Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 2004, pages 6-8

Special Report

Death, Destruction, and Torture as Bush Brings Democracy to the Middle East

By Rachelle Marshall

Palestinians express their anger in front of an Israeli bulldozer during a June 7 protest against the construction of a new section of the separation barrier being built on their land in the northern West Bank village of Al-Zawieh, near Salfit (AFP Photo/Jaafar Ashtiyeh).

Oh fools who lay a city waste.
giving to desolation temples, tombs,
the sanctuaries of the dead—so soon
to die themselves.

—Prologue to The Trojan Women, c. 440 B.C.E.

AT THE start of Euripides’s anti-war play The Trojan Women, the Greeks have conquered and laid waste to Troy and are about to return home with their spoils. But their triumph will be short-lived, for two powerful gods have conspired to punish the victors for their arrogance by sending down storms that will wreck their ships. Euripides’s play seemed as timely as ever a year after George Bush boasted that victory in Iraq was in reach. Hundreds more Americans and Iraqis were dead. The cities of Fallujah, Karbala, and Najaf had become battlegrounds, and resistance continued in parts of Baghdad and other cities. After photos appeared showing U.S. prison guards laughing as they tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners, military victory was no longer relevant. America had suffered a moral defeat.

In his determination to oust Saddam Hussain, Bush ignored repeated warnings that the principal cause of instability in the Middle East was the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would inflame resentment and increase the danger of terrorism. As a result the administration is now trapped in a no-win situation. One of Bush’s goals in going to war was to enhance Israel’s security by installing a friendly, pro-Western government in Iraq. His mistake was to assume that the United States could win over Arab hearts and minds while defending and subsidizing Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

The deadly parallels between Israel’s actions in Gaza and U.S. efforts to subdue Iraqi resistance became increasingly evident in mid-May, when Israeli forces were bombarding refugee camps and towns in Gaza while U.S. forces were laying siege to holy cities in Iraq. The tanks and gunships and jet bombers used by Israel and the Americans were identical; the gutted buildings, broken streets, and acres of sand-colored rubble looked much the same whether they were in Rafah or Karbala and Najaf. The faces of Iraqis and Palestinians mourning their dead were interchangeable.

On May 20 a front-page picture appeared in The New York Times showing a weeping man holding his dead son while rescue workers and horrified bystanders milled about in the background. According to the caption, the little boy was one of several children killed in Rafah when an Israeli tank fired on a group of peaceful protestors. The same photo could have accompanied the adjoining article, which described a U.S. bombing attack on an Iraqi village near Syria that killed 45 people who were attending a wedding. In each incident several children were killed. After each one military officials said armed fighters had been the target.

The two episodes took place on different battlefields, but to many in that part of the world they seem part of the same war, a war in which two powerful allies are joined in an effort to impose their will on Arab and Muslim people. Ever since George Bush linked his “war on terrorism” to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, the alliance between Israel and America has come increasingly close. The result has been greater suffering for the people of the Middle East and more of the despair that fuels terrorism.

When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ignored the internationally sponsored “road map to peace” and unveiled his own unilateral withdrawal plan last June, he assumed that with Bush’s endorsement he could force on the Palestinians an arrangement in which Israel would withdraw from Gaza but keep and expand its West Bank settlements. Although a majority of Israelis favored the plan, Bush’s support carried no weight with Sharon’s own Likud party, which bitterly opposed giving up the Gaza settlements. Sharon ignored the majority and chose to appease the die-hards. Instead of withdrawing the army from Gaza he sent them in to destroy it.

Palestinian militants had responded to Israel’s repeated raids and home demolitions in early May by killing 13 Israeli soldiers. Israel retaliated with the most powerful display of force since April 2002, when Operation Defensive Shield devastated much of the West Bank. As bulldozers, giant tanks, helicopter gunships and soldiers poured into Gaza on May 16, Israeli officials said their purpose was to hunt down gunmen and destroy tunnels used for smuggling weapons. But it was clear that the show of force was aimed at convincing Palestinians that Gaza was not Lebanon and, if Israel did leave Gaza, it would not be in retreat.

