Mission Impossible: the Sheiks, the US and the Future of Iraq
By Paul McGeough
Quarterly Essay 14, 2004
Black Inc
117 pages, $13.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY ALEX MILLER
There can be no doubt that Sydney Morning Herald journalist Paul McGeough has got bottle. It takes a lot of courage to venture into regions of Iraq where getting caught in the crossfire between the US and the insurgency is an ever-present threat.
There is also no doubt that McGeough isn't afraid to publish stories damning of the US-puppet interim Iraqi government — witness his recent report of allegations that US-installed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi personally executed in cold blood prisoners of the US-installed regime.
Nor is there any doubt that McGeough's contribution to Quarterly Essay, now on sale, provides a useful and thought-provoking snapshot of the brutalities of life in Iraq under US occupation. McGeough's main thesis, that the US has considerably underestimated the role of tribal loyalty in modern Iraq, deserves an extended appraisal that cannot be attempted here.
Given all of the above, the essay is certainly worth reading. The amazing thing is that, even though McGeough admits that he never believed the pre-war stories about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he still repeats time and time again the big lie routinely parroted by the mainstream media: that the aim of the war is to bring democracy to Iraq.
Seemingly unaware that "imposed democracy" is as much an oxymoron as "unfree freedom", McGeough writes of "the American attempt to impose its version of democracy in a lonely place where it needs all of the friends it can get". He describes the US as "seized more by the notion of democracy as a poison for Saddam Hussein than as a nourishment for his people", and Iraq as "a land that has stubbornly resisted all attempts to import democracy".
Thanks for the information, Mr McGeough: here we were thinking the Iraqis have been engaging in a struggle against colonial repression, when actually they're attempting to resist freedom! Time and time again McGeough refers to present day Iraq as "liberated" and says that in the June 28 "handover" the US "relinquished political control of the country". He implies that the blame for US repression actually falls on the resistance — "The insurgents have also succeeded in drawing the US into provocative, Israeli-inspired tactics of collective punishment" — and also describes the resistance as having "lured the US into a badly thought out military response" to the killing of US mercenaries ("security contractors") in Fallujah.
McGeough seems to think that the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 doesn't really count as violent, since he writes of "the violence that has been mounting since April 2003". Even worse than his talk of "the White House drive for democracy" is his amazing description of the Abu Ghraib scandal as "a self-inflicted US wound". The Iraqi wounds — real wounds — don't seem to count. McGeough could have earned the respect of progressive Australian readers by using this essay to expose the big lie, the myth of "American-imposed democracy" in Iraq. Instead, and to his discredit, much of the essay reads like an attempt to reinforce it.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, September 1, 2004.
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