Tomgram: Dahr Jamail on Devastated Iraq

I've been in liberated Baghdad and environs on and off for 12 months, including being inside Fallujah during the April siege and having warning shots fired over my head more than once by soldiers. I've traveled in the south, north, and extensively around central Iraq. What I saw in the first months of 2004, however, when it was easier for a foreign reporter to travel the country, offered a powerful -- even predictive -- taste of the horrors to come in the rest of the year (and undoubtedly in 2005 as well). It's worth returning to the now forgotten first half of last year and remembering just how terrible things were for Iraqis even relatively early in our occupation of their country. Then, as now, for Iraqis, our invasion and occupation was a case of liberation from -- from human rights (think: the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib which are still occurring daily there and elsewhere); liberation from functioning infrastructure (think: the malfunctioning electric system, the many-mile long gas lines, the raw sewage in the streets); liberation from an entire city to live in (think: Fallujah, most of which has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment and other means). Iraqis were then already bitter, confused, and existing amid a desolation that came from myriads of Bush administration broken promises. Quite literally every liberated Iraqi I've gotten to know from my earliest days in the country has either had a family member or a friend killed by U.S. soldiers or from the effects of the war/occupation. These include such everyday facts of life as not having enough money for food or fuel due to massive unemployment and soaring energy prices, or any of the countless other horrors caused by the aforementioned. The broken promises, broken infrastructure, and broken cities of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months of 2004 -- and the sad thing is that the devastation I saw then has only grown worse since. The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous as it was, was but a prelude to what was to come under the U.S. occupation. The warning signs were clear from a shattered infrastructure, to all the torturing, to a burgeoning, violent resistance.

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The Mire of Death, Lies and Atrocities: Robert Fisk Looks Back at 2004

Well, I think that the whole project in Iraq is finished. We are not being told by Mr. Blair in my case and Bush in yours that this is the case, and perhaps through their own misjudgment or their own fantasies, they don't even accept this themselves. But the American project for democracy or whatever its real purposes were, for oil, economic expansion, Middle East fit for Israel, whatever it may have been, that project is finished. It is hopeless. It cannot succeed. The insurgency in Iraq is so great now that American troops, however enormous their technology, cannot control it. The Iraqi so-called ministers, and I include Iyad Allawi, the so-called interim prime minister, who was of course appointed by the Americans as a former C.I.A. asset, they behave like statesmen when they tour the world or turn up in Washington, but in Baghdad they're not even safe inside their little Green Zone. They're not even the Mayor of Baghdad, they have less power than the town clerk. So, we have reached a stage now where insurgents control much of the country. The only safe part of Iraq is Kurdistan in the north, which is effectively an autonomous region, outside of the control anyway of the Iraqi government. And the elections, which are coming up, appear doomed because already we're hearing that if the Sunnis won't take part, the Americans are trying to persuade the unelected government to appoint Sunni Muslims to make up for the voters who didn't vote. This is not an election, this is a charade. And what has happened is that the alienation of the Iraqis as a people from the West has been brought about by lunatic policies by the State Department and by the Pentagon, I'm afraid by the behavior of American troops and a lesser expect, but nonetheless culpable British troops and by the fantasies, which drove this war in the first place, the idea that we were going to suddenly create democracy in the Middle East. One of the things I have been studying for my new book on the Middle East, which comes out this year, is what happened when the rebellion first occurred in 1920, the time of which Lawrence of Arabia was talking, against the British military in Iraq. And exactly the same pattern took place. The Sunni Muslims became disenfranchised. The British laid seize to Fallujah, they laid seize to Najaf. The prime minister, in this case Lloyd George rather than Tony Blair, said if we believe there will be civil war and British military intelligence in Baghdad claimed that the terrorists were arriving - in 1920 this is - from Syria. Same old sorry. So I am afraid that even if you look at the pattern of history, there is no hope. If you look at the pattern today there is no hope. We come back to the equation, which I think I have set out on your program before, that the Americans must leave, and the Americans will leave, and the Americans can't leave.

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