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Estado Unidos no debería confiar en los hombres “yes” de Irak

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Original story found here.

¿Cómo terminamos con tantos aprietos en Irak? Porque hicimos lo que hemos hecho por largo tiempo: Buscamos no a los extranjeros con quienes todavía necesitamos trabajar, sino a los exiliados que fueran más parecidos a nosotros.

La práctica de imponer poderes impopulares no comenzó con esta administración de Bush hijo. Es una que los hacedores de la política de Estados Unidos han venido persiguiendo con diferentes resultados. Pero en un mundo tan complejo como este después del 11/9, los días de seleccionar líderes con caracteres de un nobel a lo Graham Greene, se han ido. Al contrario, nosotros debemos construir relaciones con los extranjeros que tienen apoyo entre su propia gente y dejar de acercarnos a los que meramente nos dicen lo que queremos escuchar.

Los hijos de los extranjeros favoritos a menudo disfrutan de más apoyo en esta nación estadounidense que en la suya, apoyo basado en ilusiones que han venido vendiendo de puerta en puerta y que puede tomar años antes de que sean expuestas. Tal hombre fue el presidente de El Salvador, José Napoleón Duarte, quien una vez disfrutó de un amplio consenso bipartidista en Washington.

Duarte era tan dependiente de nosotros para mantenerse en el poder, que él no solamente escribió su autobiografía cuando todavía era presidente en el contexto de la guerra civil de su país, sino que la escribió y la publicó en inglés para que nosotros la leyéramos, en lugar de su propia gente.

Les tomó cinco años a los políticos de Estados Unidos para que finalmente se dieran cuenta de que Duarte, por todas sus promesas color rosa, había fracasado.

Pero ha tomado solamente un año para la mayoría de políticos el darse cuenta que los iraquíes seleccionados por Estados Unidos, están fracasando. El Pentágono ha favorecido a Ahmad Chalabi, mientras que el Departamento de Estado ha preferido a Adnan Pachachi. Ambos son exiliados que no sentaron sus pies en Irak por más de tres décadas, y tampoco nunca se han unido a algún distrito electoral dentro de Irak.

Pero cada uno de ellos se ve bien en papeles. Fluido en inglés, Chalabi estudió matemáticas antes de convertirse en banquero, y él se describe a sí mismo no en términos religiosos sino como un secular Shia Iraki. Pachachi, quien tiene mejores enlaces en el mundo árabe, es un antiguo diplomático quien una vez representó a Irak en Nueva York, en las Naciones Unidas. Chalabi y su familia estuvieron cerca de la “Iraq’s old British-imposed monarchy”(La pasada monarquía inglesa impuesta sobre Irak), mientras que Pachachi sirvió para “Iraq’s pre-Baathist military regimes”( Los regímenes militares antes de la fundación del partido Baath ). Cuando los diferentes oficiales de la actual administración buscaron sobre el colorido pero confuso paisaje sectario de Irak, estos dos hombres sobresalieron.

Una razón por la que Chalabi se encontró favorito por tanto tiempo es que él, en particular, siempre nos dijo que “sí”. “Yes”, los iraquíes van a alzarse cuando tú invadas, a pesar de que Estados Unidos los traicionó la última vez que ellos se alzaron contra Saddam durante la primer guerra del Golfo Pérsico (el libro de Bob Woodward “Plan de ataque”, reporta que el vicepresidente Dick Cheney no supo hasta después de la invasión que “el trauma” entre Shias iraquíes por esa “traición”, todavía era muy grave). “Yes”, tú podrías explotar el petróleo iraquí por medio de un tratado de dulce corazón con Halliburton, aunque solo unos cuantos iraquíes se beneficien de ello.

“Yes,” Chalabi argumentó, tú podrías usarme para dar forma a un gobierno de tu conveniencia, incluso si los iraquíes no lo eligen. Oh, y no te preocupes acerca de todas esas tensiones religiosas y étnicas, conmigo a cargo, juntos vamos a transcenderlas.

La más grande ficción que Chalabi difundió fue la misma que Duarte, que llevar la democracia a su país era sinónimo de ponerlo a él en el poder. Esta es la gran mentira que la Casa Blanca podría haberse tragado. El mes pasado en Washington, el presidente George W. Bush dijo a los editores de periódicos que él todavía planea llevar la democracia a Irak. Pero lo que Bush todavía no puede entender es que algunas elecciones democráticas no son como para conducir a algún gobierno que él tiene en mente, o elegir a algún líder que él conoce.

