No tiene desperdicio

The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn

5 años desde la invasión de Iraq. 5 años!!! Intento imaginar la vida del iraquí medio, visualizar su lo que siente al despertar, un día más, en la jungla humana.

En otro momento hablaremos de vencedores y vencidos. De momento, baste con saber que siempre es sano leer a Robert Fisk. Columnista estrella por derecho del británico diario The Independent, suele plantear las preguntas adecuadas. Ahí va un ejemplo.
Wednesday, 19 March 2008
Five years on, and still we have not learnt. With each anniversary, the steps crumble beneath our feet, the stones ever more cracked, the sand ever finer. Five years of catastrophe in Iraq and I think of Churchill, who in the end called Palestine a "hell-disaster".
But we have used these parallels before and they have drifted away in the Tigris breeze. Iraq is swamped in blood. Yet what is the state of our remorse? Why, we will have a public inquiry – but not yet! If only inadequacy was our only sin.
Today, we are engaged in a fruitless debate. What went wrong? How did the people – the senatus populusque Romanus of our modern world – not rise up in rebellion when told the lies about weapons of mass destruction, about Saddam's links with Osama bin Laden and 11 September? How did we let it happen? And how come we didn't plan for the aftermath of war?
Oh, the British tried to get the Americans to listen, Downing Street now tells us. We really, honestly did try, before we absolutely and completely knew it was right to embark on this illegal war. There is now a vast literature on the Iraq debacle and there are precedents for post-war planning – of which more later – but this is not the point. Our predicament in Iraq is on an infinitely more terrible scale.
As the Americans came storming up Iraq in 2003, their cruise missiles hissing through the sandstorm towards a hundred Iraqi towns and cities, I would sit in my filthy room in the Baghdad Palestine Hotel, unable to sleep for the thunder of explosions, and root through the books I'd brought to fill the dark, dangerous hours. Tolstoy's War and Peace reminded me how conflict can be described with sensitivity and grace and horror – I recommend the Battle of Borodino – along with a file of newspaper clippings. In this little folder, there was a long rant by Pat Buchanan, written five months earlier; and still, today I feel its power and its prescience and its absolute historical honesty: "With our MacArthur Regency in Baghdad, Pax Americana will reach apogee. But then the tide recedes, for the one endeavour at which Islamic people excel is expelling imperial powers by terror or guerrilla war.
"They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon. We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before. The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
How easily the little men took us into the inferno, with no knowledge or, at least, interest in history. None of them read of the 1920 Iraqi insurgency against British occupation, nor of Churchill's brusque and brutal settlement of Iraq the following year.
On our historical radars, not even Crassus appeared, the wealthiest Roman general of all, who demanded an emperorship after conquering Macedonia – "Mission Accomplished" – and vengefully set forth to destroy Mesopotamia. At a spot in the desert near the Euphrates river, the Parthians – ancestors of present day Iraqi insurgents – annihilated the legions, chopped off Crassus's head and sent it back to Rome filled with gold. Today, they would have videotaped his beheading.
To their monumental hubris, these little men who took us to war five years ago now prove that they have learnt nothing. Anthony Blair – as we should always have called this small town lawyer – should be facing trial for his mendacity. Instead, he now presumes to bring peace to an Arab-Israeli conflict which he has done so much to exacerbate. And now we have the man who changed his mind on the legality of war – and did so on a single sheet of A4 paper – daring to suggest that we should test immigrants for British citizenship. Question 1, I contend, should be: Which blood-soaked British attorney general helped to send 176 British soldiers to their deaths for a lie? Question 2: How did he get away with it?
But in a sense, the facile, dumbo nature of Lord Goldsmith's proposal is a clue to the whole transitory, cardboard structure of our decision-making. The great issues that face us – be they Iraq or Afghanistan, the US economy or global warming, planned invasions or "terrorism" – are discussed not according to serious political timetables but around television schedules and press conferences.
Will the first air raids on Iraq hit prime-time television in the States? Mercifully, yes. Will the first US troops in Baghdad appear on the breakfast shows? Of course. Will Saddam's capture be announced by Bush and Blair simultaneously?.
But this is all part of the problem. True, Churchill and Roosevelt argued about the timing of the announcement that war in Europe had ended. And it was the Russians who pipped them to the post. But we told the truth. When the British were retreating to Dunkirk, Churchill announced that the Germans had "penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks".
Why didn't Bush or Blair tell us this when the Iraqi insurgents began to assault the Western occupation forces? Well, they were too busy telling us that things were getting better, that the rebels were mere "dead-enders".
