Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Streak of violence

PV Vivekanand

WASHINGTON has grossly miscalculated the streak of violence in the Iraqi society that is behind the continuing and rising wave of attacks against coalition troops occupying Iraq. True, American strategists might have taken note of the history of violence and bloodshed in the country and perpetual state of tension and confrontation there, but they went wrong when they expected the people of Iraq to stay put and remain forever grateful to Washington for ending the tyrannic regime of Saddam Hussein.
That is the fundamental message that the Bush administration should learn from last week's bombing at the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed at least 20 people -- including chief of mission Sergio Vieira e Mello -- and injured over 100 others.
Shocking as it might have been to many around the world, the bombing should not have been surprising since the natural course of events dictated that the UN would be targeted, notwithstanding the world body's efforts to alleviate the suffering of the people of post-Saddam Iraq.
The US brushed aside international opposition and UN refusal to authorise war and going ahead with its invasion of Iraq on justifications that have been proved hollow. The US told the world that it did not care what the international community felt about its moves and pressing its own agenda in Iraq after invading the country and toppling Saddam.
At that point, everyone respected the UN's position that it needed much more evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction before authorising war.
But the twist came when the UN Security Council was pressured into adopting Resolution 1500 welcoming the formation of the US-picked Iraqi Governing Council (but stopping short of recognising it), it was seen by some as the forerunner of an eventual UN endorsement of American moves and decisions concerning Iraq. The bombing at the UN office in Baghdad was a message that the world body should not allow itself to be manipulated by the US. If the very image of the UN flag flying outside the Canal Hotel in Baghdad was seen as the world body's acquiesence with the US occupation of Iraq, it came to symbolise what many saw as its being part and parcel of the occupation of the country; and last week's bombing was a message to the UN to stay way from becoming part of occupation as much as it was also a warning to the international community not to assign troops to support the American occupation of Iraq.
One needs to understand the violent streak in Iraqi blood that could be traced to several centuries ago.
Many historians note that Iraq was ruled for more than 150 years in the 13th and 14th century by the Mongols, known for their savagery and brutality as well as intolerance as evident in their policy of not taking prisoners in their conquests. For them, taking prisoners not only meant having to feed and guard them but also leaving the door open for a potential enemy to re-emerge to pose a new challenge.
That approach has been handed down to the generations and remains a strong feature of the Iraqi society today, the historians argue.
Examples are many to support this theory. The simplest of them is the fact that it takes very little for two Iraqis to go for each other's throat at the slighest provocation. Degeneration of arguments into fisticuffs among Iraqis are a daily feature of life in the country. It does not really matter whether they belong to the same community or otherwise; quite simply, they have a violent temper of a magnitude that is several notches higher than any other people, whether Arab, Muslim or otherwise.
That streak has prevailed throughout the years of the evolution of modern Iraq.
There has never been any smooth transition of power in Iraq over the centuries. The Ottomans, who occupied the entire region for nearly 500 years, had great difficulty in containing the Iraqis and it was only through conspiring with local communities and playing one against another that the Ottomans largely saved their own skin from the dangers of controlling a people whose history is more bloody than any other in the region.
The very diversity of Iraqi society -- Sunnis, Shites, Kurds (with varying links to Iran, Syria and Turkey), Turkomen, Christians and Assyrians, not to mention groups following differing ideologies -- always remained a challenge to anyone who tried to rule them.
In the years after the Ottoman Empire collapses after World War I, Britain, by sheer military force, held the communities together and imposed on them the Hashemite monarchy. But then, more than 20,000 British and allied Indian soldiers died between 1916 and 1920 in battles with Iraqi tribes who resisted the British designs in post-Ottoman Iraq.
"Iraq was and is a very violent and dangerous place," wrties British journalist Patrik Coburn. "It is easy to get into, as the British armies found in 1914, but one of the most difficult countries in the world to rule."
Recovering from the centuries of oppression and enjoying what they saw as newfound freedoms, the Iraqis started challenging the Hashemite monarchy soon thereafter, and the ruling family hit back with equal force and brutality. However, it was not until 1958 that the Iraqis got together and mustered enough strength for themselves to overthrow the monarchy.
Even at that, the ouster of the regime was violent. Jubilant Iraqis dragged the bodies of royal family members through the streets of Baghdad; oldtimers remember that pieces of bones from the bodies were offered for sale as coveted souvenirs. Such violence should be compared with the ouster of the monarchy in Egypt only four years earlier, when the Egyptians put their ousted king and his family aboard a boat from Alexandria into the Mediterranean and sent him out to exile.
No doubt, it is the very nature of the Iraqi society that produced a ruthless and iron-fisted Saddam Hussein as its ruler. Had Saddam been soft, he would not have survived in power and the Iraqis themselves understood it more than anyone else.
It was not at all surprising during the Saddam reign to hear many Iraqi grudgingly agreeing that "we Iraqis need someone like Saddam to keep the country together because we Iraqis recognise the language of physical force than anything else."
As such, it should not have been shocking for the Iraqis to see the gruesome images of the dead bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein -- Saddam's sons – on television and blown up on front pages of newspapers. They simply accepted it as something that could happen any day; but then, by displaying those bodies, the Americans sent a wrong message to some Iraqis -- that the US was all-too powerful and could and would do anything it wanted in the country; surely that did not go down well with them since it touched the very core of the Iraqi mindset (notwithstanding the bitter and intense hatred that the Saddam family had acquired for themselves).
And now the Americans, recording an everage of 12 attacks on its soldiers every day in occupied Iraq and having lost about 60 soldiers since May, are learning the lessons the hard way; and it is only a matter of time when a massive attack takes place to claim dozens of American soldiers' lives in one go.