NOTE: Nothing I, or anyone, can say about this issue can equal the AP photographs circulating around the world today [December 20]. Criminal thugs pulling election workers out of their car in Baghdad traffic and executing them in the street. What we see in this atrocity are not "insurgents" "resisting" foreign occupation, but fascists attempting to subvert and destroy the birth of democracy.
For a deeper and more eloquent analysis of the significance of these photographs go to Belmont Club.
The second war to liberate Iraq has begun, pitting election campaigns against terrorist campaigns. While we hope and expect politics to win, its enemies are exacting a bloody cost from the Iraqi people.
Today, two car bombs exploded an hour apart in the Shia-dominated cities of Najaf and Karbala. According to the AP, the blast in Najaf occurred amidst a funeral procession in Maidan Square, killing forty-nine and wounding 90. The attack in Karbala, 45 miles northwest, took place near the city's bus station: 13 dead, 30 injured. This was the second terrorist attack to strike Karbala this week. On December 15--the opening day of the election campaign--a blast struck the Imam Hussain mosque, killing seven.
In Baghdad today, 30 gunmen armed with grenades and machine-guns ambushed a car carrying five employees of the Election Commission of Iraq, killing three.
Let us pause to consider these events. Here is a country struggling to stage the first democratic elections in its 3,000 year history. Meanwhile, paramilitary death-squads are attempting to delay, de-legitimize and destroy the process, even as they prod the country toward civil war. The values millions of people profess to hold dear--democracy, peace, stability, tolerance, women's rights--are at risk. And yet the world remains largely silent.
In the 1930s, men volunteered for units like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in order to fight Fascism in Spain. Today, their tenured sons and daughters sit in comfortable academic seminars where they denounce the "empire" and its nefarious designs on the planet. (See my "The Empire and Laurie Brand" in the archives.) Or they create websites like "Iraq Body Count," which tallies the number of civilian deaths--without, however, discriminating between those killed by U.S. troops, fascist paramilitaries, disease, crime or tribal disputes. Judging by its home page image of a Stealth Bomber dropping its payload, every death is America's fault.
At least Iraq Body Count is acknowledging and registering the dead; the rest of the world just turns away. As the New York Times' Thomas Friedman noted last week, the European Union, NATO, the Arab League - all stand to gain from stability in Iraq, yet none are contributing much in the way of manpower or resources to assure that outcome. The columnist writes,
"We in Iraq have a lot of disappointment with many of our neighbors," Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's interim president, told me the other day while he was visiting Washington. Al-Yawar described Iraq's neighbors as sitting on a fence "dangling their legs and munching on pistachios," while "the forces of darkness" try to rip Iraq to shreds. "We do not understand why a vicious suicide bomber who claims the lives of innocent civilians is a terrorist in one country and in Iraq he becomes a freedom fighter," added al-Yawar, a bright and decent man.
As for the U.N.'s treatment of the Iraqis--let us pass over the Oil for Food program scandal and Kofi Annan's description of their liberation as "illegal. Rather, let us contemplate on the fact the organization plans to send 25 election monitors (perhaps a few more), far less than the 300 it dispatched to East Timor in 1999.
Why? According to the Daily Kos, the reason the world ignores Iraq is because
No one, but no one, trusts the Bush Administration on anything. BushCo is malevolent, untrustworthy and incompetent. Consider for a moment the risks involved in cooperating with BushCo. They remain as high as ever. Especially in the surroundings of a controversial election that is sure to fuel considerable violence. And what are the potential rewards? A successful election in Iraq? And this guarantees what exactly?
In other words, it's all Bush's fault. It doesn't matter how many brave Iraqis die in an attempt to move their country to a better place, it doesn't matter that their enemies are the same type of creatures who operated the killing fields of Cambodia, the gulags of the Soviet Union, the concentration camps of Nazi Germany--who have, in every generation throughout history, found the light of human freedom too painful to withstand and so sought to darken it forever. No, it's Bush's fault.
God knows the current administration has done much to earn such opprobrium. But I wonder if there aren't other factors at work in the world's seeming apathy to the Iraqis. Europe calculates that its advantage lies, as always, in letting the U.S. do the heavy-lifting security work while its ministers stand on the sidelines carping at American policies. The Arab League is too obsessed with anti-Semitism to act in any constructive manner. And the Left? Their multicultural, anti-capitalist, anti-globalization impulses have put them in tacit sympathy with the very forces which retard progress in Iraq, in the world and throughout history: tribalism.
When a group of Islamofascists killed 300 people in Madrid's train stations, Spaniards declared the event was their "9-11." When a single Muslim extremists killed one man--Theo van Gogh--the Dutch claimed that event was their 9-11. By that estimation, the Iraqi people suffer the equivalent of numerous 9-11s every week. Where is the world's sympathy, its outrage, its offers of assistance? Nous sommes tous Americains, Le Monde famously declared after the real 9-11. Nous sommes tous Irakiens? The answer is, distressingly, no.
ADDITIONAL INFO: Jeff Harrell at shapeofdays.typepad.com alerts me to iraqelect.com. For more information about the elections (plus a great tutorial on the fascist paramilitaries), go to Iraqi Bloggers Central.
Comments