Cada uno debería saber por ahora que el futuro de Irak podría bien manejarse sobre la palabra, o vida, de un clerigo de 74 años de edad de la fe Shia Musulmán, Ali Sistani, quien viste un turbante negro calificándolo como un descendiente del profeta Mohammed. Pero solo después de la invasión el año pasado, parecieron los políticos entender que posiblemente pueden necesitar el apoyo de iraquíes no tan familiares de nosotros como este gran “ayatollah”.

Pero, por el contrario, los oficiales administrativos seleccionaron a diferentes iraquíes con los que se sentían más cómodos, y ahora soldados estadounidenses junto a civiles iraquíes están muriendo por sus errores.

Para una nación con tantos enemigos como los que Estados Unidos tiene ahora, nosotros necesitamos más aliados y menos títeres alrededor del mundo.

Frank Smyth es un periodista independiente que está escribiendo un libro sobre los levantamientos de 1991 contra Saddam Hussein. Traducción al español por Catalina Barrera.

U.S. shouldn’t rely on Iraq’s yes men

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Original story found here.

How did we end up in such a fix in Iraq? We did what we have long done abroad: We sought out not the foreigners whom we still need to work with, but the exiles who were most like us.

The practice of imposing unpopular proxies hardly began with this Bush administration. It is one that U.S. policy makers have long been pursuing with mixed results. But, in a world as complex as this one is after 9/11, the days of picking leaders like characters in a Graham Greene novel may be gone. Instead, we must build relationships with foreigners who have support among their own people and stop sidling up to the kind who merely tell us what we want to hear.

Favorite foreign sons often enjoy more support in this nation than in their own, and it may take years before the illusions they have peddled here are exposed. One such man was the late president of El Salvador, José Napoleon Duarte, who once enjoyed a broad bipartisan consensus in Washington.

Duarte was so dependent on us to keep him in power that he not only wrote his autobiography when he was still in office during his nation’s ongoing war, but he wrote and published it in English for us to read – instead of his own people.

It took five years before U.S. policy makers finally realized that Duarte, for all his rosy promises, had failed.

But it has taken only one year for most policy makers to realize that America’s handpicked Iraqis are failing. The Pentagon has favored Ahmad Chalabi while the State Department has preferred Adnan Pachachi. Both are exiles who did not set foot inside Iraq for more than three decades, and neither man has ever enjoyed any sizable constituency inside Iraq.

But they each looked good on paper. Fluent in English, Chalabi studied mathematics before becoming a banker, and he describes himself not in religious terms but as a secular Shia Iraqi. Pachachi, who has better ties to the Arab world, is a former diplomat who once represented Iraq in New York at the United Nations. Chalabi and his family were close to Iraq’s old British-imposed monarchy, while Pachachi served Iraq’s pre-Baathist military regimes. When different administration officials looked out at Iraq’s colorful (and confusing) sectarian landscape, these two men stood out.

One reason Chalabi found favor for so long is that he, in particular, always said yes to us. Yes, Iraqis will rise up when you invade, even though America only betrayed them the last time they rose up. (Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack” reports that Vice President Dick Cheney did not know until after the invasion that “the trauma” among Shi’a Iraqis was still so bad.) Yes, you may exploit Iraqi oil through a sweetheart deal with Halliburton, even if few Iraqis benefit from it.

Yes, Chalabi argued, you may use me to shape a government to your liking, even if Iraqis do not elect it. Oh, and don’t worry about all those messy ethnic and religious tensions — with me in charge together we will transcend them.

The biggest fiction Chalabi spread was the same one Duarte told, that bringing democracy to his country was somehow synonymous with bringing him to power. This is the whopper the White House may have swallowed. Last month in Washington, President George W. Bush told newspaper editors that he still plans to bring democracy to Iraq. But what Bush may not yet get is that any democratic elections there are not likely to lead to any government he has in mind, or elect any leader he knows.

Everyone should know by now that Iraq’s future could well hang on the word, or life, of a 74-year-old cleric of the Shi’a Muslim faith, Ali Sistani, who wears a black turban signifying that he is a descendant of the prophet Mohammed. But only after last year’s invasion did policy makers seem to learn that they might even need support from Iraqis as unfamiliar to us as this grand ayatollah.

Instead, administration officials picked different Iraqis with whom they were most comfortable, and now American soldiers along with Iraqi civilians are dying for their mistakes.

For a nation with as many enemies as America has today, we need more allies and fewer puppets around the world.

Between Tyranny and Bombs: A Review of “Baghdad Diaries”

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BAGHDAD DIARIES: A Woman’s Chronicle of War and Exile
By Nuha al-Radi
Vintage. 217 pp. Paperback, $12

[NOTE: The Iraqi painter and author of this book, Nuha al-Radi, died not long after her book was published on August 30, 2004 in Beirut.]

