http://www.pittsburghpulp.com/content/2004/04_29/news_cover_story.shtml

Smoke Gets in Our Eyes
As violence in Iraq escalates, our national debate turns inward and the issues of ordinary Iraqis fade from view
BY GEOFF KELLY

Early one morning several months back, a U.S. Army Humvee drove straight through the front door of a Baghdad hotel and into the lobby. A raiding party of American soldiers, assault rifles at the ready, followed the vehicle into the lobby and tore the hotel to pieces, searching every room and every guest, upending the restaurant kitchen and the offices behind the main desk. When the soldiers were finished, they confiscated the hotel's safe and drove off, the morning air drifting in among the rubble where the door and windows used to be.

Upset and bewildered, the owner of the hotel appealed to a special compensation board the Coalition Provisional Authority set up to hear the grievances of Iraqi civilians who have lost property or loved ones as the result of actions undertaken by the U.S. troops that American commanders optimistically insist on calling "coalition" forces. "What happened?" he asked the compensation board, which is staffed with U.S. military officers and is empowered to grant a maximum of $2,500 to redress all wrongs, from dead relatives to hotel demolition.

Informers had told American intelligence officers that insurgents were hiding in the man's hotel and had a cache of weapons there. As it turned out, however, the raiding party made no arrests and found no weapons. They'd been misled. "Okay," the hotel owner replied, "so how about paying for the damage to my hotel?"

No luck, he was told. Because the U.S. soldiers who tore up his place of business believed there were armed insurgents inside, the event qualified as a "combat situation" -- which is defined as any situation in which U.S. soldiers feel at risk. Because it was a combat situation, and because the soldiers followed "the rules of engagement" -- a body of guidelines that is unavailable to both Iraqi citizens and the international press -- he could have just $500 in compensation.

"But why did the army drive through my front door?" asked the hotel owner, who knew that $500 would never cover the damage to his building and his business. "If somebody had only knocked, I certainly would have opened it."

Again, they told him, it was a combat situation. Also, the hotel safe, he was informed, had disappeared. Lost in transit. C'est la guerre.

"It could be a funny story," said Thomas Summer, a French human-rights activist who works on such cases with a group called Occupation Watch (www.occupationwatch.org). Except, Summer explained, that in many such instances people have been killed or wounded.

Hundreds of Iraqi civilians have been killed during 11 months of U.S. occupation. No one knows how many. Tens of thousands have been jailed and denied contact with family members or lawyers. Again, no one knows how many. Occupation Watch has helped hundreds of families in Baghdad and surrounding communities to file grievances with the compensation board and petitions to locate imprisoned relatives. All of them have been denied.

Hundreds of thousands have been put out of work; some estimate the unemployment rate to be as high as 70 percent. In a country where 60 percent of the population already relies on food bags distributed by the United Nations, hundreds of thousands of families have been stripped of the ability to make a living -- or, worse yet, have been stripped of family members who were principal breadwinners.

As fighting has intensified in the last month, attention has been diverted from the everyday and long-term impacts of Iraq's occupation and turned to short-term, tactical issues: how to deal with Sunni fighters and their allies in Fallujah; how to handle Muqtada al-Sadr's Iran-supported army and the Shia militias across the country that will rise up if the U.S. Army attacks the holy city of Najaf that is his power base.

Political questions are being re-examined as well, though they are not nearly as sexy for CNN and Fox as the question of how to quell the new Iraqi uprisings: to whom the CPA will nominally cede authority on June 30; whether and how to withdraw U.S. troops; the role of the U.N. in Iraq; and, most self-reflective of all, the impact all of this might have on November's presidential election.

In the past month, Iraq has become our problem to resolve. Never mind that nearly 25 million people live in Iraq. We seem certain that the solution to the Iraq problem will be ours to determine.

In a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Toensing, editor of Middle East Report (www.merip.org), described what he called "the stubborn solipsism of the American debate on Iraq": "...the ultimate measure of how self-centered our national conversation about Iraq has become can be found in what is not measured. No attempt is being made by the U.S. military to count civilian deaths in besieged Fallujah -- nor were such records kept during the major combat operations last year. And no one is monitoring maternal and child mortality rates since [Saddam] Hussein's defeat."

Hussein's regime kept meticulous records of those statistics, Toensing points out, as did the United Nations and independent researchers during the 12 years of economic sanctions that followed the first Gulf War. Hussein wanted the world to know that U.N. sanctions were killing Iraqi civilians. The U.S. apparently would prefer the world be unable to measure the impact of its occupation of Iraq. Toensing quotes Alaa Yusuf, a doctor he and I interviewed in mid March in a hospital in north Baghdad, which reportedly is now filling up with civilian casualties from Fallujah: "Maybe the statistics were part of the old regime's propaganda," Yusuf told us. "Maybe the new propaganda requires no statistics."