On 17 June 1940, Churchill told the people of Britain: "The news from France is very bad and I grieve for the gallant French people who have fallen into this terrible misfortune." Why didn't Blair or Bush tell us that the news from Iraq was very bad and that they grieved – even just a few tears for a minute or so – for the Iraqis?
For these were the men who had the temerity, the sheer, unadulterated gall, to dress themselves up as Churchill, heroes who would stage a rerun of the Second World War, the BBC dutifully calling the invaders "the Allies" – they did, by the way – and painting Saddam's regime as the Third Reich.
Of course, when I was at school, our leaders – Attlee, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, or Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy in the United States – had real experience of real war. Not a single Western leader today has any first-hand experience of conflict. When the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq began, the most prominent European opponent of the war was Jacques Chirac, who fought in the Algerian conflict. But he has now gone. So has Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran but himself duped by Rumsfeld and the CIA.
Yet one of the terrible ironies of our times is that the most bloodthirsty of American statesmen – Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfovitz – have either never heard a shot fired in anger or have ensured they did not have to fight for their country when they had the chance to do so. No wonder Hollywood titles like "Shock and Awe" appeal to the White House. Movies are their only experience of human conflict; the same goes for Blair and Brown.
Churchill had to account for the loss of Singapore before a packed House. Brown won't even account for Iraq until the war is over.
It is a grotesque truism that today – after all the posturing of our political midgets five years ago – we might at last be permitted a valid seance with the ghosts of the Second World War. Statistics are the medium, and the room would have to be dark. But it is a fact that the total of US dead in Iraq (3,978) is well over the number of American casualties suffered in the initial D-Day landings at Normandy (3,384 killed and missing) on 6 June, 1944, or more than three times the total British casualties at Arnhem the same year (1,200).
They count for just over a third of the total fatalities (11,014) of the entire British Expeditionary Force from the German invasion of Belgium to the final evacuation at Dunkirk in June 1940. The number of British dead in Iraq – 176 – is almost equal to the total of UK forces lost at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944-45 (just over 200). The number of US wounded in Iraq – 29,395 – is more than nine times the number of Americans injured on 6 June (3,184) and more than a quarter of the tally for US wounded in the entire 1950-53 Korean war (103,284).
Iraqi casualties allow an even closer comparison to the Second World War. Even if we accept the lowest of fatality statistics for civilian dead – they range from 350,000 up to a million – these long ago dwarfed the number of British civilian dead in the flying-bomb blitz on London in 1944-45 (6,000) and now far outnumber the total figure for civilians killed in bombing raids across the United Kingdom – 60,595 dead, 86,182 seriously wounded – from 1940 to 1945.
Indeed, the Iraqi civilian death toll since our invasion is now greater than the total number of British military fatalities in the Second World War, which came to an astounding 265,000 dead (some histories give this figure as 300,000) and 277,000 wounded. Minimum estimates for Iraqi dead mean that the civilians of Mesopotamia have suffered six or seven Dresdens or – more terrible still – two Hiroshimas.
Yet in a sense, all this is a distraction from the awful truth in Buchanan's warning. We have dispatched our armies into the land of Islam. We have done so with the sole encouragement of Israel, whose own false intelligence over Iraq has been discreetly forgotten by our masters, while weeping crocodile tears for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died.
America's massive military prestige has been irreparably diminished. And if there are, as I now calculate, 22 times as many Western troops in the Muslim world as there were at the time of the 11th and 12th century Crusades, we must ask what we are doing. Are we there for oil? For democracy? For Israel? For fear of weapons of mass destruction? Or for fear of Islam?
We blithely connect Afghanistan to Iraq. If only Washington had not become distracted by Iraq, so the narrative now goes, the Taliban could not have re-established themselves. But al-Qa'ida and the nebulous Osama bin Laden were not distracted. Which is why they expanded their operations into Iraq and then used this experience to assault the West in Afghanistan with the hitherto – in Afghanistan – unheard of suicide bomber.
And I will hazard a terrible guess: that we have lost Afghanistan as surely as we have lost Iraq and as surely as we are going to "lose" Pakistan. It is our presence, our power, our arrogance, our refusal to learn from history and our terror – yes, our terror – of Islam that is leading us into the abyss. And until we learn to leave these Muslim peoples alone, our catastrophe in the Middle East will only become graver. There is no connection between Islam and "terror". But there is a connection between our occupation of Muslim lands and "terror". It's not too complicated an equation. And we don't need a public inquiry to get it right.