Try to imagine yourself or your family living in Baghdad over the past decade, enduring tyranny, privation and wars. What if your family came from the old ruling guard but the quality of your life had only eroded under President Saddam Hussein’s regime? Would you blame him and his cronies for your plight, or blame America for the twin punishments of sanctions and bombings?

The answers to these questions may help explain why at least some Iraqis today seem so ungrateful to the United States. Not long after being liberated from Iraq’s homegrown dictatorship, large crowds began demonstrating against the subsequent U.S. military occupation. The mood soured faster across Iraq than leading U.S. officials or news commentators had expected, but readers of this book will see through a window into Iraq that they missed.

Born in Baghdad during the Second World War, Nuha al-Radi is a Western-educated Iraqi who retains an Eastern outlook. A world-renowned sculptor, ceramist and painter, she is a survivor from a once-thriving cultural community rooted in ancient Mesopotamia, which remains among the most respected artistic traditions in the Arab world. While she was pinned down in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of Baghdad, and afterward, while she was in exile in both Eastern and Western countries, this artist stopped working with her hands to speak with her head.

Anyone comfortable with the jingoism passing for journalism on many American television networks may find some passages in “Baghdad Diaries” as hard to digest as green, moldy bread. But if one is wondering how millions among the audience of the Qatar-based satellite television network, Al-Jazeera, today see Iraq, the raw and often bitter passages of this artist’s diary are a good place to start:

“Everyone was preparing and hoarding foodstuffs in their freezers, never imagining that they would bomb us out of electricity. Now the big question is whether to keep the freezer and fridge doors open or closed. If they stay open the rubber seals will dry out, and if closed they smell.”

Nuha al-Radi’s story begins in 1991 with the last Gulf War. She is an unmarried woman, living near her mother and struggling to get by. Another central character is her dog Salvi, named after the Spanish painter Salvador Dali. The artist says they are “well-to-do” Iraqis who live not far from the Mansur neighborhood, where Hussein was filmed walking among supporters in the street after the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The author’s late father was an ambassador back when Iraq was ruled (briefly) by British-backed kings, and her family, like others associated with the old monarchy, waned under Hussein’s regime. “Ma says she feels like Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” writes al-Radi, “except that we are far from starving.”

This is an impressionistic chronicle, and anyone looking to learn more about the rich ethnic and religious mosaic that is Iraq will not find it here. Although its author does not say it, “Baghdad Diaries” is told from the point of view of Iraq’s traditionally privileged minority based in the capital. Compared with most other Iraqis, this elite has long managed to live reasonably well even under so-called revolutionary regimes.

Some of the author’s friends and acquaintances had low-level jobs in Hussein’s government. One of her friends worked for Uday, the more notorious of Hussein’s two sons, and was told to wear “a smart dress and make-up” for work. Another friend’s nanny worked inside one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. “She said that when someone was caught stealing, they gathered the staff together, brought in a doctor who chopped off this guy’s hand, and immediately dunked it into boiling oil to cauterize it.”

This grisly account is told without commentary; al-Radi saves most of her outrage for America’s apparent disregard for the plight of the Iraqi people. “We didn’t have anything to do with the Kuwaiti take-over, yet we have been paying the price for it. Meanwhile Our Leader is alive and well — or not so well, we do not know. We’re living,” she goes on, “like Peter Sellers in [the 1968 film] ‘The Party,’ refusing to die and rising up again and again, another last gasp of the bugle.”

Al-Radi’s narrative possesses a disarming charm. Her snapshots of the strangulation of Iraq play out in the smaller details of daily life: “The birds have taken the worst beating of all. They have sensitive souls which cannot take all this hideous noise and vibration [of bombing]. All the caged love-birds have died from the shock of the blasts, while birds in the wild fly upside down and do crazy somersaults. Hundreds, if not thousands, have died in the orchard. Lonely survivors fly about in a distracted fashion.”

Al-Radi looks at Iraq like a woman who insists on viewing a canvas only through a magnifying glass, intimately describing its texture while failing to see the wider scene. But however narrow its focus, “Baghdad Diaries” offers an unfiltered perspective on a widely misunderstood world.

Waiting for the Anti-Saddam Revolt: Where Is It?

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Why aren’t more Iraqis rising up against President Saddam Hussein? Most likely, many remember what happened the last time they followed U.S. instructions to rise up against him. As the Gulf War was concluding, then-President George H. W. Bush urged Iraqis “to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Two weeks later, so many Iraqis, in fact, heeded those words to fight their own government that the CIA predicted it would fall.