After 10 days of destruction and death in which Israeli soldiers in Rafah and nearby communities fired rockets and machine gun bullets at anything that moved, 57 Palestinian were dead, including at least 10 children. “Neighborhoods entered by Israeli troops resembled the aftermath of an earthquake,” a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote on May 22. He described mounds of smashed concrete, crumpled refrigerators, broken toys and furniture, and flattened cars. Bulldozers and tanks had shredded streets, broken water mains and power lines, uprooted crops, and even plowed through a zoo. At least a dozen animals were killed, and many were injured, including a deer and a racoon.

During their week-long savaging of Gaza the Israelis destroyed at least 90 houses, bringing the total of home demolitions in Gaza to 191 in May alone. They found one tunnel. With thousands of Gaza residents now homeless for the second and third time in their lives, the army is now considering demolishing an additional 2,000 buildings along the Israeli-controlled border with Egypt.

“Monsters in the Eyes of the World”

The destruction in Gaza already has aroused fierce criticism. Members of the Arab League accused Israel of “war crimes aimed at ethnic cleansing and collective punishment.” European foreign ministers called for an immediate halt to the home demolitions. The Security Council voted, with the U.S. abstaining, to condemn the killing of Palestinian civilians. The sharpest words of protest came from Israeli Minister of Justice Josef Lapid, who said on Israel radio, “We look like monsters in the eyes of the world. This makes me sick.”

In Washington, only Secretary of State Colin L. Powell criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, saying they had “worsened the situation.” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice put the burden on the Palestinians. On May 17, as Israeli aircraft were firing missiles on Gaza City, and 32 Palestinians lay dead, Rice ignored the Israeli attacks and called on the Palestinians to establish “accountable political and economic institutions.” On May 18, a day on which Israeli soldiers killed 19 more Palestinians, including 7 children, Bush praised Israel for its “skill and heroism” in a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

As Israeli raids on Gaza continued, along with the bulldozing of homes and farmland, it became evident that Sharon’s notion of “unilateral withdrawal” involved no withdrawal at all. He changed his original plan to provide for a phased withdrawal that could delay the dismantling of settlements indefinitely, and made it clear that Israeli troops would continue to enter Gaza at will. The Israeli peace publication The Other Israel predicted that Sharon “would go on speaking of withdrawal for a year or so...gain time to extend West Bank settlements and build the wall, and then find an excuse to wiggle out.”

The intensified violence in Gaza added to the problems of a Bush administration that already was facing challenges to its competence and credibility. Bush had endorsed Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal plan only to see it scrapped by Sharon himself. Meanwhile, pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Arab prisoners appeared on the TV program “60 Minutes II,” and photos of even more atrocious acts by U.S. prison guards in Iraq began circulating around the world. A third blow came when U.S. intelligence agents and Iraqi police raided the home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi and charged members of his Iraqi National Congress with kidnapping, embezzlement, and theft of government property. Chalabi, a long-time favorite of administration hawks, is now under suspicion of spying for Iran and providing false and misleading information about Iraq’s weapons programs.

The exposure of Chalabi as a fraud came as no surprise, but was a reflection of the Bush administration’s willingness to use any source, no matter how shady, and any evidence, no matter how suspect, to justify war on Iraq. The CIA and State Department long had regarded Chalabi as a corrupt and self-serving charlatan. Military experts repeatedly disputed his claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And, even before the raid on his headquarters, he was widely distrusted by most Iraqis. Nevertheless, Pentagon neocons regarded Chalabi as a useful ally and potential leader of Iraq—until he apparently saw greater advantage in turning on his American backers and calling for Iraq’s independence and an end to the occupation.

