Klein on Iraq

To: Retort

Die, then vote. This is Falluja
Naomi Klein
November 13, 2004
The Guardian

 The hip-hop mogul P Diddy announced at the weekend that his "Vote or 
Die"
campaign will live on. The voter registration drive during the US 
presidential
elections was, he said, merely "phase one, step one for us to get people
engaged".

Fantastic. I have a suggestion for phase two: P Diddy, Ben Affleck, 
Leonardo
DiCaprio and the rest of the self-described "coalition of the willing" 
should
take their chartered jet and fly to Falluja, where their efforts are
desperately needed. But first they are going to need to flip the slogan 
from
"Vote or Die!" to "Die, then Vote!"

Because that is what is happening there. Escape routes have been sealed 
off,
homes are being demolished, and an emergency health clinic has been 
razed - all
in the name of preparing the city for January elections. In a letter to 
United
Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, the US-appointed Iraqi prime 
minister
Iyad Allawi explained that the all-out attack was required "to 
safeguard lives,
elections and democracy in Iraq."

With all the millions spent on "democracy-building" and "civil society" 
in Iraq,
it has come to this: if you can survive attack by the world's only 
superpower,
you get to cast a ballot. Fallujans are going to vote, goddammit, even 
if they
all have to die first.

And make no mistake: it is Fallujans who are under the gun. "The enemy 
has got a
face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja," marine Lt Col Gareth 
Brandl told
the BBC. Well, at least he admitted that some of the fighters actually 
live in
Falluja, unlike Donald Rumsfeld, who would have us believe that they 
are all
from Syria and Jordan. And since US army vehicles are blaring recordings
forbidding all men between the ages of 15 and 50 from leaving the city, 
it
would suggest that there are at least a few Iraqis among what CNN now
obediently describes as the "anti-Iraqi forces".


Elections in Iraq were never going to be peaceful, but they did not 
need to be
an all-out war on voters either. Mr Allawi's Rocket the Vote campaign 
is the
direct result of a disastrous decision made one year ago. On November 
11 2003,
Paul Bremer, then chief US envoy to Iraq, flew to Washington to meet 
George
Bush. The two men were concerned that if they kept their promise to hold
elections in Iraq within the coming months, the country would fall into 
the
hands of insufficiently pro-American forces.

That would defeat the purpose of the invasion, and it would threaten 
President
Bush's re-election chances. At that meeting, a revised plan was hatched:
elections would be delayed for more than a year, and in the meantime, 
Iraq's
first "sovereign" government would be hand-picked by Washington. The 
plan would
allow Mr Bush to claim progress on the campaign trail, while keeping 
Iraq safely
under US control.

In the US, Mr Bush's claim that "freedom is on the march" served its 
purpose,
but in Iraq, the plan led directly to the carnage we see today.

Mr Bush likes to paint the forces opposed to the US presence in Iraq as 
enemies
of democracy. In fact, much of the uprising can be traced directly to 
decisions
made in Washington to stifle, repress, delay, manipulate and otherwise 
thwart
the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people.

Yes, democracy has genuine opponents in Iraq, but before George Bush 
and Paul
Bremer decided to break their central promise to hand over power to an 
elected
Iraqi government, these forces were isolated and contained. That 
changed when
Mr Bremer returned to Baghdad and tried to convince Iraqis that they 
weren't
yet ready for democracy.

Mr Bremer argued that the country was too insecure to hold elections, 
and
besides, there were no voter rolls. Few were convinced. In January 2004,
100,000 Iraqis peacefully took to the streets of Baghdad, and 30,000 
more did
so in Basra. Their chant was "Yes, yes elections. No, no selections." 
At the
time, many argued that Iraq was safe enough to have elections and 
pointed out
that the lists from the Saddam-era oil-for-food programme could serve 
as voter
rolls. But Mr Bremer wouldn't budge and the UN - scandalously and 
fatefully -
backed him up.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Hussain al-Shahristani, chairman of 
the
standing committee of the Iraqi National Academy of Science (who was 
imprisoned
under Saddam Hussein for 10 years), accurately predicted what would 
happen next.
"Elections will be held in Iraq, sooner or later," he wrote. "The 
sooner they
are held, and a truly democratic Iraq is established, the fewer Iraqi 
and
American lives will be lost."

Ten months and thousands of lost Iraqi and American lives later, 
elections are
scheduled to take place with part of the country in the grip of yet 
another
invasion and much of the rest of it under martial law. As for the voter 
rolls,
the Allawi government is planning to use the oil-for-food lists, just 
as was
suggested and dismissed a year ago.

So it turns out that all of the excuses were lies: if elections can be 
held now,
they most certainly could have been held a year ago, when the country 
was vastly
calmer. But that would have denied Washington the chance to install a 
puppet
regime in Iraq, and possibly would have prevented George Bush from 
winning a
second term.

Is it any wonder that Iraqis are sceptical of the version of democracy 
being
delivered to them by US troops, or that elections have come to be seen 
not as
tools of liberation but as weapons of war?

First, Iraq's promised elections were sacrificed in the interest of 
George
Bush's re-election hopes; next, the siege of Falluja itself was crassly
shackled to these same interests. The fighter planes didn't even wait 
an hour
after George Bush finished his acceptance speech to begin the air 
attack on
Falluja. The city was bombed at least six times through the next day 
and night.
With voting safely over in the US, Falluja could be destroyed in the 
name of its
own upcoming elections.

In another demonstration of their commitment to freedom, the first goal 
of the
US soldiers in Falluja was to ambush the city's main hospital. Why? 
Apparently
because it was the source of the "rumours" about high civilian 
casualties the
last time US troops laid siege to Falluja, sparking outrage in Iraq and 
across
the Arab world. "It's a centre of propaganda," an unnamed senior 
American
officer told the New York Times. Without doctors to count the dead, the 
outrage
would presumably be muted - except that, of course, the attacks on 
hospitals
have sparked their own outrage, further jeopardising the legitimacy of 
the
upcoming elections.

According to the New York Times, the Falluja general hospital was easy 
to
capture, since the doctors and patients put up no resistance. There was,
however, one injury: "An Iraqi soldier who accidentally discharged his
Kalashnikov rifle, injuring his lower leg."

I think that means he shot himself in the foot. He's not the only one.