“Saddam Hussein faces his most serious political challenge in more than 20 years in power,” writes the CIA on March 16, 1991, in a secret report in the middle of the monthlong uprisings. “Time is not on his side.”

The revolt began on February 28, 1991, in Iraq’s southernmost city of Basra when a tank commander in a column of Iraqi troops retreating from previously U.S.-occupied Kuwait pulled away to stop in Sa’ad Square, near Basra’s ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters. In a scene that Pentagon planners now dream would repeat itself, the commander got out of his tank and denounced Saddam before he got back in and blew apart a building-size mural of his image.

The fighting spread to Basra’s old city before it reached the neighborhood of Jamoriya, where an Iraqi army private, Mohammad Honan, lived. He said Ba’ath Party paramilitaries were out in the streets.

“We all heard shooting coming from downtown,” Honan told me at the time. “‘It’s a revolution!’ someone shouted. They were demonstrating — shouting, shooting,” added Honan, who joined the anti-Saddam revolt.

Thousands of regular army soldiers, mostly Shiah Arabs, joined the civilians who overran the Ba’ath Party headquarters and emptied the city’s prisons. Within days the intifada, as countless Iraqis called the uprisings at the time, spread north along the Euphrates River engulfing first Nasiriyah and then Samawah before reaching the two holy Shiah cities of Najaf and Karbala, only 50 miles south of Baghdad. (These are the very same battlegrounds of the current conflict).

So far only the Kurdish part of the 1991 uprisings has ever gotten much press, but “the Shiah uprising in the south was far more dangerous to the regime than the Kurdish insurgency in the north,” reads one contemporaneous, formerly classified State Department cable. Across Iraq, 14 of 17 cities were at least partly under anti-Saddam rebel control during the four-week-long uprisings, including every Shiah-dominated city in the south and every Kurdish-dominated city in the north.

The ’91 uprising even flared in Baghdad itself. A secret State Department report issued on March 24, 1991, said: “Discontent was not limited to the insurgencies in the north and south . . . three neighborhoods in Baghdad (one of them named ‘Saddam’) had been sealed off by the military for several days due to anti-regime activities.”

But just as the anti-Saddam intifada was getting under way, U.S. and Iraqi military officers were negotiating the cease-fire accord that formally ended the 1991 Gulf War.

After the first draft of the cease-fire accord, which restricted the flight of Iraqi “fixed-wing” aircraft, had already been printed, Saddam’s generals said they wanted to add a new point: that Iraq be allowed to fly helicopter gunships. Saddam’s generals told the American negotiators that Iraq still needed the helicopters for two reasons: to ferry themselves to the ongoing peace talks, and in order to transport Iraq’s own wounded soldiers.

By the time the uprisings were drowned in blood, the world knew the real intentions of Saddam’s regime were to use the helicopters to massacre the rebels in the north after hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians fled Iraq into neighboring Turkey or Iran in early April 1991. But until then, U.S. officials repeatedly told reporters that they did not know much about the fighting inside Iraq.

Turns out the Americans were also lying. Senior U.S. officials knew just 12 days into the monthlong uprisings that Saddam’s regime was already using his helicopters in violation of at least the spirit of the cease-fire accord. “Throughout Iraq, the military is relying on helicopters to battle the insurgents, often firing indiscriminately on civilian targets in areas of resistance activity,” reads a secret morning briefing paper prepared by the State Department for then-Secretary of State James W. Baker II on March 12, 1991. But the U.S. stood idly by and let the suffocation of the anti-Saddam revolt continue.

I experienced that betrayal at ground level. I can recall one of those days exactly 12 years ago in Kirkuk, the oil-rich northern Iraqi city that remains as coveted today as it was back then. Although Kurdish pesh merga, or “those who face death,” guerrillas managed to hold off Saddam?s elite forces for more than five hours on March 28, 1991, by midday Kirkuk was falling.

At a crossroads on the northern side of the city, thousands of people were walking fast on two roads out of town, as an occasional car, truck or bus packed with more people rushed by in the same direction. No one knew for how long they might be walking, and nearly everyone carried water. Many women wrapped in traditional Kurdish cloth were also carrying or leading children, many of whom were crying, in tow.

Fahdil was a thin, balding pesh merga who was an intelligence officer with the Kurdish wing of the Iraqi Communist Party. “Now it is time to leave Kirkuk,” he told a small group of journalists at the crossroads.

