What occupation looks like - Comment - Iraqi people respond to occupation of their country

Progressive, The, June, 2003

"We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say, 'Damn, we're Americans.'"

-- General Jay Garner

No one wants to be occupied; no one wants to be colonized; no one wants to see foreign troops patrolling their streets. What most people want, around the world, is to rule themselves and to have enough food and water for their families.

For more than twelve years, the United States helped to decimate Iraq's food supply and pollute its water by insisting that the U.N. impose economic sanctions. (In a sadistic irony, George Will and others used the brutality of these sanctions as a justification for the war: Essentially, we need to invade your country so we can stop starving your kids.) As the United States rolled in, President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assured the Iraqi people that the American conquerors would take care of them. But that care was not immediately forthcoming.

"With no law and no government, the people of Baghdad feel alone, afraid, and angry," Reuters reported on April 30. "Three weeks after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, many parts of the capital still have no water or electricity, there are floods of sewage, and only a trickle of convoys have made it through with urgently needed food and medical supplies."

Reuters quoted a woman in Baghdad named Nada Ali: "It has never been this bad before," she said. "It just seems to get worse every day. I used to have hope, but I can no longer believe we will be saved. No one cares for us. I have four people at home and my husband was killed during fighting in Basra. I have no money, and I no longer know what to do."

One retired civil servant, Nizar Sarhan, told Reuters: "We did not defend Saddam because we did not want him. But if this situation continues, all the Iraqi people will fight the Americans."

It may be that General Jay Garner's colonial administration will start delivering the goods and thereby take some of the fuel away from this anger. But it's likely that the occupation will still rankle, and that the calls from Iraqi nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists will continue to draw thousands of protesters into the streets to demand that the Americans go home.

If anyone thought this occupation of Iraq was going to be easy, send them to Mosul or Falluja. On April 15, a crowd of 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqis in Mosul was protesting against the American occupation and, in particular, against Iraqi opposition leader Mishaan al-Jabouri, who claimed to be the new governor of this city of 700,000 people. When al-Jabouri spoke to the crowd and praised the Americans, many in the crowd responded by throwing rocks at him, according to several news accounts. As the crowd got rowdier, the Marines opened fire, killing at least ten Iraqis and wounding dozens of others. One of the wounded was an eleven-year-old girl who had been watching the protest from the roof of a nearby building. She ended up with a chunk of shrapnel embedded in her lung. The next day, U.S. soldiers killed three more people in Mosul.

Then, on April 28 in Falluja, 200 people reportedly had gathered to protest the fact that U.S. troops had taken over a school, but then what happened is unclear. U.S. troops say they were fired on from the crowd, and then returned fire, killing at least thirteen. The protesters say no one from the crowd shot at the Americans. On the morning of April 30, as demonstrators were denouncing the shootings, U.S. soldiers killed two more demonstrators.

This is what occupation looks like.

With some justification, many Iraqis suspect hat the primary reason for Bush's invasion was to grab Iraq's oil.

If it wasn't about oil, how come one of the first things the U.S. soldiers did was to secure the oil fields?

If it wasn't about oil, how come U.S. troups guarded the oil ministry, while they stood idly by as looters rampaged through the national museum?

If it wasn't about oil, how come Philip J. Carroll, former head of Shell Oil Company of the United States, has been appointed to run the oil ministry?

If it wasn't about oil, how come Rumsfeld's favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, is on record as saying, "American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil"?

If it wasn't about oil, how come Rumsfeld took less than a week to use oil as a weapon by turning off the spigot on the pipeline between Iraq and Syria?

"Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil," Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation on April 23. "They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports, and drugs." General Garner may end up privatizing all of these industries, Klein says, arguing that this is corporate globalization at gunpoint. Who needs the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization when the Pentagon can do the job?

Klein is on to something. "State Department blueprints sent to Congress before the war began laid out a vision for Iraq's reconstruction that would move that country aggressively toward 'self-managed economic prosperity, with a market-based economy and privately owned enterprises,'" The Washington Post reported.