Crónica de un Fracaso Anunciado en Iraq

Informo a los que me siguen que Iraq sigue al borde del precipicio. No caben soluciones mágicas pero más temprano que tarde habrá que reconocer que la misión que el Presidente Bush, disfrazado de Top Gunner, dio por cumplida en el portaviones USS Abraham Lincoln el 1 de mayo del 2003, definitivamente no se ha cumplido y que merece la pena aplicar alternativas más sensatas. El fracaso estaba cantado. Siendo constructivos, valga como guía la propuesta redactada en el informe final del Iraq Study Group coordinado por James Baker III. Además, para los que todavía a estas alturas no lo quieren ver, basta leer el artículo recientemente publicado por uno de sus gurús, el lobo estepario Henry Kissinger:

A political program to exit Iraq
By Henry A. Kissinger
Monday, July 2, 2007
The war in Iraq is approaching a kind of self-imposed climax. Public disenchantment is palpable. Congress will surely press for an accelerated, if not total, withdrawal of American forces. Demands for a political solution are likely to mount.
But precipitate withdrawal would produce a disaster. It would not end the war but shift it to other areas, like Lebanon or Jordan or Saudi Arabia. The war between the Iraqi factions would intensify. The demonstration of American impotence would embolden radical Islamism and further radicalize its disciples from Indonesia and India to the suburbs of European capitals.
We face a number of paradoxes. Military victory, in the sense of establishing a government capable of enforcing its writ throughout Iraq, is not possible in a time frame tolerated by the American political process. Yet no political solution is conceivable in isolation from the situation on the ground.
What America and the world need is not unilateral withdrawal but a vision by the administration of a sustainable political end to the conflict. Withdrawals must grow out of a political solution, not the other way around.
None of Iraq's neighbors, not even Iran, is in a position to dominate the situation against the opposition of all the other interested parties. Is it possible to build a sustainable outcome on such considerations?
The answer must be sought on three levels: the internal, the regional and the international.
The internal parties - the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds - have been subjected to insistent American appeals to achieve national reconciliation. But groups that have been conducting blood feuds with one another for centuries are, not surprisingly, struggling in their efforts to compose their differences by constitutional means. They need the buttress of a diplomatic process that could provide international support for carrying out any internal agreements reached or to contain their conflict if the internal parties cannot agree and Iraq breaks up.
The American goal should be an international agreement regarding the international status of Iraq. It would test whether the neighbors of Iraq as well as some more distant countries are prepared to translate general concepts into converging policies. It would provide a legal and political framework to resist violations. These are the meaningful benchmarks against which to test American withdrawals.
The reason why such a diplomacy may prove feasible is that the continuation of Iraq's current crisis presents all of Iraq's neighbors with mounting problems. The longer the war in Iraq rages, the more likely will be the breakup of the country into sectarian units.
Turkey has repeatedly emphasized that it would resist such a breakup by force because of the radicalizing impact that a Kurdish state could have on Turkey's large Kurdish population. But this would bring Turkey into unwanted conflict with the United States and open a Pandora's box of other interventions.
Saudi Arabia and Jordan dread Shiite domination of Iraq, especially if the Baghdad regime threatens to become a satellite of Iran. The various Gulf sheikhdoms, the largest of which is Kuwait, find themselves in an even more threatened position. Syria's attitudes are likely to be more ambivalent. Its ties to Iran represent both a claim to status and a looming vulnerability.
Given a wise and determined American diplomacy, even Iran may be brought to conclude that the risks of continued turmoil outweigh the temptations before it.
