Only an ’uptick’ in violence

http://www.dawn.com/2004/04/04/op.htm#2

What has happened to the ’Coalition Provisional
Authority’, also known as the occupying power? Things
are getting worse, much worse in Iraq. Last week’s
horrors proved that.

Yet just a day earlier, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt,
America’s deputy director of military operations,
assured us that there was only an "uptick" in violence
in Iraq . Not a sudden wave of violence, mark you, not
a down-to-earth increase, not even a "spike" in
violence - another of the general’ favourite
expressions. No, just a teeny-weany, ever-so small,
innocent little "uptick". In fact, he said it was a
"slight uptick."

Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did
General Kimmitt take us through the little ’uptick’. A
Marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a
Marine killed, a second attack with small arms fire on
the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary
recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier
killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence,
a suicide bombing against the home of the Hilla police
chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers
wounded in Mosul... All this was just 17 hours before
Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a
westerner through the streets of their city.

When you go to the manicured lawns and villas of the
so-called ’Green Zone’ in Baghdad, you get this odd,
weird feeling; that here is a place so isolated, so
ostentatiously secure - it is not secure of course,
since mortars are regularly fired into the compound -
that it has no contact with the outside world. Here US
proconsul Paul Bremer lives in Saddam Hussein’s former
palace.

There are less than 100 days before he supposedly hands
over the ’sovereignty’ of Iraq to America’s own new
hand-picked Iraqi government which will hold elections
at an unknown date. And so within the palace walls, the
occupying power believes in optimism, progress and
political development.

When someone asked - just a few hours before the horror
– about the deteriorating security in Mosul, Kimmit
snapped back that this was only "an assessment that you
may be making." As for the Iraqis down in Anbar
province, where five US soldiers were also killed by a
bomb and where at least four foreigners were murdered,
Kimmit stated on Wednesday - and here is a quotation to
remain in the history books - that the US Marines in
Fallujah "are quite pleased with how they are moving
progressively forward."

Every week, it is like this. From the hot, dangerous
streets of Baghdad with their electricity cuts and
gunfire - and an awful lot of ’upticks’ which never get
recorded - we make our way through pallisades of
concrete drums, US army checkpoints and searches, into
a vast, air-conditioned conference centre, a cavernous
Saddamite built in 1981 for presidential summits.

Next to General Kimmit always stands the rather more
spectral figure of Dan Senor, spokesman for the
’Coalition Provisional Authority’ who with his
frameless glasses, unsmiling demeanour and his
occasional, fearful glances at the general when the
latter faces a dodgy question, resembles the kind of a
doctor who clears his throat and quietly advises his
patients to settle their affairs.

That’s how it was when Mr Senor was asked if the editor
of the Shia newspaper ’Al Hawza’ - shut down by dozens
of police and US soldiers this week - had been warned
in advance that it might be closed. Under CPA law, it
was not necessary to issue warnings to newspapers, Mr
Senor huffily replied. Over 200 newspapers had sprouted
up since "liberation" but the CPA would not "tolerate"
anyone who encourages "violence against coalition
forces."

In Baghdad, "Coalition Forces" - i.e. US forces - had
conducted 620 patrols, in the north-central zone 254
patrols, one raid and the arrest of eight
"anti-Coalition suspects" (sic). US forces - this from
General Kimmitt - were "continuing to conduct precision
operations against "anti-Coalition elements and enemies
of the Iraqi people."

The latter sounded positively Soviet. Didn’t the Red
Army used to conduct operations against "anti-socialist
elements and enemies of the Afghan people?" But there
was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face
of Wednesday’s butchery - in General Kimmitt’s
narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to
"terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely
if you could leap from being a ’terrorist’ to being an
’insurgent’, then with the next little hop, skip and
jump, you become a ’freedom-fighter.’

Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He
needn’t have bothered. Kimmitt is a much smoother
operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the
general explained, "former regime elements, perhaps
trained in the Iraqi army" who have "some sort of idea
that they can return." These, it turned out were
’insurgents’ They attacked soldiers and the local
police station in Fallujah.

Then there were the ’terrorists" who go in for
"suicidal, spectacular attacks". These involved
Al-Qaeda and Zarqawi - the latest bogeyman whom the
Americans enlarged for us last month - and other groups
who attack the Iraqi army, hotels, mosques, religious
festivals, Karbala, Baghdad...

So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good ’terrorists’
and bad ’terrorists’, there are common-a-garden
insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind
against which President Bush took us to war in Iraq
when there weren’t any ’terrorists’ actually here,
though there are now.

The catch, of course, is that Kimmit defined the
Fallujah gunmen merely as "insurgents". After
westerners were dragged dead through the streets of
that Sunni Muslim city - at least one of them
reportedly an American - I doubt if he will use that
word again.

And here lies the problem. From inside the ’Green Zone’
on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything.
When a suicide bomber accidentally slammed his truck
into a minibus in Baghdad two months ago - he was
chasing a US convoy - and killed up to 20 people, the
occupying power claimed it was a road accident.

In fact, US troops had told us on the scene that the
bomber had fused his explosives with hand grenades,
some of which were still lying on the road. When two
weeks ago, another bomber blew up the Jebel Lubnan
hotel in Baghdad, more than 17 people were killed; the
authorities then stated that only seven had died.

This correspondent had counted 11 corpses. Then it
turned out that the powers-that-be were only talking
about casualties in the hotel, not the surrounding
buildings. How far can the occupying powers take
war-spin before the world stops believing anything they
say?

On Wednesday’s five o’clock follies, two armed American
soldiers stood guard at both doors - watching us, not
the approach to the doors - while a backdrop carried a
vast shield with the words "Equality, Security,
Liberty, Justice." When we first arrived, vast screens
flashed a series of dire warnings at us. "Do not
attempt to take any photos of this building." "The area
directly in front of the podium is off-limits." "Do
not, under any circumstances, take photos of Coalition
Checkpoints." "Welcome."

Did I detect, among my colleagues, a quickening of our
step as we headed back through the thousands of tons of
concrete to the smog and fear of the streets outside?
Baghdad may be dangerous. But at least it’s on Planet
Earth.

The trouble is that the real world in which Iraqis live
– and in which we travel - is nasty, brutish and
potentially short. When we point this out, we are
abused as pessimists, as journalists who want failure.

And when a bloodbath occurs on the television screens,
we are asked to censor out the worst carnage. Hence the
dragging of the mutilated, fried corpses through the
streets of Fallujah was not shown on western
television; only a truncated, heavily censored version
was broadcast because of "images

too gruesome to show." But the Iraqis see these scenes.
So do we. They looked like Somalia. The best the
authorities can say is that they were "particularly
brutal". Particularly? They were an outrage.

I was outside one western office in Baghdad yesterday,
observing yet another concrete wall being erected
around it. Armed Iraqi militiamen stood at every corner
of the compound. If Bremer’s palace now resembles the
seat of the old British raj, the office I visited was
beginning to look like the British residency at Lucknow
during the Indian Mutiny. That is what we have now come
to. And still Mr Bremer and the men and women of the
’Green Zone’ dream on.- (c) The Independent