For hours that morning Saddam’s regime only deployed a handful of small helicopters, as pesh merga fired captured government anti-aircraft guns into the sky. But by noon the Soviet-made helicopter gunships suddenly appeared and spread out over the city. With multiple pods on each fixed wing, they fired exploding rockets. Soon everyone in sight began to run.

At the time, many Iraqis across the country were filled with hope. Several different pesh merga in northern Iraq in March 1991 told Western journalists about different Kurdish couples that had just given their newborns the first name “Bush.” But many Iraqi babies died of exposure just weeks later after their families went on the run. No wonder so few Iraqis are rising up alongside U.S.-led forces today.

Frank Smyth, who covered the 1991 Gulf War for CBS News, The Economist and Village Voice, is writing a book on the 1991 uprisings.

Contra Saddam Hussein: Porque no hubo insurreccion

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Published here (translated from the LAWeekly).

¿Por qué los iraquíes no se sublevaron en contra de Saddam Hussein? Lo más seguro es que muchos recuerdan la última vez que lo hicieron después de seguir las instrucciones comandadas por los Estados Unidos.

Al momento que la guerra del Golfo Pérsico concluía, el entonces presidente de Estados Unidos, George Bush, padre del actual mandatario, urgió a los iraquíes a “tomar las cosas en sus propias manos, para forzar a Saddam Hussein, el dictador, a renunciar”. Dos semanas después, muchos en verdad atendieron esas palabras para pelear en contra de su propio gobierno, el cual la Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA) predijo que colapsaría.

?Saddam Hussein se enfrenta a su desafió político más serio, después de 20 años en el poder?, afirmaba la CIA en marzo de 1991 en un reporte secreto escrito durante el mes que duraron los levantamientos. “El tiempo no está de su lado”, continuaba el informe.

El levantamiento comenzó el 28 de febrero de 1991 en Basora, ciudad situada en el extremo sur de Irak, cuando el comandante de un tanque perteneciente a una columna de soldados iraquíes que en ese momento se retiraba de la ocupación de Kuwait, se desvió hacia la plaza Sa’ad, cerca de los cuarteles generales del partido oficialista Ba’ath.

En esa ocasión, y en una escena que los actuales planificadores del Pentágono soñarían con que se repitiera hoy, el mencionado comandante del tanque salió de su blindado y denunció a Hussein, regresando luego a su interior, y procediendo entonces a volar en pedazos un mural, del tamaño de un edificio, con la imagen del gobernante.

El combate se extendió en ese entonces hacia el interior de Basora, mucho antes de alcanzar el conocido barrio de Jamoriya, lugar donde residía el soldado iraquí, Mohammad Honan, quien afirmó que paramilitares pertenecientes al partido Ba’ath merodiaban por las calles.

“Todos escuchamos los disparos que provenían desde la ciudad”, me dijo Honan en ese entonces, al tanto que alguien más también gritaba que se trataba de “una revolución. Ellos están gritando y disparando”, aseveró Honan, quien fuera uno de los tantos soldados que se incorporaría en la revuelta para derrocar a Hussein.

Miles de soldados, en su mayoría árabes shiítas, se unieron a los civiles e invadieron el cuartel general del partido Ba’ath, para proceder y vaciar las cárceles principales de la ciudad. Así, en pocos días, la Intifada, como la llamaron los incontables iraquíes que se unieron a la insurrección, se extendió hacia al norte sobre el río Eúfrates, consumiendo primero a Nasiriyah y Samawah, para luego llegar a las ciudades santas shiítas de Najaf y Karbala, a solo 50 millas al sur de Bagdad, los mismos y actuales teatros de combate en el presente conflicto.

Por ese entonces solo el levantamiento de los kurdos en el norte de Irak llamó la atención de la prensa; sin embargo, “la insurrección shiíta en el Sur del país fue más peligrosa para el régimen que la insurgencia de los kurdos en el norte”, afirma ahora un contemporáneo y antes ?cable clasificado? del Departamento de Estado: A través de Irak, al menos 14 de 17 ciudades estaban bajo control de los insurrectos durante las 4 semanas que durara el levantamiento, y que incluía cada ciudad bajo dominio de los shiítas en el sur, y cada ciudad de los kurdos en el norte.

El levantamiento de 1991 incluso estalló en el propio Bagdad. Un reporte secreto del Departamento de Estado fechado el 24 de marzo de 1991 afirmaba: “El descontento no se limitaba a los levantamientos en el norte y el sur? tres barrios en Bagdad (uno de ellos conocido como Saddam) habían sido acordonados por los militares por varios días debido a actividades en contra del régimen”.