Revelations about the torture of Iraqi prisoners were not news to anyone but the three-star generals who claim to have learned only in January about what was happening at Abu Ghraib. Amnesty International, the Red Cross, and other human rights organization had begun reporting in May 2003 that conditions in the prisons violated the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions. Human rights organizations earlier had issued strong complaints to the Bush administration about prison conditions in Afghanistan, where several detainees had died under interrogation. Three months before the generals allegedly found out about it, the September 2003 issue of the Washington Report (p. 57) cited Amnesty’s accusation that conditions in the U.S. prisons in Iraq were “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

What did come as news was the extreme barbarism of the actions by U.S. guards and interrogators, which included forcing prisoners to stand naked with their arms raised for long hours, beating them with rifles, letting attack dogs bite them, and in one case tying a hooded prisoner face down on the engine of the truck transporting him to prison, so that he suffered extensive burns. In three articles for the New Yorker, Seymour Hersch traced responsibility for the torture of prisoners directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone. The two men set up a secret program to kill, capture, or interrogate suspected terrorists anywhere in the world and, with blanket approval from Bush, authorized interrogators to “get tough” with prisoners. This meant using the same methods in Iraq that were being used in Guantanamo and other U.S. interrogation centers in questioning prisoners whom Bush had declared to be illegal combatants and therefore not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. At least 37 prisoners have died in U.S. interrogation centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was no coincidence that interrogators used the same methods that were used in Israeli jails, such as hooding, prolonged handcuffing in painful positions, confinement for weeks in totally dark concrete cells, sleep deprivation, and sexual violence. According to a CounterPunch report of May 11, many of the interrogators in Iraq were Arabic-speaking Israelis hired by the Pentagon under classified contracts. Two of the contractors, CACI and Titan, had close ties to the Israeli military.

As shocking details of conditions in Abu Ghraib continued to surface, and the occupation became increasingly unpopular with Iraqis, Bush’s stated goal of turning Iraq into a stable, free-market democracy appeared more and more out of reach. Instead of reconsidering his failed policies, however, Bush chose to defend them. In a May 24 speech to the Army War College, he called Iraq “the central front in the war on terrorism,” and said American soldiers would remain in Iraq to fight it “as long as necessary.” He then laid out an elaborate plan for achieving democracy that called for the appointment of a president, two vice presidents, and a prime minister; an interim legislature; a constitutional assembly, and, finally, elections in January 2005.

The speech painted a promising picture but left the important questions unanswered. Bush did not explain how the interim government would deal with a possible power struggle among Kurds, Shi’i, and Sunnis; or whether rival militias will allow free elections to take place in the areas they control. He did not say what the function of the American advisers to the government ministries will be, or how long they will remain. Bush listed as successes of the occupation the growth of a private economy in Iraq and the opening of the country to foreign investment, but he failed to mention that poverty and unemployment remained at high levels while a few Iraqis are getting rich, or that small businesses have been forced to close because of the influx of foreign goods.

The main question raised by Bush’s speech was, who did he think it would convince? Listeners in Iraq and the rest of the world are sure to wonder how Iraq could enjoy “full sovereignty” after June 30 under a hand-picked government with limited powers, or how a “free and self-governing Iraq” that “would give momentum to reformers across the region” could develop in a country that continues to be occupied by the same army that bombed their cities, raided their homes, and allowed their society to sink into chaos and lawlessness. Iraqis might find it hard to believe in the benevolent intentions of an administration that, at its highest levels, sanctioned the torture and humiliation of their fellow citizens.

The ultimate challenge to Bush’s credibility when he talks about freedom lies in his support for Israel and for Ariel Sharon. Iraqis are aware that it is America that supplies the bulldozers that are destroying Palestinian homes and the weapons that are killing Palestinian children. Many in the Arab world and elsewhere regard America, like Israel, as an occupying power. As long as both occupations continue Bush will have a hard time convincing the Iraqis or anyone else that his purpose is to promote democracy.

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights activist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said in an interview at Stanford in late May that “Military occupation not only doesn’t help the evolution of democracy, but in fact hurts the process. It leads to further unification among the fundamentalists. It weakens the positions of those who defend human rights. And it becomes a machine for producing further violence.”

Her statement accurately describes what is happening in Iraq and in Gaza and the West Bank. Only an end to both occupations will bring peace and stability to the Middle East.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the International Jewish Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.