The dramatic violence of the last month has coaxed the major media's cadre of senior military analysts back onto the airwaves to talk about the efficacy of particular weapons systems: the ability, for example, of the A-130 to target a square meter with its cannons, each of whose rounds, of course, destroys a far greater area. The retired military officers discuss the perils of street-to-street fighting against a guerrilla force, whom they call "the bad guys," and provide voiceover for footage of explosions and troop movements. We are advised that the Sunnis in Fallujah have been joined by "black-robed foreign fighters," a sign that if Iraq previously was not the "front line in the war on terror," it surely is now, thanks to the CPA's failure to secure the country's borders.

Arab journalists -- the only journalists who can get close enough to appreciate the Iraqi perspective on the confrontation at this point -- report that in the last month more than 1,000 Iraqis have been killed, 600 in Fallujah alone. As of April 27, there were 829 dead among coalition troops since the war began, 725 of those Americans. One hundred twenty-two of those American deaths came in April. Confronted with hourly reports on this carnage, it is understandable that the American public should become less curious about the daily pains and injustices of occupation and reconstruction. But for most Iraqis, the fundamental questions -- how to make a living, how to improve quality of life, how to engage in politics for the first time in 30 years -- will not be resolved by firefights in Fallujah and Najaf. The answers to those questions, many Iraqis seem to believe, are being negotiated for them in the Green Zone, in Hussein's former palace. The negotiators are American officials of the CPA, U.S.-approved private contractors and the largely discredited Iraqi Governing Council, whose members most Iraqis consider sellouts handpicked to be U.S. puppets when the CPA is dissolved at the end of June.

Yusuf, the doctor at the hospital in north Baghdad, works a second job in his off-hours in order to feed his family. The Ministry of Health cannot keep his hospital supplied with the most basic drugs and equipment. "Isn't there money?" he said on the day we interviewed him. "Iraq is full of money. If I put my hand under this hospital, I can assure you I'll bring back money. There is everything here. I should be rich, you should be rich, everybody should be rich. We have money from the banks. We have the personal money from the old regime. We have the money in the ground, which is going out by American oil companies."

In the U.S. we debate the price of occupation and our burgeoning budget deficit, while Iraqis worry that a $310 billion debt to other nations, rung up by Saddam Hussein over the course of 25 years and three wars, will cripple the nation's economy for decades. While we debate who should take power in Iraq at the end of June, Iraqis worry that whoever we choose will continue to give away the store, making trade agreements that allow U.S.-approved contractors to privatize the country's infrastructure and security agreements that will allow U.S. troops to occupy the country indefinitely.

"There are so many other things going on in Iraq where there are not witnesses," said Herbert Docena, a Filipino activist working with Occupation Watch. "More covert things, like the drafting of new laws by private American corporations. The setting up of illegal governmental and economic structures. Things which need more than direct witnessing -- things that need more technical, academic specialization. Academically, Iraq is like a laboratory, if you will, for how the U.S. is creating a state to its liking, using its own processes."

Asked what he thought Iraq needed most in the coming months and years, Docena replied, "Lots of things, of course: food, money, medical supplies, new infrastructure. But we also need graduate students, people with technical and academic specialties. I think right now it's critical that we monitor how they are setting up the transitional government."

Right now foreign corporations are allowed to repatriate 100 percent of the profits earned on investments in Iraq. That amounts to usury; it's no wonder that bribes are allegedly pouring into the hands of the CPA officials who make contract decisions and the IGC members who have their ears.

The June 31 handover date approaches and plumes of smoke rising above Fallujah dominate American TV news. While our political and military leaders debate how to proceed and dissect a litany of mistakes made, Iraqis are occupied with other concerns: Who will direct the country's new banking system? Why are CPA contractors importing Pakistani laborers to take jobs that Iraqi families desperately need? When will Bechtel's elaborately drawn plans for Baghdad's new sewage treatment plants be realized, and who will own them and maintain them? When will the phones start working? When will electricity be reliable? When will there be an independent police force that does more to make the streets safe than stand behind barbed-wire checkpoints? If Iraqis are not making these decisions, then who is? When will Iraqis finally get to vote?

Even the most abstract of these problems is more real to the Iraqis I met than, for example, the debate in America's editorial pages over invoking Viet Nam as an analogy for the deteriorating situation in Iraq -- by which we mean the deterioration of our control of the country and its destiny. Iraqis don't even respect the American experience in choosing analogies. "Fallujah will be their Stalingrad," a man who was wounded in Fallujah, along with his son, recently told the London Daily Telegraph. "The Euphrates will be a river of their blood." The devil is in the details, as they say. Quick, look over there -- another bomb just went off.