Pero justo en el momento en que la Intifada se desenvolvía, los Estados Unidos y oficiales iraquíes negociaban un cese al fuego que formalmente pondría fin a la Guerra del Golfo en 1991.

Después de redactarse e imprimirse el primer párrafo del acuerdo de cese al fuego, y el cual restringía los vuelos de “ala fija” iraquíes, los generales de Saddam dijeron que querían agregar un nuevo punto, y era que a Irak se le permitiera pilotear helicópteros artillados. Los militares dijeron a los negociadores estadounidenses las dos razones por las que Irak necesitaba los helicópteros: 1) Para lograr transportarse a las negociaciones de paz, 2) para transportar a sus soldados heridos.

Para el tiempo en que los levantamientos fueron ahogados en sangre, el mundo entero sabía que las verdaderas intenciones del régimen de Saddam eran usar los helicópteros para masacrar a los rebeldes kurdos en el norte, después de que miles de civiles huyeran de Irak hacia la vecina Turquía e Irán, durante los primeros días de abril en 1991. No obstante y hasta esa fecha, portavoces estadounidenses repetidamente dijeron a los periodistas de que no conocían mucho acerca de combates en el interior de Irak.

Resulta ser ahora que los estadounidenses estaban mintiendo. Portavoces de los Estados Unidos sabían que a solo 12 días, con relación al mes de los levantamientos, el régimen de Saddam ya estaba usando los helicópteros en violación de al menos el espíritu contenido en los acuerdos de cese al fuego. “A través de Irak, los militares cuentan con sus helicópteros para combatir a los insurgentes, disparando indiscriminadamente sobre civiles en áreas con actividad de resistencia”, se lee en un secreto briefing de la mañana, preparado para el entonces Secretario de Estado, James Baker II, y fechado el 12 de marzo de 1991. Pero a pesar de todo, Estados Unidos se mantuvo despreocupado y permitió que la sofocación del levantamiento se desarrollara sin ninguna objeción.

Yo mismo experimenté esa traición sobre el terreno hace 12 años en la rica ciudad petrolera de Kirkuk en el norte Irak, tan codiciada entonces como lo es ahora, y en donde recuerdo uno de esos días cuando la Merga Kurdo Pesh , traducida literalmente como “aquellos que enfrentamos la muerte”, se las arregló para mantener sus posiciones y rechazar así a las fuerzas elite de Saddam el 28 de marzo de 1991, para luego sucumbir a medio día después de más de cinco horas de combate.

En los cruces en el extremo norte de la ciudad, miles de personas apresuraban el paso sobre dos caminos que conducían fuera de la misma, al momento que ocasionalmente algún vehículo, camión o bus cargado con algunos pasajeros, aceleraban con rapidez sobre la misma dirección. Nadie podía imaginarse por cuánto tiempo habrían de caminar y casi todos ellos contaban con agua para el camino. Muchas mujeres ataviadas en el tradicional atuendo de los kurdos cargaban a unos niños, mientras otros tantos menores y en fila les seguían al paso con lágrimas en los ojos.

En esa mañana y por solo ciertas horas, el régimen de Saddam solo desplegó un puñado de sus helicópteros, al tiempo que la Merga Kurdo Pesh disparaba hacia el cielo a través de sus armas de fuego antiaéreo capturadas al gobierno. Sin embargo y ya por la tarde, helicópteros de fabricación soviética aparecieron súbitamente por el cielo y repartiéndose sobre el entorno de la ciudad, lanzaron múltiples ataques de explosivos cohetes. Muy rápido, cualquiera a su vista, empezaron a correr.

En ese tiempo, muchos iraquíes, a lo largo de su país, fueron inundados de esperanzas. Muchos Merga Kurdo Pesh, en el norte de Irak en marzo de1991, afirmaron a periodistas occidentales cómo muchas mujeres kurdas habían dado a sus recién nacidos el nombre de “Bush”. Sin embargo, muchos de estos recién nacidos murieron al ser expuestos, semanas después de que sus padres y familia tuvieron que huir. No es de sorprenderse entonces, ahora en el 2003, el que solo un puñado de iraquíes estén rebelándose al compás de las fuerzas lideradas por los Estados Unidos.

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Frank Smyth, quien cubrió la Guerra del Golfo en 1991 para CBS News, The Economist y The Village Voice, está escribiendo un libro acerca del levantamiento contra Saddam Hussein en 1991. Recientemente estuvo en Qatar y Kuwait. El artículo tiene traducción libre.

