The week began with news of a startling battle outside the Iraqi city of Najaf, a battle that left 250 dead "militants" on one side, 25 dead Iraqi soldiers and a couple of dead Americans from a downed helicopter. It was the largest single battle since the American invasion, and was immediately characterized by U.S. commanders and politicians as a victory for Iraqi troops over "insurgents," proving their military mettle with only air support from the U.S.
The governor of Najaf province, a member of Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim's SCIRI party (closely allied with the current Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki and with the government of Iran), quickly threw as many negative labels as he could on the dead. He called them Sunni extremists, Baath loyalists and even members of a militia loyal to Mahmoud Hasani al-Sarkhi, a Shiite leader from Basra (not Najaf) who opposes both the Iraqi government and Moqtada al-Sadr's movment as political sell-outs working with the American occupiers and the Iranians.
But by Monday morning, the stories were emerging that instead a strange cult of "Mahdawis" had been involved in the fight. They are Shiite millenialists who believe in the imminent return of the Mahdi, a Messiah-like figure in Islam. This led to massive confusion among U.S. news reporters, who called the dead "cultists," a mix of Sunnis and Shiites, and generally got them and their leader, Ahmed al-Hasan, mixed up with al-Sarkhi and everyone else involved. Western media were further confused by books found among the dead bodies written by one "Ali bin Ali bin Abi Talib." (Ali bin Abi Talib, the prophet Mohammed's son-in-law, is the most widely revered figure in Shiism aside from Mohammed himself, so someone purporting to be his son is an obvious pseudonym.)
But these reports were still largely based on the official words of local authorities, who, remember, were partisan loyalists of the central Iraqi government. By Tuesday, as reports were leaking out that bodies of women and children had been found amidst the armed men, opposition newspapers and their English-language translators were offering another explanation for Sunday's massacre: Witnesses on the ground said that a Shiite tribe opposed to SCIRI and al-Maliki's Dawa party, and coincidentally to their "Iranian" influence, had been traveling—heavily armed and by night, as one might expect in Hobbesian Iraq—to Najaf to partake in celebrations of the the Shiite Ashura holiday. They had taken refuge with an allied tribe only to suddenly come under attack from Iraqi security forces loyal to their political opponent—-the SCIRI- and government-controlled Iraqi army. As some interviewed by Dahr Jamail pointed out, southern Shiites opposed to the Iraqi government are often painted as terrorists by that government as an excuse to attack them. (Remind you of anyone else we know?)
In all this, the Mahdawis got caught in the middle. And American troops, summoned by "our allies," had no clue who was who, so simply bombed who they were told to bomb. As a startling report from The Boston Globe points out, there are now dozens of armed militias operating across Iraq, and the U.S. military has no clues about most of them.
Meanwhile, in Baghdad, Tom Lasseter, a McClatchy Newspapers reporter, explains to us how Bush's escalation strategy will likely only aid the ones we are ostensibly "surging" against, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr—just as Bush's previous attempts to flood Baghdad and swiftly throw up Iraqi troops have come out in their favor.
The madness of our leap to bomb Shiite splinter sects in a war ostensibly against Sunni al-Qaida—and of our mad grappling for excuses to bomb Iran while we lean on Iran's allies in Iraq to massacre their opponents—exemplifies our entire project in this "war on terror." The Bush administration, in its ignorance and its arrogance, never cared to target any one specific enemy. The important thing is just to have an enemy. If the people at the receiving end of our counterterrorism trick us into believing they are the bad guys, well, that's their problem.
At home, this thinking is reflected by Bostonian politicians. After they made fools of themselves shutting down the city for some Lite-Brite boards, claiming that they were fake bombs designed to "hoax" authorities, they decided to arrest the "hoaxers." Never mind the fact that the Mooninites in question—representing characters in a Cartoon Network show—were clearly neither bombs nor faux bombs and were notintended to fool anyone—as they did not in any of the other cities where they had been deployed for weeks. So they dragged the advertisers in question to court (thankfully they treated it as seriously as it deserved to be treated). Meanwhile, there was no arrest in the case of two fake pipe bombs found on the same day clearly designed to frighten people. Get the sense that the Mooninite planters are being punished for the Boston establishment's embarressment?
From Najaf to Boston, the war on terror is terrifying because it is aimless and directionless, and could sweep up anyone at any moment—-especially if you're someone who's already opposed to the current status quo, whether that means an anti-Iranian Shiite tribe, eco-activists in Washington or Palestinians .
Edward Said saw the philosophical construction of the Other as the political and cultural foundation of Empire: In order to conquer we must study and construct an image of the enemy, distinguished by being Not Us, to justify our conquest. But Bush's neocons lack the intellectual rigor of the old imperialists, who, after all, did meticulous research on their targets and gave us a legacy of Orientalism that still is the basis for most academic Middle East studies.
But the old empires had stability and longevity as their goals. Bush seems content to shoot anything that moves, smash the place, light fire to the rubble and move on.
--Ethan Heitner |
Friday, February 2, 2007 9:01 AM
