi people. But one really cannot think abouteverything, can one? When the armed resistance started, the Americans comfortedthemselves with talk about "remnants of the Saddam regime", or"terrorists", perhaps foreign agents of Osama Bin-Laden. More than anyother colonial regime, the Americans find it difficult to accept the most simplefact in the world: that an occupied people will arise against its occupier. And really, whathave the Iraqis to complain about, after the idealistic Americans, out of the kindness of theirhearts, liberated them from the evil Saddam? 

Now the Americans are consideringwhether to bring in more troops. The politicians ask the generals: how many more soldiers do youneed in order to control Iraq? And the generals ponder in all earnest: 10 thousandmore? 20 thousand more? If there had been one serious person among them, he would have answered:"Even 500 thousand will not be enough. When a whole people rises, foreign soldiers arehelpless." 

The Americans were ready for the Sunnis to be dissatisfied. Theyhad been ruling the Iraqi state since it was founded by the British after thefirst World War, and were going to lose their supremacy. But the Shiites? Afterall, in the "democracy" that the Americans were about to establish, the Shiites couldexpect a major share in power. But the Shiites do not want to receive "power" in acountry that stays occupied. 

Even before the war, we warned (don't worry, I am not going toquote myself a third time!) that it was well-nigh impossible to maintain a stateof three mutually hostile peoples: the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds. That isstill true today. But perhaps a miracle is happening now: Shiites and Sunnis are fightingtogether against the occupation. Who knows, the common struggle may just, and for the firsttime, forge a real Iraqi nation and prevent a bloody civil war along the road. Let us hope so.

Now the Americans are caught in a trap of their own making. Even if they wantedto leave Iraq (which they certainly do not!), they would be unable to do so. As the Hebrewsaying goes, they can neither swallow it nor spit it out.
There is really nothing they can do. They will sink ever deeper into thequagmire, kill and be killed, destroy and be destroyed, with ever growing brutality, in a kindof a new desert Vietnam. In the hourly news on Al Jazeera, it is already difficult todistinguish between our soldiers in Ramallah and the American soldiers in Falluja. What ishappening to us will happen to them, only on a larger scale.

How will this similarity influence Bush and his people? They might say: One quagmire isenough. Let's get out of one of them. Let us compel Sharon to make, at long last, an agreementwith the Palestinians, instead of babbling about "unilateral disengagement",which will probably never happen anyhow.

But Bush and the Bushites could also say: If we are so much alike, let us embrace Sharoneven more closely. Such a reaction would find its well-earned place in "March of Folly2".

That might even be a good thing, allowing these two gentlemen the pleasure of leavingthe stage together.