Living Dangerously: A Review of “The Lion’s Grave”

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THE LION’S GRAVE: Dispatches from Afghanistan
By Jon Lee Anderson
Grove. 244 pp. $24

Any egomaniac with an audience can do a live stand-up in an alleged combat zone these days, but Jon Lee Anderson is a war correspondent’s journalist. On Sept. 11, while most Americans were still either looking up or glued to their television sets, Anderson sent an e-mail from southern Spain to his editor at The New Yorker in Manhattan. “I am guessing you never made it to the office. I hope everyone at The New Yorker is OK,” he wrote. “I feel like I should be heading for Afghanistan, which I fully expect to be flattened any day now.”

The result is an insightful book of dispatches that are different in focus from, but reminiscent, in their on-the-ground style, of the late Ernie Pyle’s reporting from North Africa during World War II. In London, Anderson bought a portable satellite phone, which he used to file his reports from Central Asia over the ensuing months. A pack of hundreds of other reporters descended upon the region in late 2001, but Anderson, who had been covering the country since the days of the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, was nearly the first journalist to reach Afghanistan after Sept. 11. All but one of these dispatches previously appeared in the weekly magazine, but much of the writing remains prescient.

“The sight of women, or at least discernibly human creatures in feminine clothes, is about the only thing that relieves the harshness of the landscape. This visible part of Afghan society is unremittingly male, as is the land, which is drab and muscular,” writes Anderson. “Barefoot boys walk back and forth through beds of harvested rice, turning the grains with their toes to dry them in the sun. . . . Lambs are tethered next to men with long knives who slaughter them and hang the carcasses from hooks, hacking them into a steadily diminishing mess of blood and meat and bone and fat by day’s end. Grain and vegetables are weighed in tin scales that are balanced with stones.”

Anderson also gives his readers a window on himself. The book’s narrative journalism is framed by contemporaneous e-mails that either begin or end every chapter. Most were sent by Anderson via laptop (with a special bullet-proof casing) and satellite phone to his editor, Sharon DeLano. Some e-mails show the hardships of prolonged frontline reporting. “Our compound has mud walls and mud floors and mud everything,” he tells DeLano. “Outside, there is a large dirt patio with two hole-in-the-floor latrines, a vigilant mongrel dog, and — as of yesterday — a scorpion in the washroom.”

Other e-mails reveal another side of a correspondent who is apparently not afraid of talking back to men with guns: “One [Afghan combatant] asked for a cigarette. I gave him one, but chided him, since it was Ramadan, and Muslims are not supposed to smoke [or eat or drink] during the daylight hours. Then another man came up and demanded a cigarette and I could see that the whole group of ten or so fighters were planning on doing this. So I said, No more.”

“A third mujahideen, a burly man with a large PK machine gun slung over his shoulder, leered at me and grabbed me between the legs, hard. Then he darted away and laughed. I followed him and kicked him in the rear end, twice. This made his comrades roar with laughter, but he didn’t think it was so funny, and he pointed his gun at me, then lowered it. I began cursing him in English and he raised the gun at me again and I could tell that he was cursing me too, in Dari. We had something of a standoff.”

The book, as its title suggests, revolves around the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, “The Lion of Panjshir,” the Northern Alliance commander who was killed by two Arab men posing as journalists two days before Sept. 11. Anderson convincingly ties the assassination to Osama bin Laden, who, like Anderson himself, apparently expected an American retaliation on Afghan targets in response to Sept. 11. In the only new reporting in the book, Anderson explores bin Laden’s former home base south of Jalalabad, where he introduces readers to a heavily armed American named “Jack,” a 46-year-old former U.S. Army Green Beret from Fayetteville, N.C., who claimed, “I have no official relationship to the U.S. government.”

The strength of The Lion’s Grave goes beyond its character profiles to its effective navigation of the crisscrossing lines of Afghan politics. Anderson already knew the country and its players, not only the late Massoud but also many lesser-known Afghans, including noncombatants. Like the dispassionately illuminating biography of Che Guevara that largely earned this correspondent his name, this book captures a time and a place that no one who reads it will forget. The text is interspersed with black-and-white images by Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak that depict austere Afghans usually in a cold landscape. For anyone tired of instant journalism, this book reflects an older art.

Frank Smyth is writing a book on the 1991 Iraqi uprisings against Saddam Hussein.