To be sure, Iranian leaders may believe that the wind is at their backs, that the moment is uniquely favorable to realize millennial visions of a reincarnated Persian empire or a reversal of the Shiite-Sunni split under Shiite domination. On the other hand, if prudent leaders exist - which remains to be determined - they might come to the conclusion that they had better treat these advantages as a bargaining chip in a negotiation rather than risk them in a contest over domination of the region.
No American president will, in the end, acquiesce once the full consequences of Iranian domination of the region become apparent. Russia will have its own reasons, principally the fear of the radicalization of its own Islamic minority, to begin resisting Iranian and radical Islamist domination of the Gulf. Combined with the international controversy over its nuclear weapons program, Iran's challenge could come to be perceived by its leaders to pose excessive risks.
Whether or whenever Iran reaches these conclusions, two conditions will have to be met: First, no serious diplomacy can be based on the premise that the United States is the supplicant. America and its allies must demonstrate a determination to vindicate their vital interests that Iran will find credible. Second, the United States will need to put forward a diplomatic position that acknowledges the legitimate security interests of Iran.
Such a negotiation must be initiated within a genuinely multilateral forum. A dramatic bilateral Iranian-U.S. negotiation would magnify all the region's insecurities. For if Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - which have entrusted their security primarily to the United States - become convinced that an Iranian-U.S. condominium is looming, a race for Tehran's favor may bring about the disintegration of all resolve.
Within a multilateral framework, the United States will be able to conduct individual conversations with the key participants, as has happened in the six-party forum on North Korea.
A forum for such an effort already exists in the foreign ministers' conference that met recently at Sharm el-Sheikh. It is in the United States' interest to turn the conference into a working enterprise under strong, if discreet, American leadership.
The purpose of such a forum should be to define the international status of the emerging Iraqi political structure into a series of reciprocal obligations. Iraq would continue to evolve as a sovereign state but agree to place itself under some international restraint in return for specific guarantees.
In such a scheme, the United States-led multinational force would be gradually transformed into an agent of that arrangement, along the lines of the Bosnian settlement in the Balkans.
All this suggests a three-tiered international effort: an intensified negotiation among the Iraqi parties; a regional forum like the Sharm el-Sheikh conference to elaborate an international transition status for Iraq; and a broader conference to establish the peacekeeping and verification dimensions. The rest of the world cannot indefinitely pretend to be bystanders to a process that could engulf them through their default.
Neither the international system nor American public opinion will accept as a permanent arrangement an American enclave maintained exclusively by American military power in so volatile a region. The concept outlined here seeks to establish a new international framework for Iraq. It is an outcome emerging from a political and military situation on the ground and not from artificial deadlines.

“VOCES DE IRAQ”

Entre el 7 y el 22 de junio, la sede de la Fundación Diario Madrid (calle Larra, 14) acogerá la exposición “Voces de Iraq”, una selección de fotografías de Iraq realizadas por jóvenes periodistas iraquíes de la agencia Aswat al Iraq (Voces de Iraq).

Una sala vacía en una tarde de sábado en Madrid. Las fotos, muestran normalidad dentro del desastre sin fin en el país de las Mil y Una Noches. Un hombre sirve té mientras los chíies, de cuya existencia nada se sabía hasta que los medios empezaron a dar trascendencia a las comunidades religiosas de Iraq, hace bien poco de ello, desfilan en el homenaje a sus profetas frente a la mezquita de Kerbala. Otro hombre pesca en el Eufrates. Dos fotos más allá, una brigada de marines registra una vivienda de adobe, entre el miedo, la angustia y la desazón de sus habitantes. Un autobús deglutido por las llamas protagoniza otra foto, la tela de los asientos consumida. Son fotos a color sin color. Distintas tonalidades de gris chamuscado son el color de Iraq.