Saddam’s Real Opponents

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Three years ago, the influential journal Foreign Affairs published an article on Iraq entitled “The Rollback Fantasy.” It was a typically long and sober piece, challenging the thinking of those who were arguing for a United States role in toppling Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein. But unfortunately, the article contained its own odd piece of fantasy: In referring to “Iraq’s Sunni majority,” it managed to get one of the most basic pieces of demographic information about Iraq exactly backward. There is no Sunni majority. In proclaiming that the United States should back this alleged majority in a post-Saddam Iraq, while opposing either “Kurdish or Shi’ite bids for hegemony over the Sunnis,” the magazine garbled its analysis. The Sunni Arabs who now govern Iraq make up no more than 17 percent of the population. As Foreign Affairs’ editors noted two issues later: “Most Iraqis are Shi’ites. Our apologies.”

In fact, as a quick look at a good almanac will tell you, Shi’ite Muslims make up at least 60 percent of Iraq’s population, while Sunni Muslims (including Sunni Kurds and Sunni Arabs) are no more than 37 percent. These are important distinctions — perhaps the most crucial facts to know about Iraq if one is speculating about a post-Saddam future for the country, as much of official Washington is these days.

Yet here was Henry Kissinger popping up on the op-ed page of The Washington Post in January referring to “the Sunni majority, which now dominates Iraq” and, for good measure, adding an observation about “the Shi’ite minority in the south.” It seems to be a mistake that has staying power. A Washington Post editorial last spring also made mention of “minority Shi’ites from the south.” And last month, New York Times reporter Todd S. Purdum worried in print “that a change in regime could leave Iraq’s Shi’ite minority more empowered.”

Neither the Post nor the Times has corrected the mistake, so we can surely expect to see more references in the U.S. press to a Shi’ite minority that does not exist — not in the south of Iraq, not in the north, not in the country as a whole. Most Iraqis are Shi’ites. And it matters. For all the plans that are now being hotly discussed about turning U.S. military might against the Iraqi regime, there is widespread confusion about what political outcome is desirable and what is realistic. If Saddam were removed from power, would the United States feel compelled to prevent the majority Shi’ites from forming a new Islamic state? What kind of “axis of evil” would the Bush administration face if both Iran and Iraq were controlled by Shi’ite clerics? What are the alternatives?

The same U.S. newspapers that are misguided about Iraq’s demographics have been calling the Iraqi National Congress “the Iraqi opposition.” But the INC is the active opposition’s least-significant part: It has not mounted any military efforts in Iraq since September 1996. The group is based in London and is made up mostly of families who fled Iraq after the fall of the British-imposed monarchy in 1958. They are mainly Sunni Arabs – just like much of Saddam’s regime — and thus are not representative of the Iraqi majority.

Meanwhile, it’s been Shi’ite rebel groups in southern Iraq that have attempted to attack the “pillars” of Saddam’s regime. In December 1996, a group calling itself al-Nahda (Renaissance) wounded Saddam’s eldest son and security chief, Uday, a notorious enforcer who is credibly accused of using torture against suspected dissidents. In 1998, Shi’ite rebels farther south threw hand grenades at Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s second-in command in the Baath Party’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council (The grenades missed their target).

In fact, a quiet war has been under way between Saddam’s security forces and Shi’ite clerics in southern Iraq. In a bloody crackdown from April 1998 to February 1999, three grand ayatollahs were killed in gangland-style assassinations. In each case, the cleric had been handpicked by Saddam to lead Iraq’s Shi’ites. But each one had defied Saddam by encouraging Shi’ite Muslims to return to their local mosques to receive prayers instead of receiving them through Iraqi state television. The clerics had also asked
Saddam to release other religious leaders from imprisonment.

After Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr was gunned down with his two sons on the road to Najaf, Shi’ites from Beirut to Tehran marched in the streets denouncing Saddam. Inside Iraq, some brave Shiites took to the streets, even in cities as far north as “Saddam City,” a Shi’ite slum on the [outskirts] of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces opened fire there, reportedly killing 54 people.

The Shi’ites could be Saddam’s Achilles’ heel, but what will U.S. policy be toward the enemies of our enemy? Policy makers and pundits have voiced concern about whether the instability and “fragmentation” that might follow Saddam’s overthrow would be worse than Saddam’s continued rule. Neighboring Turkey fears the possibility that Iraqi Kurds in the north might attempt to secede, thus fomenting Kurdish nationalism in Turkey. The United States is concerned with the specter of Iraq’s Shiites turning either all or most of Iraq into a pro-Iranian Islamic state. Yet as long as the United States remains distant from Shi’ite opposition groups, the opposition to Saddam will remain divided — and insignificant.

If only those troublesome Shiites really were a minority, as Henry Kissinger and some in the press would have us believe, the answers might be simpler. But hasn’t Kissinger always insisted on “realism” in foreign
policy? Or did he mean magical realism?